ICSI Board of Trustees member Wolfgang Walhlster will be the first chairman of the TZS Scientific Advisory Board. TZS is a new German company using data analysis to address urban management challenges. More >>
ICSI's Brazilian visitor program has issued its first annual call for applications, and is set to begin in 2010 as soon as participants have been selected from the pool of applicants. The program offers exciting opportunities to expand the horizons of ICSI scientists' worldwide collaborative research.
The ICSI team led by Dr. Gerald Friedland of the Speech Group has won the Grand Challenge at the Beijing ACM multimedia meeting. Their project, Joke-o-mat, was a response to the Yahoo! video challenge. Joke-o-mat is designed to parse sitcoms by identifying main characters, the best jokes (signaled by the loudest and longest laughs) and scene changes. It was developed by Friedland, Luke Gottlieb, and Adam Janin. More >>
Professor Charles Fillmore of the AI Group has been invited to speak at a Framenet Masterclass and Workshop at the Eighth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT8) hosted by The Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan Italy. The masterclass takes place on December 3rd, 2009 with the general conference on the 4th and 5th. More information about the class and conference >>
Rainer Böhme, a visitor with ICSI's Networking Group, was selected as a co-winner (with Tyler Moore of Harvard University) of the first Gordon Prize in Managing Cybersecurity Resources by the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. The prize is named after Lawrence A. Gordon, a cybersecurity expert at the school. Read more about the prize and the winning essay by Böhme and Moore >>
Liz Shriberg of the Speech Group has been selected as one of six fellows for 2009 of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) for her significant contributions to the field of speech communication science and technology. ISCA's Fellows Program began in 2007 to honor the contributions of outstanding members.
Professor Dan Klein, an affiliate of the Speech Group and a professor at UC Berkeley, has won an Okawa Foundation research grant award for 2009. This award is given out annually to selected scientists in the US and Asia. The award includes a $10,000 unrestricted grant.
Steve Sinha, of the AI Group, has received an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship and will be working at the DHS Office of Policy Development. Sinha is among 190 doctoral-level scientists and master's- and doctoral-level engineers who will spend a year working in federal agencies or congressional offices. The Fellows learn about science policy while providing valuable S&T expertise to the government. The fellowship begins September 1 with a two-week orientation in Washington, D.C.
In the last few years, genome association studies have led to breakthrough medical discoveries. However, due to privacy concerns that the identity of individuals could be determined through DNA data, health institutes in the US and abroad removed public access to the genetic data coming from these association studies. Such association studies have been shown to shed light on diseases such as cancer or Alzheimer's disease, and sharing the raw data from these studies with other scientists can aid tremendously with further discoveries. Nature Genetics has just published a new study by Dr. Eran Halperin of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) and Tel Aviv University, and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, that describes their "mathematical formula and software solution that ensures that malicious eyes will have very low chances to identify individuals in any study," says Dr. Halperin. Read the article here >>
The Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology (BFOIT) hosted its 10th Anniversary Reception on Friday, August 14 at the Sibley Auditorium in the Stephen D. Bechtel Building at the University of California, Berkeley from 2:00 - 3:30 p.m.
Congratulations to Luke Gottlieb (a researcher with the Speech Group as well as a Systems Administrator at ICSI) and his wife Emy on the birth of their son, Judah Richmond, on July 27 at 7:58 p.m. Judah weighed 9 pounds 1 ounce at birth.
ICSI bioinformatics researchers made significant contributions to a recently published study in Nature Genetics which links a single gene mutation to follicular lymphoma. The disease, a type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, affects approximately 66,000 Americans per year, resulting in 20,000 deaths. Professor Eran Halperin and Dr. Lucia Conde of ICSI's Algorithms Group performed the statistical analysis of the genetic data used in the study, which was led by Dr. Christine Skibola of UC Berkeley and Dr. Kevin M. Brown of the Translational Genomics Research Institute. More >>
Tobias Friedrich, a visiting scientist in the Algorithms Group, along with co-authors Christian Horoba and Frank Newmann, won a Best Paper Award in the Evolutionary Multiobjective Optimization category at the 2009 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) for their paper, Multiplicative Approximatons and the Hypervolume Indicator.
The recently published book Multilingual FrameNets in Computational Lexicography, edited by ICSI alum Professor Hans C. Boas of the University of Texas, features articles contributed by several of ICSI's past and present FrameNet team. More >>
The Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute hosted FRAMES AND CONSTRUCTIONS: A conference in honor of Charles J. Fillmore on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The conference, whose theme is Fillmore's contributions to Linguistics for nearly five decades, took place on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, July 31-Aug 2, 2009. More >>
BFOIT, the Berkeley Foundation for Opportunities in Information Technology, has received a generous donation for $5,000 from Paula Hawthorn and Michael Ubell of the Agape Foundation. BFOIT is an ICSI program that supports historically underrepresented ethnic minorities and women. Working directly with bay area youths from these populations, BFOIT provides training and encouragement in their desire to become leaders in the fields of computer science, engineering, and information technology.
New Scientist magazine's May 11 edition (magazine issue 2707) featured botnet infiltration work done by Christian Kreibich and other members of the Networking Group in an article titled "Cyber Espionage Reveals Spammer Strategies". This work was also featured in The Berkeley Science Review in an article by ICSI's own Dan Gillick, a graduate student in the Speech Group.
Paul Kay and several co-authors from the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have a paper in the May 4-8 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled "Language Regions of Brain are Operative in Color Perception." Kay, a linguist working in the AI Group at ICSI, has been published in PNAS several times for related work on color naming and color perception.
Ulrich Rückert, a postdoc with the Algorithms Group, won the Best Paper Award at the recent Siam International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2009), for a paper titled "Adaptive Concept Drift Detection" that he co-wrote with Anton Dries.
Press highlights related to Professor Karp's recent Kyoto Prize: a feature article about him at investors.com and this video biography created by San Diego State University.
Professor Richard M. Karp, head of ICSI's Algorithms Group, was presented with the 2008 Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology at the Kyoto Prize Symposium in San Diego, California March 18-20. More >>
ICSI's annual BEARS Open House was held on February 12th from 2:00-5:00 p.m. Professor Trevor Darrell, head of the new Vision Group, presented a talk on his latest computer vision work, Luke Gottlieb showed a video demo of recent speaker diarization work by members of the Speech Group, and the FrameNet team demonstrated their latest improvements, including some work on different languages. In addition, representatives from all research groups presented posters summarizing recent results from various current research projects.
Professor Richard Karp, head of ICSI's Algorithms Group, is the 2008 winner of the Dickson Prize in Science. According to the prize website, "The Dickson Prize in Science is awarded annually to the person who has been judged by Carnegie Mellon University to have made the most progress in the scientific field in the U.S. for the year in question." The prize will be presented to Professor Karp on March 25, 2009.
Dilek Hakanni-Tür of ICSI's Speech Group and Guiseppe Riccardi of the University of Trento have won an IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) 2008 Best Paper Award for their paper, "Active Learning: Theory and Applications to Automatic Speech Recognition" which appeared in the July 2005 issue of IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. They will be presented with the award at the ICASSP 2009 conference in Taipei, Taiwan, April 19-24, 2009.
