TTIC News
Prof. Jinbo Xu Awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced on February 15, the selection of 126 outstanding researchers drawn from 51 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada as recipients of the distinguished Sloan Research Fellowships for 2012. One recipient was Professor Jinbo Xu of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Xu's research interests lie in computational molecular biology.
Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars in recognition of achievement and the potential to contribute substantially to their fields. Potential fellows must be nominated for recognition by their peers and are subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars.
In the Press Release, Dr. Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation states, "Today's Sloan Research Fellows are tomorrow's Nobel Prize winners. These outstanding men and women are responsible for some of the most exciting science being done today. The Foundation is proud to support them during this pivotal stage of their careers."
The $50,000 fellowships are awarded in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, and physics.
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in New York City, established in 1934 and makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economic performance. www.sloan.org
Midwest Vision Workshop held at TTIC
The 5th Midwest Vision Workshop (formerly Illinois Vision Workshop) was held at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago on Thursday January 12, 2012. The workshop drew more than 40 participants, including researchers from TTIC, University of Chicago, Indiana University, University of Illinois, and University of Michigan. It provided an opportunity for members of computer vision community in the Midwest to present their recent work in the form of talks and posters, get informal feedback and exchange ideas. The next workshop will be held in late Spring 2011 in Ann Arbor, MI.
Professor Jinbo Xu awarded NSF CAREER grant
Professor Jinbo Xu is the recipient of the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant.
The grant is awarded by the National Science Foundation to support junior faculty in their research and educational activities. Quoting from the NSF website: "The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations".
Professor Xu's project focuses the Exact and Approximate Algorithms for 3D Structure Modeling of Protein-Protein Interactions.
Nov 14, 2011
Presidential Search Continues
The Presidential Search Committee reported to the Board of Trustees on October 5 that it is continuing its work to search for the best person to serve as the next President. While the Committee is several months into the search effort, it will still accept and review nominations and applications for the position of president.
Any inquiries regarding the search can be sent to Stuart Rice at sarice@ttic.edu.
Nov 11, 2011
Devi Parikh receives the Marr Prize
Devi Parikh received the Marr Prize for her co-authorship of a paper "Relative Attributes" that was presented at the13th International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 2011. Her co-auther was Kristen Grauman, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin. The Marr Prize is a prestigioius award in computer vision given by the Committee of the International Conference on Computer Vision. Named after David Marr, the Prize is considered one of the top honors for a computer vision researcher.
Sept 28, 2011
The Simons Foundation New Institute for the Theory of Computing
The University of Chicago-TTIC application to be the site of The New Institute for the Theory of Computing just made the cut to become one of the three finalists for the Simons Institute. There were seven applications under consideration.
According to the Simons Foundation, "the new Institute will be focused on research in Theoretical Computer Science, broadly defined, including its theoretical core agenda as well as its joint endeavors with mathematics and the sciences. It will promote sustained collaboration in focused research areas, and become a meeting point for year-long or semester-long visitors at all seniority levels. It will be a center for the training of postdocs. It may also be a venue for conferences and for intense graduate programs, and may host related educational programs at other levels."
The Simons Foundation also states that "an institute focused on the theory of computation could bring together a critical mass of researchers from around the world to accelerate fundamental research on computation and to further develop its interactions with other areas of science ranging from mathematics and statistics to biology, physics and engineering."
Sept 9, 2011
TTIC Professors Selected for NIPS Plenary Presentation
The paper "Consistency and Generalization Bounds for Latent Structured Probit and Ramp Loss" by David McAllester and Joseph Keshet was just selected for an oral (plenary) presentation at the NIPS 2011 conference in December. Only 20 papers out of 1,400 submissions were selected for plenary presentations.
Sept 9, 2011
Devi Parikh awarded NSF Grant
TTIC's Research Assistant Professor Devi Parikh was recently awarded and will be Principal Investigator of a 1 year grant from the National Science Foundation. NSF Award 11-15719, "Debugging Machine Visual Recognition via Humans in the Loop" Funding duration is September 2011 through August of 2012. Award: $150,000
The problem of visual recognition is fundamental towards the goal of automatic image understanding. While a large number of efforts have been made in the computer vision community, machine performance at these semantic tasks remains significantly inferior to human ability. The overarching goal of this project is to leverage the best known visual recognition system - the human visual recognition system. This project employs a "Human Debugging" paradigm to replace various components of a machine vision pipeline with human subjects, and examines the resultant effect on recognition performance. Meaningful comparisons provide valuable insights and pinpoint aspects of the machine vision pipeline that are performance bottlenecks and require future research efforts.
