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Congratulations to Liz Shriberg and Andreas Stolcke of the Speech Group on the birth of their son, Peter Liev Stolcke, on November 8th. Peter was 6 pounds 13 ounces at birth and 19.5 inches long. Peter's four older brothers are excited to finally complete their basketball team. Professor Richard Karp, head of the ICSI Algorithms Group, was quoted in an October 31 New York Times article by Steve Lohr. Karp's presentation at the recent "2016" symposium clearly made an impression on Lohr, who writes, "[Karp] presented a fundamental explanation for why computing has had such a major impact on other sciences, and Dr. Karp himself personifies the trend. His research has moved beyond computer science to microbiology in recent years. An algorithm, put simply, is a step-by-step recipe for calculation, and it is a central concept in both mathematics and computer science". New York Times subscribers can read the article here. Mark Ashida discussed XORP, ICSI's eXtensible Open-source Router Project, in a podcast posted on the Port 25: Communications from the Open Source Lab @ Microsoft website on Thursday, October 26. Professor Paul Kay of ICSI's AI Group was interviewed for an October 16 Nature magazine article reporting on a recent study by scientists at Ohio State University on universals of color naming. The current study uses data from the World Color Survey to make a strong statistical case in support of ideas long held by Kay and his colleagues on color naming. ICSI's Board of Trustees met on October 13th, and voted on changes to Board membership and corporate officers at ICSI. Professor Stuart Russell replaces Jitendra Malik as ex officio board representative from the University of California, Berkeley's Computer Science department, and Professor Javier Aracil of Spain's Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid fills the board seat of recently deceases Mr. Pedro Lizcano. Dr. Jordan Cohen left the Board and resigned as Secretary-Treasurer to focus on his new position at SRI International, a close ICSI collaborator. Replacing him as Secretary-Treasurer is ICSI's Professor Scott Shenker, formerly the Vice President of the corporation. Dr. Marcia Bush, Associate Director of ICSI, is the new Vice President, and Professor Nelson Morgan, Director of ICSI, remains the President of the corporation. ICSI hosted its annual Research Review on October 13th, along with a book signing party honoring Professor Jerry Feldman's new book, From Molecule to Metaphor. Professor Feldman was also honored by ICSI's Board of Trustees with the 2006 Distinguished Service Award during the Board of Trustees Meeting that morning. He was recognized for the guidance and expertise he provided during 10 years as ICSI's first Director, and his continued service to the Institute as a scientist in the AI Group. During the Research Review, Professor Scott Shenker and Dr. Dilek Hakkani-Tur of ICSI's research staff presented their latest work. Shenker, recipient of the IEEE Internet Award, is the head of the Networking Group. Hakkani-Tur recently joined ICSI from AT&T Research and works on spoken language processing. Professor Domenico Ferrari (ICSI alum featured in the March 2006 ICSI Gazette) received the 2006 SIGCOMM award. The SIGCOMM award recognizes lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks. Ferrari was selected for "fundamental contributions to Internet QoS architecture and wide-area network research testbeds, his leadership in managing the BSD Unix project, his leadership in founding and establishing ICSI as a premier international networking research institution, and his dedication to educate the next generation of leaders in networking research". A list of past participants is available on the SIGCOMM website. Research by ICSI Alum Lisa Aziz-Zadeh (now at University of Southern California) on mirror neurons was featured in a September 21, 2006 article on seedmagazine.com. Aziz-Zadeh uses fMRI technology to observe brain activity in subjects when they observe an action and when they read words describing that action - and her results show that the activity in the brain's premotor cortex is the same for both. Aziz-Zadeh was a postdoctoral researcher with ICSI's NTL project in 2005. Her fMRI work continues to provide physical evidence in support of NTL's hypothesis that mirror neurons play an important role in language. Read about the mirror neuron study on seedmagazine.com. Professor Vern Paxson, Internet security expert from ICSI's Networking Group, has been awarded the "SIGCOMM Test of Time" award for his paper titled "End-to-End Routing Behavior in the Internet," which was published at SIGCOMM's 1996 conference. The award recognizes a paper published 10 to 12 years in the past. Congratulations to Dr. Eddie Kohler, an ICSI alum now teaching at UCLA, on being selected by MIT Technology Review as a TR35 2006 Young Innovator. Kohler was selected for developing Asbestos, an operating system that protects private data, even when software programs may have failed. Read more about Kohler and his work online at MIT Technology Review. ICSI alum Eric Allman was honored at the Telluride Tech Fest 2006. Allman, author of Sendmail, the world's first Internet mail program, was a researcher in ICSI's "Realization Group" (the predecessor to today's Speech Group) in the early 1990's. More information on the Tech Fest honorees is available on The Telluride Watch. The XORP team announced the release of XORP version 1.3 on August 2nd. The new version has several new features, including the ability to build on Linux Fedora Core5, DraagonFlye BSD-1.4, and FeeBSD-6.1, implementation of IGMPv3 and MLDv2, and numerous bug fixes. Download XORP 1.3 and read more details at xorp.org. The Internet is buzzing about Vyatta, Inc. and ICSI's XORP routing technology, since a late July press release from Vyatta regarding the release of their Open Flexible Router (OFR), which utilizes XORP as its routing stack. Around the same time, Light Reading featured Vyatta as one of the top ten new startups. Here are a few more links to recent articles about Vyatta and XORP:
