Computer science faculty Xiaohui Xie and Chen Li have been awarded a three-year grant of nearly $662,000 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop new computational tools essential for future advances in sequencing human genomes. The primary goal of the NIH-funded research is to develop computational algorithms and open-source software to improve both the efficiency and accuracy of next-generation sequencing analysis tools and expand the accessibility of those tools to previously understudied regions of the genome.

Charless Fowlkes, assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award for his project, “Combinatorial Inference and Learning for Fusing Recognition and Perceptual Grouping.” The CAREER program is NSF’s most prestigious award for junior faculty members. Awardees are chosen because they exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Seyoung Kim, an assistant professor in the Lane Center for Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon University, was awarded the prestigious Sloan Fellowship for pushing frontiers of research. Kim earned her PhD in computer science at UCI in 2007. She is interested in developing statistical machine learning tools for analyzing large-scale genomic data and investigating biological systems of various organisms and disease processes using these tools.

CML researchers showed up in force at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, held August 2012 on Catalina Island, California. Their contributions include six accepted papers, an oral presentation, and several poster spotlights. Collaborations among current and former CML members also won the top spot in every category of the associated Pascal Approximate Inference Competition.

Kevin Bache is one of two Bren School Ph.D. students who received a coveted 2012 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF GRF program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who have demonstrated their potential for significant achievements in science and engineering research. Fellows receive three years of support, including a $30,000 annual stipend.

Co-authored by Ph.D. students Sungjin Ahn and Anoop Korattikara, and computer science professor Max Welling, the paper “Bayesian Posterior Sampling via Stochastic Gradient Fisher Scoring” won the best paper award at the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2012) held in Edinburgh, Scotland. Ahn and Korattikara presented the paper in an ICML plenary session on June 27.

The first annual Southern California Machine Learning workshop was recently held at UC Irvine. The one-day event consisted of talks and posters by students and faculty from schools such as UCSD, UCI, USC, Caltech, UCLA, CSU Long Beach, UC Riverside, and UC Merced, as well as local industry participants. Over 90 people attended the meeting and plans are underway for the 2nd annual workshop next Fall.

PhD students Qiang Liu and Nick Navaroli have each been awarded prestigious national research fellowships. Qiang received a 3-year Microsoft Graduate Fellowship — one of only 12 awarded in 2011 from almost 200 applications. Nick received a 3-year National Defense Science and Engineering (NDSEG) Fellowship. Congrats to both!

Computer science professor Padhraic Smyth is the Program Chair for the 17th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Considered the premier annual international research conference on data mining, the event this year drew a record-setting 1,000+ attendees. Approximately 725 research papers were submitted (another record), of which 125 were accepted for oral or poster presentation at the meeting. The review process involved more than 350 reviewers and 35 senior program committee members. Keynote presenters include Peter Norvig (Google), Stephen Boyd (Stanford University), David Haussler (UC Santa Cruz) and Judea Pearl (UCLA).

Computer science professor Max Welling is now Associate Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). Welling has previously served as Associate Editor for TPAMI, which is one of the highest impact journals in the general area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. In addition to participating in the review process, Welling is helping to organize a number of special issues on timely topics in machine learning.