Machine Learning News
February, 2012
FAWM (February Album Writing Month) Founder, Burr Settles mixes song writing and machine learning. The premise of the project is this: You sign up and create a profile at the FAWM website, www.fawm.org. Then, during the month of February, your goal is to write 14 songs. You record and share them on the website, and give and receive feedback with other participants ("fawmers"). Read more
January, 2012
Tom Mitchell, Department Head of Machine Learning and Manuela Veloso will be among the presenters at the World Economic Forum, Jan. 25-29 in Davos, Switzerland. The WEF is a prestigious independent international organization committed to improving the state of the world by engaging business, political and academic leaders to shape global, regional and industrial agendas. Read more
Noah Smith, associate professor in the Language Technologies Institute, has been awarded a three-year Finmeccanica Career Development Chair. His research interests include statistical natural language processing, especially unsupervised methods, machine learning for structured data and applications of natural language processing. An endowment by the Italian conglomerate Finmeccanica funds two chairs that support outstanding young faculty members in the School of Computer Science. The other chair is currently held by Alexei Efros, associate professor of Computer Science and Robotics.
Robert F. Murphy, director of the Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology, will lead a multidisciplinary team of researchers that will collaborate with scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine and Yale University. The ultimate dream, Murphy said, is to develop what Ion Torrent Founder and CEO Jonathan M. Rothberg dubbed "doctor in a box," software. Doctor-in-a-box would take a patient's DNA sequence and use it to diagnose disease, identify a patient's susceptibility to disease, and predict which therapies might be most effective or cause the fewest side effects. Read more
December, 2011
Robert F. Murphy, director of the Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology, has been appointed to the National Institutes of Health Council of Councils. See CMU's announcement.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences has named Manuela Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, as an Einstein Chair Professor for 2012. She is one of 20 prominent international scientists so honored. As an Einstein Chair Professor, Veloso will present a lecture at the University of Science and Technology of China, a national research university in Hefei, China, and at another Chinese university. For more information, see CMU’s announcement.
November, 2011
Ramayya Krishnan, Heinz College Dean, related faculty in the Machine Learning Dept., has received the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Information Systems Society Distinguished Fellow Award in recognition of his intellectual contributions to the information systems discipline. His current research projects investigate risk management in business process design and in information security, social network analysis in settings ranging from call data records to knowledge sharing communities, consumer behavior in e-business settings, and the design of policies that take into account the competing needs of promoting data access and protecting privacy.
October, 2011
Ann Lee, Associate Professor in Statistics & Co-Director of the Machine Learning graduate programs, is awarded the Estella Loomis McCandless Career Development Chair.
July, 2011
ISMB Best Paper Award in Translational Bioinformatics
Ankur Parikh, W. Wu, R. Curtis and E. P. Xing for " TREEGL: Reverse Engineering Tree-evolving Gene Networks Underlying Developing Biological Lineages".
Leila Wehbe and Alona Fyshe, PhD candidates in the Machine Learning Department are among the inaugural recipients of Rothberg Research Awards in Human Brain Imaging. They will use their share of the $100,000 prize to use machine learning, fMRI and magnetoencephalography (MEG) to model the neural processing of a word to understand how it is affected by semantic context. For more information, see CMU’s announcement.
June, 2011
Alumnus Daniel Wilson's first novel, "ROBOPOCALYPSE," has been released. Wilson's seventh book tells the story of a group of people trying to survive after technology has turned against them.
Read more: http://www.danielhwilson.com/
ICML 2011 Best Paper Award
Kevin Waugh, Brian Ziebart and Drew Bagnell for "Computational Rationalization: The Inverse Equilibrium Problem".
ICML 2011 Test of Time Award for the 10 Year Best Paper
John Lafferty , Andrew McCallum, and Fernando C. N. Pereira, "Conditional Random Fields: Probabilistic Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data".
May, 2011
SCS team won the best application paper award at PAKDD 2011
"Spectral Analysis for Billion Scale Graphs: Discoveries and Implementation" by U Kang, Brendan Meeder and Christos Faloutsos, PAKDD'11, Shenzhen China. The paper shows how to do accurate spectral analysis on large graphs using 'hadoop', and showed how to use the results for anomaly detection. PAKDD is one of the top data mining conferences.
Professor Avrim Blum will be awarded the Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in Computer Science at the SCS Diploma Ceremony. http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/computing/2011/spring/avrim-blum.shtml
Jiashun Jin, Associate Professor of Statistics, has received a fellowship with the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). IMS selects fellows to honor outstanding research and personal contributions that keep IMS in a leading role in the field of statistics and probability. Jin's current research is in large-scale inference and massive-data analysis, which are frequently found in many scientific areas, such as genomics, astronomy, functional magnetic resonance imaging and image processing.
April, 2011
Professor William Cohen has been elected the next President of the International Machine Learning Society. The IMLS is the professional society that organizes the annual International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
Polo Chau speaks out on graph mining and fraud detection in an invited article in ACM Crossroads, explaining how his work can help spot fraudsters.
NDSEG Fellowship awarded to Carl Doersch, ML PhD student working with Alyosha Efros.
Daniel Neill, Assistant Professor, Heinz School and Machine Learning Dept. and Alumni, Jure Leskovec named "10 to Watch" by IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine, which recognizes 10 outstanding young researchers in AI.
NSF Fellowship awarded to Ankur Parikh, ML PhD student working with Eric Xing.
March, 2011
IBM Fellowship awarded to Xi Chen, ML PhD student working with Jaime Carbonell.
