Cryptography interview
Yevgeniy Dodis is interviewed on NBC on the use of cryptography for privacy and for security.
Yevgeniy Dodis is interviewed on NBC on the use of cryptography for privacy and for security.
NYU's top team, with members Jingyu Deng, Jingwen Deng and Yixin Tao, placed 4th at the Greater New York ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) which was held on Sunday, November 8th at Queens College. NYU's second team, with members Lingsong Zeng, Zeleng Zhuang and Ziyi Tang placed 8th. Congratulations to all the team members and to their coaches Bowen Yu and Evan Korth!
The fall meeting of the Open Networking User Group (ONUG) was held Nov. 3-5 at the NYU Kimmel Center, and was hosted by Lakshmi Subramanian. This year's meeting was the largest ever; there were 640 participants, including both research scientists and business leaders from pharma, financial services, retail, computing, transportation, media & entertainment, express delivery, healthcare, cloud providers, service providers and many other industry segments.
Victor Shoup has been awarded the 2015 Richard D. Jenks Memorial Prize for Excellence in Software Engineering Applied to Computer Algebra for his work on NTL: A Library for Doing Number Theory. Congratulations!
Subhash Khot has been named a Silver Professor. Congratulations!
Prof. Ted Rappaport is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE Communications Society Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award, "for broad contribution and outstanding leadership in channel measurement and technology research fundamental to mobile communication." Congratulations!
Craig Kapp is rated #14 on the ratemyprofessors.com list of "Highest Rated University Professors of 2014-2015." Congratulations!
Oded Regev's work on lattice-based cryptography is discussed in an article in Quanta Magazine.
Yann LeCun's research on deep learning is featured in an article in Technology Review.
Rich Bonneau has received the 2015 Iakobachvili Faculty Science Award from NYU School of Arts and Science. Congratulations!
Subhash Khot has been named a Simons Investigator in Theoretical Computer Science by the Simons Foundation. Congratulations!
Sana Odeh's research on the involvement of women in the Arab world in computer science is discussed in an article in Forbes Magazine.
Professor Emeritus Robert Dewar has died at the age of 70. Robert was a faculty member in the Computer Science department from 1975 until his retirement in 2005 and was chair of the department from 1978 to 1980. Robert was a leading figure in programming languages, particularly in the development of Ada; an inspiring and admired teacher; a raconteur, singer, and actor; and a well-loved colleague and friend. Our sympathies to his family and friends.
Yann LeCun and his work on deep learning are featured in an article in Le Monde (in French).
Dennis Shasha has been named an INRIA international chair; he will be hosted by the ZENITH project, which works on data intensive problems having applications in biology and astronomy. Congratulations!
Dennis Shasha, long-time author of puzzle columns and books, was named the puzzle column editor for the Communications of the ACM (CACM) in November 2014. Check out a recent column.
Lakshmi Subramanian was an invited speaker at the 2015 National Academy of Engineering, China-US Frontiers of Engineering symposium, speaking on Big Data. Congratulations!
One of the founders of the NYU Computer Science Department, Jack Schwartz, is remembered in a collection of reminiscences in the current issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, including a contribution from Professor Emeritus Martin Davis.
Dr. Russell Power has been awarded the 2014-2015 Dean's Outstanding Dissertation Award in the Sciences for his thesis "Building efficient distributed in-memory systems". His advisor was Jinyang Li. Congratulations!
The fourth Annual NYUAD Hackathon for Social Good in the Arab World, organized by Professor Sana Odeh, took place April 10-12. It drew over 100 students from a dozen countries worldwide.
For more news about the hackathon, see here.
Juliana Freire has been named a Fellow of ACM for contributions to provenance management research and technology, and computational reproducibility. Congratulations!
See the press release for more information.
Clark Barrett has been named a 2014 Distinguished Scientist by the ACM. Congratulations!
Theodore Rappaport and his students have been awarded the 2015 IEEE Donald G. Fink Award for the outstanding survey, review, or tutorial paper in IEEE publications. Congratulations!
Claudio Silva has been awarded the 2014 Visualization Technical Achievement Award in recognition of seminal advances in geometric computing. Congratulations!
NYU has awarded a Silver Professorship to Patrick Cousot. Congratulations!
"Finding Minimum Type Error Sources" by doctoral students Zvonimir Pavlinovic and Tim King and Prof. Thomas Wies has won the Best Paper Award at OOPSLA 2014 (Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Language, and Applications). Congratulations!
David Sontag and Thomas Wies have each received an NSF CAREER award for their projects "Exact Algorithms for Learning Latent Structures" and "Abstracting Programs for Automated Debugging". Congratulations!
Yann LeCun's work on back-propagation neural networks and deep learning are the subject of an in-depth profile in Wired.
Subhash Khot has been awarded the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for 2014 for his formulation and analysis of the Unique Games Conjecture. The Nevanlinna Prize is given every 4 years by the International Mathematical Union for outstanding contributions in mathematical aspects of information sciences. The award citation states that "Efforts to prove the conjecture, to disprove it, and to discover its consequences have all proven enormously fruitful. The Unique Games Conjecture will be driving research in theoretical computer science for many years to come." Congratulations!
Read the News Release.
Read the "What It Takes to Win the World's Highest Computer Science Honor" Article in Wired.
At the 2014 World Finals ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest, held in Ekaterinburg, Russia, the NYU team placed 13th overall, and 1st among North American teams, beating out teams from such schools as MIT, Stanford, CMU, and Berkeley. Congratulations to the team Bowen Yu, Fabian Gundlach, and Danilo Neves Ribeiro and their coaches Brett Bernstein, Evan Korth and Sean McIntyre!