Information Week: Article about Open-Source Networrking
CIO: Article based on the Vyatta press release
Slashdot: Mentions Vyatta's open source router
Internet News: Another article based on the Vyatta release Congratulations to Dana Wilson-Green in the ICSI Accounting department on the arrival of her daughter, Nina, on Thursday, July 27. Nina weighed 6 pounds 15 ounces and was 19 inches long at birth. Jerry Feldman, who has played a leading role in the development of a neural theory of language at ICSI and UC Berkeley, was interviewed by Michael Krasny on the KQED Forum radio show on Monday, July 17 at 9:00 am. Krasny conducted an in depth interview with Feldman on the theories presented in his new book, "From Molecule to Metaphor". A transcription of the interview is available on the KQED Forum audio archives. An IBM press release issued on July 13, 2006 quotes ICSI Internet security experts for statistics on financial damage that could be caused by a major Internet worm outbreak. Read the press release >> Just in time for the World Cup final match on July 9th, Thomas Schmidt, a visiting researcher working on FrameNet, has completed "Kicktionary", a semantically annotated dictionary of soccer terms in German, French, and English. To call it a dictionary, however, is a bit misleading. It's more like a multilingual guide to the game of soccer, which not only defines terms, but defines them relative to other soccer terms, gives sample sentences showing correct usage, and clearly illustrates the situations during a soccer match relating to each term. If you've been following the World Cup this year, but were too embarrassed to admit to friends and colleagues that you actually don't know what a corner kick is, this tool could prove to be very useful.
Additionally, it clearly shows how beneficial semantic annotation, such as that used in ICSI's FrameNet project, can be. While a regular dictionary simply provides basic definitions, pronunciation, and part of speech information, a semantically annotated dictionary such as Schmidt's kicktionary provides the context necessary to show the meaning of a word as it applies specifically to soccer. By providing what is known as frame semantic information, the kicktionary allows a user to understand the nuances in meanings of words as they are used to describe soccer. Professor George Lakoff, of UC Berkeley and ICSI's Neural Theory of Language project, is featured in the July 2006 issue of Chronogram, a Hudson Valley, New York based magazine of "events and ideas". He was interviewed for the magazine by Loma Tychostup on his theories about the use of linguistic frames in politics. Since publication of his book on this very topic, 'Don't Think of an Elephant' several years ago, Lakoff has been a favorite expert for the media whenever debates between conservative and progressive politicians have intensified. The interview covers the effectiveness (or sometimes ineffectiveness) of various public figures' use of frames when discussing issues currently facing the Unites States, such as terrorism and global warming. June 26, 2006 marks the 20th anniversary of ICSI's incorporation as a California non-profit corporation. Planning and fundraising continued for the next two years, leading to ICSI's inauguration in 1988. We will offer a toast to ICSI's legal birthday at our annual summer picnic on June 30, and look forward to an inaugural celebration in two years. Dr. Atanu Ghosh, XORP project leader, has been appointed to the advisory board of Vyatta, Inc. According to a press release issued by Vyatta on June 20, the advisory board is a "who's who" of networking and open-source experts. The XORP technology developed by Ghosh and his team at ICSI is an integral part of Vyatta's open source router platform. Regarding his nomination to the board, Ghosh said, "Vyatta has been a strong supporter of the XORP project, and I'm pleased to participate in Vyatta's open-source networking community." ICSI researchers Madelaine Plauché and Joyojeet Pal, along with Divya Ramachandran and Richard Carlson, were awarded third prize in the
CITRIS white paper competition for their proposed work on speech technology for developing regions. Plauché and Carlson had the opportunity to travel to India this spring to test their technology in Sempatti, Tamil Nadu, India. Details and pictures from the trip >> Jaron Lanier was quoted in the New York Times business section on June 10. He had recently published an article, The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, on Edge, which got attention from bloggers and online news sites for its criticism of Wikipedia.
