The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois faces unique security challenges as it must both maintain an open academic environment accessible to researchers around the world and protect some of the most valuable IT assets in the nation, a point brought home by the recent inauguration of the Blue Waters petascale computing system.
Alexander Ziem has joined the FrameNet project through our German visiting program, which is funded by the German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD). Alexander studied at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, and also studied abroad at the University of Melbourne. He has worked in various teaching and research positions at the Universities of Düsseldorf, Berlin, Bremen, and Basel, in Switzerland.
Digital images have become ubiquitous companions of our everyday life. At the same time, the very nature of digital data puts into question many of the positive aspects that we usually associate with digital images. Digital data can be manipulated easily. Powerful editing software, which allows even inexperienced users to conveniently process digital images in innumerable ways, raises questions regarding the authenticity of digital images.
Ilya Nikolaevskiy is a visitor working with Scott Shenker of Networking and Security. He's here on our Finnish visiting program, which is funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation through Aalto University and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.
Jussi Kangasharju is vising ICSI's Networking and Security group through our Finnish visiting program, which is funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation through Aalto University and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology.
In 2006, Google released a corpus of more than 1 trillion words, making it the world’s largest. The corpus, pulled from Web sites and users’ queries, is used for applications including statistical machine translation, speech recognition, spelling correction, entity detection, and information extraction. Three years later, Google researchers – including Peter Norvig, a former ICSI board member and now the director of research at Google – published a paper titled “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data.” They wrote that natural language processing tasks could be accomplished more efficiently and less expensively through statistical means than by methods that rely on human experts to annotate text.
In April 2012, the Hewlett Foundation hosted a competition on Kaggle, the predictive modeling competition site, to find the most effective system for automated grading of essays. These systems are based on principles of artificial intelligence, and those of us in the artificial intelligence community are always excited to see useful applications of our work. Our excitement, however, should be tempered by the recognition of some unintended consequences of automated essay grading.
At our annual BEARS Open House Thursday, February 14, several group directors gave brief talks overviewing recent work. In case you missed it, here are slides from the talks.
In case you missed it at our open house last Thursday, check out this video of the real-time object detection system demonstrated by Daniel Goehring, a DAAD postdoc in our Audio and Multimedia Group. It's able to quickly detect household objects - and can even identify a can of Pringles! The video is below; here's the abstract: