Rich Caruana has been named program co-chair for the Thirteenth Annual ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, which will be in San Jose in August.
Nature published an article about the plagiarism detection work by Johannes Gehrke, Simeon Warner, Paul Ginsparg and Daria Sorokina.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7119/full/444524b.html
ScienCentral News, an independent science and technology news bureau that produces segments to be used in ABC and NBC newscasts, has just posted their story about Jon Moon's and Steve Marschner's SIGGRAPH 2006 work. It can be seen on the web here:
(direct link is http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3? type=article&article_id=218392876)
Cornell News; Bill Steele
Researchers from Cornell University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Utah have launched a project seeking to train computers to scan text and make a determination as to whether its contents are fact or fiction. The Department of Homeland Security created the consortium of three universities as one of four that are exploring sophisticated techniques for information analysis and security-related computational technologies. "Lots of work has been done on extracting factual information--the who, what, where, when," said Cornell computer science professor Claire Cardie. "We're interested in seeing how we would extract information about opinions." The research aims to bridge the gap between the distinctly human form of intuitive intelligence and the more literal machine intelligence by giving meaning to sentences through novel machine-learning algorithms. Cardie says her team is also working to rate the sources of a work that a writer might cite. "We're making sure that any information is tagged with confidence. If it's low confidence, it's not useful information," she said.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept06/Cardie.homeland.ws.html
CS Professors Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Lillian Lee and Eva Tardos received a Yahoo! Research Alliance gift for the 2006-2007 academic year to pursue their project, "Diffusion and Temporal Dynamics in Web Information".
CS Professor Graeme Bailey was honored at the Annual Greek Faculty Appreciation Reception as having "impacted both ... academic and extracurricular experiences at Cornell". One professor from each college at Cornell was chosen.
Kavita Bala, with co-authors Phil Dutre and Philippe Bekaert, has released the 2nd edition of their graduate textbook Advanced Global Illumination(Publishers A.K. Peters). This book provides the reader with a fundamental understanding of a broad class of rendering algorithms for realistic image synthesis.
Bart Selman is quoted in a New York Times article called "In web world, rich now envy the superrich"; he talks about the "serious motivation" provided by the astronomical amounts for which recent startups have been acquired.
Dexter Kozen is an invited speaker at "Logical Methods in Exact and Social Sciences", a conference to commemorate the 70th birthday of Professor Rohit Parikh. He will be speaking about "Parikh's Theorem in Commutative Kleene Algebra".
Claire Cardie is co-PI on an NSF grant, "The Dynamics of Digital Deception in Computer Mediated Environments", together with PI Jeff Hancock (assistant professor, communications) and co-PI Mats Rooth (professor, linguistics).
In a Cornell Chronicle article, Hancock says that "By using their [Cardie and Rooth's] expertise in natural language processing and computational linguistics, we will see if we can determine if the very language of deceptive messages is different from that in messages which are not deceptive," said Hancock. "We should have ample opportunity to look at lies because usually people tell one to two lies a day, and these lies range from the trivial to the very serious, including deception between friends and family, in the workplace, and in security and intelligence contexts."