May 11, 2011
TTIC Hosts Illinois Speech Day 2011
TTIC continues in 2011, the tradition of hosting the Illinois Speech Day. Illinois Speech Day is a day-long meeting consisting of presentations and discussion on the theme of computational models of speech. Presenters are faculty, postdocs, and students at University of Chicago, Northwestern, UIUC, and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Presentations include completed and ongoing work, with the goal of fostering interaction among the attending parties. To register for attendance, see the program, or get directions, visit the event website: http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~jkeshet/Illinois_Speech_Day_2011.html
February 17, 2011
TTIC's Stuart Rice is Awarded the 2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry
TTIC's Interim President, Dr. Stuart Rice, has been awarded the prestigious 2011 Wolf Prize in chemistry. Sharing the prize with him this year are Ching Tang of the University of Rochester, and Krzysztof Matyjaszewski of Carnegie Mellon University.
The Wolf Prize is an international award that has been presented most years since 1978 to living scientists and artists for "achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among peoples ... irrespective of nationality, race, color, religion, sex or political views." The Wolf Prizes in physics and chemistry are often considered the most prestigious awards in those fields after the Nobel Prize.
The Wolf Foundation has said about Dr. Rice, "Professor Stuart A. Rice (born 1932, USA) has influenced the course of virtually every aspect of contemporary physical chemistry, and has shaped its directions broadly and powerfully. He has been a leader in most thematic areas of chemical physics. Rice´s great advances in organic solids led directly to his distinctive later work on the dynamics of single molecules and on phase transition behavior. This, in turn, led to his epoch-making research on the photonic control of chemical reactions. Rice´s original and pioneering investigations (both theoretical and experimental) into the properties of organic solids helped to define and to characterize a panoply of behaviors, and to conceptualize and formulate a coherent set of concepts, such as exciton behaviors, radiationless transitions, light absorption and emission."
This coming May, Dr. Rice will receive his award from the President of the State of Israel in a special ceremony at the Knesset Building (Israel’s Parliament), in Jerusalem. For more info: www.wolffund.org.il
February 15, 2011
Prof. Julia Chuzhoy Awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced on February 15, the selection of 118 outstanding researchers as recipients of the distinguished Sloan Research Fellowships for 2011. One recipient was Professor Julia Chuzhoy of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Chuzhoy's research interests lie in theoretical computer science, with a focus on the area of approximation.
Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars in recognition of achievement and the potential to contribute substantially to their fields. Potential fellows must be nominated for recognition by their peers and are subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars.
In their Press Release, Dr. Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation states, "The scientists and researchers selected for this year's Sloan Research Fellowships represent the very brightest rising stars of this generation of scholars. The Foundation is proud to be able to support their work at this important stage in their careers."
The $50,000 fellowships are awarded in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, and physics.
For a complete list of 2011 winners, visit: www.sloan.org/fellowships/page/21
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in New York City, established in 1934 and makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economic performance. www.sloan.org.
December 13, 2010
Midwest Vision Workshop held at TTIC
The 4th Midwest Vision Workshop (formerly Illinois Vision Workshop) was held at TTI-Chicago on Monday December 13. The workshop drew more than 40 participants, including researchers from TTIC, University of Chicago, Indiana University, University of Illinois, and University of Michigan. It provided an opportunity for members of computer vision community in the Midwest to present their recent work in the form of talks and posters, get informal feedback and exchange ideas. The next workshop will be held in late Spring 2011 in Ann Arbor, MI.
December 11, 2010
Midwest Theory Day held at TTIC
TTIC has hosted the 61st Midwest Theory Day on Dec. 11, 2010. Midwest Theory Day is a biannual meeting which aims to bring together computer theorists and people generally interested in theoretical computer science. The theory day had a packed schedule, that featured a number of invited talks by some of the leading local theoreticians, as well as many short talks by local students, postdocs and faculty. With almost 50 people attending from all over Midwest, this was a great opportunity to listen to new results, discuss research in an informal atmosphere, and get to know each other better. More information available here: http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~yury/midwest2010/
October 6, 2010
President Nagasawa retires, Dr. Rice appointed as Interim President
Dr. Mitsuru Nagasawa, the founding President of TTIC in 2001, retired effective at the end of the Board of Trustees meeting on Friday October 1. Under his leadership, TTIC developed active research and education programs in fundamental computer science, became accredited to grant PhD degrees, and is active in the recruitment of outstanding graduate students and faculty. He will continue to serve as a Trustee.
