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November, 2009 ML Ph.D. student, Babis Tsourakakis and CSD Ph.D. student, U Kang, attracted the 'best applications paper award' (runner up), in ICDM '09, one of the top data mining conferences, for their paper, "PEGASUS: A Peta-Scale Graph Mining System - Implementation and Observations." The paper was selected among 70 accepted papers, out of a total of 786 submissions, and it showed how to use 'hadoop' and Yahoo's M45 machine, to analyze one of the largest publicly available graphs (over 100Gb). Moreover, the paper has been invited for fast-track possible publication to the KAIS Journal. October, 2009 Associate Research Professor in the School of Computer Science, Jeff Schneider, will lead the new initiative that will create tools to spot strange new objects that merit in-depth study, and identify larger patterns in observational data that could provide insights into the evolution of the universe. Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Washington are using a three year, $1.6 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop automated methods for discovering astrophysical phenomena. Eric
Xing Receives USAF Young Investigator Award
Eric P. Xing, Associate Professor of Machine Learning, Language Technology,
and Computer Science is one of 38 scientists and engineers chosen for funding
through the U.S. Air Force’s highly competitive 2010 Young
Investigator Research Program.
Xing was awarded a five-year, $600,000 grant for his winning research proposal, “SocioScape:
Real-time Analysis and Mining of Dynamic Networks in Complex Socio-Cultural
Systems.” The Air Force Office of Scientific Research selected the
proposal from among 202 submitted for this year’s program. The program
is open to scientists and engineers at research institutions across the United
States who have received
Ph.D. or equivalent degrees in
the last five years and show exceptional ability and promise for conducting
basic research. Assistant Professor in Computer Science, Luis Von Ahn, is one of 16 promising young scientists chosen by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation as a 2009 recipient of a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. Each fellow receives and unrestricted research grant of $875,000 over five years. Von Ahn, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon in 2005 and joined the faculty in 2006, has pioneered an area of computer science that he calls "human computation" - combining human abilities with those of computers to solve problems that would be impossible for humans or computers to solve by themselves. News Release ML Ph.D. Student - Brian Ziebart has been awarded a Richard King Mellon Presidential Fellowship in the Life Sciences for 2009 to 2010. Congratulations to Brian, and to his advisor Anind Dey! August, 2009 MLD Student Research Symposium ML Faculty, Eric Xing, and postdoctoral scientist, SeYoung Kim have developed an analytical technique to detect the multiple genetic variations that contribute to complex disease syndromes such as diabetes, asthma and cancer, which are characterized by multiple clinical and molecular traits. Xing and Kim report today in the online journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) Genetics that their graph-guided fused lasso (GFlasso)metond showed increased power in detecting gene variants associationed with complex symptoms compared with other moethods.including his roles as editor of Annals of Applied Statistics, Statistical Science, and co-editor of Chance; and for exceptional service and leadership in a wide variety of professional and government-related consultant activities. News release. ML Faculty, Stephen Fienberg, the Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science, has been named a recipient of an American Statistical Association's (ASA) 2009 Founders Award. Fienberg was honored for outstanding leadership and contributions in Bayesian approaches to the analysis of contingency tables, confidentiality and data disclosure, and legal decision making; for distinguished service on the ASA Board of Directors, including his role as vice president; for long-term active involvement in ASA committees and remarkable leadership and participation in sister organizations; for superior editorial activities past and present, including his roles as editor of Annals of Applied Statistics, Statistical Science, and co-editor of Chance; and for exceptional service and leadership in a wide variety of professional and government-related consultant activities. Assistant Professor of Statistics, Christopher Genovese, accepted an invitation to serve as a member of the Biostatistical methods and Research Design Study Section at the Center for Scientific Review (CSR). The CSR is the peer review system that the National Institutes of Health uses to identify the most promising research for treating, curing and preventing disease. Genovese's appointment provides a unique opportunity to contribute to the national biomedical research effort. For more information on the CSR visit http://cms.csr.nih.gov/. ML Faculty members Eric Xing and Noah Smith, along with LTI Ph.D. Student, Andrew Martins, have been awarded one of three ACL 2009 Best Paper Awards for "Concise integer linear programming formulations for dependency parsing." ACL (The annual meeting for the Association for Computational Linguistics) is the premier natural language processing and computational linguistics conference. The paper can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nasmith/papers/martins+smith+xing.acl09.pdf Congratulations Andre, Noah and Eric! July, 2009 ML Finmeccanica Assistant Professor, Carlos Guestrin, has won a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers. Guestrin is among 100 recipients announced Thursday by the White House. He will receive his award at a White House ceremony this fall. The PECASE program recognizes scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge. "I