February, 2011
Open House for Accepted PhD Students
January, 2011
Manuela Veloso and Larry Wasserman have been elected 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellows for their distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. They will be honored at the AAAS Fellows Forum, Feb. 19 at the 2011 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. Read more
Noah Smith Receives NSF CAREER Award
The National Science Foundation has awarded Noah A. Smith, assistant professor in the Language Technologies Institute and Machine Learning Department, a five-year, $550,000 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award to study flexible statistical learning algorithms for natural language processing. Smith's research focuses on computational models of human language: formal aspects, learning such models from data, and applying them to problems like translation and social media analysis.
Fruit Fly Nervous System Provides New Solution To Fundamental Computer Network Problem
Ziv Bar-Joseph is working on a biologically derived method that could help organize wireless sensor networks. The fruit fly has evolved a method for arranging the tiny, hair-like structures it uses to feel and hear the world that's so efficient a team of scientists in Israel and at Carnegie Mellon University says it could be used to more effectively deploy wireless sensor networks and other distributed computing applications. News Release
Burr Settles, a post-doctoral fellow in the Machine Learning Department, has developed Titular and LyriCloud, two online creativity tools for songwriters. Titular suggests song titles, while LyriCloud makes lyrical suggestions based on words selected by the user. The motivation for Settles to create Titular and LyriCloud last year was February Album Writing Month (FAWM, http://fawm.org), an international songwriting event that he helped launch in 2004. FAWM challenges participants ("fawmers") to compose 14 new works of music — roughly an album's worth — in only 28 days. Last year, 4,000 people registered for FAWM and generated more than 10,000 new songs. Titular and LyriCloud, along with tools related to song structure and plot lines, were made available on the FAWM website to help participants in achieving their 14-song goals. Read more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2011/January/jan20_songtool.shtml
Michael J. Tarr, co-director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC), has received a professorship for his contributions to further understanding the brain and mind. Tarr was named the George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Professor of Cognitve Neuroscience. Tarr studies the neural, cognitive and computational mechanisms underlying visual perception and cognition. He is particularly interested in how we effortlessly learn, remember, and visually identify both human faces and objects, as well as how these mechanisms of vision interact with our other senses, thoughts and emotions. See CMU's announcement.
September, 2010
ML and CS Professor Christos Faloutsos and his brothers, Michalis (University of California-Riverside) and Petros (UCLA), were honored with the Test of Time Award for their 1999 paper, "On the Power Law Relationships of the Internet Topology" by SIGCOMM, the premier computer communications conference. News Release
August, 2010
Save The Census: ML and Statistics Professor, Stephen E. Fienberg warns that demographic data provided is too valuable to lose. For the full news release visit http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2010/August/aug26_savethecensus.shtml
July, 2010
Best Research Paper: Innovative Contribution at KDD-2010 goes to, "Connecting the Dots between News Articles" by Dafna Shahf and Carlos Guestrin. Congratulations!
Recognized Finalist goes to "Discriminative Topic Modeling based on Manifold Learning" by Stephen E. Fienberg and Seungil Huh. Congratulations!
Computer Science and ML Professor, Christos Faloutsos will receive the 2010 Innovation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) at the KDD 2010 international conference July 25-28 in Washington, DC. Faloutsos' cross-disciplinary works on power-law graphs, fractal-based analysis, time series, multimedia and spatial indexing is among the most referenced in industry and academic publications. He and his students also have devised software for identifying accomplices on Internet auction sites that help others perpetrate fraud.
Best Paper Award at PAKDD 2010 goes to "OddBall: Spotting Anomalies in Weighted Graphs"
by Leman Akoglu, Mary McGlohon and Christos Faloutsos and gives fast algorithms to spot strange nodes in large social networks. PAKDD is one of the top data mining conferences. The paper was selected among 412 submissions, and 42 accepted full-papers.
Machine Learning Best Paper Awards
Best Student Paper (COLT 2010)
"Theoretical Justification of Popular Link Prediction Heuristics"
Purnamrita Sarkar, Deepayan Chakrabarti, Andrew Moore
Best Paper (ICML 2010)
"Hilbert Space Embeddings of Hidden Markov Models"
Le Song, Byron Boots, Sajid Siddiqi, Geoff Gordon, and Alex Smola
Runnerup Best Student Paper (ICML 2010)
"Modeling Interaction via the Principle of Maximum Causal Entropy"
Brian Ziebart, Anind Dey, Drew Bagnell
Manuela Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Professor in the Computer Science Department, has been elected president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Veloso will be the fourth AAAI president from Carnegie Mellon, following Allen Newell, Raj Reddy and Tom Mitchell.
William F. Eddy, the John C. Warner Professor of Statistics, will complete his second three year term as chairman of the Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT) at the National Academies on June 30. CNSTAT is an independent and objective resource for evaluating and improving the work of the highly decentralized U.S. federal statistical system. Eddy is the only person to have chaired both statistics committees at the National Academies, having previously been chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics.
May, 2010
Philosophy Professor Richard Scheines has been reappointed head of the Department of Philosophy, a position he has held since 2005. Scheines has been faculty member since 1990 and has additional appointments in ML and HCII. His research focuses on causal discovery, the philosophy of social science and educational technology and online courses.
Noah Smith, an assistant professor of Language Technologies, and his team of researchers found that sentiments expressed in a billion Twitter messages were similar to those of well-established public opinion polls. "With seven million or more messages being tweeted each day, this data stream potentially allows us to take the temperature of the population very quickly," Smith said. "The results are noisy, as are the results of polls. Opinion pollsters have learned to compensate for these distortions, while we're still trying to identify and understand the noise in our data. Given that, I'm excited that we get any signal at all from social media that correlates with the polls." For more on the research, which will be presented May 25 at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, DC, visit http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2010/May/may11_twitterpolls.shtml