Dr. Stuart A. Rice, who has served as Dean for TTIC since October 2006, was appointed by the Board of Trustees to serve as the Interim President upon the recommendation of the Presidential Search Committee. He was also appointed to serve as a Trustee concurrent with this appointment.
Dr. Rice, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physical Chemistry at the University of Chicago, earned the following degrees:
- Bachelor's degree in 1952 from Brooklyn College,
- Master's and doctorate from Harvard University in 1954 and 1955, respectively.
He remained at Harvard as a Junior Fellow for two years and then joined the faculty of The University of Chicago in 1957, where he has remained since.
Professor Rice has served the university in a wide variety of capacities during his fifty-three year tenure. He served as the director of the James Franck Institute (the university's center for physical chemistry and condensed matter physics) from 1961 to 1967. He was Chairman of the Department of Chemistry from 1971 to 1976 and was Dean of the Physical Sciences Division from 1981 to 1995.
Dr. Rice is currently on the Board of Governors at Argonne National Laboratory, managed by and affiliated with The University of Chicago, as well as Tel Aviv University. He has served as editor for Chemical Physics Letters and Advances in Chemical Physics, and co-authored several physical chemistry textbooks with Stephen Berry and John Ross.
Professor Rice's was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific prize awarded in the United States, in 1999. He is a Fellow of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1970 Professor Rice was awarded the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the nation's oldest prize for undergraduate teaching, and a highly esteemed faculty award at The University of Chicago.
Over the course of his career, Rice has shaped much debate on theoretical physical chemistry. He is cited on the National Medal of Science "for changing the very nature of modern physical chemistry through his research, teaching and writing, using imaginative approaches to both experiment and theory that have inspired a new generation of scientists." With over 100 doctoral students to his credit, Stuart Rice has had a great impact on the field of physical chemistry simply through the number of research scientists he has trained.
October 6, 2010
Presidential Search Continues
The Presidential Search Committee reported to the Board of Trustees on October 1 that it is continuing its work to search for the best candidates to serve as the next President. While the Committee is several months into the search effort, it will still accept and review nominations and applications for the position of president.
Any inquiries regarding the search can be sent to Stuart Rice at sarice@ttic.edu.
September 16, 2010
David McAllester and UoCTTI team win "Lifetime Achievement" Prize
At the PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge Workshop 2010 held in September in Crete, Greece, Prof. David McAllester was awarded a "Lifetime Achievement" prize as one of the authors of "Discriminatively Trained Deformable Part Model," also known to VOC participants as the "UoCTTI" object detector.
Quoting from the award announcement: "First submitted to the PASCAL VOC challenge in 2007, this detector has now become a core component of many classification, segmentation, person layout and action classification submissions. We honour the contribution made to the community by the innovation and success of the method and its free distribution."
"Discriminatively Trained Deformable Part Model" authors:
Pedro Felzenszwalb and Ross Girshick (University of Chicago), David McAllester (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago) and Deva Ramanan (University of California, Berkeley, formerly of TTIC)
The publication can be found on Prof. McAllester's webpage.
July 1, 2010
Prof. Jinbo Xu awarded NSF grant
The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $408,305 to TTIC for support of the project entitled "Algorithm and Web Server for Low-homology Protein Threading", under the direction of Prof. Jinbo Xu. This award is effective July 1 , 2010 and expires June 30, 2013.
June 29, 2010
Prof. David McAllester awarded AAAI Classic Paper award
Prof. David McAllester and David Rosenblitt have won the 2010 AAAI Classic Paper award for the paper "Systematic Nonlinear Planning", which appeared in the AAAI conference in 1991, for "contributing seminal principles of systematic nonlinear planning, with wide-ranging influences on the evolution of research on automated planning." The award will be presented at the AAAI - 10 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, July 11-15.
June 2, 2010
Illinois Speech Day hosted at TTIC
TTIC hosted a regional speech research meeting, the 2nd Illinois Speech Day, on May 10, 2010, organized by Prof. Karen Livescu. About fifty people from Illinois and beyond 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.
