November, 2008

Carlos Guestrin, assistant professor in the Machine Learning Department and the Computer Science Departmenthas been awarded the Finmeccanica Chair in Computer Science.  This chair is awarded to outstanding junior faculty. This chair recognizes Carlos’ outstanding contributions in research, education, and the many roles he plays in making SCS a better place. Congratulations Carlos!

Discover magazine's December cover story features the "50 Best Brains in Science" and the editors have included Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science. For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/blog/2008/Fall/von-ahn-among-best-brains.shtml

October, 2008
Carlos Guestrin Named One of Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10”! Carlos Guestrin, assistant professor of machine learning and computer science, is the latest Carnegie Mellon faculty member to be named to Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10,” the magazine’s annual list of top young scientists. The Brilliant 10 are featured in the November issue of the magazine, which is now on newstands. News release

September, 2008
Ph.D. students Andrew Arnold & Suyash Shringarpure of the Machine Learning Department have been named Presidential Fellows in the Life Sciences. Made possible by a generous grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the Presidential Fellows are chosen for their outstanding potential in a variety of life sciences fields.

Jure Leskovec in the news! ML PhD candidate Jure Leskovec, and his MSR colleagues, studied the largest social network in published literature, the Microsoft Instant Messenger network, and found 6.6 degrees of separation, among other fascinating results. The work is mentioned in major news venues, including Washington Post, MSNBC, BBC news, Guardian, Spiegel. The work showed that, even in a huge network of millions of people, we still have the ``six degrees of separation'' phenomenon, that Milgram observed decades ago, in a social network of about 100 people. Washington Post article

August, 2008
ML Faculty Ziv Bar-Joseph receives $1.2 million from the National Institutes of Health. The aim of the proposed research program is to develop and experimentally test new computational methods for reconstructing dynamic regulatory networks. The methods would be used to study response programs and diseases in several species.

ML IC Schedule

James Kuffner, associate professor of robotics, and Seth Goldstein, associate professor of computer science, are being featured in two episodes of the Discovery Channel series "NextWorld," which airs new programs at 8 p.m. each Wednesday. The "Future Intelligence" episode, which premiered Aug. 13, included segments on Kuffner's work on motion planning for humanoid robots and Goldstein's work on Claytronics programmable matter. Both also will appear in the "Extreme Tomorrow" episode, now slated to air Aug. 27.

A new Carnegie Mellon brain imaging study of dyslexic students and other poor readers shows that the brain can permanently rewire itself and overcome reading deficits, if students are given 100 hours of intensive remedial instruction. "This study demonstrates how remedial instruction can use the plasticity of the human brain to gain an educational improvement," said neuroscientist Marcel Just, director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) and senior author of the study. "Focused instruction can help underperforming brain areas to increase their proficiency." Just says that the brain's capacity to adapt as the result of targeted instruction has the potential to influence the remedial learning process in other subject areas, far beyond improving literacy skills. Co-authors of the study are CCBI research fellows Ann Meyler and Tim Keller, Vladimir Cherkassky of the CCBI, and John D.E. Gabriel of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. News Release

July, 2008
New research from Carnegie Mellon sheds light on the neural mechanisms responsible for social difficulties in autism, such as struggling to pick up on innuendo and social cues. "The communication between the frontal and posterior areas of the social brain network is impaired in autism, making it difficult to understand the intentions of others," said the study's senior author, Marcel Just, director of the university's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging. The study, available on the Web site of the journal Social Neuroscience, is the first to measure the synchronization between the brain areas that make up the Theory of Mind network, which is responsible for processing the intentions and thoughts of others, and the first to provide concrete evidence of faulty social network connections. Eventually, it might be possible to tailor autism therapies to the brain communication deficit on a case-by-case basis. The study's lead author, Rajesh K. Kana, is now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Additional co-authors include Timothy Keller and Vladimir Cherkassky of Carnegie Mellon and Nancy J. Minshew of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. News Release

William Cohen, associate research professor in the Machine Learning Department, received the 2008 SIGMOD Test of Time Award during the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Management of Data conference June 9-12 in Vancouver, B.C. The award recognizes the enduring insights of a paper Cohen published 10 years ago on the challenges of combining information from multiple databases and introduced a logic called WHIRL that analyzes natural language text to determine the similarity of names used in different databases. Cohen wrote the paper "Integration of Heterogeneous Databases Without Common Domains Using Queries Based on Textual Similarity" while on the staff of AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J.

The Philosopher's Annual 2008 chose Alumni University Professor of Philosophy Clark Glymour's article "When is a Brain Like the Planet," published in Philosophy of Science, as one of the 10 best articles published in philosophy in 2007.

June, 2008
Benjamin Shih, Ken Koedinger & Richard Scheines receive "Best Paper Award" at the first annual Educational Data mining Conference, EDM'08. "A Response Time Model for Bottom-Out Hints as Worked Examples". Congratulations!

Carnegie Mellon Computer Model Reveals How Brain Represents Meaning. The team, led by computer scientist Tom M. Mitchell and cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just, constructed the computational model by using fMRI activation patterns for 60 concrete nouns and by statistically analyzing a set of texts totaling more than a trillion words. News Release

Wall Street Journal features recipients of the 2008 Symantec graduate fellowships including our own Polo Chau, Machine Learning PhD Student. Congratulations Polo!

The Statistical Society of Canada has named Stephen Fienberg, the Maurice Faulk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science, the first recipient of the Lise Manchester Award. This new award recognizes excellence in state of the art statistical research, which considers problems of public interest and is potentially useful for formation of Canadian public policy. Fienberg received this award for his 2006 paper dealing with the growing concerns regarding loss of privacy associated with the rapidly growing availability of online databases containing personal information. His work explores how such activities can take place without compromising pledges of confidentiality for individual databases. As such, it is likely to have a major impact on how large online databases are maintained and analyzed in the future.

