Center member Anima Anandkumar was awarded a Google Research award grant for Fall 2015. Google Research Awards are an “annual open call for proposals on computer science and related topics including machine learning, speech recognition, natural language processing, and computational neuroscience.” Awards are highly competitive, with 151 projects funded of 950 proposals. Grants include funding for a graduate student, and provide opportunities for students and faculty to collaborate directly with researchers at Google. For more information, see the Google Research Blog.
News
Stern to help lead national effort to improve criminal evidence analysis, cut wrongful convictions
StandardCenter member Hal Stern, dean of the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences and professor of statistics, will help lead a new national Forensic Science Center of Excellence. Aimed at improving criminal evidence analysis and reducing wrongful convictions, it will be funded by a five-year, $20 million grant from the National Institute of Standards & Technology. The campus will receive about $4 million, to be used by ICS and social ecology faculty and students. “UC Irvine is honored to be a part of this. There is a critical need to advance the scientific underpinnings for the analysis of forensic evidence – including fingerprints, firearms, marks left by tools, and documents – and to ensure that participants in the law enforcement process have a strong understanding of proper analyses and interpretation,” said Stern, who is principal investigator for UCI. The center, headquartered at Iowa State University, also will partner with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Virginia. It will incorporate both a research agenda – developing new probabilistic methods and statistical tools – and education to ensure that judges, lawyers and investigators can effectively utilize the results of forensic analyses. For more information, see here.
Ihler gives short course on approximate inference at MLSS
StandardCenter Director Alexander Ihler gave a half-day course on approximate inference in graphical models as part of the 2015 Machine Learning Summer School in Sydney Australia. MLSS is a long-running series of summer schools around the world for graduate students and researchers who want to apply machine learning methods to their research problems. His lecture is available online here.
Anandkumar receives AFOSR Young Investigator Award
StandardCenter member Prof. Anima Anandkumar received a 3-year grant, Learning Mixed Membership Community Models: A Statistical and a Computational Framework, from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, as part of its Young Investigator Research Program. The YIP is open to scientists and engineers who received their Ph.D. within the last five years, and show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research. Its objective is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering.
Mjolsness named American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow
StandardCenter member and Professor of Computer Science Eric Mjolsness has been been made a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his distinguished contributions to the fields of computer science and biology, particularly for new computational models of gene regulation (networks of genes that turn each other on, off or partly on) and resulting technologies. For more details, see here.
Baldi, Kobsa, Mark receive Google Faculty Research Awards
StandardThree ICS professors have received a Google Faculty Research Award as part of Google’s biannual open call for proposals in computer science, engineering and related fields. Computer science Chancellor’s Professor Pierre Baldi, informatics and computer science professor Alfred Kobsa and informatics professor Gloria Mark join several other ICS faculty who have received the award in recent years. Read more
Tomlinson, Patterson receive $400,000 NSF grant for crowdsourcing and food security project
StandardThe National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded informatics professor Bill Tomlinson $400,000 for his project “Fostering Non-Expert Creation of Sustainable Polycultures through Crowdsourced Data Synthesis.” Associate professor Donald Patterson and Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois Sarah Taylor Lovell serve as co-principal investigators.
The project integrates research in computing and sustainability science with the goal of enabling a new approach to sustainable food security. By combining cyber-human systems and crowdsourcing research with the science of agroecology, the project seeks to develop an understanding of how online design tools may contribute to sustainability through enhanced local food production; to use the process of populating a plant species database as an instance of a class of problems amenable to intelligent crowdsourcing; and to pioneer new knowledge in crowdsourcing optimization.
According to the project abstract, “The work will contribute to long-term food security and offer lessons, concepts, methods, and software tools that may be transferable to other sustainability challenges.”
The award is part of the Cyber-Innovation for Sustainability Science and Engineering (CyberSEES) program at NSF, and is funded through the Division of Computing and Communication Foundations (CCF), which supports research and education projects that explore the foundations of computing and communication devices and their usage. According to the CCF website, “CCF-supported projects also investigate revolutionary computing models and technologies based on emerging scientific ideas and integrate research and education activities to prepare future generations of computer science and engineering workers.”
Lee uses crowdsourcing to predict World Cup outcome
StandardCenter member and Professor of Cognitive Science Michael Lee, in partnership with
Ranker, are using the wisdom of the crowd to predict the outcome of the World Cup. Lee and his collaborators developed a model that integrates multiple sources of ranking information available from participating individuals, along with bracket information, to make an overall prediction on each country’s likelihood of winning. See their blog post for more information.
Update: After the tournament, Lee and his collaborators have also analyzed their performance relative to other World Cup prediction models.
Smyth gives keynote talk at top artificial intelligence conference
StandardProfessor Padhraic Smyth gave an invited keynote talk at the recent AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-14). Held July 27-31 in Quebec City, Canada, the conference promotes research in artificial intelligence and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists and engineers in affiliated disciplines. Read more
‘Deep learning’ makes search for exotic particles easier
StandardUCI researchers develop computing techniques that could aid hunt for Higgs bosons. Fully automated .deep learning. by computers greatly improves the odds of discovering particles such as the Higgs boson, beating even veteran physicists. abilities, according to findings by UC Irvine researchers published today in the journal Nature Communications. Read more