The first annual Southern California Machine Learning workshop was recently held at UC Irvine. The one-day event consisted of talks and posters by students and faculty from schools such as UCSD, UCI, USC, Caltech, UCLA, CSU Long Beach, UC Riverside, and UC Merced, as well as local industry participants. Over 90 people attended the meeting and plans are underway for the 2nd annual workshop next Fall.

PhD students Qiang Liu and Nick Navaroli have each been awarded prestigious national research fellowships. Qiang received a 3-year Microsoft Graduate Fellowship — one of only 12 awarded in 2011 from almost 200 applications. Nick received a 3-year National Defense Science and Engineering (NDSEG) Fellowship. Congrats to both!

Computer science professor Padhraic Smyth is the Program Chair for the 17th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Considered the premier annual international research conference on data mining, the event this year drew a record-setting 1,000+ attendees. Approximately 725 research papers were submitted (another record), of which 125 were accepted for oral or poster presentation at the meeting. The review process involved more than 350 reviewers and 35 senior program committee members. Keynote presenters include Peter Norvig (Google), Stephen Boyd (Stanford University), David Haussler (UC Santa Cruz) and Judea Pearl (UCLA).

Computer science professor Max Welling is now Associate Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). Welling has previously served as Associate Editor for TPAMI, which is one of the highest impact journals in the general area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In addition to participating in the review process, Welling is helping to organize a number of special issues on timely topics in machine learning.

Max Welling, professor of computer science, has been awarded European Conference on Computer Vision’s Koenderink Prize in recognition of his computer vision research paper that has “withstood the test of time.” Entitled “Unsupervised Learning of Models for Recognition,” the paper was originally published in 2000. The research paper presents a method to learn object class models from unlabeled and unsegmented cluttered scenes for the purpose of visual object recognition.

Padhraic Smyth, professor of computer science and director of the CML, has been named a fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Recognized for his significant contributions to the theory and practice of statistical machine learning, Smyth is one of only eight researchers worldwide who has been named AAAI Fellows this year. The AAAI Fellows program recognizes individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence — a lifetime honor.

Pierre Baldi, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science and Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics director, has been awarded the 2010 Eduardo R. Caianiello Prize for Scientific Contributions to the Field of Neural Networks from the Italian Neural Network Society (SIREN). The distinguished prize is given to senior professors who have made significant contributions to the field of neural networks. Neural network are circuits of artificial neurons used to build systems that can learn from data and experience.

CML faculty Chen Li and Xiaohui Xie have been awarded a $100,000 grant from Intel. The grant will support research on genome compression and direct querying of compressed genomic data — critical challenges in the emerging field of personalized medicine. Li and Xie will be collaborating on the research with colleagues at China’s Northeastern University.

Statistics professor David van Dyk has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The Fellowship honors the outstanding research and professional contributions of IMS members who are leaders in the field of statistics and probability. Professor van Dyk’s scholarly work focuses on methodological and computational issues involved with Bayesian analysis of highly structured statistical models and emphasizes serious interdisciplinary research.

Professor of Computer Science Chen Li has received a $50,000 NSF grant for his project entitled ‘RAPID: Supporting Family Reunification for the Haiti Earthquake and Future Emergencies.’ Li is leading the effort on developing a web site for family reunification in response to the Haiti earthquake. The techniques developed in this project will potentially have a broad impact on many information systems that are moving towards the cloud-computing paradigm.