TTIC Faculty

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Dr. Mitsuru Nagasawa, the founding President of the Toyota Institute of Technology at Chicago (TTIC), will retire this year. With his leadership, TTIC has developed active research and education programs in computer science, has become accredited to grant PhD degrees, and is active in the recruitment of graduate students and outstanding faculty. The Board of Trustees has appointed a committee of the Board, the Presidential Search Committee, to accept and review nominations and applications for the position of president, and to make a recommendation to the Board for an appointment. Inquiries can be sent to Stuart Rice at sarice@ttic.edu.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $408,305 to the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago for support of the project entitled "Algorithm and Web Server for Low-homology Protein Threading", under the direction of Dr. Jinbo Xu.

This award is effective July 1 , 2010 and expires June 30, 2013.

This grant is awarded pursuant to the authority of the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, as amended (42 U.S.C. 1861-75).

David McAllester has won the 2010 AAAI Classic Paper award for the paper “Systematic Nonlinear Planning" with David Rosenblitt, which appeared in the AAAI conference in 1991.

The AAAI Classic Paper award honors the author(s) of paper(s) deemed most influential, chosen from a specific conference year. Each year, the time period considered will advance by one year. The 2010 award is being given to the most influential paper(s) from the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1991 in Anaheim, California, and will be presented to Dr. McAllister at the AAAI – 10 conference in Atlanta, Georgia on July 11 - 15.

The papers are judged on the basis of impact, for example:

- Started a new research (sub)area
- Led to important applications
- Answered a long-standing question/issue or clarified what had been murky
- Made a major advance that figures in the history of the subarea
- Has been picked up as important and used by other areas within (or outside of) AI
- Has been very heavily cited

This award will be posted on the AAAI website soon. There was no award given in 2009.

Jinbo Xu was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Health effective May 14, 2010, and the project title is New Computational Methods for Data-driven Protein Structure Prediction. The budget for the first year is $268,555 and the project period is from the start date noted above to April 30, 2015.

The project described was supported by Award Number R01GM089753 from the National Institute Of General Medical Sciences. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences or the National Institutes of Health.

Karen Livescu hosted a regional speech research meeting, the 2nd Illinois Speech Day, on May 10, 2010. About fifty people from Illinois and farther away participated. Among the institutions represented, in addition to TTIC, were the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of Washington, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University. The program can be found here.

TTIC congratulates Jian Peng, a TTIC third-year Ph.D. student who was awarded the prestigious Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship this month (February 2010). The Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship is a two-year fellowship program for outstanding Ph.D. students, and supports men and women in their third and fourth years of Ph.D. graduate studies.

The fellowship award will cover 100 percent of recipient’s tuition and fees for two academic years (2010 and 2011), provide a stipend to cover living expenses while in school, a travel allowance for recipients to attend professional conferences or seminars, and offers recipients the opportunity to complete one salaried internship over the duration of the year following the award.

Jian works with TTIC’s professor Jinbo Xu on mathematical modellings in computational biology. His other research interests include machine learning and algorithms. For more information about Jian, check out his webpage.

Other TTIC News

Faculty

	David McAllester, Professor and Chief Academic Officer PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Machine learning theory, the theory of programming languages, automated reasoning, AI planning, computer game playing (computer chess), computational linguistics and computer vision.
	Andreas Argyriou, Research Assistant Professor PhD - University College London Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Machine learning and especially in multi-task learning and kernel based methods. He is also interested in sparse methods, connections of learning with optimization and applications such as marketing and recommender systems.
	Shai Ben-David, Professor Part Time PhD - Hebrew University Bio Research Interests: Span a wide spectrum of topics in the foundations of computer science and its applications, with a particular emphasis on statistical and computational machine learning. The common thread throughout my research is the interplay between mathematical theories and real world problems.
	Julia Chuzhoy, Assistant Professor PhD - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Theoretical computer science, with the main focus on the design and the analysis of approximation algorithms for computationally hard problems, and on proving lower bounds on approximability of such problems.
	Xinyu Feng, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Yale University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Programming languages and formal methods. In particular, he is interested in developing theories, programming languages and tools to build formally certified system software, such as operating system kernels and libraries, with rigorous guarantees of safety and correctness properties.
	Lance Fortnow, Adjunct Professor PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computational complexity and its applications to electronic commerce, quantum computation, bioinformatics, learning theory and cryptography.
	Tamir Hazan, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Hebrew University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Machine learning and computer vision, recently focusing on graphical models, primal-dual inference algorithms and beliefs propagation. He is also interested in mixture models with various divergence measures, tensor factorization and model selection, and support vector machines.
	Joseph Keshet, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Hebrew University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Speech, audio and language processing, speech recognition, discriminative methods in machine learning, and large margin and kernel methods.
	Karen Livescu, Assistant Professor PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Speech and language processing, recently focusing on speech recognition. With a particular interest in statistical modeling techniques that can take advantage of both large stores of data and knowledge from linguistics and speech science.
	Yury Makarychev, Assistant Professor PhD - Princeton University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Theoretical computer science including combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, semi-definite programming, unique games, low-distortion metric embeddings, and lift-and-project methods.
	Devi Parikh, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Carnegie Mellon University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning.
	Nathan Ratliff, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Carnegie Mellon University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Robotics and machine learning, including the specialized areas of imitation learning, structured prediction, kernel methods, convex optimization, mobile manipulation, navigational planning, LADAR segmentation, optical character recognition, grasp planning, and quadrupedal locomotion.
	Alexander Razborov, Professor, Part Time PhD - Steklov Mathematical Institute Bio Research Interests: Complexity theory, and he is specifically interested in circuit complexity, proof complexity, quantum computations and communication complexity.
	Anastasios Sidiropoulos, Research Assistant Professor PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computational geometry, metric embeddings, graph theory, and applications of geometry and topology in theoretical computer science.
	Greg Shakhnarovich, Assistant Professor PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computational vision and machine learning. His current research is focused on automatic understanding of visual scenes, including recovery of three-dimensional structure and detection and categorization of objects. He is also generally interested in similarity-based, supervised and semi-supervised statistical learning methods.
	Sameer Sheorey, Research Assistant Professor PhD - University of Maryland Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computer vision, machine learning and applied mathematics.
	Stephen Smale, Professor Part Time PhD - University of Michigan Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Dynamical systems, geometry, econometrics, operational research, topology and the mathematical theory of computer science.
	Nathan Srebro, Assistant Professor and Directory of Graduate Studies PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Statistical and computational aspects of machine learning, and the interaction between them: statistical learning theory, probabilistic modeling, optimization. Applications in computational biology, text analysis and collaborative filtering.
	Ambuj Tewari, Research Assistant Professor PhD - University of California, Berkeley Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Artificial intelligence and machine learning, particularly large-margin methods, reinforcement learning and online learning.
	Raquel Urtasun, Assistant Professor PhD - Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Machine learning, computer vision and computer graphics. She is particularly interested in non-parametric Bayesian statistical methods, latent variable models, and their application to human motion analysis, tracking, visual scene understanding, behavior analysis and biology.
	Jinbo Xu, Assistant Professor PhD - University of Waterloo Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computational biology and bioinformatics including homology search, protein structure prediction, and protein interaction prediction.

