News

Clarissa on the International Space Station

June 27, 2005
An article about Richard Karp, head of the Algorithms Group, appeared in the August-October 2005 issue of the French journal Les Dossiers de la Recherche.
Clarissa, a voice-enabled procedure browser developed by NASA Ames, ICSI, UCSC and Xerox Research Center Europe, was successfully tested for the first time on the International Space Station on June 27th by astronaut John Phillips. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever use of a spoken dialogue system in space. During the test, Phillips completed the interactive Clarissa training procedure, which exercises all the main system functionality. ICSI's Manny Rayner worked on the development of Clarissa and is thrilled that it is now working in space.

Rich Transcription Spring'05 Evaluation

June 15, 2005
Members of ICSI's Speech Group recently participated in the Rich Transcription Spring'05 evaluation, RT-05S, sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This annual evaluation targets the automatic processing of audio recordings from meetings, establishing benchmarks in core recognition capabilities. ICSI submitted systems for both the speech transcription task (or "Speech-to-text") and the speaker segmentation and tracking task ("Speaker Diarization"), and peformed very well in both categories.

Congratulations to Mary and Martin Penilla

June 2, 2005
Congratulations to Mary and Martin Penilla! Their second child, a baby boy, was born on Wednesday, June 2nd at 9:30 pm. He was five pounds nine ounces at birth and nineteen inches long.

Research on Witty Worm in the News

June 2, 2005
Research on the Witty worm by Vern Paxson, Nick Weaver, and Abhishek Kumar continued to make headlines in June. After the write-up by Robert Lemos appeared online in late May, the research was highlighted on CNET news.com, ZDnet, monstersandcritics.com, New Scientist magazine and P2Pnet.net.

Press for Science Article on Color Naming Research

June 1, 2005
Following the Science write-up of color naming research by Terry Regier, Paul Kay, and Richard Cook, several publications including New Scientist magazine and The Guardian published summaries of the results of the study. ICSI's Paul Kay is known for his work on color naming with Brent Berlin. The new study with Terry Regier builds on his prior research about color naming universals and shows that strong universal tendencies in color naming exist in languages of both industrialized and non-industrialized societies.

2005 Speaker Recognition Evaluation

May 27, 2005
ICSI's speaker recognition group, a subset of the Speech Group, participated in the 2005 speaker recognition evaluation conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). These evaluations are an important contribution to the calibration of technical capabilities and are of interest to researchers working on the general problem of text-independent speaker recognition worldwide.
ICSI's submitted system was one of the top performers in the core test condition. The effort was led by staff scientist Nikki Mirghafori and showcased work of students Kofi Boakye, Dan Gillick, Andy Hatch, and Steve Stafford, with important contributions from SRI's Speaker Recognition team.

Witty Worm Featured in Security Focus Online

May 24, 2005
A paper analyzing the Witty worm by ICSI security experts Vern Paxson and Nick Weaver, along with former ICSI intern Abhishek Kumar, was the focus of an article by Robert Lemos on Security Focus online on May 24, 2005.

Color Naming in PNAS

May 23, 2005
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a paper on color naming worldwide by Terry Regier, a frequent ICSI visitor, Paul Kay, a senior researcher in ICSI's AI Group, and Richard Cook, an ICSI postdoctoral resarcher. On May 23, 2005, a write-up about this research appeared on Science Magazine's online daily news site, sciencenow.com, in an article called "Carving Up the Rainbow".

Professor Dan Klein is ICSI's Newest Faculty Associate

May 23, 2005
Professor Dan Klein of the UC Berkeley Computer Science Faculty is ICSI's newest Faculty Associate. Professor Klein's area of expertise is natural language processing, and he will be affiliated with the Speech Group.

Genetic Research Reviewed in MIT's Technology Review

May 22, 2005
A recent study co-authored by Dr. Eran Halperin of ICSI with scientists at Perlegen and UC San Diego was reviewed in MIT's Technology Review magazine. The project, the first of three studies featured in "From The Lab: Biotech" by Monya Baker in the June, 2005 issue, is described as a "gene map shortcut" which uses a subset of SNPs to describe human genetic variation. Read the Article >>

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