May, 2008
Carnegie Mellon Computer Model Reveals How Brain Represents Meaning. The team, led by computer scientist Tom M. Mitchell and cognitive neuroscientist Marcel Just, constructed the computational model by using fMRI activation patterns for 60 concrete nouns and by statistically analyzing a set of texts totaling more than a trillion words. News Release

Justin Y. Newberg, a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering, and Robert F.Murphy, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology, have developed a software toolbox that is intended to help bioscience researchers characterize protein patterns in human tissues. This pattern recognition tool and its underlying methods are important for identifying biomarkers that could be useful for cancer diagnosis and therapy.For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may12_proteinpatterns.shtml

The School of Computer Science recently launched a new site with multi-player online games designed to be fun while giving players a chance to make computers smarter. In addition to Luis von Ahn, an assistant
professor in the Computer Science Department, gwap.com and the games have been developed by software engineers Mike Crawford and Edison Tan, and graduate students Severin Hacker, Edith Law and Bryant Lee. "We have games that can help improve Internet image and audio searches, enhance artificial intelligence and teach computers to see," von Ahn said. The site initially features four new games and a classic called the ESP Game, with three more to be added in the coming months. For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may14_gameswithapurpose.shtml

Associate Research Professor, Geoffrey Gordon and Director for the Lane Center for Computational Biology, Robert Murphy along with Biomedical Engineering Student Shann-Ching "Sam" Chen, have discovered how to significantly speed up critical steps in an automated method for analyzing cell cultures and other biological specimens. The new technique promises to enable higher accuracy analysis of the microscopic images produced by today's high-throughput biological screening methods, such as the ones used in drug discovery, and to help decipher the complex structure of human tissues. Improved accuracy could reduce the cost and the time necessary for these screening methods, make possible new types of experiments that previously would have required an infeasible amount of resources, and perhaps uncover interesting but subtle anomalies that otherwise would go undetected, the researchers said. Press Release.

April, 2008
ML Ph.D. Student Hanghang Tong, Spiros Papadimitriou (CMU alumni) and colleagues win 'best paper award'  at the SIAM Data Mining conference, 2008.  The paper was authored by Hanghang Tong, Spiros Papadimitriou (IBM; CMU Alumni), Philip Yu (IBM), and Christos Faloutsos (CMU) with title "Proximity Tracking on Time-Evolving Bipartite Graphs" SIAM-DM is one of the top data mining conferences.  The work focuses on social networks, and specifically on measuring the proximity of nodes, as the networks change over time. With careful design, the proposed methods achieve up to 2 orders of magnitude faster computation over straightforward competitors.  Congratulations, Hanghang and Spiros!

Assistant Professor Luis von Ahn has received the Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in Computer Science. A Celebration of Teaching recognizes the accomplishments of faculty who exemplify the university’s standards of excellence in education. The ceremony will be held April 23, 2008. For more information please visit: http://www.cmu.edu/celebration-of-teaching/

Computer Scientist Anind Dey has received the National Science Foundation's Facutly Early Career Development Award, its most prestigious award for junior faculty. Press Release

February, 2008
Eric Xing, Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning Department has received a Sloan Research Fellowship in computer science. These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Currently a total of 118 fellowships are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.

Researchers Receive $1.1 Million From Keck Foundation To Pursue New Breakthroughs in Learning How the Brain Works! Cognitive Neuroscience Professor Marcel Just (Director, Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging) and Computer Science Professor Tom M. Mitchell (Chair of the Machine Learning Department) have received a three-year grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to pursue new breakthroughs in the science of brain imaging. Ultimately, this research could shed light on brain disease or conditions like autism, dyslexia or depression. News release

Statistics Professor William Eddy has received the first John C. Warner Professorship of Statistics. A pioneer in the field, Eddy has conducted research in theoretical probability, statistics and applied problems. His current research focuses on data generated by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. Press Release

Duen Horng Chau wins Symantec Research Labs Fellowship for 2008-2009.
For more info on the fellowship:http://www.symantec.com/about/careers/working/graduatefellowshippgms.jsp

Mary McGlohon receives Key Technical Challenges Grant from Yahoo!
The Key Technical Challenges Program is a new Yahoo! program that provides a limited number of exceptional PhD students with $5,000 each of unrestricted funds for the support of their research activities.

January, 2008
Tom Mitchell testifies at the House Veterans' Affairs Committee to advise the use of artificial intelligence to reduce the backlog of disability claims. Press Release

Ziv Bar-Joseph research study finds genes that turn abnormal and may help to fight against cancer. Press Release

ML Ph.D. Student, Brian Ziebart wins the Grand Prize in the 2nd Annual Ellington Bid-Tac-Toe Challenge! The 2nd Annual Ellington Bid-Tac-Toe Challenge is a competitive programming challenge designed to stimulate multiple-level thinking in a competitive game with intuitive rules but without dominant strategies. The challenge was opened to three schools recognized for their strong programming culture: MIT, Caltech, and Carnegie Mellon. A total of 27 people entered under 19 team submissions.

Marcel Just & Tom Mitchell Identify Where Thoughts of Familiar Objects Occur Inside the Human Brain. Press release. Newsweek article

Announcing the new ML/Google Seminar Series beginning 1/14/08 with Pedro Domingos, please see website for list of talks. http://calendar.cs.cmu.edu/cald/google_seminar

December, 2007
We are accepting Faculty Applications, for more information see: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scsdean/FacultyPage/scshiringad08.html

November, 2007
Congratulations to Roy Maxion who has been elected as an IEEE Fellow. The IEEE Fellows are an elite group from around the globe. The IEEE looks to the Fellows for guidance and leadership as the world of electrical and electronic technology continues to evolve.

Congratulations to Avrim Blum who has been elected as an ACM Fellow. The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council in 1993 to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. The ACM Fellows serve as distinguished colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership as the world of information technology evolves.