Dan Mitchell, a reporter for the Times, featured Lanier's article and reactions to it in a round-up of online news, So Many Airfares, So Much Data. The article also talks about a new web service that predicts when low airfares will be available, and the blog of Adam Scott's experiences living off of "Monkey Chow" for a week. ICSI speech processing technology excelled in the recent National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) evaluations. The ICSI Speaker Diarization system and the ICSI/SRI Speech-to-Text (STT) system performed extremely well in all test conditions that were entered in the NIST evals. More information about this year's evals
is available from the NIST 2006 Rich Transcription Eval Site. Although NIST regulations prevent comparing ICSI's results to those of other participating labs, complete results are available from the NIST website:
Speaker Diarization results (.pdf file)
STT results (.pdf file)
Chuck Wooters, Xavier Anguera, and Jose Manuel Pardo worked on ICSI's diarization technology, and along with a team from SRI International, Adam Janin, Andreas Stolcke, Xavier Anguera, Chuck Wooters, Kofi Boakye, Ozgur Cetin, and Joe Frankel worked on STT. This year's performance followed similarly strong showings for diarization and STT in 2004 and 2005. From Molecule to Metaphor, a new book by Professor Jerome A. Feldman, ICSI's first Director and current research scientist, was released in June 2006 by MIT Press. The book describes in detail the ICSI NTL group's theory on the neural basis of human language and thought. Early endorsements of the book suggest it may have a profound impact on the field of Cognitive Science. Professor George Lakoff of UC Berkeley says it is "an indispensable book for anyone interested in how human beings think, act, and communicate."
Professor V.S. Ramachandran of UC San Diego praises the book as a "fascinating tour through the mysteries of the human brain," and adds that "the ideas are deep, as should be expected from one of the pioneers in the field, but also lucidly presented for the nonspecialist reader."
In August, Brad DeLong reviewed the book on his blog. It's a well thought out review, and includes a few interesting excerpts from the book.
More information is available from m2mbook.org, the official website for the book. In a letter to Nature magazine and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, a group of senior female technology professors named ICSI's Sally J. Floyd as one of three women who exemplify "outstanding female experts in computing and other fields". Floyd was cited for her work on core Internet technologies. The letter was written to protest the lack of women in Microsoft Research Cambridge's 2020 Science Group and in a special issue of Nature on March 23, 2006.
According to an article in The Age, an Australian newspaper, Nature will print the letter in the May 4 issue. Microsoft has issued a statement saying that several women were invited to the workshop but were unable to attend. On March 8,
XORP project leader Atanu Ghosh announced the release of XORP (eXtensible Open Router Platform) version 1.2. The new release includes several significant new features, including support for Windows Server 2003, addition of a reconfigurable version of the OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) protocol, and implementation of a policy framework that is fully integrated across all routing protocols.
More >> On February 23rd, ICSI hosted an open house in conjunction with BEARS 2006, UC Berkeley's annual EECS research symposium. In addition to posters outlining various research activities at ICSI, there was a demonstration of a speech recognition application that provides market information to Tamil-speaking Indian crop growers, and two featured talks.
The first talk, given by graduate student Joseph Makin, outlined a new hybrid-system model for human blood clotting, which he developed by with AI Group Leader Srini Narayanan.
The second talk was given by invited speaker Allan Leinwand, chairman and founder of ICSI sponsor Vyatta Inc. (see next brief).
The event was enthusiastically received by BEARS 2006 participants, invited guests of ICSI and Vyatta Inc, and ICSI staff. Announcing the beta release of a commercial-grade router built on ICSI's eXtensible Open Router Platform (XORP, Vyatta Inc. emerged from stealth mode on February 22nd. Vyatta will target mid-size enterprises with flexible, open networking software and services delivered on commodity hardware. Vyatta is committed both to building the XORP/open-source networking community and to challenging the closed, high-cost, proprietary networking platforms that dominate today. See Business 2.0 article by Om Malik for more information. Congratulations to Litonya Walker in the accounting department on the birth of her daughter Zoe on February 9th. Zoe was born at 10:30 in the morning, and weighed 5 pounds 4 ounces at birth. According to a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in January by Aubrey Gilbert, Terry Regier, ICSI's Paul Kay, and Richard Ivry, language affects visual perception -- but for the most part, only in the right half of the visual field. This makes sense hypothetically because the left hemisphere of the brain processes language, and receives visual information from the right side of the visual field. Regier, a frequent visitor to ICSI, suggested a study to test this hypothesis. Gilbert and Ivry of UC Berkeley led the experiments, which confirmed Regier's hypothesis. The study built on previous studies by Paul Kay and his colleagues regarding the influence of language on the perception of color. top |
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ICSI Gazette
September 2006 (pdf)
Online Articles:
Featured Research: Neural Theory of Language
As I See It: Director's Column
Featured Researchers: NTL Then and Now
From Molecule to Metaphor: A New Book by Professor Jerome Feldman
Featured Research: Speech Technology in Tamil Nadu, India
Visiting Researchers (April - September)
March 2006
March 2006 (pdf) |
