Recent News & Accomplishments
2008
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, presents "New Sciences for a new Web". Date: December 1, 2008 Time: 4:00 pm Location: CSIC 1115 The web experience has changed from a human interacting with a browser, to the emergence of a plethora of social media experiences. One consequence is that we need research advances that straddle the boundaries between computational and social sciences, the latter including microeconomics, cognitive psychology and sociology. It also raises difficult questions on the use of data - ranging from the algorithmic to the societal. This lecture will attempt to... read more
Congratulations to Matt McCutchen, Mitchell Katz and Alan Jackoway for placing first in the Mid-Atlantic ACM programming contest. The team was advised by Amol Deshpande. Score summary read more
Bonnie Dorr and her students, Matthew Snover and Nitin Madnani (in collaboration with Rich Schwartz at BBN Technologies) participated in the first ever NIST Metric MATR workshop to evaluate and compare automatic machine translation evaluation metrics. Their submission, TERp (Translation Edit Rate plus), was noted for its ability to automatically predict the quality of a translation. TERp was one of the top performing metrics at the workshop, and had the highest Pearson correlation coefficient, with human judgments in 9 of the 45 test conditions -- more than any other metric. In addition, in... read more
Thomas Malone from MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence presents "Classifying and Designing Collective Intelligence". Date: November 3, 2008 Time: 4:00 pm Location: CSIC 1115 Some of the most interesting recent Internet applications (like Wikipedia, Digg, and Google) are examples of what is variously called "Web 2.0" or "collective intelligence." Designing such systems well is not just a matter of software design read more
Effective January 1, 2009 Professor Ashok Agrawala will become a Life member of the IEEE, a distinguished status reserved for those with a long association with the IEEE. Life members contribute greatly to the fortunes of the IEEE through their service on committees and boards, involvement with local activities, and their contributions to the technical vitality of the IEEE. read more
David Jacobs continues the 2008 Colloquium Series with his research "Matching Images with Deformations". Date: October 20, 2008 Time: 4:00 pm Location: CSIC 1115 When we match images that come from the same object, we must often allow for 2D, non-linear deformations. These can model changes in shape that can occur when an object deforms or an articulated object moves its parts, differences in shape between different instances of the same type of object, or variations in apparent shape due to changes in viewpoint. This talk will provide an overview of several approaches to matching that stress... read more
The University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) is organizing a Theoretical Computer Science Day to be held on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at the University of Maryland, College Park. All talks will be held in room AVW 2460 A.V.Williams Building. Theory Day webpage... read more
CBCB faculty member Mihai Pop receives funding from NIH for a new R01 basic research grant, Assembly and analysis software for exploring the human microbiome. read more
Bobby Bhattacharjee continues the 2008 Colloquium Series with his research "Systems without Cooperation". Date: October 13, 2008 Time: 4:00 pm Location: CSIC 1115 Early systems on the Internet were exercises in feasibility: institutions and users cooperated to build, deploy, and demonstrate applications and uses of packet switching. Modern Internet protocols must assume a user base that is not necessarily cooperative or altruistic. Fundamental Internet protocols were characterized by cooperative primitives such as voluntary backoff, exchange of accurate local state, and trusted authorities... read more