September, 2007
Professor Stephen Fienberg was honored at the Case Studies in Bayesian Statistics Workshop this past Friday at Carnegie Mellon, in advance of his 65th birthday, which takes place Nov. 27. Four of Fienberg's former Ph.D. students gave talks touching on Fienberg's work, and Fienberg was feted during the workshop's dinner Friday night. Fienberg is the Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics.

Jason Ernst awarded the Siebel Scholarship. The Siebel Foundation has established the Siebel Scholars Program to recognize the most talented students who have demonstrated academic and leadership excellence at the world's leading graduate schools of business and computer science. More information

Robert F. Murphy appointed Director of new Ray and Stephanie Lane Center for Computational Biology. Dr. Murphy also received the Ray and Stephanie Lane Chair. More Information

Eric Xing and Christos Faloutsos awarded a $1.3M NSF grant. The title is "Indexing, Mining and Modeling Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Gene Expressions", and the goal is to analyze drosophila (fruit-fly) embryo photographs. The project involves biology, machine learning, machine vision and databases, and the aims to discover how genes interact with each other during the beginning of life. The long term goal is to generate hypotheses about the corresponding human genes.

ML IC Party - 9/23/07

August, 2007
Professor Carlos Guestrin receives 2007 IBM Faculty Award. Professor Guestrin also received this award in 2006. The award is highly competitive and recognizes the quality of research and its importance to industry.

ML IC SCHEDULE

Jure Leskovec (ML) and co-authors, win the prestigious 'KDD best student paper' award. The paper is titled "Cost-effective Outbreak Detection in Networks" by Jure Leskovec, Andreas Krause, Carlos Guestrin, Christos Faloutsos, Jeanne VanBriesen, Natalie Glance, ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM KDD), San Jose, 2007.

25th Anniversary of Scott Fahlman's :-) smiley

July, 2007
Andy Carlson quoted in Tribune Review

Information for Incoming Fall 07 Students

April, 2007
Stephen Fienberg is elected Fellow in the American Academy of Art & Sciences

Best Paper Awards at SIAM'07, International Conference on Data Mining
Research: Less Is More: Compact Matrix Decomposition for Large Sparse Graphs
Authors: J. Sun, Y. Xie, H. Zhang and C. Faloutsos
Application: Harmonium Models for Semantic Video Representation and Classification Authors: J. Yang, Y. Liu, E. Xing and A. Hauptmann

Andy Carlson, Ph.D. Student receives Yahoo! Fellowship

March, 2007
The Discipline and Future of Machine Learning Video - Tom Mitchell, March 1, 2007

February, 2007
James H. Garrett Jr. receives Professor of the Year for 2007 from The American Society of Civil Engineers, Pittsburgh section. Garrett, head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and related faculty in Machine Learning, will receive the award at a dinner Feb. 17 at the Engineer's Society of Western Pennsylvania.

Sharon Cavlovich awarded the SCS Award for Individual Dedication! Sharon created the Machine Learning website, in addition to her other duties as Assistant to the Department Head, Tom Mitchell. Here are some quotes from her nominators..."In thinking about Sharon, three characteristics stand out to me: dedication, skill and fearlessness". "Sharon is knowledgeable and competent, and she is always willing to help out. She has excellent judgment and common sense - a rare and crucial property that makes me completely comfortable delegating tasks to her, no matter how important". For details about the Awards Ceremony please see: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/people/achievements/final2006_staff_awards.html

January, 2007
Robert Murphy, Professor of Biology Biomedical Engineering & Machine Learning, has been elected a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers (AIMBE). He will be initiated in a ceremony on Feb. 28 in Washington, D.C. Murphy joins biomedical faculty members Jim Antaki, Mike Domach and Todd Przybycien in the AIMBE College of Fellows.

December, 2006
ICDM 2006 Best Paper Award
"Fast Random Walk with Restart and Its Applications" by Hanghang Tong, Christos Faloutsos, and Jia-Yu (Tim) Pan, won the best paper award at ICDM 2006, Hong-Kong, China. ICDM is one of the top data mining conferences, with acceptance ratio 1-of-10 for full papers. The paper gives a fast algorithm to estimate a popular variation of the 'pageRank' score of Google, and shows how to use it for several applications in social networks. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~htong/pdf/ICDM06_tong.pdf

ML Faculty make a clean sweep in NSF Career Awards
Carlos Guestrin has just received a prestigious Career Award from the National Science Foundation for his project entitled "Thinking that is 'just right': Query-Specific Probabilistic Reasoning and its Application to Large-Scale Sensor Networks."This award to Carlos gives the Machine Learning Department a clean sweep. All three of our eligible Assistant Professors -- Ziv Bar-Joseph, Eric Xing, and Carlos -- now have NSF Career Awards. As NSF states on their website: "The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization."

UNIVERSITY RESEARCHERS UNCOVER ONLINE AUCTION FRAUD
A team of researchers led by Professor Christos Faloutsos is using data mining techniques to identify fraudsters and their otherwise unknown accomplices among online auction users. The new method analyzes publicly available histories of transactions posted by online auction sites such as eBay and identifies suspicious online behaviors and associations among users. Perpetrators of these frauds have distinctive online behaviors that cause them to be purged from an auction site. The software developed by the research team--Network Detection via Propagation of Beliefs, or NetProbe--could prevent future frauds by identifying the perpetrators accomplices, who lurk on a site indefinitely and enable new generations of fraudsters. In a test analysis of about one million actual transactions between almost 66,000 eBay users, NetProbe correctly detected 10 previously identified perpetrators, as well as more than a dozen probable fraudsters and several dozen apparent accomplices. Other NetProbe team members include research associate Duen Horng "Polo" Chau, junior Samuel Wang and graduate student Shashank Pandit.

