Profile: Nelson Morgan - Part 1

Monday, November 5, 2012

ICSI Deputy Director Nelson MorganThis week, we'll be posting a two-part profile of Nelson Morgan, so make sure to check back for the rest of the story.

Morgan has led speech recognition research at ICSI since the Institute’s inauguration in 1988. Morgan also served as director for thirteen years starting in 1999, the year the agreement that had established ICSI expired. Morgan volunteered for the challenge of broadening and stabilizing the Institute’s funding base, and in 2012, at the end of his tenure, the Institute is doing better financially than it has in years. But then Morgan has always enjoyed a challenge.

October 2012 Highlights

Thursday, November 1, 2012

A few highlights from October 2012:

You can stay up to date on all the happenings at ICSI by subscribing to our news feed and our blog feed, as well as following us on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

An Inside View of the Online Pharmaceuticals Industry

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Financial records of three vendors that sell unauthorized and counterfeit pharmaceuticals over the Internet show, among other things, that they rely on a relatively small number of affiliate advertisers to drive traffic to their sites. An analysis of the records by Networking researchers and their collaborators gives a rare insider’s view of the finances of illicit online activity.

Introduction to ICSI

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

At ICSI's annual town hall - know here as our state of the institute address - Director Roberto Pieraccini gave an abbreviated version of the talk he gave at the board meeting. It gives an overview of ICSI's structure, management, and finances. View the slides.

Drinking from a Multimedia Firehose: How to Deal with Billions of Daily Video Posts

Monday, October 29, 2012

At the ICSI Research Review, Gerald Friedland spoke about the challenges of performing empirical research on the astronomically large data set that is consumer-produced video. Here is Dr. Friedland's abstract:

Consumer-produced videos are the fastest-growing type of content on the Internet. YouTube claims that 72 hours of video are uploaded to its Web site alone every minute. Because the videos capture parts of the world, they are potentially useful for qualitative and quantitative empirical research on a larger scale than has ever been possible before. A major prerequisite to making social media videos usable for "field studies" is efficient and unbiased (e.g., keyword-independent) retrieval. More importantly, retrieval needs to go beyond simply finding objects to detecting more abstract concepts, such as “taking care of a car” or “winning a game that is not a card game.” Research on such a large corpus requires the creation of methods that exploit as many cues as possible from different modalities. ICSI has begun using novel acoustic methods to complement computer vision approaches. This talk summarizes ICSI’s research and progress in this area.

MetaNet

Friday, October 26, 2012

MetaNet: talk by Srini NarayananProfessor Srini Narayanan, leader of the AI Group, gave a talk at the Research Review about the MetaNet project. His talk was titled "MetaNet: A Multilingual Metaphor Extraction, Representation, and Validation System." Here is the abstract:

Metaphors are ubiquitous in language and thought and pose a critical barrier to progress in natural language understanding. This talk describes recent results from a new interdisciplinary project, MetaNet, whose goal is to be able to extract, analyze, interpret, and experimentally validate metaphors in four languages. This project is a multi-year collaborative effort led by ICSI with participants from UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Stanford, University of Southern California, and UC Merced.

Brain Networks

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Research on Brain Networks at ICSIEric Friedman gave a presentation on brain networks research at the ICSI Research Review. Professor Friedman is a scientist in the Algorithms Group and collaborates with researchers at UC San Francisco on brain network research. Together they are developing tools to analyze brain networks and improve understanding and diagnosis of neurological disorders. Here is the abstract of his talk:

Analyses of connectomes (brain networks) have become an important tool in the understanding and diagnosis of a variety of brain disorders. This talk provides an overview of research in this area, describing the construction of connectomes from MRI scans, their analysis using modern network theory (tools developed for the study of social and computer networks), and their applications to several disorders, including Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injuries, and agenesis of the corpus callosum, a birth defect. This talk also covers some of the challenges and new directions in this area.

Beyond Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic Perspectives

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Beyond Technical Security title slide from Vern Paxson's talkVern Paxson of the Networking Group leads security research at ICSI. At our research review, he gave a talk titled "Beyond Technical Security: Developing an Empirical Basis for Socio-Economic Perspectives," which described recent ICSI research on the socio-economic side of Internet security. Here is the talk abstract:

Security is at once a technical property of a system and a socio-economic property of the environment in which it operates. While the vast majority of security research and practice focuses on the first of these, a perspective limited to technical considerations misses an entire half of the problem space: the human element. This talk sketches some recent work exploring security issues from a socio-economic perspective, which highlights both interesting new problems to tackle and the power that such approaches can potentially provide to defenders.

The Relationship Between Simons Institute and ICSI

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Simons Institute slide by Richard KarpAt ICSI's Research Review on October 12, Richard Karp, the director of the new Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and head of the Algorithms Group at ICSI, gave a talk about the planned affiliation between Simons Institute and ICSI.

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