Three 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

Professor 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

UCI 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

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

Professors Michael Carey and Chen Li have received $750,000 from the National Science Foundation and nearly $400,000 from corporations . including Google, Oracle and HTC . to continue the development of their Big Data system, AsterixDB. Read more

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

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

Anima Anandkumar has been awarded a 2013 Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship. An assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Irvine’s The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, Anandkumar is one of seven from around the world to receive this support. Read more

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

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