--Further information:
http://cmu.edu/news/archive/2006/december/dec6auctionfraud.shtml

November, 2006
John Lafferty, Professor of Computer Science and Machine Learning, has been elected as IEEE Fellow 2007, for contributions to statistical pattern recognition and statistical language processing. Being named Fellow is the highest and most prestigious honor bestowed on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) members. Other SCS Fellows of IEEE

October, 2006
Christos Faloutsos is the recipient of the Research Contribution Award in ICDM'06.
ICDM is one of the top data mining conferences. Excerpts from the nomination letters: "Christos is a very prolific scholar and has made several important research contributions to the data mining field in such areas as mining for graphs and streams and indexing, searching and mining for temporal and video data. " "Christos is one of the most cited scholars in the Data Mining field. His citation rank on CiteSeer is 159 (among all the computer scientists)."

Latanya Sweeney, Associate Professor CSD, technology and policy, will be inducted this fall as a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics. Sweeney, director and founder of the Data Privacy Lab, will be one of the few fellows who is not affiliated with a medical center or with a university that has a medical school. News release

Manuela Veloso, Computer Science Professor, is spending her sabbatical year as one of 50 fellows at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Veloso was selected from a pool of more than 700 applicants for the highly competitive fellowship program. Veloso, who directs Carnegie Mellon's highly successful RoboCup teams, will be studying integrated intelligence in robots and teams of robots. She is scheduled to make a public presentation of her work Oct. 18 at the institute.

September, 2006
2006 SIEBEL COMPUTER SCIENCE SCHOLARS ANNOUNCED
Pradeep Ravikumar has been selected as Siebel Scholars for 2006-2007. Each year the Siebel Scholars program honors five of the most talented graduate students at SCS and at each of nine other leading computer science and business schools. Each scholar receives $25,000 to defray tuition and expenses for the final year of graduate study. The program was established in 1999 by Tom Siebel, entrepreneur and founder of Siebel Systems, with the goal of nurturing the best and brightest graduate students in computer science and business. Further information: http://www.siebelscholars.com

August 2006
Christos Faloutsos, Professor Computer Science Department, and Carlos Guestrin, Assistant Professor, Machine Learning & Computer Science Departments, are new 2006 IBM Faculty Award recipients. "The IBM Faculty Awards program is a competitive worldwide program intended to: * Foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development and services organizations; and * Promote courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies that are strategic to IBM.

June 2006
Statistics Professor Larry Wasserman has won the 2006 DeGroot Prize for his textbook "All of Statistics." The prize is awarded every two years by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for "textbooks or monographs concerned with fundamental issues of statistical inference, decision theory and/or statistical applications." Recipients are chosen "based on their novelty, thoroughness, timeliness and importance of their intellectual scope."

ROBOCUP SOCCER TEAM WINS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
A small, wheeled robot designed and built at Carnegie Mellon powered the school's robot soccer team, CMDragons'06, to victory last Sunday in the small robot league at the RoboCup 2006 World Championship in Bremen, Germany. The team's five robots, cube-shaped machines with 7-inch sides, outscored opponents by a combined 53-3 margin in the six games played at the international competition. The small robot league is one of six leagues that compete in the games.

--Team advisor Manuela Veloso said the superior speed of the new robots built by research engineer Michael Licitra gave the CMDragons a big advantage over other teams. "These great robots, combined with accurate path and control software algorithms for attacking and defending by graduate students James Bruce and Stefan Zickler, produced an exceptional robot team," said Veloso, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science.

--Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases06/060620_robocup.html.

May 2006
Manuela Veloso, Professor CSD, has been named the new Herbert Simon Professor of Computer Science, for her tremendous contributions to the field of artificial intelligence and to the School of Computer Science. Read about her teams' successes at RoboCup US Open 2006. News release

March 2006
We are now the Machine Learning Department!
CENTER FOR AUTOMATED LEARNING AND DISCOVERY RENAMED

The Center for Automated Learning and Discovery, one of six units within the School of Computer Science, has been renamed the "Machine Learning Department," effective this week. The center, first established in 1997, becomes the nation's first Department of Machine Learning. Tom Mitchell, the center's founding director, is head of the department. Machine learning, which combines expertise from both computer science and statistics, has become a hot discipline in the past decade and a half, and Carnegie Mellon has played a leading role in its development. Machine learning is a method of designing software that can learn from experience and thus improve in performance over time. It is the preferred method used in such commercial applications as speech recognition systems and enables
the increasingly popular practice of data mining.http://news.cs.cmu.edu/Releases/demo/209.html

February 2006
Carlos Guestrin, Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning Department; Doug James, assistant professor in the Robotics Institute; and Adrian Perrig, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and engineering and public policy, have received Sloan Research Fellowships in computer science. A Sloan Fellowship is intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science.

January 2006
Eric Xing, Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning Department and the Language Technologies Institute has been awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
Dr. Xing's research interest spans several areas in machine learning, statistics, molecular biology, and their intersections. The major theme of his current research is understanding and modeling the mechanism and evolution of living systems based on mathematical principles, and developing probablistic inference and learning systems both as a tool for computational biology and as building blocks of generic intelligent systems for a wide range of applications, such as image recognition, IR, NLP and control.

Jurij (Jure) Leskovec, ML PhD student, has been selected as a Microsoft Research Fellow for the next two years. Competition for the Fellowship was extremely intense, with 22 awards out of over 150 very highlyqualified applicants. Jure will be invited to an awards ceremony at Microsoft in Redmond recognizing his selection as an MSR Fellow. He will also be invited to spend a summer internship at Microsoft Research. For more details on the Fellowship and for past Fellows, please visit http://research.microsoft.com/aboutmsr/jobs/fellowships/default.aspx
Jure has been working on data mining and specifically on graphs and text.

Stephen E. Fienberg, the Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Social Science, has been appointed a co-chair, with former Attorney General Janet Reno and former CIA and FBI Director William Webster, of a newly created National Commission on Forensic Science and Public Policy created by the American Judicature Society (AJS). The commission will advise AJS on the research agenda for its new Institute of Forensic Science and Public Policy and periodically consider national standards for forensic science, such as those used for the collection, testing, preservation and admissibility of evidence. Alfred Blumstein, the J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of Urban Systems and Operations Research in the Heinz School, is a commission member.

