Andrew Myers (Asst. Prof., CS) has been asked to serve on the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group for the next three years. ISAT was established in 1987 by DARPA to support its technology offices, providing independent assessment of the state of advanced information science and technology and their relationship to DoD issues. Many ISAT studies ultimately contribute to the technical directions of DARPA initiatives.
The Computing Facilities Support Advisory Committee membership has grown and the committee is looking for broader range of input from its users. Filip Radlinski has agreed to serve in the newly created role of graduate student representative, and Paul Ginsparg now represents CIS faculty on the committee. Johannes Gehrke and Dan Huttenlocher have also recently joined the committee. Other members include Andrew Myers (chair), Al Demers, and Paul Stodghill.
Bart Selman was featured in the December 5, 2005, issue of ComputerWorld. The article, "Getting Real: Analyzing Dynamics That Can Choke Supercomputers," leads with an example that illustrates a point the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is trying to make: "computers will never be able to exhaustively examine the possible outcomes of complex activities, any more than a roomful of monkeys with typewriters would ever be able to re-create the works of Shakespeare."
The article highlights work done by Selman, Robert Constable, Carla Gomes, Mark Bickford, and Christoph Kreitz. The team has developed chess-playing software that extends the concept of single-agent reasoning to multiagent scenarios that include one or more opposing forces.
In the article, Selman explained that the Cornell chess program emulates a grandmaster. "It might exploit certain strategies, then find they are not successful. It learns from that and adds that to its knowledge base. It gets better the more games it plays, even during a single game," Selman explains. It develops a conceptual view of the board and seeks out overall positions that will give it strength.
By applying these learning techniques and other improvements over traditional reasoning tools, Selman indicated that his team has so far achieved a 109 speed improvement over those tools.
For the complete article, visit http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2005/0,4814,106722,00.html.
Jon Kleinberg was the subject of an interview in the October 24, 2005, issue of ComputerWorld. The article, "Shrinking Degrees of Separation," explored Kleinberg's work in improving search engine performance by considering not only a site's content, but also the number and quality of links to it.
The article explains that Kleinberg developed the concept of authorities and hubs, a network search principle used by major public search engines. "His algorithms can also be used to define and explain social groups and their connections."
The article concludes with a Q&A, illustrating Kleinberg's predictions for how some of his ideas can impact the future.
For the complete interview, visit http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2005/0,4814,105595,00.html.
An interview with Kleinberg also appeared in the December 5, 2005, issue of Technology Research News. The interview shared Kleinberg's perspectives on trends in the industry, the importance of research that studies network data, network growth, and network evolution, and the technological, social, and economic implications of the structure of the Web.
Kleinberg also shared insights into the important social questions related to today's cutting-edge technologies.
"The information we process every day will become increasingly varied, complicated, and voluminous; and since it's already at the limit of our cognitive abilities, something has to give: we will either develop tools that can manage this information for us more effectively, or we will develop new styles of dealing with it.
"As a consequence of these developments, we are accumulating incredibly detailed datasets of human activity on-line -- the way people author content on the Web, the way they browse and read information, and the way they communicate with one another. This is inevitable; personal information streams create enormous archives, and significant aspects of people's lives are encoded in these archives.
"We face two challenges here: how to make sense of data at this resolution, and how to ensure people's privacy in a world where this kind of data exists. But if we can overcome these challenges, we'll have much better insight into how to make on-line tools better conform to the ways in which people read, write, search, and communicate --- and more generally how to design on-line tools for a world in which people are increasingly dependent on them."
For the complete interview, visit http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/120505/View_Jon_Kleinberg_120505.html.
Adam Siepel has joined the faculty in the Department of Computational Biology and Biological Statistics. His research interests lie in the area where statistics, computer science, evolutionary biology, and genomics meet. Currently, his main focus is on developing computational methods for the identification of functional elements in eukaryotic (primarily mammalian) genomes, based on comparative sequence data. A major theme in his work is to model and analyze the evolution and the function of genomic sequences simultaneously, so that evolution sheds light on function, and function sheds light on evolution. He likes to tackle problems of practical importance in genomics, such as gene finding and conserved element identification, using methods from machine learning and computational statistics. As much as possible, he tries to stay grounded in biology by working with experimentalists to test predicted functional elements in the lab.