am pleased to see that Carlos has received such a prestigious award," said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science. "Carlos has already made major contributions to the theory and application of machine learning. He is also a great educator, and he has helped make the School of Computer Science better in many different ways." For further information: http://www/cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/July/july10_guestrinaward.shtml June, 2009 A new algorithm developed by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists, including Machine Learning Faculty, Eric Xing, has revealed for the first time how genetic networks in the fruit fly evolve during the insect's lifecycle. The discovery could lead to new cancer drug therapy, among other innovations. "Once we understand the dynamics of a network, we can build models that predict how it will respond to stimuli and identify its vulnerabilities," said Xing. "In the context of cancer genetics, for instance, this dynamic network analysis could help us identify new targets for drug therapy. For further information: http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/health/2009/summer/genetic-networking.shtml Professors earn prestigious HP Innovation Research Awards! LTI and Machine Learning Assistant Professor, Noah Smith and ECE Professor, Greg Ganger were among 60 recipients worldwide to receive awards as part of HP's 2009 Innovation Research Program, which is designed to create opportunities for colleagues, universities and research institutes around the world to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP. Smith received his award for research into the use of probabilistic models to analyze political blogs, which also involves Ph.D. student Tae Yano and Associate Research Professor, William Cohen. News Release Gene regulatory networks in cell nuclei are similar to cloud computing networks, such as Google or Yahoo!, researchers report today in the online journal Molecular Systems Biology. This finding by an international team led by Carnegie Mellon University computational biologist, Ziv Bar-Joseph helps explain not only the robustness of cells, but also some seemingly incongruent experimental results that have puzzled biologists. News Release May, 2009 Eric Xing, Associate Professor of Machine Learning, Computer Science, and Language Technology, has received a grant of $2,66 Million from National Institute of Health to develop new theoretical foundation and efficient algorithm and software that enable next-generation genome-wide association studies. The proposal, titled "Genome-Transcriptome-Phenome-Wide Association: a new paradigm for association studies of complex diseases", received a top 0.7 percentile score in the NIH review, and was commended as the following “very timely, mathematically rigorous, and very novel, …, shows an admirable grasp of the issues associated with clinical descriptions of complex phenotypes classified as a single disease, … and the collaboration with clinicians is realistic and likely to bear fruit.” Machine Learning alumni, Professor Jure Leskovec wins the prestigious ACM SIGKDD dissertation award! Jure defended his dissertation in MLD in September of 2008. The title is "Dynamics of Large Networks," describing numerous, surprising patterns that hold for real graphs, as well as several powerful tools to study blogs, instant-message networks, social networks like LinkedIn, and other types of real graphs. ACM SIGKDD is the premier society for data mining research, and the above award is the highest distinction for a Ph.D. dissertation in the area. The award, which constitutes a $2,500 honorarium and a plaque, will be presented during the opening ceremonies at the upcoming SIGKDD Conference in Paris, Sunday, June 28. Jure will have 15 minutes during the ceremony to present a summary of his work. Congratulations Jure! Machine Learning PhD student, Han Liu is the recipient of a Google Fellowship in Statistics, one of 13 Google Fellowships awarded for the first time this year. The main theme of his research is nonparametric inference for high-dimensional massive datasets and its applications for high-dimensional nonparametric regression, classification, density estimation, structural learning, and simultaneous hypothesis testing. News release Tom Mitchell, the Fredkin Professor of AI and Machine Learning Department Head, has been named a University Professor. As stated by the Faculty Handbook: "The rank of University Professor is the highest one at Carnegie Mellon University, and it bestows both honor and obligation onto its recipient." The title is limited, by charter, to at most 10% of the full professors. Tom has been a pioneer in AI and Machine Learning throughout his career, and he has contributed greatly to Carnegie Mellon, including his founding of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, which subsequently became the Machine Learning Department. Congratulations Tom! The Children's Museum of Pittsburgh recently hosted interactive art installations controlled by computers programmed to learn from their surroundings, or from the people observing the art. The installations were developed by students in the interdisciplinary class "Art That Learns," led by Machine Learning Faculty, Carlos Guestrin and visiting professor in the School of Art, Osman Khan. Check out the projects in this short video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey9bZJOidHg. April, 2009 Machine Learning Faculty, Carlos Guestrin and Christos Faloutsos, along with Machine Learning Ph.D. Alumni, Jure Leskovec, have been awarded the ASCE Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management Engineering Best Policy-Oriented Paper Award for the paper "Efficient Sensor Placement Optimization for Securing Large Water Distribution Networks," November/December 2008. To be awarded during the World Environmental and Water Resources Congress, May 17-21, 2009 