December 2005
Andrew W. Moore, Carnegie Mellon University professor of Computer Science and Robotics, has been chosen by Google Inc., developer of the award-winning search engine, to head a new engineering office that will open in Pittsburgh sometime in 2006. The new engineering office will focus on creating a variety of search tools for Google and could act as an engine for creating new high-tech jobs in the Pittsburgh area. Carnegie Mellon Press release

Edoardo M. Airoldi, a student in the Ph.D. program in Computation,Organization and Society in the School of Computer Science, and ML Alumni has won the John Van Ryzin Award for the best student contributed paper to be at the spring meeting of the Eastern North American Region of the International Biometric Society, to be held in Tampa Florida in March 2006. The winning paper, "Mixed Membership Stochastic Block Models for Relational Data with Application to Protein-Protein Interactions," is joint work with David Blei, Stephen E. Fienberg, and Eric Xing from the Machine Learning Department and the Department of Statistics. Airoldi received M.S. degrees from both the Department of Statistics and ML.

Ziv Bar-Joseph, Assistant Professor, ML and CS, used a standard Internet protocol, that checks errors made during email transmissions, to produce a revolutionary method to transform DNA microarray analysis, a common technology used to understand gene activation. Read Carnegie Mellon Press release and Post-Gazette article

November 2005
Katia Sycara, Research Professor, RI, was elected as IEEE Fellow "for contributions to case based reasoning, multi-agent systems and semantic web services and standards". Dr Sycara was also recently awarded the Sixth Century Chair (part time) in Computing Science at the University of Aberdeen. Media Release

October 2005
2005 DARPA GRAND CHALLENGE CHAMPIONS ML Adjunct Faculty Sebastian Thrun and his Stanford Racing team were awarded 2 million dollars for being the first team to complete the 132 mile DARPA Grand Challenge course. Stanley finished in just under 6 hours 54 minutes and averaged over 19 miles per hours on the course. http://www.stanfordracing.org/
http://www.grandchallenge.org/

August 2005
Rob Kass is editor-in-chief for new electronic Bayesian Analysis Journal
The International Society for Bayesian Analysis began publishing its electronic journal, Bayesian Analysis, at http://ba.stat.cmu.edu on Aug. 1, with Statistics Professor Rob Kass as its editor-in-chief. Bayesian methods have been used for many years by Carnegie Mellon researchers in diverse disciplines. The journal's manuscript-handling and publication software, which will be available to the public, was written by Carnegie Mellon alumnus Adrian Rollett (A'01) with guidance from Statistics Professor Pantelis Vlachos. The first issue includes an historical article written by Statistics Professor Steve Fienberg titled "When Did Bayesian Inference Become 'Bayesian'?"

Christopher Genovese and Larry Wasserman receive the American Statistical Association's 2005 Outstanding Statistical Application Award for their paper "Nonparametric Inference for the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Statistics professors Christopher Genovese and Larry Wasserman receive the American Statistical Association's 2005 Outstanding Statistical Application Award for their paper "Nonparametric Inference for the Cosmic Microwave Background." The paper, published in the journal Statistical Science, provides a new analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the radiation left over from the Big Bang about 380,000 years ago. Genovese will accept the award at the 2005 Joint Statistical Meeting Aug. 7-11 in Minneapolis, Minn.

July 2005
Ziv Bar-Joseph receives CAREER award
Ziv Bar-Joseph, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department and the Machine Learning Department, has received a five-year, $840,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award for his proposal "Modelling Dynamic Systems in the Cell." Bar-Joseph will develop computational methods for the analysis of gene expression data and use a variety of computational techniques to combine different data sources. The educational component of his project will bolster the new joint Ph.D. program in computational biology between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.

Jure Leskovec, ML PhD student, wins "best research paper award" in KDD'05!
... for his paper "Graphs over time: densification laws, shrinking diameters and possible explanations," co-authored with Jon Kleinberg and Christos Faloutsos. www.cs.cmu.edu/~jure/pubs/powergrowth-kdd05.pdf
KDD is the most prestigious and selective data mining conference, with acceptance ratios in the range of 1-of-8 for full papers. Each year it awards one 'best research paper' award, out of hundreds of submitted papers and about 40 accepted ones. The paper will be presented in a plenary session on Monday, Aug. 22, 2005 in Chicago, IL.

June 2005
Professor Andrew Moore elected AAAI Fellow
Professor Andrew Moore has been elected fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. Andrew was selected for "significant contributions to machine learning, data mining, and statistical AI, and for major roles in transferring these technologies to industry and government." He is one of only four fellows elected this year (the others being Usama Fayyad, Ray Mooney, David Smith), and joins 14 other past and present Carnegie Mellon faculty as Fellows of AAAI. Andrew will be honored at a dinner, in conjunction with the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence that is being held in Pittsburgh in July.

May 2005
Professor Teddy Seidenfeld named University Professor
Professor Teddy Seidenfeld, the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Philosophy and Statistics, a University Professor--the highest academic distinction faculty members at Carnegie Mellon can achieve. The title is awarded on the basis of national or international recognition for research, artistic and literary accomplishments, and other scholarly activities.

ML Summer School Bayesian Networks & Graphical Models, June 6 - 8, 2005

April 2005
In the Fourth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN'05) the Best Paper Award
went to...Mark Paskin,Carlos Guestrin and Jim McFadden; "A Robust Architecture for Distributed Inference in Sensor Networks"
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/%7Eguestrin/Publications/IPSN2005/ipsn05.pdf

March 2005
PROFESSORS RECEIVE GRANT FOR BRAIN RESEARCH
The W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded Carnegie Mellon a $750,000 grant to support research into how the human brain deciphers language. This multidisciplinary research, conducted by D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology Marcel Just and Edward Fredkin Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Learning Tom Mitchell, could one day yield advances in the treatment of neurological disorders like autism and dyslexia.
--Using computer models to interpret the results of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) brain scans, the researchers plan to develop a computational theory that describes the changes in brain activity over time during language comprehension and predicts the subprocesses involved in word and sentence comprehension. They will also demonstrate how reading different words and sentences will produce variations in brain activity and how dysfunctions in specific brain regions influence the function of the entire brain system.
--Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050314_brain.html.

