A number of Center members were recognized by their peers for major awards in the Fall. Rina Dechter received the 2007 Association of Constraint Programming Research Excellence award. Michael Goodrich was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). And Rui de Figueiredo was elected a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (U.S. Section) and was awarded the academy’s George V. Chilingar Medal of Honor for his important contributions to science and engineering. Congrats to all!

The Center is very grateful for a recent gift from Yahoo! – the gift is specifically targeted at supporting the weekly AI and machine learning seminar series. This series has proven very popular with graduate students and faculty, and we had an excellent set of talks in Fall quarter, including visitors such as Geoff Hinton, Milind Tambe, and Dave Blei. The Distinguished Speaker Series also got off to a great start in the Fall, with talks by Judea Pearl, David Heckerman, and Tommi Jaakkola. Next quarter, we look forward to visits from Tom Griffiths, Andrew McCallum, and Trevor Hastie.

At the recent (Dec 2007) NIPS conference in Vancouver, six different papers were presented by PhD students and faculty from the Center. The students included Ian Porteous, Eric Linstead, and Arthur Asuncion, and researchers and faculty from the Center included Alex Ihler, Max Welling, Pierre Baldi, Dave Newman, and Padhraic Smyth. The NIPS conference is one of the major annual conferences in machine learning (over 1000 attendees) and is also highly competitive — only about 25% of submitted papers are accepted.

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 2007-2008. This year’s series will bring a set of internationally-known researchers to UC Irvine, speaking on a broad set of topics ranging from automated reasoning, distributed learning algorithms, human and machine learning, statistical prediction, and analysis of text, network, and Web data. For further information, see the 2007-2008 speaker schedule.

Chloe Azencott and S. Josh Swamidass, two graduate students in Professor Pierre Baldiﾒs lab, finished in 1st and 2nd place respectively in the data mining competition “Agnostic Learning vs. Prior Knowledge” part of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2007 Conference, a major international conference in the field of neural networks.

The UC Irvine Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics (IGB) has been awarded $5.6 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health to continue training students to apply advanced computer and information technologies in the biological and medical sciences. The funding will be used to expand the interdisciplinary Biomedical Informatics Training (BIT) program, one of eighteen such programs in the country.

David Newman presented a plenary paper on statistical topic models for indexing large digital libraries in June at this year’s ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Titled “Subject Metadata Enrichment using Statistical Topic Models, the paper was selected as one of the 5 best research papers at the conference, from over 200 submitted papers. This was joint work with co-authors Chaitanya Chemudugunta and Padhraic Smyth from UC Irvine and Kat Hagedorn from the University of Michigan. The paper appeared in the Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2007), June 2007.”

Pierre Baldi, Chancellor’s Professor and Director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics, has been named a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Baldi is recognized for his significant contribution to statistical machine learning and the development of widely used algorithms to solve problems in the life sciences.

Ramesh Jain, Donald Bren Professor in Information and Computer Sciences, has been awarded the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Multimedia Modeling, held in Singapore January 10-12. The paper, entitled Ontology-based Annotation of Paintings using Transductive Inference Framework, proposed a framework for ontology-based annotation of paintings with application-level concepts of art period.

Students and faculty in the Baldi, Smyth, and Welling research groups presented a total of 7 papers at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Conference in Vancouver in December. NIPS is one of the premier international conferences in machine learning – over 800 papers were submitted to the conference and only 200 were accepted.