Presentations Shine at 2nd Annual ISD Grad Student Symposium

Impressive scientific imagination and effective showmanship by graduate students working at the ISI Intelligent Systems Division were on view at an August 24 competition, the second of its kind.

Papers submitted by students were reviewed by a group of research staff and graduate students who selected a number of those for oral presentation and posters.

The audience on Friday listened to the presentations, viewed the posters and voted on the best among them.

Division director Yigal Arens presented the awards following the voting.

Best Paper:
Wesley Kerr, Training AI using Video Games, demonstrating a system in which children playing with a web-site game train AI agents to make semantic decisions.

Best Paper Runner Ups:
Daniel Hewlett & Shane Hoversten, In search of deep semantics with Sheep
Jacob Everist, Sensorless Mapping in Cramped Environments

Best Presentation:
Wesley Kerr, Training AI using Video Games

Best Presentation Runner Ups:
Steve DeNeefe, Automatic Learning of a Synchronous Tree-Insertion Grammar for Translation
Snehal Thakkar & Matthew Michelson, FastMash: Easily Building Web Integration Applications

Best Poster:
Martin Michalowski, Approximating Constraint Models Using Problem Instance Data

Best Poster Runner Ups:
Rutu Mehta, Abduction for Discourse Understanding
Anon Plangprasopchok, Automatic Image Captioning with Extended Cross Media Relevance Model

A special award was given to the Best Reviewer, Jon May.

Winners received paper certificates, gift certificates to the USC bookstore, and they'll receive plaques that they can display on their desks for everyone to see. The best paper, presentation and poster winners will have their names added to the plaque on the 9th floor.

"I would like to thank all those involved in putting together this wonderful event," said Arens. "The students who wrote and submitted papers, the reviewers, the staff who as always made sure that everyone present was well fed, and last but not least, Jason Riesa, Wes Kerr, and Steve DeNeefe (from left, below,) who worked hard to organize it."