Associate Research Professor, Geoffrey Gordon and Director for the Lane Center for Computational Biology, Robert Murphy along with Biomedical Engineering Student Shann-Ching "Sam" Chen, have discovered how to significantly speed up critical steps in an automated method for analyzing cell cultures and other biological specimens. The new technique promises to enable higher accuracy analysis of the microscopic images produced by today's high-throughput biological screening methods, such as the ones used in drug discovery, and to help decipher the complex structure of human tissues. Improved accuracy could reduce the cost and the time necessary for these screening methods, make possible new types of experiments that previously would have required an infeasible amount of resources, and perhaps uncover interesting but subtle anomalies that otherwise would go undetected, the researchers said. Press Release.

ML Ph.D. Student Hanghang Tong, Spiros Papadimitriou (CMU alumni) and colleagues win 'best paper award'  at the SIAM Data Mining conference, 2008.  The paper was authored by Hanghang Tong, Spiros Papadimitriou (IBM; CMU Alumni), Philip Yu (IBM), and Christos Faloutsos (CMU) with title "Proximity Tracking on Time-Evolving Bipartite Graphs" SIAM-DM is one of the top data mining conferences.  The work focuses on social networks, and specifically on measuring the proximity of nodes, as the networks change over time. With careful design, the proposed methods achieve up to 2 orders of magnitude faster computation over straightforward competitors.  Congratulations, Hanghang and Spiros!

Assistant Professor Luis von Ahn has received the Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in Computer Science. A Celebration of Teaching recognizes the accomplishments of faculty who exemplify the university’s standards of excellence in education. The ceremony will be held April 23, 2008. For more information please visit: http://www.cmu.edu/celebration-of-teaching/