Padhraic Smyth, director of the Center for Machine Learning and professor of information and computer science, will participate as a judge for the Netflix competition, which boasts a hefty $1 million prize. This competition seeks to improve the task of predicting user ratings of Neflix movies. Smyth will assist in the evaluation of qualifying submissions.

Pierre Baldi, director of the Institute for Genomics and Bioinformatics and professor of information and computer science and biological chemistry, has been awarded the title of Chancellor’s Professor, effective Wednesday, Nov. 1. The title is conferred for a five-year renewable term and recognizes scholars who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement makes them of exceptional value to the university. Baldi’s research areas include bioinformatics, computational biology, probabilistic modeling, and machine learning.