May 14, 2010
Prof. Jinbo Xu awarded NIH grant
Prof. Jinbo Xu was awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project titled "Computational Methods for Data-driven Protein Structure Prediction," with a first-year budget of $268,555. The project period is from May 14, 2010 to April 30, 2015.
February 11, 2010
Jian Peng awarded Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship
TTIC congratulates Jian Peng, a third-year TIC Ph.D. student who was awarded the prestigious Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship, a two-year fellowship program for outstanding Ph.D. students supporting students in their third and fourth years of Ph.D. graduate studies. Jian works with Prof. Jinbo Xu on mathematical modeling in computational biology. His other research interests include machine learning and algorithms.
December 1, 2009
3rd Illinois Vision Workshop hosted at TTIC
TTIC hosted a regional computer vision meeting, the 3rd Illinois Vision Workshop, organized by Prof. Greg Shakhnarovich. About fifty people from the Midwest and beyond participated. Among the institutions and companies represented, in addition to TTIC, were the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, the University of Missouri, UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Eastman Kodak, and Cornell.
October 19, 2009
Prof. Karen Livescu awarded NSF grant
Prof. Karen Livescu is the recipient of a grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), on which she is the Principal Investigator (PI). The grant is in collaboration with co-PIs Jeff Bilmes (University of Washington) and Eric Fosler-Lussier (Ohio State University). The award covers three years and focuses on statistical models of speech based on articulatory features (such as locations of the tongue, lips, and so on).
October 1, 2009
TTIC is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission
The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools announced that the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago is now recognized as an accredited institute of education in computer science. The HLC is the regional commission recognized by the US Department of Education for the North Central region of the United States.
Quoting Dr. Mitsuru Nagasawa, president of the Institute: “Accreditation is an intensely rigorous but highly rewarding process. It has been invigorating to watch the academic process unfold. The institute has talented and determined faculty, students and staff, and we all share in this success.”
February 13, 2009
Prof. Julia Chuzhoy awarded NSF CAREER grant
Prof. Julia Chuzhoy is the recipient of the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant. The grant is awarded by the National Science Foundation to support junior faculty in their research and educational activities. Quoting from the NSF website: "The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations".
Prof. Chuzhoy's project focuses on the development of approximation algorithms and lower bounds for network optimization problems.
February 10, 2009
TTIC hosts Workshop on Approximation Algorithms and their Limitations
Prof. Julia Chuzhoy organized a 3-day workshop on "Approximation Algorithms and their Limitations", held at TTIC. The goal of the workshop was to bring together researchers in the areas of approximation algorithms and complexity theory, and to present diverse angles for studying approximability.
Prof. Chuzhoy's comments on the workshop: The workshop was an opportunity to gather excellent researchers, who presented many outstanding new results. It was great to see how vibrant and full of activity this research community is, with new exciting research directions emerging. The informal workshop atmosphere has been great for exchanging ideas, open problems and for fostering new research connections."
February 2, 2009
TTIC moves to new facility
TTIC has expanded since it was founded in 2003, and, after six successful years at the University of Chicago Press Building, the Institute has moved to a new facility.
TTIC now occupies the fourth and fifth floors of the 6045 S. Kenwood Building on the University of Chicago campus. The space consists of nearly 30,000 square feet and includes two conference rooms, three meeting rooms, four student study rooms, a robotics laboratory, a cafe, and an idea lounge. The space boasts views of the Chicago skyline, the Midway Plaisance, the gothic University of Chicago campus, and Lake Michigan. Students, faculty and staff enjoy open, comfortable and interactive common spaces that encourage conversation, the sharing of ideas, and collaboration. There is a dramatic atrium in the center of the space with floating walkways and a grand staircase.
President Mitsuru Nagasawa's comments on the new space: "This space is a physical manifestation of the progress and growth of TTIC since its inception. The faculty, students, and staff have performed beyond my early expectations, and we are well on our way to achieving international impact through world-class research and education in fundamental computer science and information technology. These are exciting times, full of challenge and opportunity. We are fortunate to meet them with strong leadership, teamwork, vision and commitment, all within an environmentally responsible new home built for the needs we face today and anticipate for tomorrow."
The Institute looks forward to welcoming guests, new students and faculty to its new home.