News

Jaron Lanier on Edge

June 10, 2006
Jaron Lanier was quoted in the New York Times business section on June 10. He had recently published an article, The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, on Edge, which got attention from bloggers and online news sites for its criticism of Wikipedia. Dan Mitchell, a reporter for the Times, featured Lanier's article and reactions to it in a round-up of online news, So Many Airfares, So Much Data.

Professor George Lakoff Featured in Chronogram

June 7, 2006
Professor George Lakoff, of UC Berkeley and ICSI's Neural Theory of Language project, is featured in the July 2006 issue of Chronogram, a Hudson Valley, New York based magazine of "events and ideas". He was interviewed for the magazine by Loma Tychostup on his theories about the use of linguistic frames in politics.

ICSI Speech Technology Excelled at NIST Evaluations

June 5, 2006
ICSI speech processing technology excelled in the recent National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) evaluations. The ICSI Speaker Diarization system and the ICSI/SRI Speech-to-Text (STT) system performed extremely well in all test conditions that were entered in the NIST evals. More information about this year's evals is available from the NIST 2006 Rich Transcription Eval Site. Although NIST regulations prevent comparing ICSI's results to those of other participating labs, complete results are available from the NIST website:

From Molecule to Metophor

June 1, 2006
From Molecule to Metaphor, a new book by Professor Jerome A. Feldman, ICSI's first Director and current research scientist, was released in June 2006 by MIT Press. The book describes in detail the ICSI NTL group's theory on the neural basis of human language and thought. Early endorsements of the book suggest it may have a profound impact on the field of Cognitive Science.

Sally Floyd Cited as Female Expert in Computing

March 23, 2006
In a letter to Nature magazine and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, a group of senior female technology professors named ICSI's Sally J. Floyd as one of three women who exemplify "outstanding female experts in computing and other fields". Floyd was cited for her work on core Internet technologies.

XORP 1.2 Extends Open-Source Routing to Windows

March 8, 2006
On March 8th, XORP project leader Atanu Ghosh, research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, announced the release of XORP (eXtensible Open Router Platform) version 1.2. The new release includes several significant new features, including support for Windows 2005, addition of a reconfigurable version of the OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) protocol, and implementation of a policy framework that is fully integrated across all routing protocols.

ICSI Hosted an Open House in Conjunction with BEARS

February 23, 2006
On February 23rd, ICSI hosted an open house in conjunction with BEARS 2006, UC Berkeley's annual EECS research symposium. In addition to posters outlining various research activities at ICSI, there was a demonstration of a speech recognition application that provides market information to Tamil-speaking Indian crop growers, and two featured talks.

Commercial-Grade Router Built on XORP

February 22, 2006
Announcing the beta release of a commercial-grade router built on ICSI's eXtensible Open Router Platform (XORP), Vyatta Inc. emerged from stealth mode on February 22nd. Vyatta will target mid-size enterprises with flexible, open networking software and services delivered on commodity hardware. Vyatta is committed both to building the XORP/open-source networking community and to challenging the closed, high-cost, proprietary networking platforms that dominate today. See Business 2.0 article by Om Malik for more information.

Congratulations to Litonya Walker

February 9, 2006
Congratulations to Litonya Walker in the accounting department on the birth of her daughter Zoe on February 9th. Zoe was born at 10:30 in the morning, and weighed 5 pounds 4 ounces at birth.

Color Perception Research in PNAS

January 14, 2006
According to a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January by Aubrey Gilbert, Terry Regier, ICSI's Paul Kay, and Richard Ivry, language affects visual perception -- but for the most part, only in the right half of the visual field. This makes sense hypothetically because the left hemisphere of the brain processes language, and receives visual information from the right side of the visual field. Regier, a frequent visitor to ICSI, suggested a study to test this hypothesis. Gilbert and Ivry of UC Berkeley led the experiments, which confirmed Regier's hypothesis. The study built on previous studies by Paul Kay and his colleagues regarding the influence of language on the perception of color.

 

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