News

UC Berkeley Team Wins Personal Robot 2 Beta Program

June 9, 2010
A UC Berkeley team led by Professor Pieter Abbeel, ICSI Vision Group leader Trevor Darrell, and Professor Stuart Russell is one of the winners in the Personal Robot 2 Beta Program, sponsored by robotics company Willow Garage. The team, which includes Speech Group affiliate Dan Klein, will be given a robot for two years, and will experiment with hierarchical planning, perception, and manipulation of deformable objects, such as towels. Read more about the team's plans for the robot here >>

Paul Kay Publishes Article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

June 1, 2010
Paul Kay, a researcher with the AI Group, has published an article in the June 1 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The article is Kay's tenth on color naming and perception to appear in PNAS in the last five years. Read the article here>>

Netalyzr Featured in New Scientist

May 25, 2010
The Netalyzr system, developed by members of the Networking Group, has been featured in New Scientist magazine. The article encourages readers to try the system, which analyzes the extent to which a user's Internet service provider is interferring with its customers' traffic. To date, 130,000 users from 180 countries have tried the system. New Scientist also provides background information written for a nontechnical audience on the tests conducted by Netalyzr.The system, developed by Christian Kreibich, Vern Paxson, and Nicholas Weaver, has also been featured in an article in the Register.

Bonnie Kirkpatrick Wins a 2010 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

May 3, 2010
Algorithms Group graduate student Bonnie Kirkpatrick has won a 2010 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. The award, given annually to female students in technology and computer science for academic excellence and leadership, includes a $10,000 scholarship and invitations to networking retreats at Google offices. It was established in 2004 to honor Dr. Anita Borg, the founder of the Institute for Women and Technology, and is dedicated to encouraging female scholars to become leaders in the fields of technology and computing. Read more about the award here >>

Dan Klein Awarded Distinguished Teaching Award

April 15, 2010
Professor Dan Klein, an affiliate of the Speech Group, has been awarded a 2010 Distinguished Teaching Award, UC Berkeley's most prestigious award for instruction. The awards are given annually by the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate's Committee on Teaching to recognize sustained excellence in the classroom, creative scholarly work, and the ability to inspire independent thinking in students. Klein will be honored at an awards ceremony April 22. More about the awards >>

Krste Asanović Given 2009-2010 Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award

April 14, 2010
Architecture Group leader Krste Asanović has been given the 2009-2010 Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award. The award is given each year to a UC Berkeley Computer Science faculty member for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Previous winners include ICSI affiliate Dan Klein (2008-2009) and BFOIT advisory board member Daniel Garcia (2004-2005).

Christian Kreibich Quoted on BBC News

March 29, 2010
Networking Group scientist Christian Kreibich was quoted by BBC News discussing the difficulties of filtering spam email. The article focused on harmless emails incorrectly marked as spam. Researchers at ICSI and UC San Diego recently developed a spam blocking method that, in initial tests, only filtered spam messages, with no false positives -- that is, legitimate messages marked as spam. The system exploits the spam-creating botnets that run in the background of users' computers by learning the templates the bots use and teaching spam filters to look for these templates. While this doesn't guarantee a 100 percent success rate in real life situations, it is a huge step forward in spam prevention.

ICSI Alum Matthew Aylett Develops Text-to-Speech Software

March 2, 2010
ICSI Speech Group alum Matthew Aylett has developed text-to-speech software that allows film critic Roger Ebert, who lost his voice box four years ago, to speak in an approximation of his own voice. "It still needs improvement," said Ebert in a report aired on CBS, "but at least it sounds like me." Aylett's Scotland-based company, CereProc, broke down voice recordings from Ebert's film commentary into individual sounds, which are reassembled when Ebert types a sentence into the software. Ebert can also adjust the emphasis and intonation of the synthesized sentences. CereProc offers a number of other voices produced from text, including voices with Irish, Scottish, Southern English, and American accents. Ebert's new voice debuted on the Oprah Show in March.

BEARS Open House

February 11, 2010
ICSI held its annual BEARS Open House February 11. Professor Krste Asanovic, head of the Architecture Group, presented his group's work on photonic-based memory, Collin Baker led a demonstration of the latest improvements to the FrameNet Project, and Luke Gottlieb demonstrated Joke-O-Mat, an award-winning project by members of the Speech Group. Scientists from all groups presented posters summarizing recent results of various research projects. The open house is held annually in conjunction with UC Berkeley EECS Annual Research Symposium (BEARS).

Dilek Hakkani-Tür Is Quoted in the LA Times

February 7, 2010
Speech Group scientist Dilek Hakkani-Tür was quoted in The LA Times explaining some of the technical difficulties of transcribing spoken language to text in a column February 7. Scientists in the ICSI Speech Group are actively researching ways to make machine transcription of human speech more accurate, as well as creating algorithms to assist computers in making sense of the resulting transcriptions. Read the column, "Speech and Handwriting: Where's the App?", here >>.

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