Carlos Guestrin receives $41K Grant from Intel
Assistant Professor Carlos Guestrin has received a grant from Intel to support research in his Sensor Net Deployment Tool Project.

SCHEINES NAMED HEAD OF DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy Professor Richard Scheines will become head of the Department of Philosophy, effective July 1. Scheines has been at Carnegie Mellon since 1988, and his work as a researcher and educator typifies the university's multidisciplinary approach and focus on real-world problem solving. His research concentrates on causal discovery from a philosophical, statistical and computational perspective. It led to the development of the TETRAD Project, a suite of computer programs for causal modeling that has been applied to many important scientific questions, including whether low levels of lead produce cognitive deficits in children. He succeeds Professor Wilfried Sieg, who has led the department to national prominence since 1994.
--Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050301_scheines.html.

Robert Murphy selected to chair the Biodata Management and Analysis Study at NIH
Robert Murphy, professor of biological sciences, Mellon College of Science, has been selected to chair the Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA) Study Section of the Center for Scientific Review at the National Institutes of Health. The BDMA committee has an important role in reviewing federal grant applications to manage, analyze and visualize biological data. Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050303_nih.html

February 2005
Anastassia Ailamaki has been named Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellow for 2005.
Professor Ailamaki has been awarded a two-year, $40,000 fellowship for her work in computer science. The Sloan Fellowship is a prestigious award intended to provide support and recognition to the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Past Sloan Fellows from Carnegie Mellon include Todd Mowry, Hui Zhang, Tuomas Sandholm, Avrim Blum and Jessica Hodgins. Further information: http://www.sloan.org.

January 2005
NEW APPROACH SUCCESSFULLY CLASSIFIES AND RELATES PROTEINS
For the first time, researchers have automatically grouped fluorescently tagged proteins from high-resolution images of cells. This technical feat opens a new way to identify disease proteins and drug targets by helping to show which proteins cluster together inside a cell. The approach, developed by Carnegie Mellon researchers, outperforms existing visual methods to localize proteins inside cells, says Professor Robert Murphy, whose report, "Data Mining in Genomics and Proteomics," appears in an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology. "Our approach really enables the new field of location proteomics, which describes and relates the location of proteins within cells," says Murphy, a professor of biological sciences, machine learning and biomedical engineering. "This work should provide a more thorough understanding of cellular processes that underlie disease." Information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases05/050124_proteins.html

Jure Leskovec, a first year doctoral student in the Machine Learning Department, has received a Slovenian Academy of Sciences award. The annual award is presented to three doctoral students based on academic excellence.

December 2004
Interview with ML Director - Tom Mitchell

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society's Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems has awarded its Technical Achievement Award for 2004 to JOHN LEHOCZKY, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Thomas Lord Professor of Statistics. He is the sixth person to win this award, which was initiated in 1999.

New Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research (PIER):

The Department of Psychology is a major participant in CMU’s Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research (PIER): A pre-doctoral training grant funded by Institute of Education Sciences, Department of Education. The goal of this interdepartmental and interdisciplinary program is to produce scientists who are qualified to do rigorous research needed for evidence-based educational practice and policy. PIER students will deal with the bidirectional flow of ideas and challenges between laboratory studies and real-world instructional applications. They will be trained in Psychology, Statistics, and Human Computer Interaction to assess learners' knowledge at vastly different temporal and cognitive grain sizes, and they will develop skills necessary to utilize cognitive science, educational technology and advanced statistical methods to advance our understanding of learning in a variety of instructional contexts and settings. For more information see: http://www.cmu.edu/pier
Interview with ML Director - Tom Mitchell

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, a team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh have found differences in the activation and synchronization of brain networks between people with autism and those without it. Combined with the results of previous studies, these findings could yield strategies for treating autism, a mysterious brain disorder that impairs verbal and non-verbal communications and social interactions. The study will be published in the journal Neuroimage and is available online at http://www.sciencedirect.com.

The research was conducted at Carnegie Mellon's Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging (CCBI) and co-authored by Marcel Just, director of the center and the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon. The lead author was Hideya Koshino, an assistant professor of psychology at California State University at San Bernardino and a former postdoctoral fellow at the CCBI.

November 2004
H&SS Dean JOHN LEHOCZKY, the Thomas Lord Professor of Statistics, and Gerald L. Thompson, Professor of Systems and Operations Research Emeritus in the Tepper School of Business, have been named Fellows by INFORMS, the professional society for operations research and management science. Other Carnegie Mellon INFORMS Fellows are Egon Balas in the Tepper School, Alfred Blumstein in the Heinz School and Ignacio Grossmann in the College of Engineering.

New Program in Interdisciplinary Educational Research (PIER):

The Department of Psychology is a major participant in CMU’s Program in
Interdisciplinary Educational Research (PIER): A pre-doctoral training grant funded by Institute of Education Sciences, Department of Education.

The goal of this interdepartmental and interdisciplinary program is to produce scientists who are qualified to do rigorous research needed for evidence-based educational practice and policy. PIER students will deal with the bidirectional flow of ideas and challenges between laboratory studies and real-world instructional applications. They will be trained in Psychology, Statistics, and Human Computer Interaction to assess learners' knowledge at vastly different temporal and cognitive grain sizes, and they will develop skills necessary to utilize cognitive science, educational technology and advanced statistical methods to advance our understanding of learning in a variety of instructional contexts and settings. For more information see: http://www.cmu.edu/pier

October 2004
NSF GIVES $25 MILLION TO ESTABLISH NEW SCIENCE OF LEARNING CENTER

The National Science Foundation has awarded Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh a five-year, $25 million grant to establish the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC), which will sponsor rigorous research into how people learn and, based on what they find, develop technologies and approaches to teaching that will foster consistently high achievement in the nation's classrooms.

