News

Smyth to head new Data Science Initiative

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Center member and Professor of Computer Science Padhraic Smyth has been named the director of a new campus-wide initiative with a focus on coordinating and linking the activities of researchers and students across campus involved in various aspects of data science. UCI’s Data Science Initiative was initiative was started on July 1, 2014 and is sponsored by the Provost through the Office of Academic Initiatives. Find out more here.

Anandkumar Receives ‘Early-Career’ Sloan Research Fellowship

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Center member Anima Anandkumar, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, has been awarded a 2014 Sloan Research Fellowship for her work at the interface of theory and practice of large-scale machine learning and high-dimensional statistics. Bestowed annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the two-year fellowships go to 126 early-career scientists and scholars in the U.S. and Canada whose achievements and potential identify them as the next generation of scientific leaders. Read more here.

Two Center Members Elected as ACM Fellows

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The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, has announced two faculty members have earned prestigious honors. Computer science professors Rina Dechter and Padhraic Smyth have been named 2013 ACM Fellows. Read more

ICS grad students take second place in sbv IMPROVER competition

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Peter Sadowski and Michael Zeller, both Ph.D. students with the Department of Computer Science, earned a second-place finish in an international data-mining competition. The honor was given by sbv IMPROVER, a collaborative project designed to enable scientists to learn about and contribute to the development of a new crowdsourcing method for verification of scientific data and results. Read more

CML Faculty Member Alex Ihler receives NSF CAREER Award

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Alexander Ihler, associate professor of computer science, has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project, .Estimation and Decisions in Graphical Models.. Ihler will receive $442,000 over five years for his CAREER project, which seeks to develop a new framework for exact and approximate methods for advanced computational reasoning problems. It extends the abilities of intelligent systems to reasoning and decision-making under uncertainty, and it applies and tests these methods on a variety of application domains, including sensor networks and computer vision. Read more

Professor Pierre Baldi wins ICSB Award

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The International Society for Computational Biology has selected Chancellor’s Professor Pierre Baldi as an ISCB Fellow. The ISCB Fellows program honors members who have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. The 2013 fellows were recognized at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology conference, held July 21-23 in Berlin. Read more

Professor Padhraic Smyth serves as Program Chair for UAI 2013 Conference

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Computer science professor Padhraic Smyth served as program chair for the 29th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2013), held July 11-15 in Bellevue, Wash. Sponsored by Microsoft Research, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Toyota and IBM, UAI is the leading international conference on the use of probabilistic models and algorithms in artificial intelligence and machine learning. More than 240 papers were submitted to the conference; 73 were accepted for presentation at the meeting, after extensive peer review by a program committee of over 200 researchers in the area. Read more