Max Welling, professor of computer science, has been awarded European Conference on Computer Vision’s Koenderink Prize in recognition of his computer vision research paper that has “withstood the test of time.” Entitled “Unsupervised Learning of Models for Recognition,” the paper was originally published in 2000. The research paper presents a method to learn object class models from unlabeled and unsegmented cluttered scenes for the purpose of visual object recognition.

Padhraic Smyth, professor of computer science and director of the CML, has been named a fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Recognized for his significant contributions to the theory and practice of statistical machine learning, Smyth is one of only eight researchers worldwide who has been named AAAI Fellows this year. The AAAI Fellows program recognizes individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence — a lifetime honor.

Pierre Baldi, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science and Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics director, has been awarded the 2010 Eduardo R. Caianiello Prize for Scientific Contributions to the Field of Neural Networks from the Italian Neural Network Society (SIREN). The distinguished prize is given to senior professors who have made significant contributions to the field of neural networks. Neural network are circuits of artificial neurons used to build systems that can learn from data and experience.

CML faculty Chen Li and Xiaohui Xie have been awarded a $100,000 grant from Intel. The grant will support research on genome compression and direct querying of compressed genomic data — critical challenges in the emerging field of personalized medicine. Li and Xie will be collaborating on the research with colleagues at China’s Northeastern University.

Statistics professor David van Dyk has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The Fellowship honors the outstanding research and professional contributions of IMS members who are leaders in the field of statistics and probability. Professor van Dyk’s scholarly work focuses on methodological and computational issues involved with Bayesian analysis of highly structured statistical models and emphasizes serious interdisciplinary research.

Professor of Computer Science Chen Li has received a $50,000 NSF grant for his project entitled ‘RAPID: Supporting Family Reunification for the Haiti Earthquake and Future Emergencies.’ Li is leading the effort on developing a web site for family reunification in response to the Haiti earthquake. The techniques developed in this project will potentially have a broad impact on many information systems that are moving towards the cloud-computing paradigm.

Research Scientist David Newman has been awarded a $25,000 NSF EAGER Award for his research entitled ‘Analyzing Grant Portfolios through Topic Modeling.’ The goal of this research is to develop and apply topic models to analyze collections of grant proposals and their metadata. The award will be used to develop tools to help NSF program officers better analyze, visualize and interact with large collections of both unfunded proposals and funded projects.

A paper entitled “Discriminative models for multi-class object layout” by Chaitanya Desai, Deva Ramanan and Charless Fowlkes received the Marr Prize at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) held in Kyoto, Japan. The prize is named after David Marr, a theoretical neuroscientist who made profound contributions to the theory of both human and machine vision in the 1970’s. The prize is awarded to the best paper at ICCV and is considered one of the top honors in computer vision. The authors plan to spend the prize money on a couch for the UCI Computational Vision lab.

The Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems is very pleased to announce its Distinguished Speaker series for the academic year 2009-2010. This year’s series will bring a set of internationally-known researchers to UC Irvine, speaking on a broad set of topics ranging from machine learning, statistical prediction, and analysis of text, network, and Web data. For further information, see the 2009-2010 speaker schedule.

Michael Carey and Center member Chen Li, professors of Computer Science at the University of California Irvine, have been awarded a $1.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Data-Intensive Computing Program. The project entitled ‘ASTERIX: A Highly Scalable Parallel Platform for Semistructured Data Management and Analysis’ will research and develop new technologies for storing and analyzing semi-structured data.