The PSLC codirectors are KENNETH R. KOEDINGER, Carnegie Mellon associate professor of human-computer interaction and psychology, and Pitt Computer Science Professor Kurt VanLehn, senior scientist in Pitt's Learning Research and Development Center.

Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/PR/releases04/041004_nsf.html

August 2004
CARLOS GUESTRIN , Assistant Professor in ML and CS has received the 'best paper' award in VLDB 2004. VLDB and SIGMOD are the two most competitive and most prestigious database conferences; Carlos' paper was selected as the best, among 504 submissions and 81 accepted papers and posters. The paper proposes advanced statistical methods to find patterns and correlations in a network of sensors.
Model-Driven Data Acquisition in Sensor Networks; Amol Deshpande, Carlos Guestrin, Sam Madden, Joseph Hellerstein, Wei Hong; Int. Conf. on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Toronto, Canada, August 2004.

SCIENTISTS DISCOVER BIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR AUTISM

MARCEL JUST and a team of brain scientists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh have made a groundbreaking discovery into the biological basis for autism, a mysterious brain disorder that impairs verbal and non-verbal communications and social interactions.

The research team is jointly headed by Just, the D.O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon, and Dr. Nancy Minshew, professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and director of its Center for Autism Research. Further information: www.cmu.edu/PR/releases04/040727_autism.html

July 2004
STEPHEN FIENBERG, Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science and a faculty member in ML, has been elected as a Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada (the Canadian Academy of the Sciences and Humanities). http://www.rsc.ca.
His citation reads as follows:
Professor Fienberg has made fundamental and innovative contributions to: the statistical theory and methodology for the analysis of discrete data, a vast and earlier underdeveloped area of statistics, including geometrical representations for contingency tables and expansions of the role of loglinear models in the analysis of large sparse multiway tables, capture-recapture problems, social networks, and confidentiality- disclosure limitation; to conceptual insight on relationships between randomized experiments and sample surveys and censuses; and to diverse areas of application including biology, criminal justice, law, medicine, public health, public policy, and sociology.

June 2004
REID SIMMONS has been awarded The School of Computer Science Allen Newell Medal for Research Excellence. Dr. Simmons is a research professor in the Robotics Institute. Simmons' research focuses on developing fully autonomous robots that function for long periods of time in natural, social environments. Some of those robots include Xavier, which navigated the hallways of Wean Hall, and Valerie, the robot receptionist in Newell-Simon Hall. Information: www.cmu.edu/PR/releases04/040602_rsimmons.html

KATIA SYCARA , SCS research professor, has received an honorary doctorate from the Department of Computer Science and Communications Systems Engineering of the University of the Aegean "in recognition of her outstanding scientific, academic and professional contributions to the field of artificial intelligence." The ceremony took place May 10 in Samos, Greece. Information: www.aegean.gr/intro_en.htm

May 2004
SCS Commencement Events

April 2004
Carnegie Mellon's autonomous soccer-playing AIBO Dogs and its coach simulation team took first place in the International RoboCup Federation's second annual U.S. Open at the University of New Orleans, April 24-27. The simulation team placed third. The AIBO Dogs, CMPACK'04, defeated the University of Pennsylvania, 2-0, in the championship game. Carnegie Mellon's robotic soccer program is led by Computer Science Professor MANUELA VELOSO, Brett Browning and Paul Rybski of the Robotics Institute, and a cast of doctoral, master's and undergraduate students.

STEPHEN FIENBERG , the Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics, has been named a Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. The academy designates Fellows each year to recognize and honor individual social scientists for their scholarship, efforts and activities to promote the progress of social science. Fienberg is only the second statistician to be so honored. He is the Thorsten Sellin Fellow for 2004, a position named after the distinguished criminologist and social scientist who helped to provide leadership to AAPSS and the social science profession more broadly over decades.

BILL EDDY, Professor of Statistics has been appointed to a committee performing a "Study on the feasibility, accuracy and effectiveness of a national Ballistics database" for the National Academies. The study will focus on fundamental issues concerning the uniqueness of ballistic images; the ability of imaging systems to capture unique characteristics and to extract reproducible information from ballistic impressions; the probability that ballistics evidence presented would lead to a match with an image captured in a database; the development of base rates for crimes that produce ballistic evidence, the probabilities and consequences of false positives and negatives, and the operational effectiveness and utility of such a database in solving crimes.

ROBERT KASS , head of the Department of Statistics, has been awarded a Visiting Miller Research Professorship at the University of California at Berkeley during the 2004-05 academic year.

February 2004
ML Open House for Accepted PhD Students
March 25-27, 2004

ML Research Day - February 23, 2004
This day is designed to present the latest research from CMUs Machine Learning Department an interdisciplinary group of faculty and students developing the next generation of data mining and learning methods. Agenda
Kary Myers, ML Alumni and PhD student in Statistics, has won a Student Paper Competition Award from the Statistical Computing and Graphics sections of the American Statistical Association for her paper "The Billion Byte Brain: Combining Physiological Data and Gigabytes of Images to Improve Maps of Brain Activity." The paper will be published as part of the proceedings of the Joint Statistical Meetings in August. Kary will be presenting her talk at the ML Research Day.

November 2003
JAY McCLELLAND, Co-Director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the Walter Van Dyke Bingham Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience, has been awarded the 2003-04 William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society (APS). The award honors APS members for a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology.

