News

New Collaboration with Japan National Institute of Informatics

January 26, 2011
ICSI and Japan's National Institute of Informatics will collaborate on work in networking, computer vision, and algorithms. In a memorandum of understanding signed in January, ICSI and NII outlined their commitment to establishing a joint research program.

Orial Vinyals Receives Microsoft Research Fellowship

January 15, 2011
Oriol Vinyals, a UC Berkeley student in the Speech Group, has received a Microsoft Research Fellowship to continue work in tele-immersion using analysis of both human speech and vision. Vinyals, one of twelve PhD students in the U.S. to receive the fellowship in 2011 and the only one from UC Berkeley, will help develop systems that are able to interact with humans by analyzing things like gestures, gazes, and spoken questions. The work may help, for example, doctors who need to interact with patients who are hundreds of miles away. The two-year fellowship begins this fall.

Richard Karp Keynote Speech in India

January 8, 2011
Algorithms Group leader Richard M. Karp was invited to give talks at three prestigious research institutes in India in January. He was a keynote speaker at the 2011 Microsoft Research School on Approximability, hosted at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. He was also selected to be this year's speaker at an annual lecture in honor of Hari Sahasrabuddhe, a founding faculty member of the computer science and engineering department of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. In addition, he was invited to speak at the InfoSys Research Lab, also in Bangalore.

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

PDF

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.

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