2008 News

Professor Nelson Morgan, ICSI's Director, has been named to the Advisory Council of the International Speech Communication Society (ISCA). ISCA is the primary organization devoted to speech communication science and technology.
The Vision Group recently welcomed two new arrivals - Torsten Darrell, son of Trevor Darrell and his wife Lisa, on December 18th, and Nika Tio, daughter of graduate student Kate Saenko, on October 25th. Congratulations to both families, and welcome Torsten and Nika.
Professor Richard M. Karp, of the ICSI Algorithms Group, was profiled in The Berkeley Science Review, Issue 15. The feature is written by ICSI Speech Group grad student Dan Gillick, a regular contributor to the publication.
Recent research on the profitability of spam, conducted by ICSI Networking Group researchers along with a team from UCSD, was featured in a Washington Post blog article on November 6, 2008.
Congratulations to Eran Halperin of the Algorithms Group and his wife Leticia Ortiz on the birth of their second son, Helio Halperin Ortiz. Helio was born at 9:17 a.m. on September 27 at UCSF.
Professor Krste Asanovic, head of the Architecture Group, is quoted in this InfoWorld article on parallel processing. Asanovic is an expert on this new technology, and advises programmers to be cautious in their choice of programming language for parallel programming. Because the technology is so new, there isn't yet an industry standard programming platform, so many of the existing platforms may become obsolete.
Two new research groups were formed in the summer of 2008. Professor Krste Asanovic, a former ICSI graduate student researcher and frequent visitor, is heading the new Architecture Group. Professor Trevor Darrell, formerly of MIT, is heading a new Vision Group.
Dr. Eero Silvennoinen of Tekes joined ICSI's Board of Trustees in June 2008. Dr. Silvennoinen is Director of Software and Telecommunications Technologies at Tekes, and has been at Tekes since 1988. He replaced Mr. Jouko Salo as the Finnish representative to ICSI's Board.
ICSI announced that it has transferred its eXtensible Open Router Platform (XORP) technology to XORP, Inc. (http://xorp.net), a startup founded by the leaders of the XORP.org project (http://xorp.org). The same day, XORP, Inc. debuted the XORP 1.5 Release. More >>
ICSI alum Chris Bregler and Emeritus Trustee Jitendra Malik have won the 2008 Longuet-Higgins prize for "Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision That have Stood the Test of Time."
Professor Richard M. Karp, Head of the Algorithms Group, received the 2008 Kyoto Prize in the Advanced Technology Category for "fundamental contributions to the development of the theory of computational complexity."
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ICSI's Krste Asanovic is working to set up the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (or ParLab) at UC Berkeley, which was featured in the March 19 New York Times article "Industry Giants Try to Break Computing's Dead End." For more information on Professor Asanovic's work with Par Lab, please see here
Paul Kay of ICSI's AI group was featured in a March 3 Nature News article by Kerri Smith entitled "Perception Coloured by Language." The piece highlights findings from two of Dr. Kay's studies, suggesting language may constrain color perception.
Vern Paxson, Senior Scientist with the Networking Group and a UC Berkeley Professor, is the recipient of the 2007 Grace Murray Hopper Award from ACM for outstanding young computer professional of the year. Paxson was selected for work he did on measuring Internet behavior. ACM issued a press release about Paxson's award on February 21. Last year's winner, Dan Klein, is an ICSI Faculty Associate working with the Speech Group on machine translation.
A new study by Dr. Eran Halperin of ICSI and colleagues provides a means of pinpointing the ancestry of each position on an individual's genome. This information can be used to reconstruct ancestral history, which can then be used in studies of complex genetic diseases. Results of the study are published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics. More >>
In 2008, two German postdoctoral fellows at ICSI are working with ICSI's newest industrial partners. Gerald Friedland, who came to ICSI for a 2007 fellowship, extended his research visit another year with funding from the Silicon Valley company Appscio, Inc. Felix Salfner arrived at ICSI in January of 2008 and is working with German company SAP's Palo Alto office. Salfner and Friedland also receive funding for their research visits from DAAD in Germany, ICSI's longest-running international visitor program sponsor.
Nelson Morgan, Director of ICSI, was quoted on globeandmail.com, a national newspaper in Canada, in an article called Reality TV: When the tube talks back. The article discusses how technology is changing the way people interact with technology, using technologies such as speech recognition.
Umit Guz, Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher in 2007, received The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) CAREER Award for his project, "Extracting and Using Prosodic Information for Turkish Spoken Language Processing". Guz has returned to Turkey where he will conduct this research over the next two years, advised by ICSI's Dilek Hakkani-Tur and SRI's Gokan Tur and Mural Akbacak. More >>
The 2007 Spanish call for proposals has been issued. Applications will be accepted through February 24, 2008. Information on applying is available here.