Recent News

ICSI's Krste Asanovic is working to set up the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (or ParLab) at UCB, which was featured in the March 19th New York Times article Industry Giants Try to Break Computing's Dead End. For more information on Prof. Asanovic's work with Par Lab, please see here
Paul Kay of ICSI's AI group was featured in a March 3, 2008 Nature News article by Kerri Smith entitled Perception coloured by language. The piece highlights findings from two of Dr. Kay's studies, suggesting language may constrain color perception.
Vern Paxson, Senior Scientist with the Networking Group and a UCB Professor, is the recipient of the 2007 Grace Murray Hopper Award from ACM for outstanding young computer professional of the year. Paxson was selected for work he did on measuring Internet behavior. ACM issued a press release about Paxson's award on February 21st. Last year's winner, Dan Klein, is an ICSI Faculty Associate working with the Speech Group on machine translation.
A new study by Dr. Eran Halperin of ICSI and colleagues provides a means of pinpointing the ancestry of each position on an individual's genome. This information can be used to reconstruct ancestral history, which can then be used in studies of complex genetic diseases. Results of the study are published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics. More >>
In 2008, two German postdoctoral fellows at ICSI are working with ICSI's newest industrial partners. Gerald Friedland, who came to ICSI for a 2007 fellowship, extended his research visit another year with funding from the Silicon Valley company Appscio, Inc. Felix Salfner arrived at ICSI in January of 2008 and is working with German company SAP's Palo Alto office. Salfner and Friedland also receive funding for their research visits from DAAD in Germany, ICSI's longest-running international visitor program sponsor.
Nelson Morgan, Director of ICSI, was quoted on globeandmail.com, a national newspaper in Canada, in an article called Reality TV: When the tube talks back. The article discusses how technology is changing the way people interact with technology, using technologies such as speech recognition.
Umit Guz, Visiting Postdoctoral Researcher in 2007, received The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) CAREER Award for his project, "Extracting and Using Prosodic Information for Turkish Spoken Language Processing". Guz has returned to Turkey where he will conduct this research over the next two years, advised by ICSI's Dilek Hakkani-Tur and SRI's Gokan Tur and Mural Akbacak. More >>
The 2007 Spanish call for proposals has been issued. Applications will be accepted through February 24, 2008. Information on applying is available here.
Congratulations to Birte Loenneker Rodman, visiting scientist with the AI Group, and her husband Matjaz Rodman on the birth of their daughter Amaia. Amaia is the couple's first child and was born December 2nd at 4:00 a.m.
The Regional Council of Tuscany has awarded the Giulio Predi Prize in Science and Democracy to Professor George Lakoff of the Berkeley Linguistics Department. Lakoff is a longtime collaborator with the AI Group at ICSI. This is the first time the prize has been awarded and Professor Lakoff was the unanimous choice of the scientific committee. He will be accepting the prize in Florence, Italy on November 24.
On October 30th, ICSI signed a Memo of Understanding (MOU) with the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development. Mr. Reginaldo Arcuri, President of the agency, visited ICSI to sign the memo along with officials from the Brazilian Development Bank. The MOU will be the framework within which future activities between ICSI and Brazil, such as a visitor program, will be organized.
Vern Paxson of the Networking Group collaborated with Adrian Perrig and Jason Franklin from Carnegie Mellon and Stefan Savage from UC San Diego to design tools to fight the growth of Internet black markets. Franklin, a PhD student and former ICSI visitor, said "Our research monitoring found that more than 80,000 potential credit card numbers were available through these illicit underground web economies." To read about the strategies being used to stop identity and credit card theft online, see this press release from Carnegie Mellon.
Christian Müller, a postdoctoral researcher from Germany working with the Speech Group, is the editor of two new books on speaker classification. The books are part of Springer's State-of-the-Art Survey and the Lecture Notes on Artificial Intelligence sub-series of Lecture Notes on Computer Science. In the first book, Speaker Classification I: Fundamentals, Features, and Methods, Müller compiled a comprehensive collection of articles written by leaders in the field of speaker classification. Liz Shriberg of the Speech Group wrote a chapter in this volume titled "Higher Level Features in Speaker Recognition". The second book, Speaker Classification II: Selected Projects, is intended to be a companion to the first book, and contains numerous papers related to recent work done on speaker classification.
Congratulations to Jisup Hong and his wife Sara. Their son, Jonathan Jingul Hong, was born on September 7th at 8:49 a.m. weighing 7 pounds 12 ounces and 20.25 inches long. Jonathan is the couple's first child.
Gerald Friedland, a German postdoc working with the Speech Group, received the IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his contributions to organizing the IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing (ICSC 2007). Friedland served as the Program Coordination Co-Chair for this conference, which took place September 17-19, 2007.
ICSI's Srini Narayanan is the winner of a Google Research Award in 2007. The award is for exploring the use of search and language technology to develop local language content and resources for rural populations in the developing world. Srini Narayanan leads the Artificial Intelligence group at ICSI and has an adjunct appointment as an Associate Professor in the Cognitive Science program and at the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.