Artificial Intelligence Group
News 2009 2008

2009

(11/12/09) Congratulations to Ph.D. students Daniel Hsu (CSE) and Bharath Sriperumbudur (ECE), both of whose first-authored papers received Honorable Mention Awards at this year's conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS-09). These awards recognize excellence in student research and acknowledge some of the most outstanding work published at NIPS.


(11/07/09) Congratulations to Ph.D. student Brian McFee, whose paper on Heterogeneous Embedding for Subjective Artist Similarity won the Best Presentation Award at the meeting of the International Society for Musical Information Retrieval (ISMIR-09) in Kobe, Japan. The paper was co-authored with Professor Gert Lanckriet (ECE).

(11/01/09) Professor Charles Elkan has been selected as an inaugural member of the editorial board for the new ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST). This is the first ACM journal in the field of artificial intelligence.


(09/24/09) Check out the official launch of "Herd It", the first Facebook game that collects audio annotations as training data for an intelligent music recommendation system. "Herd It" is the brainchild of Luke Barrington and Gert Lanckriet in the UCSD Computer Audition Lab.

(09/21/09) Netflix today awarded $1 million to the winner of its worldwide data-mining competition, in which researchers strived to improve the company's movie recommendation system. In overseeing the competition, Netflix was helped by Professor Charles Elkan, who has served as a contest designer, consultant and judge for the past three years. More details here.


(09/16/09) With his former student Fei Sha, Professor Lawrence Saul has received an NSF award to study Deep Architectures for Speech and Audio Processing.

(09/07/09) Seven papers by Ph.D students at UCSD have been accepted for publication at this year's conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS-09). Congratulations to Lawrence Cayton, Youngmin Cho, Daniel Hsu, Samory Kpotufe, and Bharath Sriperumbudur (ECE). Co-authors on accepted papers include postdoctoral fellow Kamalika Chaudhuri and faculty members Yoav Freund, Gert Lanckriet (ECE), and Lawrence Saul.


(07/27/09) Congratulations to Ph.D. students Luke Barrington, Diane Hu, and Brian McFee who each had first-authored papers accepted to appear at this year's conference of the International Society for Musical Information Retrieval (ISMIR-09) in Kobe, Japan. The students are members of the Computer Audition Lab at UCSD.

(07/15/09) Professor Serge Belongie has received a Google Research Award for work on YouTube video genre classification. The work is being done with Ph.D. student Boris Babenko.


(07/09/09) After returning from ICML-09 in Montreal, where he gave an invited talk on "Linear Separation, Drifting Games, and Boosting", Yoav Freund has launched the Machine Learning Forum, an online meeting place for researchers in machine learning and related areas of computer science.

(07/01/09) Congratulations to all the members of the Machine Perception Laboratory, whose latest work on learning in robots is featured prominently in the current issues of Smithsonian Magazine and Wired.


(06/21/09) Congratulations to Samory Kpotufe, whose single-authored paper on "Escaping the curse of dimensionality with a tree-based regressor" won the best student paper award at COLT-09.

(05/22/09) Congratulations to In Tae Lee, who successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on Machine Learning Algorithms for Independent Vector Analysis and Blind Source Separation.


(05/21/09) Congratulations to Lawrence Cayton, who successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on Bregman Proximity Search. Lawrence will be starting a postdoc in September 2009 at the Max Planck Institute in Tuebingen, Germany.

(05/20/09) After a two year stint at Yahoo Research, Kilian Weinberger will start in January 2010 as an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Washington University. Kilian was a Ph.D. student of Lawrence Saul.


(05/10/09) Students at UCSD had two first-authored papers accepted for publication at this year's Conference on Learning Theory (COLT-09). Congratulations to Samory Kpotufe and Daniel Hsu for their hard work.

(05/01/09) Researchers at UCSD had eight papers accepted for publication at this year's International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-09). Congratulations to all the student authors: Jie Cheng, Youngmin Cho, Gabe Doyle, Brian McFee, Justin Ma, and Pew Putthividhya. Co-authors on accepted papers included postdoctoral fellow Kamalika Chaudhuri and faculty members Sanjoy Dasgupta, Charles Elkan, Gert Lanckriet (ECE), and Lawrence Saul.


(03/16/09) Lawrence Saul has received a Google Research Award for work on detecting individual sounds in mixed audio signals. The work is being done with Ph.D. students in the Computer Audition Lab.

(01/01/09) Charles Elkan has received a three-year award from the University of California Lab Fees Research Program to study learning from only positive and unlabeled examples.

2008

(10/09/08) Sunhyoung Han has been selected as the winner of the IBM Student Paper Award at ICIP-08. ICIP is the IEEE's flagship conference in the area of image and video processing. Sunhyoung's award-winning paper, entitled "Complex discriminant features for object classification", was co-authored with her advisor Nuno Vasconcelos.

(10/08/08) The Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center at UCSD has just been awarded an additional $12 million by NSF to expand its important work studying the roles of time and timing in learning.
(09/07/08) Congratulations to the authors of accepted papers at NIPS-08. Researchers at UCSD will be presenting on a wide range of topics, including privacy-preserving logistic regression, human online sentence processing, robust loss functions for classification, and reinforcement learning for optimization on a budget.

(08/05/08) Lawrence Saul has received an NSF award to pursue work on Assistive Listening Technologies for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. The project involves a partnership with the Deaf Culture Training Program at UCSD, directed by Dr. Georgia Sadler.
(06/17/08) After postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley and Yahoo Research, Fei Sha will start in the fall as an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at USC. Fei was the first Ph.D. student supervised by Lawrence Saul.


(06/13/08) This year's summer internships: William Beaver (DriveCam), Lawrence Cayton (Yahoo!), Jie Cheng (IBM), Daniel Hsu (Yahoo!), Mayank Kabra (Broad Institute), Kai Wang (Google).

(06/09/08) Lawrence Saul has been selected to be the next editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), one of the flagship journals in the field. Lawrence has served on the editorial board of JMLR since 2001.

(05/07/08) Congratulations to Doug Turnbull, who successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis on The Design and Development of a Semantic Music Discovery Engine. Doug is leaving his surfboard in San Diego and will start a faculty position in the fall at Swarthmore.
(04/24/08) Yoav Freund has been elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The award recognizes Yoav's significant contributions to machine learning, including the development of practical boosting algorithms. Congratulations, Yoav!




(04/14/08) Nine papers from UCSD were accepted at this year's ICML, COLT, and UAI. Congratulations to all the authors. Still no word from the chancellor if we can charter a private jet to Helsinki.