Congratulations to Birte Loenneker Rodman, visiting scientist with the AI Group, and her husband Matjaz Rodman on the birth of their daughter Amaia. Amaia is the couple's first child and was born December 2nd at 4:00 a.m.
The Regional Council of Tuscany has awarded the Giulio Predi Prize in Science and Democracy to Professor George Lakoff of the Berkeley Linguistics Department. Lakoff is a longtime collaborator with the AI Group at ICSI. This is the first time the prize has been awarded and Professor Lakoff was the unanimous choice of the scientific committee. He will be accepting the prize in Florence, Italy on November 24.
On October 30th, ICSI signed a Memo of Understanding (MOU) with the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development. Mr. Reginaldo Arcuri, President of the agency, visited ICSI to sign the memo along with officials from the Brazilian Development Bank. The MOU will be the framework within which future activities between ICSI and Brazil, such as a visitor program, will be organized.
Vern Paxson of the Networking Group collaborated with Adrian Perrig and Jason Franklin from Carnegie Mellon and Stefan Savage from UC San Diego to design tools to fight the growth of Internet black markets. Franklin, a PhD student and former ICSI visitor, said "Our research monitoring found that more than 80,000 potential credit card numbers were available through these illicit underground web economies." To read about the strategies being used to stop identity and credit card theft online, see this press release from Carnegie Mellon.
Christian Müller, a postdoctoral researcher from Germany working with the Speech Group, is the editor of two new books on speaker classification. The books are part of Springer's State-of-the-Art Survey and the Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence sub-series of Lecture Notes on Computer Science. In the first book, Speaker Classification I: Fundamentals, Features, and Methods, Müller compiled a comprehensive collection of articles written by leaders in the field of speaker classification. Liz Shriberg of the Speech Group wrote a chapter in this volume titled "Higher Level Features in Speaker Recognition". The second book, Speaker Classification II: Selected Projects, is intended to be a companion to the first book, and contains numerous papers related to recent work done on speaker classification.
Congratulations to Jisup Hong and his wife Sara. Their son, Jonathan Jingul Hong, was born on September 7th at 8:49 a.m. weighing 7 pounds 12 ounces and 20.25 inches long. Jonathan is the couple's first child.
Gerald Friedland, a German postdoc working with the Speech Group, received the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his contributions to organizing the IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2007). Friedland served as the Program Coordination Co-Chair for this conference, which took place September 17-19, 2007.
ICSI's Srini Narayanan is the winner of a Google Research Award in
2007. The award is for exploring the use of search and language
technology to develop local language content and resources for rural
populations in the developing world. Srini Narayanan leads the
Artificial Intelligence group at ICSI and has an adjunct appointment
as an Associate Professor in the Cognitive Science program and at the
Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of
California, Berkeley.
Congratulations to Martin Hilpert and his wife Ning on the birth of their son, Hugo Oliver, on August 27th. Hugo was born one day after his sister Carla's second birthday.
ICSI's Krste Asanovic is a winner of the prestigious Okawa Foundation Research Grant for 2007. Asanovic was selected for his work on the design of computer systems, system software, innovative high-level architectures for CPUs and memory systems, and novel low-power circuit designs. Krste began his affiliation with ICSI while a graduate student in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He recently left a tenured faculty position at MIT to accept a joint appointment at ICSI and UCB.
Congratulations to Sally Floyd, winner of the 2007 SIGCOMM Award! The SIGCOMM Award is given annually to recognize the achievements of an exceptional computer scientist. Floyd is a leading researcher in the fields of Internet congestion control and Internet architecture. Her past awards include the IEEE Internet Award for 2005 and the Distinguished Alumna Award from the University of California at Berkeley's Computer Science and Engineering department in 2002.
ICSI is pleased to welcome two new members to the Board of Trustees, Dr. David Tennenhouse and Dr. Prabhakar Raghavan. Dr. Tennenhouse is a general partner at New Venture Partners, which specializes in corporate spin-outs. Formerly, he was CEO of A9, Amazon.com's search technology subsidiary, and Director of Research for Intel. Dr. Raghavan is the head of Yahoo! Research and is also a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM.
In response to a recent article posted on the popular tech site Slashdot claiming that some ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are increasing revenue by inserting ads into web pages viewed by their users, Scientists at ICSI and University of Washington created a Javascript program that checks whether this occurs. They found a few cases where this is true. The program can be accessed by visiting this page on the University of Washington web site.
Michael Luby and Amin Shokrollahi, both alumni of ICSI, were co-recipients of this year's IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award. This award was given "for bridging mathematics, internet design, and mobile broadcasting as well as successful standardization". Luby founded Digital Fountain, Inc. which utilizes technology he helped develop while at ICSI. Shokrollahi is chief scientist for Digital Fountain and works at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
Dick Karp, head of the Algorithms Group, was selected by the Computing Research Association (CRA) to serve a one-year term on its Council for the Computing Community Consortium. The Council will provide leadership to the CRA while it works with industry partners on determining the direction of future research projects. More about the Council and its members
The University of Chicago presented Scott Shenker of ICSI's Networking Group with an honorary Doctorate of Science degree at its June 8 convocation ceremony. Shenker, an alum of the university, was one of five scholars to receive honorary degrees this year. He was chosen for his "unprecedented record of fundamental contributions to the core architecture that underlies the Internet, a tool that is an engineering achievement of the first order, as well as a social revolution". The complete story is online at the University of Chicago Chronicle.