in Kansas City, Missouri. The paper also includes authors Andreas Krause and Jeanne VanBriesen. Congratulations! Mr. Duen Horng (Polo) Chau and Yi Zhang each win a Yahoo! Key Technical Challenge grant! The grant is awarded to a limited number of exceptional Ph.D. students and it carries a gift of $5,000 unrestricted funds to support their research activities. The award also includes an exclusive invitation to the KSC graduate student Summit, where Polo and Yi will have the chance to get feedback and interact with some of the best Yahoo! scientists. Congratulations Polo and Yi! News Release February, 2009 Manuela Veloso, the Herbert Simon Professor of Computer Science, has received the 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award. Award winners receive an honorarium and are invited to give a talk at the annual Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Conference. This award is specifically intended to recognize researchers whose current research is influencing the field. Veloso's research is particularly noteworthy for its focus on the effective construction of teams of robot agents where cognition, perception and action are seamlessly integrated to address planning, execution and learning tasks. Mr. Duen Horng (Polo) Chau wins a 2009 Symantec Fellowship, second year in a row! Polo is working on visualization and anomaly detection for large graphs. The Symantec Graduate Fellowship program was established to identify and support exceptional graduate students who are investigating novel ways to solve real-world problems in protecting security and availability. In addition to the financial support, Polo will have the opportunity to work directly with Symantec's top researchers on new investigations and will also have access to security insight from Symantec's global intelligence network via the option of a summer internship. Congratulations Polo! Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of Computer Science, is a recipient of Sloan Research Fellowships for 2009, which include two-year grants of $50,000. One of Von Ahn's primary research interests is finding techniques for using human processing power to solve problems that computers cannot yet solve, such as understanding images. To that end, he has developed online "games with a purpose," such as the ESP Game, and repurposed a widely used online security tool into a mechanism, called reCAPTCHA, for digitizing old texts.News Release Machine Learning PhD student, Edith Law is an awardee of the highly competitive Microsoft Research Fellowship! Edith was selected as Microsoft Research Graduate Student Scholar. Edith will be honored at an awards ceremony at Microsoft Research later this month. January, 2009 Information for Admitted Students Charalampos (Babis) Tsourakakis had a paper that was invited for fast-track publication, as one of the best in ICDM '08. ICDM is one of the top data mining conferences, and the paper gives an extremely fast method (1000x faster) to compute triangles in social networks. The details of the paper are "Fast Counting of Triangles in large Real Networks, without counting: Algorithms and Laws". ICDM '08, Pisa, Italy, Dec. 2008. Congratulations Babis! Carlos Guestrin, assistant professor of Machine Learning, is recipient of the 2009 IJCAI Computers and Thought Award. This award is given every two years to "outstanding young scientists in artificial intelligence." Congratulations Carlos! Machine Learning Faculty Robert Murphy, William Cohen and Eric Xing along with Machine Learning PhD student, Andrew Arnold are among the four finalists in the inaugural Elsevier Grand Challenge on Knowledge Enhancement in the LIfe Sciences, a contest designed to encourage development of tools dealing with the ever increasing amount of online life sciences information. The team also includes graduate students, Amr Ahmed, Luis Pedro Coelho and Josh Kangas and research programmer Saboor Sheikh. News release "60 Minutes" Features Carnegie Mellon Thought Identification Experiments December, 2008 Tom M. Mitchell, Fredkin Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and head of the School of Computer Science’s Machine Learning Department, is one of four Carnegie Mellon professors named this year as Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. News release November, 2008 Carlos Guestrin, assistant professor in the Machine Learning Department and the Computer Science Department has been awarded the Finmeccanica Chair in Computer Science. This chair is awarded to outstanding junior faculty. This chair recognizes Carlos’ outstanding contributions in research, education, and the many roles he plays in making SCS a better place. Congratulations Carlos! Discover magazine's December cover story features the "50 Best Brains in Science" and the editors have included Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science. For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/blog/2008/Fall/von-ahn-among-best-brains.shtml October, 2008 August,
2008 ML IC Schedule A new Carnegie Mellon brain imaging study of dyslexic students and other poor readers shows that the brain can permanently rewire itself and overcome reading deficits, if students are given 100 hours of intensive remedial instruction. "This study demonstrates how remedial instruction can use the plasticity of the human brain to gain an educational improvement," said neuroscientist Marcel Just, director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) and senior author of the study. "Focused instruction can help underperforming brain areas to increase their proficiency." Just says that the brain's capacity to adapt as the result of targeted instruction has the potential to influence the remedial learning process in other subject areas, far beyond improving literacy skills. Co-authors of the study are CCBI research fellows Ann Meyler and Tim Keller, Vladimir Cherkassky of the CCBI, and John D.E. Gabriel of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. News