Recent News

Director Roberto Pieraccini met with collaborators and partners involved in ICSI's Finnish visiting program April 23 to 25 in Finland. Since the program's establishment over 10 years ago, ICSI has hosted more than 50 Finnish visiting researchers funded through the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes). Read more about Pieraccini's visit and the Finnish visiting program on the Tekes Web site.
Professor Richard Karp, leader of ICSI's Algorithms Group, will be the founding director of a theoretical computer science institute to be established at UC Berkeley with a $60 million gift from the Simons Foundation. The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing will bring together top computer theorists and researchers from around the world to address challenges in areas like social sciences, biology, physics, and economics. Read more about the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in the New York Times and the ICSI press release. Read more about Karp on our blog.
Omoju Miller, a graduate student researcher in the AI Group, will attend the inaugural TEDx Summit from April 16 to 20 in Doha, Qatar. The TEDx program sponsors local, independent events licensed by TED, the popular series of conferences on technology, entertainment, and design. The summit brings together 600 TEDx organizers from 90 countries to discuss ways to improve events. Last year, Miller organized TEDxEuclidAve, which focused on how to use technology and entrepreneurship to achieve social good and featured, among other speakers, Nobel Peace Prize winner Professor Daniel Kammen and ICSI collaborator Yahel Ben-David.
Speech Group researchers Gerald Friedland and Jaeyoung Choi won a best poster award at the Korean Student Technical and Leadership Conference in March. The researchers were able to automatically estimate where some YouTube and Flickr videos were shot by semantically analyzing the tags added to them by users. The researchers ran text from the tags through several filters to account for ambiguities, such as words that could refer to multiple things (for example, Paris, France and Paris, Texas) or that contained typos. The paper extends previous work showing it is possible to, for example, use the locations of videos and photos to quickly and easily find the home addresses of users currently on vacation, leaving them vulnerable to burglary. Read the award-winning paper, which originally appeared in the International Journal of Semantic Computer, here > >
Professor Richard Karp, leader of the Algorithms Group, has been invited to speak at three conferences celebrating the 100th birthday of the British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. Karp received the Turing Award in 1985 for his contributions to the theory of computational algorithms. The Turing Award is the most prestigious technical award given by the ACM and widely considered the most prestigious award in computing. More > >
Director Roberto Pieraccini's book The Voice in the Machine, about the evolution of speech recognition technology, was released March 30 by MIT Press. The book examines the evolution of human-computer speech interaction capabilities over the past six decades. More > >
ICSI alum Oliver Günther has been appointed as the president of the University of Potsdam, Germany. Günther was the second postdoctoral fellow to be hired by ICSI after its founding in 1986 and has been a strong supporter of the Institute since then. He took over as president of Potsdam on January 1.
Prabhakar Raghavan, chairman of ICSI's Board of Trustees, has accepted a position as the vice president of strategic technologies at Google. Raghavan was formerly the head of Yahoo! Labs, where he worked for the last seven years.
ICSI Board of Trustees member Wolfgang Wahlster has received the Eagle of Saint Venceslao, the highest recognition given by the Autonomous Province of Trento, Italy. Wahlster was recognized for more than 15 years of service to IRST, now called the Bruno Kessler Foundation. IRST, located in Trento, is one of the most prestigious research centers in Italy. See photos of the ceremony here >>
The Communications of the ACM recently featured a roundtable discussion among Networking Group researcher Nicholas Weaver and other computer scientists about bufferbloat, the overuse of buffering inside a network, which can result in slow network connections. Weaver joined Vint Cerf of Google, Jim Gettys of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, and Van Jacobson of PARC in discussing the history, causes, and potential solutions for the problem. Weaver, with Christian Kreibich and Vern Paxson of ICSI's network measurement and security group, designed the Netalyzr system, which, among other things, measures the buffers in a user's network traffic.
An interview with ICSI Director Roberto Pieraccini was featured on Mobile Groove. Pieraccini comments on the history and status of speech recognition research. An analysis of the interview is available here >> The interview with Pieraccini begins at 18.10 in the video below.

ICSI has appointed Roberto Pieraccini as its new director. Pieraccini brings to ICSI expertise in both academic and corporate research as well as enterprise business leadership. He succeeds Professor Nelson Morgan, who will continue to lead the Speech Group and assist Pieraccini as his deputy director. More >>
The 2010-2011 Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award has been given to Networking Group researcher Vern Paxson, who leads security efforts at ICSI. The award is given each year to a UC Berkeley Computer Science faculty member for excellence in undergraduate teaching. Previous winners include Architecture Group leader Krste Asanović (2009-2010) and ICSI affiliate Dan Klein (2008-2009).
