July 2008
Jimeng Sun Runner-up for Best SIGKDD Dissertation Award
Dr. Jimeng Sun (Ph.D. CMU-CSD 2007), [/], attracted the runner-up award for the best SIGKDD dissertation! ACM SIGKDD is the premier community for data mining research. Jimeng's dissertation is on tensor and stream mining, proposing novel and efficient methods to handle streams of numerical data, as well as streams of graphs. He applied his methods on chlorine monitoring in the drinking water (joint project with Prof. Jeanne VanBriesen of CIT/CMU), on monitoring the self-star data center of PDL/CMU (with Prof. Greg Ganger and his group), and also on monitoring computer traffic (with Prof. Hui Zhang, SCS/CMU) Jimeng will receive a plaque and will be recognized during the award ceremonies at the upcoming ACM SIGKDD Conference in August 24-27. Furthermore, he will present his work during the conference. The ACM SIGKDD conference is the most selective and prestigious data mining conference. Warmest congratulations, Jimeng!
June 2008
Priya Narasimhan Receives Teaching Award
ECE Associate Professor Priya Narasimhan has been presented an award recognizing her teaching excellence
by Eta Kappa Nu (Sigma Chapter, Carnegie Mellon). Congratulations Priya!
May 2008
Penguins Fans Get a New View
In the midst of hockey fever comes news that software developed at Carnegie Mellon could offer up new benefits for Pittsburgh Penguins fans in coming seasons.
Called the "Yinz Cam," the tool could let spectators watch the game from any vantage point in the new arena on their cell phones. It could even tell them the best times to head for the refreshment line (or yes, even the bathroom line).
"Hockey moves really, really fast, and you want to catch every second of the game," explained Carnegie Mellon Professor Priya Narasimhan. "Even if you have excellent seats right up against the glass, when the action is on the other side of the arena you no longer have the best seats in the house."
Narasimhan and her students began working on a solution when they heard the Penguins were looking for ideas for the new arena, which is set to open in the Fall of 2010.
An associate professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE), Narasimhan made the project part of her capstone course on embedded systems design last semester.
With the Yinz Cam, spectators could download a widget onto their cell phones prior to the game. They'd then be able to choose from a variety of camera views. It would also allow them to replay their favorite player scoring a goal, a fight that broke out or any other action that happens on the ice.
Narasimhan said her students' passion for the Pens was her inspiration for the project. "The students are amazing," she said. "And they and I are big fans, so this is a really big deal for them."
Michael Chuang, a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. student working with Narasimhan, is enjoying the opportunity to combine his interest in sports with his engineering research.
"Many times my friends and I prefer watching the game at home instead of paying for nosebleed seats because we get a better view of the game on television," said Chuang.
"Now that we're replicating some of that TV and TiVo experience for fans on their cell phones, there's more incentive to go to the games."
-- Carnegie Mellon News
April 2008
Best Paper Award at the SIAM Data Mining 2008 Conference
Hanghang Tong (CMU), Spiros Papadimitriou (IBM; CMU Alumni), Philip Yu (IBM) and Christos Faloutsos (CMU) have received the best paper award for their paper titled "Proximity Tracking on Time-Evolving Bipartite Graphs" at the 2008 SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) Data Mining Conference, 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, Spiros and Christos!
April 2008
Carlos Guestrin among Office of Naval Research 2008 Young Investigators Awardees
The Young Investigator Program (YIP) aims to attract to naval research those outstanding new faculty members at institutions of higher education. As part of the program, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) grants monetary support to award recipients for research and encourages their promising teaching and research careers. This year's YIP recipients showed exceptional talent in the following naval priority research areas: Command Control Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance. Congratulations to Carlos Guestrin on receiving an award to research "Novel Computational Paradigm for Integration of Uncertain Information in Adversarial Activity Recognition."
January 2008
Evan Hoke a Finalist for CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Award
Congratulations to Evan Hoke who was nominated as a finalist for the Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Award for 2008. The CRA award is extremely competitive and prestigious, with fierce competition from the top undergraduates of all the schools in the nation.
Evan has worked on the InteMon and SPIRIT projects. His advisor is Christos Faloutsos.