Release July, 2008 William Cohen, associate research professor in the Machine Learning Department, received the 2008 SIGMOD Test of Time Award during the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data conference June 9-12 in Vancouver, B.C. The award recognizes the enduring insights of a paper Cohen published 10 years ago on the challenges of combining information from multiple databases and introduced a logic called WHIRL that analyzes natural language text to determine the similarity of names used in different databases. Cohen wrote the paper "Integration of Heterogeneous Databases Without Common Domains Using Queries Based on Textual Similarity" while on the staff of AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J. The Philosopher's Annual 2008 chose Alumni University Professor of Philosophy Clark Glymour's article "When is a Brain Like the Planet," published in Philosophy of Science, as one of the 10 best articles published in philosophy in 2007. June, 2008 Carnegie Mellon Computer Model Reveals How Brain Represents Meaning. The team, led by computer scientist Tom M. Mitchell and cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just, constructed the computational model by using fMRI activation patterns for 60 concrete nouns and by statistically analyzing a set of texts totaling more than a trillion words. News Release Wall Street Journal features recipients of the 2008 Symantec graduate fellowships including our own Polo Chau, Machine Learning PhD Student. Congratulations Polo! May, 2008 The School of Computer Science recently launched a new site with
multi-player online games designed to be fun while giving players a chance
to make computers smarter. In addition to Luis von Ahn, an assistant
professor in the Computer Science Department, gwap.com and the games have
been developed by software engineers Mike Crawford and Edison Tan, and
graduate students Severin Hacker, Edith Law and
Bryant Lee. "We have games
that can help improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial
intelligence and teach computers to see," von Ahn said. The site
initially features four new games and a classic called the ESP
Game, with three more
to be added in the coming months.
For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may14_gameswithapurpose.shtml April, 2008 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/ Computer Scientist Anind Dey has received the National Science Foundation's Facutly Early Career Development Award, its most prestigious award for junior faculty. Press
Release February,
2008 Researchers Receive $1.1 Million From Keck Foundation To Pursue New Breakthroughs in Learning How the Brain Works! Cognitive Neuroscience Professor Marcel Just (Director, Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging) and Computer Science Professor Tom M. Mitchell (Chair of the Machine Learning Department) have received a three-year grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to pursue new breakthroughs in the science of brain imaging. Ultimately, this research could shed light on brain disease or conditions like autism, dyslexia or depression. News release Statistics Professor William Eddy has received the first John C. Warner Professorship of Statistics. A pioneer in the field, Eddy has conducted research in theoretical probability, statistics and applied problems. His current research focuses on data generated by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Press Release Duen
Horng Chau wins Symantec Research Labs Fellowship for
2008-2009. January,
2008 ML
Ph.D. Student, Brian
Ziebart wins the Grand Prize in the 2nd Annual Ellington
Bid-Tac-Toe Challenge! The 2nd Annual Ellington Bid-Tac-Toe
Challenge is a competitive programming challenge designed to
stimulate multiple-level thinking in a competitive game with
intuitive rules but without dominant strategies. The challenge
was opened to three schools recognized for their strong programming
culture: MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon. A total of 27 people
entered under 19 team submissions. December,
2007 November,
2007 Congratulations to Avrim Blum who has been elected as an ACM Fellow. The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council in 1993 to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. The ACM Fellows serve as distinguished colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership as the world of information technology evolves. September,
2007 Eric
Xing and Christos
Faloutsos awarded
a $1.3M NSF grant. The title is "Indexing,
Mining and Modeling Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Gene
Expressions", and the goal is to analyze drosophila
(fruit-fly) embryo photographs. The project involves
biology, machine learning, machine vision and databases,
and the aims to discover how genes interact with each
other during the beginning of life. The long term goal
is to generate hypotheses about the corresponding human
genes. August,
2007 July,
2007 Information for Incoming Fall 07 Students April,
2007 Andy Carlson, Ph.D. Student receives Yahoo! Fellowship March, 2007 February,
2007 January,
2007 December,
2006 ML
Faculty make a clean sweep in NSF Career Awards November,
2006 October,
2006 Latanya Sweeney, Associate Professor CSD, technology and policy, will be inducted this fall as a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Sweeney, director and founder of the Data Privacy Lab, will be one of the few fellows who is not affiliated with a medical center or with a university that has a medical school. News release Manuela
Veloso, Computer Science Professor, is spending
her sabbatical year as one of 50 fellows at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Veloso
was selected from a pool of more than 700 applicants for
the highly competitive fellowship program. Veloso, who directs
Carnegie Mellon's highly successful RoboCup teams, will be
studying integrated intelligence in robots and teams of robots.