Scott Shenker, leader of the Networking Group, has been elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineers, one of the highest distinctions accorded to engineers. Shenker was recognized for his contributions to Internet design and architecture. A professor at UC Berkeley, he is also a member of ICSI's Board of Trustees, a founding member of the ICSI Center for Internet Research, and a fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. He received his PhD in physics in 1983 from the University of Chicago, and was later awarded an honorary doctorate from the same university in recognition of his contributions to Internet architecture. He has received both the SIGCOMM and IEEE Internet Awards. Other members of the National Academy of Engineering include Algorithms Group leader Richard Karp and ICSI Board of Trustees members David Culler, Deborah Estrin, and Prabhakar Raghavan. More >>
ICSI external fellow Sylvia Ratnasamy has received a Sloan Research Fellowship. Ratnasamy, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, works with ICSI's Networking Group. She is among 126 U.S. and Canadian researchers to receive the fellowship, which is given annually to young scientists and scholars. Read an interview with Ratnasamy at the UC Berkeley news center >> Read more about the Sloan Research Fellowship >>
Speech Group researcher Gerald Friedland has been named the associate editor of the year by the ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications. Friedland was recognized for excellent professional performance as an associate editor for the journal, a position he has held for the last year.
Professor Krste Asanović, leader of the Architecture Group, has been named a Distinguished Scientist for 2011 by the Association for Computing Machinery. The ACM Distinguished Member Recognition Program recognizes ACM members who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.
AI Group leader Srini Narayanan and his collaborators have received the Semantic Web Science Association's Ten-Year Award. The award recognizes papers that have had the most influence a decade after being presented at the International Semantic Web Conference. This is the first year the award has been given. Read the paper here >>
ICSI alum Mark Handley will receive the 2012 IEEE Internet Award. Handley is recognized for his contributions to Internet multicast, telephony, congestion control, and the shaping of open Internet standards and open-source systems in all these areas. Past winners of the award include Networking Group leader Scott Shenker in 2006 and Networking Group researcher Sally Floyd in 2005. Read more about the award here >>
Networking Group researcher Barath Raghavan and UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Justin Ma have found that the Internet and devices that access it are responsible for about 2 percent of the total energy used globally. The researchers estimated how much energy it takes to manufacture end systems, such as laptops and smart phones, as well as how much energy these devices use. They estimate that the Internet uses between 170 and 307 gigawatts of the 16 terawatts used globally. The findings, to be presented in November at HotNets 2011, suggest that research into energy efficiency should focus less on reducing the power used by networking and more on ways that networking can reduce other forms of energy use, for example, by replacing business travel with teleconferencing. Read more in the New Scientist >> Read the paper here >>
Congratulations to Networking Group senior researcher Mark Allman and his wife Meredith on the birth of their son, Ryan Thomas, on October 26 at 2:00 p.m. Ryan weighed 8 pounds 14 ounces and was 20.5 inches at birth.
AI Group researchers will assist a colleague at UC Irvine in studying variations in color categorization among Pacific Rim cultures and in creating a public database showing how speakers of 116 Mesoamerican languages name different colors. The Mesoamerican Color Survey, collected between 1978 and 1981 by the late cognitive anthropologist Robert E. MacLaury, documents how cultures in Mexico and Central America categorize color and until now has been available only in hard copy. Kimberly A. Jameson, associate project scientist at UC Irvine's Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, will work with AI Group researchers Paul Kay and Richard S. Cook to digitize the data. The project will provide open access to the survey for the first time. The data will be hosted at ICSI alongside the World Color Survey, a digital archive of data showing how speakers of 110 unwritten languages spoken around the world categorize color. The project is supported in part by the UC Pacific Rim Research Program >>
Priv3, an extension for Firefox developed by Networking Group members that keeps social networking sites from tracking your movement on certain Web pages without your knowledge, has been featured on Lifehacker.com >>
ICSI is pleased to announce the appointment of Roberto Pieraccini to the position of director. In January, Pieraccini will succeed Nelson Morgan, who will continue to lead the Speech Group and assist Pieraccini as his deputy director. More >>
A second edition of the acclaimed textbook "Speech and Audio Signal Processing" by Nelson Morgan, Director of ICSI, and Ben Gold was released in August by Wiley Publishing. The textbook, initially published in 1999, was updated and expanded in a number of areas, including psychoacoustic audio coding and music transcription. Columbia University Professor and ICSI contributor Dan Ellis is a new principal coauthor and editor for the edition. Other new contributors include ICSI researchers Steven Wegmann and Gerald Friedland and ICSI alum David van Leeuwen.
