Gün Sirer was quoted in a "Top Story" of Forbes Magazine about the ongoing trial
of Ross Ulbricht for running the Silk Road underground market under the Dread
Pirate Roberts (DPR) alias. Ulbricht admitted to being an erstwhile operator of
Silk Road, but pointed to the Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles as the "real" DPR.
PhD student Jason Yosinski's joint work on how deep-learning algorithms can be easily tricked has attracted more press attention, scoring writeups in Wired and MIT Technology Review:
"A technique called deep learning has enabled Google and other companies to make breakthroughs in getting computers to understand the content of photos. Now researchers at Cornell University and the University of Wyoming have shown how to make images that fool such software into seeing things that aren’t there."
"...the group generated random imagery using evolutionary algorithms.
Essentially, they bred highly-effective visual bait. A program would produce an image, and then mutate it slightly. Both the copy and the original were shown to an “off the shelf” neural network trained on ImageNet, a data set of 1.3 million images, which has become a go-to resource for training computer vision AI. If the copy was recognized as something — anything — in the algorithm’s repertoire with more certainty the original, the researchers would keep it, and repeat the process.... Eventually, this technique produced dozens images that were recognized by the neural network with over 99 percent confidence. To you, they won’t seem like much. A series of wavy blue and orange lines. A mandala of ovals. Those alternating stripes of yellow and black. But to the AI, they were obvious matches: Star fish. Remote control. School bus."
Serge Belongie and colleagues won best paper award in the "Vision and Learning"category at WACV 2015 for “Learning Localized Perceptual Similarity Metrics for Interactive Categorization”. The IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision is the IEEE’s and the PAMI-TC’s premier meeting on applications of computer vision.
The paper states, "In this work, we use perceptual similarity metrics learned from localized comparisons to perform interactive categorization. By directing the user’s attention to localized and roughly aligned regions, we aim to reduce both overall human effort required for categorization as well as improve performance over using nonlocalized comparisons and metrics."
A list of "Awesome Courses" that has been making waves on Hacker News includes Cornell's CS3110 (Data Structures and Functional Programming), CS5150 (Software Engineering), and CS5412 (Cloud Computing). The description of the latter reads, "Taught by one of the stalwarts of this field, Prof Ken Birman, this course has a fantastic set of slides that one can go through. The Prof's book is also a gem and recommended as a must read in Google's tutorial on Distributed System Design".
"Awesome Courses" is "an attempt to bring to light those awesome courses [that are not included in MOOC aggregation sites] which make their high-quality material i.e. assignments, lectures, notes, readings & examinations available online for free."
Contributing professors for CS3110 include: Michael Clarkson, Bob Constable, Nate Foster, Mike George, Dan Huttenlocher, Dexter Kozen, Greg Morrisett, Andrew Myers, and Ramin Zabih.
Bill Arms has taught CS5150 for several years.
Johannes Gehrke and Thorsten Joachims were named ACM Fellows. The ACM Fellows program celebrates the exceptional contributions of the leading members in the computing field. Johannes Gehrke is cited for his contributions to data mining and data stream query processing, and Thorsten Joachims is cited for his contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning and information retrieval. Several Cornell PhD alumni were also named, including Allan Borodin, Daniela Rus, and Aravind Srinivasan.
The NRC has launched a new roundtable, the Forum on Cyber Resilience. The Forum will bring together scientists, practitioners, and policymakers to advance the national discourse around the resilience of our networked information systems and cyberinfrastructures. Dr. Fred Schneider (NAE) of Cornell University is appointed as the Forum's inaugural Chair. Visit the Forum website
Thorsten was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The AAAI Fellows program recognizes individuals for providing intellectual leadership and making outstanding contributions in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Thorsten is honored for his contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning and information retrieval.
The International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics has selected Éva Tardos to deliver the Olga Taussky-Todd Lecture for the upcoming ICIAM 2015. She was chosen for her numerous and deep contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, discrete algorithms and algorithmic game theory, and her ability to convey the basic ideas and inspire others to pursue them.
The International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics is the most important international event in applied and industrial mathematics, held once every four years. The Olga Taussky-Todd Lectureship is an honor conferred on a "woman who has made outstanding contributions in applied mathematics and/or scientific computation". The lecture is named in tribute to the memory of Olga
Taussky-Todd, whose scientific legacy is in both theoretical and applied mathematics, and whose work exemplifies the qualities to be recognized.
