ICSI's Brazilian visitor program has issued its first annual call for applications, and is set to begin in 2010 as soon as participants have been selected from the pool of applicants. The program offers exciting opportunities to expand the horizons of ICSI scientists' worldwide collaborative research.
The ICSI team led by Dr. Gerald Friedland of the Speech Group has won the Grand Challenge at the Beijing ACM multimedia meeting. Their project, Joke-o-mat, was a response to the Yahoo! video challenge. Joke-o-mat is designed to parse sitcoms by identifying main characters, the best jokes (signaled by the loudest and longest laughs) and scene changes. It was developed by Friedland, Luke Gottlieb, and Adam Janin. More >>
Professor Charles Fillmore of the AI Group has been invited to speak at a Framenet Masterclass and Workshop at the Eighth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT8) hosted by The Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan Italy. The masterclass takes place on December 3rd, 2009 with the general conference on the 4th and 5th. More information about the class and conference >>
Rainer Böhme, a visitor with ICSI's Networking Group, was selected as a co-winner (with Tyler Moore of Harvard University) of the first Gordon Prize in Managing Cybersecurity Resources by the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. The prize is named after Lawrence A. Gordon, a cybersecurity expert at the school. Read more about the prize and the winning essay by Böhme and Moore >>
Liz Shriberg of the Speech Group has been selected as one of six fellows for 2009 of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) for her significant contributions to the field of speech communication science and technology. ISCA's Fellows Program began in 2007 to honor the contributions of outstanding members.
Professor Dan Klein, an affiliate of the Speech Group and a professor at UC Berkeley, has won an Okawa Foundation research grant award for 2009. This award is given out annually to selected scientists in the US and Asia. The award includes a $10,000 unrestricted grant.
Steve Sinha, of the AI Group, has received an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship and will be working at the DHS Office of Policy Development. Sinha is among 190 doctoral-level scientists and master's- and doctoral-level engineers who will spend a year working in federal agencies or congressional offices. The Fellows learn about science policy while providing valuable S&T expertise to the government. The fellowship begins September 1 with a two-week orientation in Washington, D.C.
In the last few years, genome association studies have led to breakthrough medical discoveries. However, due to privacy concerns that the identity of individuals could be determined through DNA data, health institutes in the US and abroad removed public access to the genetic data coming from these association studies. Such association studies have been shown to shed light on diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer's disease, and sharing the raw data from these studies with other scientists can aid tremendously with further discoveries. Nature Genetics has just published a new study by Dr. Eran Halperin of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and Tel Aviv University, and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, that describes their "mathematical formula and software solution that ensures that malicious eyes will have very low chances to identify individuals in any study" says Dr. Halperin.
BFOIT, the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology, hosted its 10th Anniversary Reception on Friday, August 14th, at the Sibley Auditorium in the Stephen D. Bechtel Building at the University of California, Berkeley from 2:00 - 3:30 p.m.
Congratulations to Luke Gottlieb (a researcher with the Speech Group as well as a Systems Administrator at ICSI) and his wife Emy on the birth of their son, Judah Richmond, on July 27th at 7:58 p.m. Judah weighed 9 pounds 1 ounce at birth.
ICSI bioinformatics researchers made significant contributions to a recently published study in Nature Genetics which links a single gene mutation to follicular lymphoma. The disease, a type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, affects approximately 66,000 Americans per year, resulting in 20,000 deaths. Prof. Eran Halperin and Dr. Lucia Conde of ICSI's Algorithms Group performed the statistical analysis of the genetic data used in the study, which was led by Dr. Christine Skibola of UC Berkeley and Dr. Kevin M. Brown of TGen (Translational Genomics Research Institute). More >>
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ICSI's Joke-o-mat was selected as a finalist in the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge 2009. Created by Gerald Friedland, Luke Gottlieb, and Adam Janin of the Speech Group, Joke-o-mat is designed to parse sitcoms by identifying the main characters, the best jokes (as signaled by the loudest and longest laughs) and scene changes. It was made in response to a challenge from Yahoo on how to segment video along thematic lines. A demo showing how Joke-o-mat works on an episode of Seinfeld is available here. The winner of the Grand Challenge will be announced in October at the ACM Multimedia Conference.
Tobias Friedrich, a visiting scientist in the Algorithms Group, along with co-authors Christian Horoba and Frank Newmann, won a Best Paper Award in the Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization category at the 2009 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) for their paper, Multiplicative Approximatons and the Hypervolume Indicator.
The recently published book "Multilingual FrameNets in Computational Lexicography", edited by ICSI alum Professor Hans C. Boas of the University of Texas, features articles contributed by several of ICSI's past and present FrameNet team. More >>
The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute hosted FRAMES AND CONSTRUCTIONS: A conference in honor of Charles J. Fillmore on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The conference, whose theme is Fillmore's contributions to Linguistics for nearly five decades, took place on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, July 31-Aug 2, 2009. More >>
BFOIT, the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology, has received a generous donation for $5,000 from Paula Hawthorn and Michael Ubell of the Agape Foundation. BFOIT is an ICSI program that supports historically underrepresented ethnic minorities and women. Working directly with bay area youths from these populations, BFOIT provides training and encouragement in their desire to become leaders in the fields of computer science, engineering, and information technology.
