Machine Learning at Cornell University's Computer Science Department

Cornell and the Cornell Computer Science Department have a diverse group of faculty and students working on machine learning and data mining and their applications to computational biology, natural language processing, text categorization, and other fields.

Selected highlights

2008-2009:
- Best Student Paper runner-up at KDD 2009: Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinberg, and Ravi Kumar, "Optimizing web traffic via the media scheduling problem"
- Thorsten Joachims wins the Best 10-year paper award at ICML 2009 for Transductive Inference for Text Classification using Support Vector Machines.
- Ping Li is one of 15 recipients of an ONR Young Investigator Award
- nomination for best paper award at WWW to Dave Crandall, Lars Backstrom, Dan Huttenlocher, and Jon Kleinberg
- Thorsten Joachims wins a Fraunhofer-Bessel Research Award from the Humboldt foundation; shakes hands with the president of Germany.
- Jure Leskovec joins the department as a postdoc, deferring a tenure-track position at Stanford
ICML 2008: five Cornell papers
COLT 2008: best student paper award to Robert D. Kleinberg, Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil and Yogeshwer (Yogi) Sharma
2008: Microsoft Research Fellowship to Yisong Yue
2008: Yahoo! Key Technical Challenges grant to Yisong Yue
ECML 2007: Best Student Paper Award to Daria Sorokina, Rich Caruana, and Mirek Riedewald
KDD 2007: Rich Caruana is program co-chair; Jon Kleinberg is an invited speaker.
IEEE Micro Top Pick (one of the most significant industry-relevant computer architecture papers of the year): ASPLOS 2006 paper co-authored by Rich Caruana (with E. İpek, S. McKee, B. de Supinski, and M. Schulz)
KDD 2006: Best Research Paper Award to Thorsten Joachims
2006: Microsoft Research Fellowship to Filip Radlinski
ICML 2005:
- Best Paper Award to Thorsten Joachims
- Distinguished Student Paper Award (of four) to Thomas Finley and Thorsten Joachims
- Distinguished Student Paper Award (of four) to Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil and Rich Caruana
- Johannes Gehrke an invited speaker
KDD 2005:
- 10% of accepted papers have Cornell (co-)authors
- Best Student Paper Award to Filip Radlinski and Thorsten Joachims
- Best Research Paper Award co-won by Jon Kleinberg (with Jure Leskovec and Christos Faloutsos)
KDD 2004: Johannes Gehrke is program chair
HLT-NAACL 2004: Best Paper Award to Regina Barzilay and Lillian Lee
KDD 2003: Best Research Paper Award to David Kempe, Jon Kleinberg, and Eva Tardos

People

Sites

Faculty

Giles Hooker, BSCB
Adam Siepel, BSCB
Claire Cardie, CS
Dan Huttenlocher, CS
Thorsten Joachims, CS
Bobby Kleinberg, CS
Lillian Lee, CS
Ashutosh Saxena, CS
Bart Selman, CS
John Hale, Linguistics
Mats Rooth, Linguistics
Hod Lipson, MAE
Morten Christiansen, Psychology
Shimon Edelman, Psychology
Paat Rusmevichientong, ORIE
Ping Li, Statistical Science

Graduate students

Visitors

Jure Leskovec

Alumni (and first position)

Eric Breck (PhD 2008 → Rhodes College)
Alin Dobra (PhD 2003 → U. Florida)
Alexandre Evfimievski (PhD 2004 → IBM Almaden)
Thomas Finley (PhD 2008 → Microsoft)
Nick Howe (PhD 2001 → Smith)
Yi-Cheng Huang (PhD 2003)
Vera Kettnaker (PhD 2000 → RPI)
Oren Kurland (PhD 2006 → the Technion)
Scott Mardis (PhD 2000 → MITRE)
Vincent Ng (PhD 2004 → UTDallas)
Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil (PhD 2008 → IBM, Goldstine fellow)
Bo Pang (PhD 2006 → Yahoo! Research)
David Pierce (PhD 2002 → SUNY Buffalo)
Filip Radlinski (PhD 2008 → Microsoft Research Cambridge)
Reba Schuller (PhD 2003 mathematics → Alphatech)
Daria Sorokina (PhD 2008 → CMU postdoc)
Kiri Wagstaff (PhD 2002 → JHU postdoc)
Wei Wei (PhD 2005)

Selected projects, groups, and departments

PERF (software for evaluating with respect to a wide variety of performance metrics; used in KDD Cup 2004)
SVM^light and cousins
Artificial Intelligence graduate study brochure
Cognitive Studies
The Intelligent Information Systems Institute
Machine Learning Reading Group
Natural Language Processing
Statistical Science Department
Biological Statistics and Computational Biology Department

Course sampling

OR 4740 - Statistical Data Mining
CS 478 - Machine Learning
CS 4782/6782/BTRY 4790/6790 - Probabilistic graphical models
CS 578 - Empirical Methods in Machine Learning and Data Mining
ORIE 6127 - Computational Issues in Large Scale Data-Driven Models
BTRY 6502 - Computationally Intensive Statistical Inference
CS 678 - Topics in Machine Learning
BTRY 6940 - Statistical Machine Learning (in general, graduate special stopics in biometry and statistics)
CS 732 - Data Mining/Databases Seminar
ORIE 6740: Statistical Learning Theory for Data Mining
ORIE 6780 - Bayesian Statistics and Data Analysis
CS 7790 - Artificial Intelligence Seminar
MATH 7740 - Statistical Learning Theory (expected to be offered FA 09)
CS 7794 - Natural Language Processing Seminar
CS 778 - Topics in Machine Learning

Events

24th International Workshop on Statistical Modeling, Cornell, July 2009
KDD 2007, Rich Caruana, program co-chair
Machine Learning Summer School, May 16-27, 2005, Rich Caruana, lecturer
NIPS 2004 Workshop on Calibration and Probabilistic Prediction in Supervised Learning, Rich Caruana, co-organizer
KDD 2004, Johannes Gehrke, program chair
KDD Cup, 2004, Rich Caruana and Thorsten Joachims, chairs
Implicit Measures of User Interests and Preferences: SIGIR 2003 workshop, Thorsten Joachims, co-organizer
Beyond Classification and Regression: Learning Rankings, Preferences, Equality Predicates, and Other Structures: NIPS 2002 workshop, Rich Caruana and Thorsten Joachims, organizers
Special Year in Machine Learning, Statistics, and Data Mining: CS Colloquium Series, 2001-2002
- 10/25/01, 4:15pm, Upson B-17:
  Usama Fayyad, digiMine
- 2/14/02: John Lafferty, CMU
- 3/7/02: Rob Schapire, AT&T Labs -- Research
- 3/26/01: Michael Jordan, Berkeley
Statistical Learning Across Cognition: Cognitive Studies Symposium, April 13-14, 2002

Updates to Lillian Lee