Networking Group researcher Barath Raghavan won the best paper award at the Workshop on Green Networking at ACM SIGCOMM 2011, held August 19 in Toronto. His paper, written with UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow Justin Ma, explores what might happen to the Internet in the event of an oil shortage resulting in a global energy crisis. Read the paper here >>
Networking Group researchers have found that the majority of the most active malware distributors pay third parties to install their malicious software on at least some of the computers they infect. Networking researchers Chris Grier, Christian Kreibich, and Vern Paxson, in collaboration with Juan Cabellero of IMDEA Software Institute, won an Outstanding Paper Award at the USENIX Security Symposium 2011 for the work, which was featured in the MIT Technology Review. Researchers infiltrated four "pay-per-install" providers and downloaded over a million instances of malware. They found that twelve of the 20 families of malware distributors seen most frequently use "pay-per-install" providers to infect machines. Pay-per-install services cost pennies per machine infected, suggesting that even if a botnet — a potentially very large group of malware-infected computers under the unified command of a single person — is completely wiped out, it could be inexpensively rebuilt from scratch. Read the award-winning paper here >>
Some Internet service providers (ISPs) redirect Internet searches through third-party companies, according to Networking Group researchers. New Scientist, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's blog, Slashdot, and the Washington Post have featured the findings. Rather than sending searches such as "apple" to search engines like Bing or Yahoo, a dozen ISPs with millions of customers divert their queries through affiliate marketing companies that ultimately send them to Web sites such as Apple Computer, bypassing the search engines. ISPs apparently earn commission off the redirected searches. Networking Group researchers Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver, and Vern Paxson have found more than 160 search terms redirected this way, including "Apple," "Dell," and "Safeway." While these retailers hire marketing companies to generate traffic through ads and other legitimate mechanisms, the retailers may end up paying for traffic that ISPs redirect from Web searches as well. Read more in the New Scientist > >, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's blog >>, Slashdot >>, and the Washington Post >>
Networking researchers have won the FCC Open Internet Research Challenge with their Netalyzr system, which tests whether a user's Internet service provider (ISP) is interfering with network traffic. The challenge, issued by the Federal Communications Commission, called for research papers on work to keep the Internet transparent, open, and under consumer control. Watch senior researcher Nicholas Weaver's presentation and acceptance speech on behalf of the team here >> Read the winning paper here >> Try the Netalyzr system here >>
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published a study coauthored by AI researcher Paul Kay on interactions between color, language, and brain activity. The article shows that the brain-localized effect of linguistic categories on early color processing occurs out of awareness. Kay has published a dozen papers in PNAS in the last several years. Read the article here >>
Vern Paxson, a senior researcher in the Networking Group, has been invited to give the keynote talk at SIGCOMM 2011, to be held in August in Toronto. SIGCOMM, the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communications, is considered the leading conference in networking. Paxson's talk is titled "Reflections on Measurement Research: Crooked Lines, Straight Lines, and Moneyshots."
Networking Group researchers have found that the majority of the most active malware distributors pay third parties to install their malicious software on at least some of the computers they infect. The study, featured in the MIT Technology Review, describes how researchers infiltrated four "pay-per-install" providers and downloaded over a million instances of malware. They found that twelve of the 20 families of malware distributors seen most frequently use "pay-per-install" providers to infect machines. Pay-per-install services cost pennies per machine infected, suggesting that even if a botnet — a potentially very large group of malware-infected computers under the unified command of a single person — is completely wiped out, it could be inexpensively rebuilt from scratch. Read more >>
ICSI's Netalyzr system is one of four end-user tests recommended by the Internet Society to see what problems users may encounter with IPv6, the new Internet Protocol address standard that will eventually replace the protocol used by most Internet services today. Netalyzr also tests whether a user's Internet service provider is interfering with network traffic. Read more about IPv6 here >> Test your Internet connection with Netalyzr here >>
Congratulations to Adam Richman, a systems administrator, and his wife Akiko on the birth of their son, Jonathan Haruto, on June 5 at 4:58 p.m. Jonathan weighed 7 pounds 1 ounce at birth.
