MLD Student Research Symposium

ML Ph.D. student, Babis Tsourakakis and CSD Ph.D. student, U Kang, attracted the 'best applications paper award' (runner up), in ICDM '09, one of the top data mining conferences, for their paper, "PEGASUS: A Peta-Scale Graph Mining System - Implementation and Observations." The paper was selected among 70 accepted papers, out of a total of 786 submissions, and it showed how to use 'hadoop' and Yahoo's M45 machine, to analyze one of the largest publicly available graphs (over 100Gb). Moreover, the paper has been invited for fast-track possible publication to the KAIS Journal.

Associate Research Professor in the School of Computer Science, Jeff Schneider, will lead the new initiative that will create tools to spot strange new objects that merit in-depth study, and identify larger patterns in observational data that could provide insights into the evolution of the universe. Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University and the University of Washington are using a three year, $1.6 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop automated methods for discovering astrophysical phenomena.
"The amount of data will be overwhelming," said Schneider, a faculty member of the Bruce and Astrid McWilliams Center for Cosmology. "The datasets, measured in quadrillions of bytes, will be so large that no astronomer or group of astronomers could fully explore them, much less comprehend them. Computers have long helped scientists make discoveries by processing and analyzing observational data, but now we will need computer programs that also can make discoveries on their own." For more details on the research, visit http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/October/oct26_astrophysicalresearch.shtml

Eric Xing Receives USAF Young Investigator Award
Eric P. Xing, Associate Professor of Machine Learning, Language Technology, and Computer Science is one of 38 scientists and engineers chosen for funding through the U.S. Air Force’s highly competitive 2010 Young Investigator Research Program.
Xing was awarded a five-year, $600,000 grant for his winning research proposal, “SocioScape: Real-time Analysis and Mining of Dynamic Networks in Complex Socio-Cultural Systems.” The Air Force Office of Scientific Research selected the proposal from among 202 submitted for this year’s program. The program is open to scientists and engineers at research institutions across the United States who have received Ph.D. or equivalent degrees in the last five years and show exceptional ability and promise for conducting basic research.