News
(Slightly delayed, but we just found out.)Rajiv Maheswaran, Yu-Han Chang, Aaron Henehan and Samantha Danesis won the grand prize at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference for their paper, "Deconstructing the Rebound with Optical Tracking Data." The conference was held in Boston in March 2012.For a short video: http://www.sloansportsconference.com/?p=6143
Please welcome Ying Zhang, who will be visiting us for one year. Ying is a faculty member in China and will be working with us on the semantics of geospatial data. Her office is 958 right now, but she will be moving to 917 in a few weeks. Here is a picture, so you will recognize her when you see her in the halls.
Craig Knoblock
Please stop by and say hi to two of our newest visitors: Madalina Georgescu and Laura Banarescu, SDL, are spending three weeks at ISI working with Kevin and I on a joint project on semantics-based MT. They are in office 901.
Submitted by Daniel
Please welcome Eva Hasler, a student of alumnus Philipp Koehn at the University of Edinburgh, who is visiting us for a few weeks. Her research is in statistical machine translation and she is in office 962.
Submitted by David
Rumi Ghosh successfully defended her dissertation titled "Disentangling the Network: Understanding the Interplay of Topology and Dynamics in Network Analysis" on April 23. Her committee, which consisted of Kristina Lerman, Shanghua Teng, Yan Liu and Peter Monge (Annenberg School of Communication), listened with interest as Rumi presented results of her research showing how dynamic processes affect our view of network structure.
ISD PhD student George Konstantinidis received the best submission award at the PhD workshop of the EDBT/ICDT 2012 Joint Conference on database theory and technology. The conference was held March 26-30, 2012, in Berlin.
The title of George's paper was "Towards Scalable Data Integration under Constraints", and it is based on the thesis research he is doing with Jose Luis Ambite.
Feel free to contact George <konstant@usc.edu> to get a copy of the paper and to discuss it with him.
The language of contagious disease has long infected computer science. Decades ago, information security pioneer Len Adleman of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering applied the term "virus" to malicious code that could take over computers.
Cybersecurity needs to move its focus from protecting the network to protecting the tasks to be accomplished, say USC Viterbi School of Engineering specialists who are now working on a dynamic approach to protect crucial computer operations.
Dr. Lisa Porter, Director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and several program directors visited ISI on May 11, 2011, as part of a tour of the West Coast.
Faculty members from the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute were among scientists from eight universities who collaborated with IBM to advance the Question Answering (QA) technology behind the IBM Watson computing system.
Most world languages don't have the abundant resources of texts in electronic form that computer scientists have used to create the now widely-used machine translation systems that turn (for example) English into Chinese. Now, Kevin Knight of ISI, who helped pioneer these earlier systems, is working as part of a multi-university team in a five-year effort to find less statistical, more semantic points of attack on 'low-density' languages, starting with some spoken in Africa.