	David McAllester, Professor and Chief Academic Officer PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Machine learning theory, the theory of programming languages, automated reasoning, AI planning, computer game playing (computer chess), computational linguistics and computer vision.
	Andreas Argyriou, Research Assistant Professor PhD - University College London Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Machine learning and especially in multi-task learning and kernel based methods. He is also interested in sparse methods, connections of learning with optimization and applications such as marketing and recommender systems.
	Shai Ben-David, Professor Part Time PhD - Hebrew University Bio Research Interests: Span a wide spectrum of topics in the foundations of computer science and its applications, with a particular emphasis on statistical and computational machine learning. The common thread throughout my research is the interplay between mathematical theories and real world problems.
	Julia Chuzhoy, Assistant Professor PhD - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Theoretical computer science, with the main focus on the design and the analysis of approximation algorithms for computationally hard problems, and on proving lower bounds on approximability of such problems.
	Xinyu Feng, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Yale University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Programming languages and formal methods. In particular, he is interested in developing theories, programming languages and tools to build formally certified system software, such as operating system kernels and libraries, with rigorous guarantees of safety and correctness properties.
	Lance Fortnow, Adjunct Professor PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computational complexity and its applications to electronic commerce, quantum computation, bioinformatics, learning theory and cryptography.
	Tamir Hazan, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Hebrew University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Machine learning and computer vision, recently focusing on graphical models, primal-dual inference algorithms and beliefs propagation. He is also interested in mixture models with various divergence measures, tensor factorization and model selection, and support vector machines.
	Joseph Keshet, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Hebrew University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Speech, audio and language processing, speech recognition, discriminative methods in machine learning, and large margin and kernel methods.
	Karen Livescu, Assistant Professor PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Speech and language processing, recently focusing on speech recognition. With a particular interest in statistical modeling techniques that can take advantage of both large stores of data and knowledge from linguistics and speech science.
	Yury Makarychev, Assistant Professor PhD - Princeton University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Theoretical computer science including combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, semi-definite programming, unique games, low-distortion metric embeddings, and lift-and-project methods.
	Devi Parikh, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Carnegie Mellon University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning.
	Nathan Ratliff, Research Assistant Professor PhD - Carnegie Mellon University Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Robotics and machine learning, including the specialized areas of imitation learning, structured prediction, kernel methods, convex optimization, mobile manipulation, navigational planning, LADAR segmentation, optical character recognition, grasp planning, and quadrupedal locomotion.
	Alexander Razborov, Professor, Part Time PhD - Steklov Mathematical Institute Bio Research Interests: Complexity theory, and he is specifically interested in circuit complexity, proof complexity, quantum computations and communication complexity.
	Anastasios Sidiropoulos, Research Assistant Professor PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computational geometry, metric embeddings, graph theory, and applications of geometry and topology in theoretical computer science.
	Greg Shakhnarovich, Assistant Professor PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computational vision and machine learning. His current research is focused on automatic understanding of visual scenes, including recovery of three-dimensional structure and detection and categorization of objects. He is also generally interested in similarity-based, supervised and semi-supervised statistical learning methods.
	Sameer Sheorey, Research Assistant Professor PhD - University of Maryland Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computer vision, machine learning and applied mathematics.
	Stephen Smale, Professor Part Time PhD - University of Michigan Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Dynamical systems, geometry, econometrics, operational research, topology and the mathematical theory of computer science.
	Nathan Srebro, Assistant Professor and Directory of Graduate Studies PhD - MIT Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Statistical and computational aspects of machine learning, and the interaction between them: statistical learning theory, probabilistic modeling, optimization. Applications in computational biology, text analysis and collaborative filtering.
	Ambuj Tewari, Research Assistant Professor PhD - University of California, Berkeley Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Artificial intelligence and machine learning, particularly large-margin methods, reinforcement learning and online learning.
	Raquel Urtasun, Assistant Professor PhD - Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Machine learning, computer vision and computer graphics. She is particularly interested in non-parametric Bayesian statistical methods, latent variable models, and their application to human motion analysis, tracking, visual scene understanding, behavior analysis and biology.
	Jinbo Xu, Assistant Professor PhD - University of Waterloo Bio \| Home Page Research Interests: Computational biology and bioinformatics including homology search, protein structure prediction, and protein interaction prediction.

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