New Scientist magazine's May 11 edition (magazine issue 2707) featured botnet infiltration work done by Christian Kreibich and other members of the Networking Group in an article titled "Cyber Espionage Reveals Spammer Strategies". This work was also featured in The Berkeley Science Review in an article by ICSI's own Dan Gillick, a graduate student in the Speech Group.
Paul Kay and several co-authors from the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have a paper in the May 4-8 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled "Language Regions of Brain are Operative in Color Perception". Kay, a linguist working in the AI Group at ICSI, has been published in PNAS several times for related work on color naming and color perception.
Ulrich Rueckert, a postdoc with the Algorithms Group, won the Best Paper Award at the recent Siam International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2009), for a paper titled "Adaptive Concept Drift Detection" that he co-wrote with Anton Dries.
Press highlights related to Professor Karp's recent Kyoto Prize: a feature article about him at investors.com and this video biography created by San Diego State University.
Professor Richard M. Karp, head of ICSI's Algorithms Group, was presented with the 2008 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology at the Kyoto Prize Symposium in San Diego, California March 18-20. More >>
The Vision Group recently welcomed two new arrivals - Torsten Darrell, son of Trevor Darrell and his wife Lisa, on December 18th, and Nika Tio, daughter of graduate student Kate Saenko, on October 25th. Congratulations to both families, and welcome Torsten and Nika.
ICSI's annual BEARS Open House was held on February 12th from 2:00-5:00 p.m. Professor Trevor Darrell, head of the new Vision Group, presented a talk on his latest computer vision work, Luke Gottlieb showed a video demo of recent speaker diarization work by members of the Speech Group, and the FrameNet team demonstrated their latest improvements, including some work on different languages. In addition, representatives from all research groups presented posters summarizing recent results from various current research projects.
Professor Richard Karp, head of ICSI's Algorithms Group, is the 2008 winner of the Dickson Prize in Science. According to the prize website, "The Dickson Prize in Science is awarded annually to the person who has been judged by Carnegie Mellon University to have made the most progress in the scientific field in the U.S. for the year in question." The prize will be presented to Professor Karp on March 25, 2009.
Dilek Hakanni-Tür of ICSI's Speech Group and Guiseppe Riccardi of the University of Trento have won an IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) 2008 Best Paper Award for their paper, "Active Learning: Theory and Applications to Automatic Speech Recognition" which appeared in the July 2005 issue of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. They will be presented with the award at the ICASSP 2009 conference in Taipei, Taiwan, April 19-24, 2009.
ICSI's annual BEARS Open House is scheduled for Thursday, February 12, 2009 at 2:00 p.m. This Open House is held in conjunction with UC Berkeley's BEARS 2009 (Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium).
Professor Nelson Morgan, ICSI's Director, has been named to the Advisory Council of the International Speech Communication Society (ISCA). ISCA is the primary organization devoted to speech communication science and technology.
Professor Richard M. Karp, of the ICSI Algorithms Group, was profiled in The Berkeley Science Review, Issue 15. The feature is written by ICSI Speech Group grad student Dan Gillick, a regular contributor to the publication.
Recent research on the profitability of spam, conducted by ICSI Networking Group researchers along with a team from UCSD, was featured in a Washington Post blog article on November 6, 2008.
Congratulations to Eran Halperin of the Algorithms Group and his wife Leticia Ortiz on the birth of their second son, Helio Halperin Ortiz. Helio was born at 9:17 am on September 27th at UCSF.
Professor Krste Asanovic, head of the Architecture Group, is quoted in this InfoWorld article on parallel processing. Asanovic is an expert on this new technology, and advises programmers to be cautious in their choice of programming language for parallel programming. Because the technology is so new, there isn't yet an industry standard programming platform, so many of the existing platforms may become obsolete.
Two new research groups were formed in the summer of 2008. Professor Krste Asanovic, a former ICSI graduate student researcher and frequent visitor, is heading the new Architecture Group. Professor Trevor Darrell, formerly of MIT, is heading a new Vision Group.
Dr. Eero Silvennoinen of Tekes joined ICSI's Board of Trustees in June 2008. Dr. Silvennoinen is Director of Software and Telecommunications Technologies at Tekes, and has been at Tekes since 1988. He replaced Mr. Jouko Salo as the Finnish representative to ICSI's Board.
ICSI announced that it has transferred its eXtensible Open Router Platform (XORP) technology to XORP, Inc. (http://xorp.net), a startup founded by the leaders of the XORP.org project (http://xorp.org). The same day, XORP, Inc. debuted the XORP 1.5 Release. More >>
ICSI alum Chris Bregler and Emeritus Trustee Jitendra Malik have won the 2008 Longuet-Higgins prize for "Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision That have Stood the Test of Time".
Professor Richard M. Karp, Head of the Algorithms Group, received the 2008 Kyoto Prize in the Advanced Technology Category for "fundamental contributions to the development of the theory of computational complexity".
