News

Speech Research Makes Headlines

January 9, 2004
Liz Shriberg, a senior researcher at ICSI, was quoted on January 3, 2004 in a New York Times article about disfluencies in speech. She was subsequently interviewed live on the radio talk show "Adler On Line" with Charles Adler of CJOB 68 Radio in Winnipeg, Canada, on Friday, January 9.

A major focus of Shriberg's speech research is disfluency detection in automatic speech recognition, because, as she says in the NY Times article, "If someday you want machines to be as smart as people, then you have to have machines that understand speech that's natural, and natural speech has lots of disfluencies in it."

Richard Karp Receives Benjamin Franklin Medal

January 5, 2004
Richard Karp, leader of ICSI's Algorithms Group, will be presented with the 2004 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science for his contributions to the understanding of computational complexity.

ICSI Group Leader Becomes ACM Fellow

January 5, 2004
Scott Shenker, leader of ICSI's Networking Group, has been selected as an ACM Fellow for his achievements in the field of information technology.

Scott McComas Joins SysAdmin Staff

December 2, 2003
ICSI has a new permanent staff member. Scott McComas joined the SysAdmin Staff at the beginning of December.

Sven Behnke and Klaus Wehrle Win Aktionsplan Informatik

November 30, 2003
Former ICSI visiting researchers, Dr. Sven Behnke and Dr. Klaus Wehrle of Germany, were two of seven award winners of the "Aktionsplan Informatik" (action plan computer science) from the DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgaemeinschaft, a German research foundation comparable to NSF. The grant will allow young researchers to start a junior research group in Germany. Dr. Behnke will be working on the building of humanoid robots. Dr. Wehrle proposed to build a toolkit for network protocol development.

BFOIT Awarded Elizabeth and Stephen Bechtel, Jr. Foundation Grant

November 13, 2003
BFOIT, the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology, part of BCIS, has been awarded a renewable grant from the Elizabeth and Stephen Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, which will allow the program to continue. BFOIT had a very successful program during the summer of 2003, expanding to a year round program with 25 high school students, and has plans to double the size to include 50 students next summer, and will include middle school students as well. BFOIT also has plans to start a program at a second location in San Jose.

AnnaLee Saxenian Appointed Faculty Associate

November 1, 2003
ICSI has appointed a new Faculty Associate. AnnaLee Saxenian, of UCB's City and Regional Planning Department, will be working with BCIS on Silicon Valley development.

Birth of Hayden George Hodson

October 24, 2003
Hayden George Hodson was born at 4:22 p.m. on Friday, October 24, 2003 weighing in at 8.1 pounds and 21 inches long. The proud parents are ICSI's XORP researcher, Orion Hodson and his wife, Heather. Hayden is the couple's first child.

Speech Group Receives NSF Grant

October 22, 2003
Speech Group receives NSF grant "Modeling Idiosyncrasies in Speaking Behavior." Barbara Peskin of ICSI's Speech Group will head a project to improve speaker recognition through incorporation of higher-level features - e.g. derived from prosody, pronunciation patterns, word usage, even distinctive laughs - to augment traditional models that rely on short-term 10-20 msec frames of speech.

Networking Group Participating in $5.3 million NSF Grant

October 20, 2003
Researchers in ICSI's Networking Group, led by Vern Paxson, will be participating in a $5.3 million NSF grant to fund cybersecurity research. They will be collaborating with UC Davis, Pennsylvania State University, and Purdue University.

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