The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, has announced two faculty members have earned prestigious honors. Computer science professors Rina Dechter and Padhraic Smyth have been named 2013 ACM Fellows. Read more

Professors Michael Carey and Chen Li have received $750,000 from the National Science Foundation and nearly $400,000 from corporations . including Google, Oracle and HTC . to continue the development of their Big Data system, AsterixDB. Read more

Peter Sadowski and Michael Zeller, both Ph.D. students with the Department of Computer Science, earned a second-place finish in an international data-mining competition. The honor was given by sbv IMPROVER, a collaborative project designed to enable scientists to learn about and contribute to the development of a new crowdsourcing method for verification of scientific data and results. Read more

Alexander Ihler, associate professor of computer science, has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project, .Estimation and Decisions in Graphical Models.. Ihler will receive $442,000 over five years for his CAREER project, which seeks to develop a new framework for exact and approximate methods for advanced computational reasoning problems. It extends the abilities of intelligent systems to reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty, and it applies and tests these methods on a variety of application domains, including sensor networks and computer vision. Read more

Anima Anandkumar has been awarded a 2013 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship. An assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Irvine’s The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, Anandkumar is one of seven from around the world to receive this support. Read more

The International Society for Computational Biology has selected Chancellor’s Professor Pierre Baldi as an ISCB Fellow. The ISCB Fellows program honors members who have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. The 2013 fellows were recognized at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference, held July 21-23 in Berlin. Read more

Computer science professor Padhraic Smyth served as program chair for the 29th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2013), held July 11-15 in Bellevue, Wash. Sponsored by Microsoft Research, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Toyota and IBM, UAI is the leading international conference on the use of probabilistic models and algorithms in artificial intelligence and machine learning. More than 240 papers were submitted to the conference; 73 were accepted for presentation at the meeting, after extensive peer review by a program committee of over 200 researchers in the area. Read more

Computer science faculty Xiaohui Xie and Chen Li have been awarded a three-year grant of nearly $662,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop new computational tools essential for future advances in sequencing human genomes. The primary goal of the NIH-funded research is to develop computational algorithms and open-source software to improve both the efficiency and accuracy of next-generation sequencing analysis tools and expand the accessibility of those tools to previously understudied regions of the genome.

Charless Fowlkes, assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project, “Combinatorial Inference and Learning for Fusing Recognition and Perceptual Grouping.” The CAREER program is NSF’s most prestigious award for junior faculty members. Awardees are chosen because they exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.