She is scheduled to make a public presentation of her work
Oct. 18 at the institute. August 2006 ROBOCUP SOCCER TEAM WINS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP --Team advisor Manuela Veloso said the superior speed of the new robots built by research engineer Michael Licitra gave the CMDragons a big advantage over other teams. "These great robots, combined with accurate path and control software algorithms for attacking and defending by graduate students James Bruce and Stefan Zickler, produced an exceptional robot team," said Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science. --Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060620_robocup.html. May 2006 March
2006 The Center
for Automated Learning and Discovery, one of six units within
the School of Computer Science, has been renamed the "Machine
Learning Department," effective this week. The center, first
established in 1997, becomes the nation's first Department of
Machine Learning. Tom Mitchell, the center's founding director,
is head of the department. Machine learning, which combines expertise
from both computer science and statistics, has become a hot discipline
in the past decade and a half, and Carnegie Mellon has played
a leading role in its development. Machine learning is a method
of designing software that can learn from experience and thus
improve in performance over time. It is the preferred method
used in such commercial applications as speech recognition systems
and enables February
2006 January
2006 Jurij (Jure)
Leskovec, ML PhD student, has been selected as a Microsoft
Research Fellow for the next two years. Competition for the
Fellowship was extremely intense, with 22 awards out of over
150 very highlyqualified applicants. Jure will be invited to
an awards ceremony at Microsoft in Redmond recognizing his
selection as an MSR Fellow. He will also be invited to spend
a summer internship at Microsoft Research. For more details
on the Fellowship and for past Fellows, please visit http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/fellowships/default.aspx Stephen E. Fienberg, the Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Social Science, has been appointed a co-chair, with former Attorney General Janet Reno and former CIA and FBI Director William Webster, of a newly created National Commission on Forensic Science and Public Policy created by the American Judicature Society (AJS). The commission will advise AJS on the research agenda for its new Institute of Forensic Science and Public Policy and periodically consider national standards for forensic science, such as those used for the collection, testing, preservation and admissibility of evidence. Alfred Blumstein, the J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research in the Heinz School, is a commission member. December
2005 Edoardo
M. Airoldi, a student in the Ph.D. program in Computation,Organization
and Society in the School of Computer Science, and ML Alumni
has won the John Van Ryzin Award for the best student contributed
paper to be at the spring meeting of the Eastern North
American Region of the International
Biometric Society, to be held in Tampa Florida in March
2006. The winning paper, "Mixed Membership Stochastic
Block Models for Relational Data with Application to Protein-Protein
Interactions," is joint work with David Blei, Stephen
E. Fienberg, and Eric Xing from the Machine Learning Department
and the Department of Statistics. Airoldi received M.S. degrees
from both the Department of Statistics and ML. November
2005 October
2005 August
2005 Christopher
Genovese and Larry
Wasserman receive the American Statistical Association's
2005 Outstanding Statistical Application Award for their
paper "Nonparametric Inference for the Cosmic Microwave
Background. Jure
Leskovec, ML PhD student, wins "best research
paper award" in KDD'05! June
2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 Robert Murphy
selected to chair the Biodata Management and Analysis Study
at NIH February 2005 January 2005 Jure Leskovec, a first year doctoral student in the Machine Learning Department, has received a Slovenian Academy of Sciences award. The annual award is presented to three doctoral students based on academic excellence. December 2004 New Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research (PIER): The Department
of Psychology is a major participant in CMU’s Program in
Interdisciplinary Educational Research (PIER): A pre-doctoral
training grant funded by Institute of Education Sciences, Department
of Education. The goal of this interdepartmental and interdisciplinary
program is to produce scientists who are qualified to do rigorous
research needed for evidence-based educational practice and policy.
