Along with six other UCI faculty members, Center member Daniel Whiteson, an assistant professor in physics & astronomy, is playing a key role in the Large Hadron Collider, the worldﾒs most powerful particle accelerator. Whiteson’s primary role is to ensure that data acquisition operates smoothly over 2,000 computers operating in parallel. Whiteson’s research includes the use of machine learning techniques to sift through huge amounts of proton-proton collision data, in order to look for evidence of the Higgs boson or other fundamentally new particles.

The Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems, in partnership with the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, is very pleased to announce its Distinguished Speaker series for the academic year 2008-2009. 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, computer vision, and analysis of text, network, and Web data. For further information, see the 2008-2009 speaker schedule.

Center member David Newman and collaborators at Yale University and University of Michigan have been awarded $750,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to study how topic modeling can be used to improve search and discovery of digital resources in increasingly large digital collections. They will apply topic modeling to three important classes of digital library resources: full-text books, images, and tagged objects. The team will build prototypes of user interface applications that use topic modeling, to assess the value of topic modeling to users.

The Center is very pleased to welcome five new faculty on board, all assistant professors who joined UC Irvine in Fall 2007. From computer science, we welcome Charless Fowlkes (computer vision and bioinformatics), Alex Ihler (statistical learning and inference), Deva Ramanan (computer vision), and Xiaohui Xie (bioinformatics) – and from cognitive science we welcome Lisa Pearl (computational language modeling).

A number of Center members were recognized by their peers for major awards in the Fall. Rina Dechter received the 2007 Association of Constraint Programming Research Excellence award. Michael Goodrich was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). And Rui de Figueiredo was elected a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (U.S. Section) and was awarded the academy’s George V. Chilingar Medal of Honor for his important contributions to science and engineering. Congrats to all!

The Center is very grateful for a recent gift from Yahoo! – the gift is specifically targeted at supporting the weekly AI and machine learning seminar series. This series has proven very popular with graduate students and faculty, and we had an excellent set of talks in Fall quarter, including visitors such as Geoff Hinton, Milind Tambe, and Dave Blei. The Distinguished Speaker Series also got off to a great start in the Fall, with talks by Judea Pearl, David Heckerman, and Tommi Jaakkola. Next quarter, we look forward to visits from Tom Griffiths, Andrew McCallum, and Trevor Hastie.

At the recent (Dec 2007) NIPS conference in Vancouver, six different papers were presented by PhD students and faculty from the Center. The students included Ian Porteous, Eric Linstead, and Arthur Asuncion, and researchers and faculty from the Center included Alex Ihler, Max Welling, Pierre Baldi, Dave Newman, and Padhraic Smyth. The NIPS conference is one of the major annual conferences in machine learning (over 1000 attendees) and is also highly competitive — only about 25% of submitted papers are accepted.

The Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems, in partnership with the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, is very pleased to announce its Distinguished Speaker series for the academic year 2007-2008. This year’s series will bring a set of internationally-known researchers to UC Irvine, speaking on a broad set of topics ranging from automated reasoning, distributed learning algorithms, human and machine learning, statistical prediction, and analysis of text, network, and Web data. For further information, see the 2007-2008 speaker schedule.

Chloe Azencott and S. Josh Swamidass, two graduate students in Professor Pierre Baldiﾒs lab, finished in 1st and 2nd place respectively in the data mining competition “Agnostic Learning vs. Prior Knowledge” part of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2007 Conference, a major international conference in the field of neural networks.

The UC Irvine Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics (IGB) has been awarded $5.6 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health to continue training students to apply advanced computer and information technologies in the biological and medical sciences. The funding will be used to expand the interdisciplinary Biomedical Informatics Training (BIT) program, one of eighteen such programs in the country.