Computer Science Department » Uncategorized

Olga Papaemmanouil receives NSF CAREER Award

admin — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 18:42:06 +0000

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Olga Papaemmanouil has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a highly selective grant that the National Science Foundation awards to junior faculty members who are likely to become academic leaders of the future.

The research project funded by Olga’s CAREER grant (“Towards Extensible Performance Management for Cloud Data Services“) aims to a) develop declarative mechanisms that allow application developers to express custom performance criteria for data processing tasks and b) exploit the properties of these mechanisms to design extensible resource, workload and Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) management services for cloud databases.

The project also includes the design and development of XCloud, an extensible cloud-based platform that will unify these services into a usable cloud utility. The XCloud platform is expected to have a significant research and educational impact as it will act as a test-bed for new performance models and diverse performance management techniques for cloud databases facilitating research and innovation in the emerging domain.

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. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.

Olga received her B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, and completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brown University in 2008. She joined the Computer Science Department at Brandeis in January 2009.

Brandeis hosts David Waltz Symposium

admin — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:43:16 +0000

Artificial Intelligence luminaries from across the nation gathered at Brandeis on Sunday Sept 23 to honor David Waltz, who was a professor at Brandeis from 1984-1993 and who passed away in March from cancer. Organized by Prof. Jordan Pollack with sponsorship from Brandeis, AAAI, and Ab Initio Software, the day long event featured keynotes and panels from 6 different phases of Waltz’s career reflecting on his work and his leadership. A complete schedule follows the break, and when video of the event is available it will link from here.

8:00 AM Registration opens [BAGELS & PASTRY]

9:00-9:15 Opening Remarks

9:15-10:30AM
MIT AI Lab period, 1961-1972
Keynote: Patrick Winston, introduced by Rodney Brooks
Core memory: Gerald Sussman, Eugene Charniak, Andee Rubin, Drew McDermott, Eugene Freuder, moderated by Edwina Rissland.

[COFFEE BREAK]

11-12:15 PM
Illinois Period, 1973-1984
Keynote: Narendra Ahuja, introduced by Pengyu Hong
Illiac Drum Memory: Tony Maddox, Ray Mooney, Tim Finin, Dick Gabriel, moderated by Gerald DeJong

12:15-1:25PM LUNCH

1:25 PM Special Guest: Marvin Minsky, introduced represented by Douglas Riecken

1:45-2:45 PM
Brandeis Period: 1984-2002
Keynote: James Pustejovsky, Introduced by Scott Waterman
Memory Based Panel: Xiru Zhang, Ron Sun, Evangelos Simoudis, Patrick Tufts, moderated by Rick Alterman.

2:45-3:45 PM
Thinking Machines Period, 1984-1993
Keynote: Jill Mesirov, introduced by Xiru Zhang
Parallel Memory Array: Craig Stanfill, Jena Jordahl, Kurt Thearling, Stephen Smith, moderated by Brij Masand.

[COFFEE BREAK]

4-5 PM
Columbia CLS Period 2003-2012
Keynote: Rebecca Passonneau, introduced by Kathy McKeown
Memory Boosting: Cynthia Rudin, Vladimir Vapnik, Albert Boulanger, Claire Monteleoni, moderated by Douglas Riecken.

5-5:30PM
AAAI President, 1997-1999
Presidential Memoirs: Barbara Grosz, Tom Mitchell, Bruce Buchanan, Randall Davis, moderated by Manuela Veloso.

5:30 PM Dessert Reception sponsored by Ab Initio

New Grant

admin — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:32:17 +0000

Professor James Pustejovsky and Marc Verhagen have received a new National Science Foundation grant “The Language Application Grid: A Framework for Rapid Adaptation and Reuse,” in collaboration with Vassar College. The Brandeis component is $1.4M and covers the period of August … Continue reading →

Book Published

admin — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 19:22:25 +0000

James Pustejovsky and his student Amber Stubbs have a new book “Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning” out from O’Reilly Books and Media: “Systems exist for analyzing existing corpora, but making a new corpus can be extremely complex. To help you build a foundation for your own machine learning goals, this easy-to-use guide includes case studies that demonstrate four different annotation tasks in detail. You’ll also learn how to use a lightweight software package for annotating texts and adjudicating the annotations.”

New DARPA Grant

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:07:38 +0000

Nianwen Xue has received a four-year $2.2M DARPA grant from the Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) Program to work on Chinese language resources and technologies.

Book Published

admin — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 16:20:13 +0000

Professor James Pustejovsky has just published a new book with Oxford University Press entitled “Interpreting Motion: Grounded Representations for Spatial Language” with Inderjeet Mani.

JBS Lecture Series on Mobile Apps and Game Design

tjhickey — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 13:40:15 +0000

The CS department is sponsoring a series of lectures on Mobile Applications and Game Design as part of the Justice Brandeis Semester program of the same name being offered this summer. All of the lectures are being taped and the videos posted to youtube. You can also attend in person on Mondays from 1-2 in Lemberg 55. Here is a link to the series with links to the videos and info about future talks this summer: https://sites.google.com/site/jbs2011mobile/info-pages/classroom-work/speakers These lectures are open to all, please come if you are in the neighborhood! We will have two alumni speaking in the series: Rob Lindeman ’85 (Assoc Prof of CS at WPI) who spoke last week and Haggai Goldfarb ’85, CEO of LIquidBits, Inc. who will be speaking on 7/11. Here is a link to a video of Prof. Lindeman’s talk:

VIDEO: Rob Lindeman ’85 on “Virtual and Augmented Reality”

NEUCS-11

tjhickey — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 14:30:19 +0000

Brandeis is one of the co-organizers of the third annual New England Undergraduate Computing Symposium which will be held on Saturday April 9th at Tufts University. This symposium is designed to build community among undergraduate Computer Science majors in New England and also to increase the diversity of our undergraduate majors by actively reaching out to under-represented groups and encouraging them to participate. Students register online at https://sites.google.com/site/neucs11/ by completing a simple form describing the project they plan to demo or present as a poster. We expect to have 60-80 students projects and around 150 students and faculty attending the symposium. If you are an undergrad that has written an interesting mobile app, or completed a creative project in one of your classes, or are working in a research lab on an exciting problem involving computation, please visit the site and register to present your project and/or demo your code.

NEUCS2010

Intro to Scientific Computing

tjhickey — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:53:27 +0000

Tim Hickey will be teaching a new course this semester, CS177 Introduction to Scientific Computing. The course meets MWT 9-10 and has no prerequisites. The first part of the course will be an introduction to the lingua franca of the Scientific programming community Matlab/Octave. The second part of the course will cover the use of Matlab/Octave to solve a variety of scientific problems using various techniques including statistical analysis, curve fitting, optimization, ordinary and partial differential equation solving, image processing, SVD and other matrix factorizations, 2d and 3d plotting. Students will also learn to use a number of tools for collaboration and dissemination of scientific results including LaTeX for scientific papers, GIT for source code sharing, google docs for shared editing and google sites for dissemination of results. For more info see the course website