Vern Paxson of ICSI's Networking Group was featured in an article by Dennis Fisher on Search Security, "Eyeing unnoticed security researchers", which profiles six security experts who are making significant contributions to the field. Paxson is described as the "baseball umpire" of Internet security, because "if things are running smoothly, you'll never even know he's there". Paxson's work to keep the Internet running smoothly, particularly with regard to early detection and prevention of worm outbreaks, is what puts him on this short list of security experts.
Wiley Press has agreed to publish a new edition of "Speech and Audio Signal Processing: Processing and Perception of Speech and Music", a textbook previously written by ICSI's Nelson Morgan and MIT's Ben Gold, with added material that will be written over the next year by ICSI alum Dan Ellis (now at Columbia University).
Speech Communication awarded the 2007 best paper award to Dilek Hakkani-Tur of ICSI's Speech Group, Gokhan Tur of SRI, and Robert E. Schapire of Princeton for their paper Combining active and semi-supervised learning for spoken language understanding. The paper was originally published in the February 2005 edition of Speech Communication.
Congralations to Michael Levit of the Speech Group and his wife Mika. Their daughter Alyssa Aoki Levit was born on April 19th at 8:00 p.m.
The ICSI Speech Group has once again scored very well at the annual NIST evaluations in speech recognition and diarization. Building on last year's success, both ICSI's diarization team and the ICSI/SRI speech recognition team excelled in all categories entered in this year's evals.
ICSI has announced Release 1.4 of XORP, the eXtensible Open Router Platform. It is available for download at www.xorp.org. Release 1.4 adds OSPFv3, the IPv6-compatible version of the Open Shortest Path First protocol, to the set of routing protocols that XORP supports. More >>
Congratulations to Tobias Kiesling, a visting scientist with the Networking Group, and his wife Manuela, on the birth of their daughter Miriam on Tuesday, March 13th. Miriam weighed 3465 grams and was 52 cm long.
The Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology (BFOIT) is accepting applications for its Summer Institute for middle school and high school students. The Summer Institute trains underrepresented minority students in computer science and helps prepare them for college and careers in technical fields. For information on how to apply or to become a volunteer, please visit the BFOIT website.
The Scale vector-thread microprocessor prototype, developed by a team from MIT including recent ICSI visitors Professor Krste Asanovic and his students Ronny Krashinsky and Chris Batten, was completed in February. The device was a winner in the 2007 ISSCC/DAC (International Solid State Circuits Conference/Design Automation Conference) student design contest, and will be presented at the upcoming DAC conference this summer.
ICSI is seeking applications for the position of Director, to begin in Fall 2008. Job description and application information
ICSI's annual Open House, in conjunction with the UC Berkeley BEARS conference, was held on February 15th from 2:00-4:00. The event featured a talk by Nick Weaver (Networking Group) on User Authentication, and several posters and technology demonstrations. More info >>
Congratulations to Eran Halperin of the Algorithms Group and his wife Leticia. Their son Yanai was born on January 29th. Yanai weighed 7.3 pounds and was 20.5 inches long at birth.
ICSI's Paul Kay, of the AI Group, was interviewed on NPR's "All Things Considered" on Saturday, January 27th. An audio file of the story, "Developing a Vocabulary of Color", is available from NPR's website.
Congratulations to Pavlin Radoslavov of the Networking Group and his wife Kazuyo on the birth of their daughter Maria on January 24th. Maria was 6 pounds, 11 ounces at birth and 19 1/2 inches long.
In honor of Norbert Szyperski on his 75th birthday, ICSI has created a fund in his name. Szyperski contributed to the founding of ICSI and his personal efforts over the years on behalf of the institute are remarkable. It was his vision and his sustained endeavor that made the success of the Institute possible. ICSI is now accepting contributions to the fund, which may qualify as tax-deductible within the U.S.
ICSI research made the news at www.economist.com on January 18th. An article in the science and technology section titled "How grue is your valley?" discusses recent research by ICSI's Paul Kay of the AI group, ICSI alum Terry Regier (now at University of Chicago) and their colleagues on the relationship between color and language in the human brain.
Vern Paxson of the Networking Group is now a Fellow of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). A January 8, 2007 press release from the ACM named Paxson as one of 41 fellows for 2006. He was recognized for his contributions to Internet measurement and intrusion detection.
Congratulations to Mark Allman of the Networking Group on the birth of his daughter, Sarah. Sarah was born on January 2nd. She weighed 7 pounds 12 ounces and was 20 inches long at birth. Sarah is the Allmans' second daughter.