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ICSI's Krste Asanovic is working to set up the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (or ParLab) at UCB, which was featured in the March 19th New York Times article Industry Giants Try to Break Computing's Dead End. For more information on Prof. Asanovic's work with Par Lab, please see here
Paul Kay of ICSI's AI group was featured in a March 3, 2008 Nature News article by Kerri Smith entitled Perception coloured by language. The piece highlights findings from two of Dr. Kay's studies, suggesting language may constrain color perception.
Vern Paxson, Senior Scientist with the Networking Group and a UCB Professor, is the recipient of the 2007 Grace Murray Hopper Award from ACM for outstanding young computer professional of the year. Paxson was selected for work he did on measuring Internet behavior. ACM issued a press release about Paxson's award on February 21st. Last year's winner, Dan Klein, is an ICSI Faculty Associate working with the Speech Group on machine translation.
A new study by Dr. Eran Halperin of ICSI and colleagues provides a means of pinpointing the ancestry of each position on an individual's genome. This information can be used to reconstruct ancestral history, which can then be used in studies of complex genetic diseases. Results of the study are published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics. More >>
In 2008, two German postdoctoral fellows at ICSI are working with ICSI's newest industrial partners. Gerald Friedland, who came to ICSI for a 2007 fellowship, extended his research visit another year with funding from the Silicon Valley company Appscio, Inc. Felix Salfner arrived at ICSI in January of 2008 and is working with German company SAP's Palo Alto office. Salfner and Friedland also receive funding for their research visits from DAAD in Germany, ICSI's longest-running international visitor program sponsor.
Nelson Morgan, Director of ICSI, was quoted on globeandmail.com, a national newspaper in Canada, in an article called Reality TV: When the tube talks back. The article discusses how technology is changing the way people interact with technology, using technologies such as speech recognition.
Umit Guz, Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher in 2007, received The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) CAREER Award for his project, "Extracting and Using Prosodic Information for Turkish Spoken Language Processing". Guz has returned to Turkey where he will conduct this research over the next two years, advised by ICSI's Dilek Hakkani-Tur and SRI's Gokan Tur and Mural Akbacak. More >>
The 2007 Spanish call for proposals has been issued. Applications will be accepted through February 24, 2008. Information on applying is available here.
Congratulations to Birte Loenneker Rodman, visiting scientist with the AI Group, and her husband Matjaz Rodman on the birth of their daughter Amaia. Amaia is the couple's first child and was born December 2nd at 4:00 a.m.
The Regional Council of Tuscany has awarded the Giulio Predi Prize in Science and Democracy to Professor George Lakoff of the Berkeley Linguistics Department. Lakoff is a longtime collaborator with the AI Group at ICSI. This is the first time the prize has been awarded and Professor Lakoff was the unanimous choice of the scientific committee. He will be accepting the prize in Florence, Italy on November 24.
On October 30th, ICSI signed a Memo of Understanding (MOU) with the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development. Mr. Reginaldo Arcuri, President of the agency, visited ICSI to sign the memo along with officials from the Brazilian Development Bank. The MOU will be the framework within which future activities between ICSI and Brazil, such as a visitor program, will be organized.
Vern Paxson of the Networking Group collaborated with Adrian Perrig and Jason Franklin from Carnegie Mellon and Stefan Savage from UC San Diego to design tools to fight the growth of Internet black markets. Franklin, a PhD student and former ICSI visitor, said "Our research monitoring found that more than 80,000 potential credit card numbers were available through these illicit underground web economies." To read about the strategies being used to stop identity and credit card theft online, see this press release from Carnegie Mellon.
Christian Müller, a postdoctoral researcher from Germany working with the Speech Group, is the editor of two new books on speaker classification. The books are part of Springer's State-of-the-Art Survey and the Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence sub-series of Lecture Notes on Computer Science. In the first book, Speaker Classification I: Fundamentals, Features, and Methods, Müller compiled a comprehensive collection of articles written by leaders in the field of speaker classification. Liz Shriberg of the Speech Group wrote a chapter in this volume titled "Higher Level Features in Speaker Recognition". The second book, Speaker Classification II: Selected Projects, is intended to be a companion to the first book, and contains numerous papers related to recent work done on speaker classification.
Congratulations to Jisup Hong and his wife Sara. Their son, Jonathan Jingul Hong, was born on September 7th at 8:49 a.m. weighing 7 pounds 12 ounces and 20.25 inches long. Jonathan is the couple's first child.
Gerald Friedland, a German postdoc working with the Speech Group, received the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his contributions to organizing the IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2007). Friedland served as the Program Coordination Co-Chair for this conference, which took place September 17-19, 2007.
ICSI's Srini Narayanan is the winner of a Google Research Award in
2007. The award is for exploring the use of search and language
technology to develop local language content and resources for rural
populations in the developing world. Srini Narayanan leads the
Artificial Intelligence group at ICSI and has an adjunct appointment
as an Associate Professor in the Cognitive Science program and at the
Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of
California, Berkeley.