Siepel is currently scheduled to teach a seminar, "Topics in Computational Genomics. He graduated from Cornell University in 1994 and discovered computational biology at Los Alamos National Laboratory, while working as a graduate research assistant for the HIV Database project. In 1996, he left Los Alamos for the National Center for Genome Resources, a private not-for-profit in Santa Fe, where he started as a programmer and later became a group leader for software development. During this time he completed a Master's in CS at the University of New Mexico, and balanced his engineering and management work by day with theoretical work on genome-rearrangement problems by night. In early 2002, his interests turned to computational statistics, machine learning, molecular evolution, and comparative genomics. In 2005, he completed his Ph.D. and accepted a faculty position in Cornell's Department of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology, beginning January 2006.
Siepel has authored more than 20 papers in the areas of molecular evolution and phylogeny, comparative genomics, genome rearrangements, bioinformatics software integration, and the detection of recombinant viruses. He was awarded a University of California Biotechnology Research and Education Program (UCBREP) fellowship, an Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) scholarship, and a UC Santa Cruz Chancellor's fellowship, and he won the Best Student Paper award at the 2002 Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB) conference. He has served as a reviewer for PLoS Biology, Genome Research, Molecular Biology and Evolution, PLoS Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, and other journals.
A group of students is organizing the North East Student Colloquium on Artificial Intelligence this spring. The colloquium will foster discussion among graduate students from the region, provide graduate students opportunities to present their work and get feedback about it, and encourage networking among the students. For more information, visit http://www.cs.cornell.edu/conferences/nescai.
Robbert vanRenesse gave a keynote address at the Stochasticity in Distributed Systems Conference in December. As the first workshop on Stochasticity in Distributed Systems, the event brought together a collection of research white papers that originated from a diverse range of distributed systems topics, but were all centered around the theme of stochasticity. The white papers were on topics that ranged from design and study of sensor networks and overlays, to rationality and social networks, to the use of nature-inspired ideas and design methodologies for building real systems.
vanRenesse is a senior research associate with the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. He was the co-founder of several companies, including DAG Labs, Norway and Reliable Network Solutions. He has worked on a variety of projects related to distributed systems, including Tacoma, Horus, Ensemble, NuPrl, and most recently and relevantly Spinglass and Quicksilver. Robbert has also served on numerous program committees and as editor of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.
On December 9, 2005, John Hopcroft received an honorary fellowship from the National College of Ireland at a ceremony held in Dublin, Ireland. Hopcroft was also recently awarded the IEEE Harry M. Goode award in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the study of algorithms and their applications in information processing. He accepted the award at a ceremony in Philadelphia in November, at which time he was presented with a bronze medal and $2,000. Hopcroft is the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics in Computer Science and an A. M. Turing Award winner.
"With this award, John joins a distinguished and elite circle of scientists," said Charlie Van Loan, computer science professor and chair of Cornell's Department of Computer Science. "His algorithmic insights over the last 40 years have had a profound impact throughout engineering and science."
Presented annually since 1964, the IEEE Harry M. Goode award recognizes its members for outstanding accomplishments in the information processing field that are considered either a single contribution of theory, design, or technique of outstanding significance or the accumulation of important contributions on theory or practice over an extended time period, the total of which represent an outstanding contribution. The Computer Society sponsors an active and prestigious awards program, which honor technical achievements and service to the computer profession and to the society.
Hopcroft's research centers on theoretical aspects of computing, especially analysis of algorithms, automata theory, and graph algorithms. He has co-authored four books on formal languages and algorithms, and his most recent work is on the study of information capture and access.
