News

Howard Lei Completes Ph.D.

December 30, 2010
ICSI has had the privilege of overseeing the doctoral thesis of Dr. Howard Lei of the Speech Group, who graduated at the end of December. Read Dr. Lei's dissertation

"Structured Approaches to Data Selection for Speaker Recognition"

H. Lei

UC Berkeley dissertation

December 2010

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Andreas Stolke Named a 2011 IEEE Fellow

December 29, 2010
Speech Group researcher Andreas Stolcke has been named a 2011 IEEE Fellow. Stolcke was honored for his contributions to statistical language modeling, automatic speech recognition and understanding, and automatic speaker recognition. The grade of Fellow is IEEE's highest membership status, conferred on only one-tenth of one percent of members by the IEEE Board of Directors. Fellows are recognized for their outstanding records of accomplishments.

Speech Group Researchers Finalists at the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge

October 25, 2010
For the second time in the two years the contest has been held, Speech Group researchers were finalists at the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge, sponsored by companies like Google and Yahoo! Eladio Martin of UC Berkeley, Speech researchers Gerald Friedland and Oriol Vinyals, and Professor Ruzena Bajcsy of UC Berkeley were recognized for developing the first application for Android smart phones that uses WiFi and audio to accurately estimate where the phone user is inside a building. Their project, Using Android and Indoor Localization for Diaries, was one of two finalists in the Google Diaries competition.

Shuai Cheng Li Receives Outstanding Achievement Award

October 22, 2010
Shuai Cheng Li, a postdoctoral fellow in the Algorithms Group, has received the Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies Designation from the University of Waterloo, Canada. The distinction is given to one person from each graduate department per year.

AI Group Receives John Templeton Foundation Grant

October 15, 2010
AI Group members have received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, an organization that supports research on "big questions" in science. Professor Jerome Feldman and group leader Srini Narayanan received funding to broaden applied work on the Neural Theory of Language to language communities, public discourse, and more fundamental questions. Their project is titled "Embodied Cognition, Communities, and Foundational Issues in AI and Mathematics." Feldman also presented a paper at a recent Templeton Symposium on Top-Down Causation. A version of the paper, "Causality and Context in Cognitive Science," will be published this year by the UK Royal Society.

Berkeley Overmind Project Wins AIIDE 2010 StarCraft Competition

October 13, 2010
UC Berkeley students led by Speech Group affiliate Professor Dan Klein have won a competition at the AIIDE Conference to create an artificial intelligence system that plays the video game StarCraft. The Berkeley Overmind Project, which has been featured in New Scientist and MTV's news blog, uses a variety of artificial intelligence techniques to calculate what moves it should take to win the game. Learn more about the system here >>

Nelson Morgan Named an ISCA Fellow

October 10, 2010
ICSI Director Nelson Morgan has been named as a Fellow by the International Speech Communication Association. Morgan is honored for his significant contributions to robust feature extraction and novel acoustic models for automatic speech recognition. He is one of 24 Fellows named since the Fellow Program began in 2007, and the second ICSI Speech Group member to be recognized with the distinction — Elizabeth Shriberg was named in 2009. The six new Fellows were announced at this year's INTERSPEECH Conference, held in September.

Jörg Lässig and Dirk Sudholt Receive PPSN 2010 Best Paper Award

September 11, 2010
Jörg Lässig and Dirk Sudholt, DAAD-sponsored postdoctoral fellows in the Algorithms Group, received the best paper award at the International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN), held in September. Lässig and Sudholt won the award for their paper titled "General Scheme for Analyzing Running Times of Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms." The pair also received a best paper award at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in July.

Online Images Can Carry Location Data, Leave Users Vulnerable to "Cybercasing"

August 30, 2010
Photos and videos posted on Web sites such as Craigslist and Twitter can carry detailed information about where the images were taken, according to researchers at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). This may leave them vulnerable to "cybercasing," the use of geo-tagged information available online to mount attacks in the real world.

Susanne Hambrusch Appointed Director of the NSF's CCF Division

August 30, 2010
Professor Susanne Hambrusch, a former ICSI visiting scholar, has been appointed the director of NSF's Computing and Communication Foundation (CCF), a division of Computer and Information Science and Engineering. Hambrusch, who has been on the faculty of Purdue University since 1982, visited the Algorithms Group under Professor Richard Karp in ICSI's early years.

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