Research Scientist David Newman has been awarded a $25,000 NSF EAGER Award for his research entitled ‘Analyzing Grant Portfolios through Topic Modeling.’ The goal of this research is to develop and apply topic models to analyze collections of grant proposals and their metadata. The award will be used to develop tools to help NSF program officers better analyze, visualize and interact with large collections of both unfunded proposals and funded projects.

A paper entitled “Discriminative models for multi-class object layout” by Chaitanya Desai, Deva Ramanan and Charless Fowlkes received the Marr Prize at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) held in Kyoto, Japan. The prize is named after David Marr, a theoretical neuroscientist who made profound contributions to the theory of both human and machine vision in the 1970’s. The prize is awarded to the best paper at ICCV and is considered one of the top honors in computer vision. The authors plan to spend the prize money on a couch for the UCI Computational Vision lab.

The Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems is very pleased to announce its Distinguished Speaker series for the academic year 2009-2010. This year’s series will bring a set of internationally-known researchers to UC Irvine, speaking on a broad set of topics ranging from machine learning, statistical prediction, and analysis of text, network, and Web data. For further information, see the 2009-2010 speaker schedule.

Michael Carey and Center member Chen Li, professors of Computer Science at the University of California Irvine, have been awarded a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Data-Intensive Computing Program. The project entitled ‘ASTERIX: A Highly Scalable Parallel Platform for Semistructured Data Management and Analysis’ will research and develop new technologies for storing and analyzing semi-structured data.

Padhraic Smyth, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems, has been awarded the 2009 Innovation Award from the Association of Computing Machineryﾒs Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD). Smyth is recognized for his contributions to both the theory and application of probabilistic and statistical approaches to data mining. For more details, see the award citation.

Christopher DuBois, America Holloway, and Chloe Azencott have recently been awarded prestigious graduate fellowships. DuBois, a first-year statistics PhD student, received a three-year NDSEG Graduate Fellowship, and he will use this funding to pursue research on statistical modeling of social networks. Holloway, a second-year computer science PhD student, received a Microsoft Graduate Women’s Scholarship, and she will use this funding to further her research on topic models. Azencott, a fourth-year computer science PhD student, received an IBM PhD Fellowship, which will fund her investigation of machine learning techniques for chemoinformatics. Congrats to all!

The Center has recently received gift funding in the amount of $5000 from Yahoo! Research for continued support of the weekly Seminar Series in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The series has been running for over 2 years now with support from Yahoo! and has been a great success with upwards of 40 to 50 students and faculty attending weekly.

Charless Fowlkes, an assistant professor in computer science, was recently awarded a grant through the UC Lab Research program, entitled "Context Driven Image Interpretation in Satellite Imagery". The grant provides $488k over three years and is a collaboration between Fowlkes and investigators at Los Alamos National Labs. Their goal is to develop new techniques for image segmentation and object recognition based on contextual relations within a scene. These methods will be applied to performing large-scale visual search and automatic identification of potential threats in satellite imagery, in order to aid nuclear verification and counter proliferation efforts.

On October 3rd, 2008, the Computational Vision group at UC Irvine hosted the first Southern California Computer Vision Meetup, where researchers in computer vision presented their latest findings. Participants included faculty from local universities such as UCI, UCLA, UCSD, and Caltech, as well as researchers from JPL and Google. The Computational Vision group is affiliated with the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems.

Along with Center members Michael Goodrich, David Eppstein, and Carter Butts, computer science professor and director of the Center for Machine Learning Padhraic Smyth has received a five-year, $5.4 million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to study large-scale networks with millions of nodes. The goal is to understand how networks the size of Facebook and LinkedIn are formed and how they evolve over time. The multidisciplinary effort spans the spectrum from theoretical computer science to the social sciences and will involve faculty with expertise ranging from algorithms to graph visualization, machine learning, statistics, sociology and behavioral science.