David Newman presented a plenary paper on statistical topic models for indexing large digital libraries in June at this year’s ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Titled “Subject Metadata Enrichment using Statistical Topic Models, the paper was selected as one of the 5 best research papers at the conference, from over 200 submitted papers. This was joint work with co-authors Chaitanya Chemudugunta and Padhraic Smyth from UC Irvine and Kat Hagedorn from the University of Michigan. The paper appeared in the Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2007), June 2007.”

Pierre Baldi, Chancellor’s Professor and Director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, has been named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Baldi is recognized for his significant contribution to statistical machine learning and the development of widely used algorithms to solve problems in the life sciences.

Ramesh Jain, Donald Bren Professor in Information and Computer Sciences, has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, held in Singapore January 10-12. The paper, entitled Ontology-based Annotation of Paintings using Transductive Inference Framework, proposed a framework for ontology-based annotation of paintings with application-level concepts of art period.

Students and faculty in the Baldi, Smyth, and Welling research groups presented a total of 7 papers at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in Vancouver in December. NIPS is one of the premier international conferences in machine learning – over 800 papers were submitted to the conference and only 200 were accepted.

Padhraic Smyth, director of the Center for Machine Learning and professor of information and computer science, will participate as a judge for the Netflix competition, which boasts a hefty $1 million prize. This competition seeks to improve the task of predicting user ratings of Neflix movies. Smyth will assist in the evaluation of qualifying submissions.

Pierre Baldi, director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics and professor of information and computer science and biological chemistry, has been awarded the title of Chancellor’s Professor, effective Wednesday, Nov. 1. The title is conferred for a five-year renewable term and recognizes scholars who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement makes them of exceptional value to the university. Baldi’s research areas include bioinformatics, computational biology, probabilistic modeling, and machine learning.