News
Yu-Han Chang has been promoted to the position of project leader!
Yu-Han's new title is given in recognition of his concerted and successful efforts to start new research projects and obtain funding for them, which have resulted in him leading a group that includes doctoral, masters, and undergraduate students.
Yu-Han co-leads the Computational Behavior Group with Rajiv Maheswaran. The group's research focuses on spatiotemporal data analytics and visualization, modeling behavior in human societies and networks, and new genres of alternate reality and location-based gaming for social experimentation and education.
I would also like to mention Yu-Han's important service to the division: organizing the mentoring group for people who are interested in learning more about how to prepare and submit proposals. This is much appreciated.
ISD's Jihie Kim and Erin Shaw's unique and highly successful initiative to use interest in video games as leverage in teaching math and collaborative skills to at-risk secondary students concluded its pilot implementation early this summer with a workshop about the project for teachers who might be interested in piloting the program at their own schools. Participants included 14 local middle and high school STEM and Media Arts teachers and two observers, including a high school principal and a professor of education at USC.
Geosemble was founded in 2004 by Craig Knoblock and Cyrus Shahabi, a professor at USC's computer science department. The company focuses on automatically integrating information into satellite and aerial imagery and maps.
Last week Geosemble was acquired by TerraGo. For more details, see:
http://www.terragotech.com/news-and-events/press-releases/terrago-acquires-geosemble-technologies
Congratulations to Craig on this next step in the development of an ISI spinoff!
Ver Steeg’s proposal, titled “Bell Inequalities for Complex Networks”, aims to devise tests to unequivocally determine the underlying mechanisms at work in complex networks. Networks, be that of friends or subatomic particles, may have more similarities than conventionally thought. Ver Steeg offers the corollary that it is not uncommon for two friends’ behaviors to be similar.
Read full story.
http://www3.isi.edu/about-news_story.htm?s=361738
In elections just held, Ed Hovy was elected a member of the AAAI Executive Council. The Council is responsible for setting policy for the association. This is an important position that can have significant impact on the AI community.
Congratulations, Ed!
ISD members just won the best poster award at the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) being held in Crete.
The winning poster was: Jun Park and Jihie Kim, Classifying Topics of Video Lecture Contents Using Speech Recognition Technology
Congratulations to Jun and Jihie!
by Jason Riesa
I was asked to contribute an article about my time at ISI as a graduate student, but when you get your PhD you are no longer supposed to always do what you are told, so I thought I would modify the scope a bit. Young researchers are often bad at maintaining structure and good at digging and diving deep into their narrow research topic and staying there. Neither of these are helpful for crossing the boundary from young researcher to seasoned scientist. Here are three things I learned while a PhD student at ISI that helped me along.
Prof. Lise Getoor (http://www.cs.umd.edu/~getoor/) of U Maryland is
visiting ISI for 6 weeks this summer. Lise is an expert on machine
learning, entity resolution, collective classification and many other
topics. Her temporary home is in Rm 903. Please stop by and say hi.
Posted by Kristina Lerman
I'm very happy to announce that Yolanda Gil has just been elected a Fellow of AAAI.
AAAI's announcement stated that Yolanda received this honor, "For significant contributions to intelligent user interfaces, knowledge capture, representations for web-based science, and for leadership in the AI community."
Congratulations to Yolanda for this well deserved honor!
submitted by: Yigal Arens