October 2003
ROBERT MURPHY , Professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering and ML, has been awarded $2.5 M as part of a $9.4 M multi-institutional grant entitled "Next-Generation Bio-Molecular Imaging and Information Discovery". Together with his collaborators at the University of California-Santa Barbara, the University of California-Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Murphy will develop and automate innovative computational tools designed to acquire, process, and interpret intracellular images. Such tools will facilitate the extraction of previously undecipherable information from cells, enabling better understanding of cellular changes underlying the pathogenesis of various diseases. The grant will also be used to train graduate students in computational biology. Carnegie Mellon Press Release
NSF Press Release

Statistics and ML Professor WILLIAM F. EDDY has been named the chairman of the influential Committee on National Statistics (CNSTAT), effective July 1, 2004. A standing committee of the National Academies, CNSTAT serves to contribute to a better understanding of important national issues by working to improve the statistical methods and information on which public policy decisions are based. Eddy is the university's second professor to serve as CNSTAT chairman. Stephen Fienberg, the Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Science, chaired CNSTAT from 1981 to 1987.

A team of Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh researchers has received a $6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to enhance an intelligent, automated Reading Tutor that listens to children read and verbally assists them when it hears them stumble. The four-year grant will be used to improve and integrate speech and user modeling technologies in the Reading Tutor, which has been developed over more than a decade by Carnegie Mellon’s Project LISTEN, led by research professor JACK MOSTOW .
Full Press Release

September 2003
Carnegie Mellon University Exports Technology to New Jersey's Centenary College Centenary College, a liberal arts school in Hackettstown, New Jersey is using educational technology developed at Carnegie Mellon as a platform for revising much of its curriculum in what could be a model for how other institutions use Web-based university courses. RICHARD SCHEINES , associate professor, has spent the past five years developing a Web-based statistical reasoning course that can be adapted to suit the needs of different educational institutions. More

June 2003
JAMES McCLELLAND , the Walter Van Dyke Bingham University Professor of Psychology and Computer Science is among the world's most highly cited researchers, according to Thomson ISI, an international scientific information corporation that scours the world's scholarly literature to identify the researchers whose work is referenced most often in scientific articles.

We say farewell to a great researcher and colleague! Sebastian Thrun is headed to Stanford.

June 16-18, 2003 - ML Summer School
NEW DIRECTIONS IN DATA MINING AND MACHINE LEARNING

What: This short course "New Directions in Data Mining and Machine Learning" is intended for data mining professionals with an interest in new research results and their practical implications over the next 1-5 years.

Who: Carnegie Mellon's world-renowned faculty in data mining and machine learning will teach this two-day course, sampling the latest research results with special emphasis on results having the greatest potential impact on applications.

April 2003
CARNEGIE MELLON HOSTS ROBOCUP'S AMERICAN OPEN

More than 150 researchers from North and South America--and their soccer-playing robots--will be on campus April 30 through May 4 to compete in the first-ever RoboCup American Open, chaired by Computer Science Professor and Carnegie Mellon RoboCup team leader Manuela Veloso. During the American Open, which will include competition in the Simulation, Small-Size and Sony Legged leagues, Carnegie Mellon researchers, led by Assistant Professor of Robotics Illah Nourbakhsh, will demonstrate teams of urban search-and-rescue robots in a special "disaster arena" developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The semi-autonomous, interactive, teleoperated robots will be put through their paces in a two-level site that simulates the challenging environments robots may encounter when searching for disaster victims.

March 2003
LATANYA SWEENEY, Director of the Data Privacy Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University.The Privacy in DATA workshop, sponsored by the NSF Aladdin Center and the Data Privacy Lab, was held March 27-28. The following article about data privacy and surveillance appeared in the Post-Gazette. http://www.postgazette.com/nation/20030328snoopingnat4p4.asp

JAY KADANE, the Leonard J. Savage University Professor of Statistics and Social Sciences, and ROBERT KASS, the head of the Department of Statistics, are on the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) list of most highly cited researchers from 1981 to 1999 in mathematics. ISI, which provides products and services to researchers, scours the world's scholarly literature to find the 250 researchers per subject whose work is cited most often in scientific articles. ISI considers this index a key measure of scientific influence.

November 2002
WILLIAM F. EDDY, of Statistics was designated a lifetime National Associate ``in recognition of extraordinary service to the National Academies'' by The National Academy of Sciences.

The National Associates program was initiated in 2001 to recognize extraordinary contributions to the National Academies through pro-bono service to the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine programs.

October 2002
RICHARD SCHEINES, Associate Professor and Associate Head of Philosophy receives part of the $1.9 MILLION HEWLETT GRANT RECEIVED FOR WEB-BASED COURSES for his Causal Reasoning with Statistical Data Course. Carnegie Mellon has received a three-year, $1.9 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to develop and deploy four Web-based courses in statistics, causal reasoning, economics and logic. The courses include Formal Logic and Causal Reasoning with Statistical Data, both already developed, as well as Introductory Microeconomics and Introductory Statistics.

CMU Statistics Researchers Participate in $2.6M Digital Government Award from NSF
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced a four-year award from the Digital Government Program of $2,560,000 for a project entitled "Data Confidentiality, Data Quality and Data Integration for Federal Databases: Foundations to Software Prototypes." Organized through the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) in
North Carolina. STEPHEN E. FIENBERG, Maurice Falk University Professor in the Department of Statistics and the Machine Learning Department and Discovery is Co-PI for the project.

Polygraph Testing Too Flawed for Security Screening
STEPHEN E. FIENBERG gave the opening statement at an Oct. 8, 2002 National Research Council News Conference, on The Polygraph and Lie Detection. "National security is too important to be left to such a blunt instrument," said Stephen E. Fienberg, chair of the committee that wrote the report, and professor of statistics and computer science, Carnegie Mellon University,Pittsburgh. "The polygraph's serious limitations in employee security screening underscore the need to look more broadly for effective, alternative methods." For the NRC report click here.

CENTER GETS $35.5 MILLION FROM U.S. GOVERNMENT FOR CYBERSECURITY
Carnegie Mellon's Center for Computer and Communications Security (C3S) will receive $35.5 million over the next five years from the Department of Defense to create a new network security paradigm to tackle the challenges related to Internet security, data storage and privacy issues stemming from America's ongoing war against terrorism.

--The new multidisciplinary center, headed by Pradeep Khosla of Electrical