PIER students will deal with the bidirectional flow of ideas
and challenges between laboratory studies and real-world instructional
applications. They will be trained in Psychology, Statistics,
and Human Computer Interaction to assess learners' knowledge
at vastly different temporal and cognitive grain sizes, and they
will develop skills necessary to utilize cognitive science, educational
technology and advanced statistical methods to advance our understanding
of learning in a variety of instructional contexts and settings.
For more information see: http://www.cmu.edu/pier Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh have found differences in the activation and synchronization of brain networks between people with autism and those without it. Combined with the results of previous studies, these findings could yield strategies for treating autism, a mysterious brain disorder that impairs verbal and non-verbal communications and social interactions. The study will be published in the journal Neuroimage and is available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com. The research
was conducted at Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain
Imaging (CCBI) and co-authored by Marcel Just, director of the
center and the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at Carnegie
Mellon. The lead author was Hideya Koshino, an assistant professor
of psychology at California State University at San Bernardino
and a former postdoctoral fellow at the CCBI. New Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research (PIER): The Department
of Psychology is a major participant in CMU’s Program in The goal of
this interdepartmental and interdisciplinary program is to produce
scientists who are qualified to do rigorous research needed for
evidence-based educational practice and policy. PIER students
will deal with the bidirectional flow of ideas and challenges
between laboratory studies and real-world instructional applications.
They will be trained in Psychology, Statistics, and Human Computer
Interaction to assess learners' knowledge at vastly different
temporal and cognitive grain sizes, and they will develop skills
necessary to utilize cognitive science, educational technology
and advanced statistical methods to advance our understanding
of learning in a variety of instructional contexts and settings.
For more information see: http://www.cmu.edu/pier The National Science Foundation has awarded Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh a five-year, $25 million grant to establish the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC), which will sponsor rigorous research into how people learn and, based on what they find, develop technologies and approaches to teaching that will foster consistently high achievement in the nation's classrooms. The PSLC codirectors are KENNETH R. KOEDINGER, Carnegie Mellon associate professor of human-computer interaction and psychology, and Pitt Computer Science Professor Kurt VanLehn, senior scientist in Pitt's Learning Research and Development Center. Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases04/041004_nsf.html SCIENTISTS DISCOVER BIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR AUTISM MARCEL JUST and a team of brain scientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh have made a groundbreaking discovery into the biological basis for autism, a mysterious brain disorder that impairs verbal and non-verbal communications and social interactions. The research
team is jointly headed by Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology
at Carnegie Mellon, and Dr. Nancy Minshew, professor of psychiatry
and neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
and director of its Center for Autism Research. Further information: www.cmu.edu/PR/releases04/040727_autism.html KATIA SYCARA , SCS research professor, has received an honorary doctorate from the Department of Computer Science and Communications Systems Engineering of the University of the Aegean "in recognition of her outstanding scientific, academic and professional contributions to the field of artificial intelligence." The ceremony took place May 10 in Samos, Greece. Information: www.aegean.gr/intro_en.htm May 2004 STEPHEN FIENBERG , the Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics, has been named a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The academy designates Fellows each year to recognize and honor individual social scientists for their scholarship, efforts and activities to promote the progress of social science. Fienberg is only the second statistician to be so honored. He is the Thorsten Sellin Fellow for 2004, a position named after the distinguished criminologist and social scientist who helped to provide leadership to AAPSS and the social science profession more broadly over decades. BILL EDDY, Professor of Statistics has been appointed to a committee performing a "Study on the feasibility, accuracy and effectiveness of a national Ballistics database" for the National Academies. The study will focus on fundamental issues concerning the uniqueness of ballistic images; the ability of imaging systems to capture unique characteristics and to extract reproducible information from ballistic impressions; the probability that ballistics evidence presented would lead to a match with an image captured in a database; the development of base rates for crimes that produce ballistic evidence, the probabilities and consequences of false positives and negatives, and the operational effectiveness and utility of such a database in solving crimes. ROBERT KASS , head of the Department of Statistics, has been awarded a Visiting Miller Research Professorship at the University of California at Berkeley during the 2004-05 academic year. February 2004 ML Research
