Padhraic Smyth, Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems, has been awarded the 2009 Innovation Award from the Association of Computing Machineryﾒs Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD). Smyth is recognized for his contributions to both the theory and application of probabilistic and statistical approaches to data mining. For more details, see the award citation.

Christopher DuBois, America Holloway, and Chloe Azencott have recently been awarded prestigious graduate fellowships. DuBois, a first-year statistics PhD student, received a three-year NDSEG Graduate Fellowship, and he will use this funding to pursue research on statistical modeling of social networks. Holloway, a second-year computer science PhD student, received a Microsoft Graduate Women’s Scholarship, and she will use this funding to further her research on topic models. Azencott, a fourth-year computer science PhD student, received an IBM PhD Fellowship, which will fund her investigation of machine learning techniques for chemoinformatics. Congrats to all!

The Center has recently received gift funding in the amount of $5000 from Yahoo! Research for continued support of the weekly Seminar Series in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The series has been running for over 2 years now with support from Yahoo! and has been a great success with upwards of 40 to 50 students and faculty attending weekly.

Charless Fowlkes, an assistant professor in computer science, was recently awarded a grant through the UC Lab Research program, entitled "Context Driven Image Interpretation in Satellite Imagery". The grant provides $488k over three years and is a collaboration between Fowlkes and investigators at Los Alamos National Labs. Their goal is to develop new techniques for image segmentation and object recognition based on contextual relations within a scene. These methods will be applied to performing large-scale visual search and automatic identification of potential threats in satellite imagery, in order to aid nuclear verification and counter proliferation efforts.

On October 3rd, 2008, the Computational Vision group at UC Irvine hosted the first Southern California Computer Vision Meetup, where researchers in computer vision presented their latest findings. Participants included faculty from local universities such as UCI, UCLA, UCSD, and Caltech, as well as researchers from JPL and Google. The Computational Vision group is affiliated with the Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems.

Along with Center members Michael Goodrich, David Eppstein, and Carter Butts, computer science professor and director of the Center for Machine Learning Padhraic Smyth has received a five-year, $5.4 million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to study large-scale networks with millions of nodes. The goal is to understand how networks the size of Facebook and LinkedIn are formed and how they evolve over time. The multidisciplinary effort spans the spectrum from theoretical computer science to the social sciences and will involve faculty with expertise ranging from algorithms to graph visualization, machine learning, statistics, sociology and behavioral science.

Along with six other UCI faculty members, Center member Daniel Whiteson, an assistant professor in physics & astronomy, is playing a key role in the Large Hadron Collider, the worldﾒs most powerful particle accelerator. Whiteson’s primary role is to ensure that data acquisition operates smoothly over 2,000 computers operating in parallel. Whiteson’s research includes the use of machine learning techniques to sift through huge amounts of proton-proton collision data, in order to look for evidence of the Higgs boson or other fundamentally new particles.

The Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems, in partnership with the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, is very pleased to announce its Distinguished Speaker series for the academic year 2008-2009. 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, computer vision, and analysis of text, network, and Web data. For further information, see the 2008-2009 speaker schedule.

Center member David Newman and collaborators at Yale University and University of Michigan have been awarded $750,000 from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to study how topic modeling can be used to improve search and discovery of digital resources in increasingly large digital collections. They will apply topic modeling to three important classes of digital library resources: full-text books, images, and tagged objects. The team will build prototypes of user interface applications that use topic modeling, to assess the value of topic modeling to users.

The Center is very pleased to welcome five new faculty on board, all assistant professors who joined UC Irvine in Fall 2007. From computer science, we welcome Charless Fowlkes (computer vision and bioinformatics), Alex Ihler (statistical learning and inference), Deva Ramanan (computer vision), and Xiaohui Xie (bioinformatics) – and from cognitive science we welcome Lisa Pearl (computational language modeling).