Two PhD students in the ICSI Speech Group have received a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship to pursue their work on a system that automatically summarizes large amounts of text. Mohit Bansal and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick will receive $50,000 each in the coming year and will collaborate with Qualcomm research and development throughout the year. Their project, "Automatic Summarization for Mobile Search," focuses on developing a system that, for example, can produce a brief synopsis of recent news resulting from an Internet search. The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship is awarded annually to help PhD students pursue innovative ideas in computer science or electrical engineering. This year, more than 140 teams applied for eight fellowship slots. Read more about the fellowship >>
The ACM SIGCOMM Test of Time Award has been given for a 2001 paper on scalable content-addressable networks written by Networking Group researchers. The award recognizes papers that continue to be useful contributions to the field a decade after publication. The award was given for "A Scalable Content-Addressable Network," written by Sylvia Ratnasamy, now a professor at UC Berkeley and an ICSI external fellow; ICSI alumni Paul Francis, director of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, and Mark Handley, professor at University College London; Algorithms Group leader Richard Karp; and Networking Group leader Scott Shenker.
Several ICSI researchers will participate in the recently announced Intel Science and Technology Center for Secure Computing at UC Berkeley. Networking Group leader Scott Shenker, Vern Paxson, who leads security efforts at ICSI, and external fellow Sylvia Ratnasamy will join researchers from across the US in exploring ways to guard personal computers from malware, secure mobile devices that use third-party applications, and protect personal data on the Internet. The center will receive $2.5 million per year in funding from Intel.
In a study featured in the New York Times, ICSI, UC Berkeley, and UC San Diego researchers found that just three banks authorize 95 percent of credit card sales of goods advertised through spam. The study measured the spam-based business cycle from the sending of unwanted email to the delivery of goods. Christian Kreibich, Nicholas Weaver, and Vern Paxson, with researchers at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, visited 6 million spam-advertised Web sites and made over 100 purchases of items such as over-the-counter medicine and replica goods in order to understand the economy of spam-based sales. The research suggests spam-based profits could be significantly reduced if credit card-issuing banks refused to settle transactions authorized by banks identified as spam business supporters. The findings will be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy next week. Read the paper here >>
The 2011 ACM SIGCOMM Award has been awarded to Vern Paxson, a senior researcher in the Networking Group. Paxson is recognized for his seminal contributions to Internet measurement and security, as well as for distinguished leadership and service to the Internet community. Past winners of the award include Scott Shenker, who leads the Networking Group, Sally Floyd, a senior researcher in the group, and Domenico Ferrari, a former deputy director of ICSI and Networking Group leader. More >>
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published a study by AI researcher Paul Kay that shows that learning new color names causes rapid growth in grey matter in the adult brain. Kay and his collaborators from Beijing and Hong Kong found that when adults learned new subcategories of green and blue, the part of the brain responsible for color vision grew rapidly. The article is Kay's tenth in PNAS in the last several years. Read the article here >>
Congratulations to Gregor Maier, a DAAD-funded postdoctoral fellow in the Networking Group, and his wife Catherine Logan on the birth of their daughter, Virginia Anne, on March 21 at 1:06 p.m. Catherine weighed 7 pounds 7 ounces at birth.
U.S. News and World Report, Wired Magazine and the NPR News Blog have featured research by Networking Group members and a team from UC San Diego on the profitability of spam. The researchers took over part of a spam botnet, a group of malware-infected computers instructed to send large amounts of spam, to find out how many spam messages were successfully delivered and how many led to a sale. Read more about the research here >>
Speech Group alum Eric Fosler-Lussier, along with Dr. Jeremy Morris of Ohio State University, has won a 2010 best paper award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society. They were one of six teams recognized for the exceptional merit of their papers. Fosler-Lussier was a graduate student under Speech Group leader Nelson Morgan and later a postdoctoral researcher at ICSI. Read more about the award here > >
Congratulations to Luke Gottlieb (a researcher with the Speech Group as well as a Systems Administrator at ICSI) and his wife Emily-Rose on the birth of their son, Asher Zev, on March 4 at 10:01 a.m. Asher weighed 8 pounds 14 ounces at birth.
Congratulations to Vision Group leader Trevor Darrell and his wife Lisa Hagstrom on the birth of their daughter, Linnea Viktoria, on February 3 at 4:09 p.m. Linnea weighed 7 pounds 12 ounces at birth.
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.
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.
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.
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.