From January 1994 until June 2001, Hopcroft was the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering. After receiving both his M.S. (1962) and Ph.D. (1964) in electrical engineering from Stanford University, he spent three years on the faculty of Princeton University. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1967, was named professor in 1972 and the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Computer Science in 1985. He served as chairman of the Department of Computer Science from 1987 to 1992 and was the associate dean for college affairs in 1993. An undergraduate alumnus of Seattle University, Hopcroft was honored with a Doctor of Humanities Degree, honoris causa, in 1990.
He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association of Computing Machinery. In 1992, he was appointed by President Bush to the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation, and served through May 1998. From 1995-98, Hopcroft served on the National Research Council's Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications.
In addition to these appointments, Hopcroft serves as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the David and Lucile Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering and the Nominating Committee for the National Academy of Engineering. He chairs the International Advisory Committee on Informatics and Engineering at the National College of Industrial Relations in Ireland, and is Co-Chair of the NRC Committee on Network Science for Future Army Applications.
Bart Selman was featured in the December 5, 2005, issue of ComputerWorld. The article, "Getting Real: Analyzing Dynamics That Can Choke Supercomputers," leads with an example that illustrates a point the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is trying to make: "computers will never be able to exhaustively examine the possible outcomes of complex activities, any more than a roomful of monkeys with typewriters would ever be able to re-create the works of Shakespeare."
The article highlights work done by Selman, Robert Constable, Carla Gomes, Mark Bickford, and Christoph Kreitz. The team has developed chess-playing software that extends the concept of single-agent reasoning to multiagent scenarios that include one or more opposing forces.
In the article, Selman explained that the Cornell chess program emulates a grandmaster.
"It might exploit certain strategies, then find they are not successful. It learns from that and adds that to its knowledge base. It gets better the more games it plays, even during a single game," Selman explains. It develops a conceptual view of the board and seeks out overall positions that will give it strength.
By applying these learning techniques and other improvements over traditional reasoning tools, Selman indicated that his team has so far achieved a 109 speed improvement over those tools.
For the complete article, visit http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2005/0,4814,106722,00.html.
An interview with Jon Kleinberg appeared in the December 5, 2005, issue of Technology Research News. The interview shared Kleinberg's perspectives on trends in the industry, the importance of research that studies network data, network growth, and network evolution, and the technological, social, and economic implications of the structure of the Web.
Kleinberg also shared insights into the important social questions related to today's cutting-edge technologies.
"The information we process every day will become increasingly varied, complicated, and voluminous; and since it's already at the limit of our cognitive abilities, something has to give: we will either develop tools that can manage this information for us more effectively, or we will develop new styles of dealing with it.
"As a consequence of these developments, we are accumulating incredibly detailed datasets of human activity on-line -- the way people author content on the Web, the way they browse and read information, and the way they communicate with one another. This is inevitable; personal information streams create enormous archives, and significant aspects of people's lives are encoded in these archives.
"We face two challenges here: how to make sense of data at this resolution, and how to ensure people's privacy in a world where this kind of data exists. But if we can overcome these challenges, we'll have much better insight into how to make on-line tools better conform to the ways in which people read, write, search, and communicate --- and more generally how to design on-line tools for a world in which people are increasingly dependent on them."
For the complete interview, visit http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/120505/View_Jon_Kleinberg_120505.html.
Cardie was also recently elected to the executive committee of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the premier international organization for research and education in computational linguistics. A member of the organization since 1992 and on the board since 2005, she served two terms as the secretary of the North American chapter of the ACL.
"I am excited to find ways to help ACL student members more quickly feel an integral part of the computational language and natural language processing research community," said Cardie. "One possibility would be to support yearly chapter-level student research symposia, separate from the ACL and chapter conferences, where students could present their research and obtain feedback in informal settings. I also believe that it is important for ACL to continue its current trend in encouraging research that expands the boundaries of computational language and natural language processing --- for example, to include relevant work and ideas from information retrieval, machine learning, statistics, speech, psychology, and psycholinguistics."
Cardie is an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research, an associate editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), and on the editorial board for Machine Learning journal.