Day - February 23, 2004 November
2003 October
2003 Statistics and ML Professor WILLIAM F. EDDY has been named the chairman of the influential Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT), effective July 1, 2004. A standing committee of the National Academies, CNSTAT serves to contribute to a better understanding of important national issues by working to improve the statistical methods and information on which public policy decisions are based. Eddy is the university's second professor to serve as CNSTAT chairman. Stephen Fienberg, the Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science, chaired CNSTAT from 1981 to 1987. A team of Carnegie
Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh researchers has
received a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation
(NSF) to enhance an intelligent, automated Reading Tutor that
listens to children read and verbally assists them when it hears
them stumble. The four-year grant will be used to improve and
integrate speech and user modeling technologies in the Reading
Tutor, which has been developed over more than a decade by Carnegie
Mellon’s Project LISTEN, led by research professor JACK
MOSTOW . September
2003 June 2003 We say farewell to a great researcher and colleague! Sebastian Thrun is headed to Stanford. June
16-18, 2003 - ML Summer School What: This short course "New Directions in Data Mining and Machine Learning" is intended for data mining professionals with an interest in new research results and their practical implications over the next 1-5 years. Who: Carnegie Mellon's world-renowned faculty in data mining and machine learning will teach this two-day course, sampling the latest research results with special emphasis on results having the greatest potential impact on applications. April 2003 More than 150 researchers from North and South America--and their soccer-playing robots--will be on campus April 30 through May 4 to compete in the first-ever RoboCup American Open, chaired by Computer Science Professor and Carnegie Mellon RoboCup team leader Manuela Veloso. During the American Open, which will include competition in the Simulation, Small-Size and Sony Legged leagues, Carnegie Mellon researchers, led by Assistant Professor of Robotics Illah Nourbakhsh, will demonstrate teams of urban search-and-rescue robots in a special "disaster arena" developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The semi-autonomous, interactive, teleoperated robots will be put through their paces in a two-level site that simulates the challenging environments robots may encounter when searching for disaster victims. March 2003 JAY KADANE, the Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics and Social Sciences, and ROBERT KASS, the head of the Department of Statistics, are on the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) list of most highly cited researchers from 1981 to 1999 in mathematics. ISI, which provides products and services to researchers, scours the world's scholarly literature to find the 250 researchers per subject whose work is cited most often in scientific articles. ISI considers this index a key measure of scientific influence. November
2002 The National Associates program was initiated in 2001 to recognize extraordinary contributions to the National Academies through pro-bono service to the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine programs. October 2002 CMU
Statistics Researchers Participate in $2.6M Digital Government
Award from NSF Polygraph
Testing Too Flawed for Security Screening CENTER
GETS $35.5 MILLION FROM U.S. GOVERNMENT FOR CYBERSECURITY --The new multidisciplinary center, headed by Pradeep Khosla of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will pull research faculty from the school's Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Engineering and Public Policy Department, the School of Computer Science, the Department of Statistics, the Heinz School, the Software Engineering Institute and the CERT Coordination Center, the nation's first and best-known computer emergency response team. Dr. Fienberg is also involved in this project. ML Research Day Agenda, October 14, 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 KATIA SYCARA has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for her sustained and "significant contributions to case-based reasoning, autonomous agents, and multiagent systems." Katia joins
fellow "Fellows" in SCS: Jaime Carbonell, Takeo Kanade,
Matt Mason, Tom Mitchell, Raj Reddy, Chuck Thorpe and William "Red" Whittaker. April 2002 Ph.D. Program
name changes to: January 2002 Professor TOM MITCHELL to receive the Debye Award for his eminent research performances in the domain of Machine Learning, on January 11, 2002 at the occasion of the Dies Natalis of the Universiteit Maastricht. http://www.cs.unimaas.nl/~postma/MLDay/BNVKIannouncement.htm TOM MITCHELL returns as Director of ML. August 2001 June 2001 May 2001 April 2001 November
2000 Tai
Sing Lee receives National Science Foundation Career
Award Press
Release - January 11, 1999 Press Release
- August 17, 1999
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