News

Dan Klein Wins Okawa Foundation Grant

September 15, 2009
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 Receives AAAS Fellowship

August 31, 2009
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.

Genomic Identification and Privacy

August 23, 2009
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

BFOIT Hosts 10th Anniversary Reception

August 14, 2009
The Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology (BFOIT) hosted its 10th Anniversary Reception on Friday, August 14 at the Sibley Auditorium in the Stephen D. Bechtel Building at the University of California, Berkeley from 2:00 - 3:30 p.m.

Conference in Honor of Charles Fillmore

July 31, 2009
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.

There were major sessions on Frame Semantics and Construction Grammar, along with other presentations linked specifically to Fillmore's work, and its relation to the allied fields of cognitive science, artificial and natural language processing.

Single Gene Mutation Linked to Follicular Lymphoma

July 20, 2009
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. Professor 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 the Translational Genomics Research Institute. More >>

Friedrich et al. Win Best Paper Award

July 12, 2009
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.

Several FrameNet Articles Featured in New Book

July 3, 2009
The upcoming 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: Dr. Thomas Schmidt, Professor Carlos Subirats, Professor Kyoko Ohara, Dr. Miriam Petruck, Professor Katrin Erk, and Professor Manfred Pinkal. The book is expected to be available for purchase in July from the publisher Mouton de Gruyter.

BFOIT Receives Agape Foundation Donation

June 16, 2009
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.

Networking Group Featured in New Scientist

May 11, 2009
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.

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