Deena Engel is the first recipient of the Samuel L. Marateck Prize for Outstanding Teaching in Computer Science. The Marateck Prize was established by the Courant Institute in memory of Prof. Sam Marateck, an outstanding and well-loved teacher and colleague in the Computer Science Department from 1973 to 2013.
The IEEE Computer Society has awarded the Harlan D. Mills 2014 Award to Patrick Cousot and Radhia Cousot for the invention of abstract interpretation, development of tool support, and its practical application. Congratulations! Link
Ernie Davis (Professor of Computer Science) and Gary Marcus (Professor of Psychology) give their thoughts on Big Data in an op-ed article in the New York Times.
At the 2014 North American Invitational Programming Contest, the NYU team came in 7th. Congratulations to the team Bowen Yu, Fabian Gundlach, and Danilo Neves Ribeiro and their coaches Brett Bernstein, Evan Korth, and Sean McIntyre.
Chris Harrison, an alumnus of the department, is the recipient of the 2014 NYU Distinguished Young Alumnus Award. Chris is a gradute of the accelerated Bachelor's/ Master's program in Computer Science at NYU. He received his BA in 2005 and his M.Sc. in 2006. Having finished a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University, he is now an assistant professor at CMU. He is one of the leading researchers in the area of human-computer interactions. Link.
Yi Louisa Lu has won the first prize in the Undergraduate Student Competition at the 2014 ACM International Symposium on Code Generation and Optimization for her project "Unleashing the Power of General Purpose Graphic Processing Unit" under the supervision of Prof. Mohamed Zahran. Louisa is a senior doing a joint major in computer science and math. Congratulations!
Sana Odeh's research on Arab Women in Computing is featured in a video article on the BBC.
Prof. Sam Marateck passed away on January 14, after an illness of several months.
Sam taught for decades in the Computer Science department. He was a particularly well-loved teacher, deeply engaged with his many students.
He will be fondly remembered and sadly missed.
Dennis Shasha has been named a Fellow of the ACM. Congratulations! Link
Facebook will be creating a new research lab focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning, with a branch at Astor Place, and with close ties to the Center for Data Science and to the Computer Science Department. Yann LeCun has been appointed as founding director of the lab.
Link: https://www.facebook.com/yann.lecun/posts/10151728212367143
Rob Fergus has won the IEEE CVPR (Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition) Longuet-Higgins prize for his 2003 paper "Object Class Recognition by Unsupervised Scale-Invariant Learning" with Pietro Perona and Andrew Zisserman. The prize is awarded for "fundamental contributions in computer vision." Link
New York University has launched a new multi-million dollar collaboration, with Berkeley and U. Washington, to enable university researchers to harness the full potential of the data-rich world that characterizes all fields of science and discovery. At NYU, the initiative will be led by Yann LeCun. This partnership will spur collaborations within and across the three campuses and other partners pursuing similar data-intensive science goals.
The new five-year, $37.8 million initiative, with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, was announced today November 12, at a meeting sponsored by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
A televised annoucement from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy can be viewed at http://live.science360.gov tomorrow November 13 at 2:00 PM. Link
Professor Evan Korth discusses coding and programming languages in an episode of the PBS video series Off Book.
The NYU Purple team of Bowen Yu, Fabian Gundlach, and Danilo Neves Ribeiro won the 2013 Greater New York ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, held October 27 at Yale University. The team answered all nine problems with no mistakes, and came in 1st of 50 teams, including teams from Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, SUNY Stony Brook, and Yale. They are invited to compete in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest in Yekaterinburg, Russia next June.
Four other NYU teams competed as well, and did very well. NYU White (Kelly Martin, Danny Padawer, and Chris Williams) placed 11th. NYU Bobcat (Yury Skobov, David Ackerman, and Aviv Goldgeier) placed 14th. NYU Torch (Stephen Hu, Weilun Du, and Dun Wang) placed 17th. NYU Gold (Y.D. Choi, Emily Lin, and Ben Xie) placed 25th out of 50 teams.
Congratulations to all the participants, and to coaches Evan Korth, Brett Bernstein, Sean McIntyre, and Zhuoran Yu.
Surin Ahn, a student of Mamaroneck High School, has been named as one of 100 Regional Finalists in the 2013 Competition in Math, Science, and Technology. Her project, on robot motion planning, was mentored by Professor Chee Yap.
Link to News Article.
Margaret Wright has been elected an Honorary Member of the London Mathematical Society. Congratulations! Link
Yann LeCun has been awarded the 2014 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Neural Networks Pioneer Award, recognizing "significant contributions to early concepts and sustained development in the field of neural networks."
Lexing Ying has received the 2013 James H. Wilkinson Prize in Numerical analysis and Scientific Computation. Lexing got his Ph.D. from the NYU Computer Science Department in 2004 under the supervision of Denis Zorin. Link
Chee Yap's paper "Soft Subdivision Search in Motion Planning" has won a Challenges and Vision Best Paper Award at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference. Congratulations! Link
A PBS Off Book video on the future of artificial intelligence features interviews with Ernie Davis and Yann LeCun. Link
Patrick and Radhia Cousot have received the SIGPLAN Achievement award, for the invention, development, and application of abstract interpretation. Congratulations! Link
A historical survey of deep learning in the current issue of CACM features the work of Yann LeCun. Link
David Sontag is leading a research group, with collaborators from NYU, Langone Medical Center, and Independence Blue Cross, to apply machine learning techniques to IBC's medical and pharmacy claims data to detect patients at risk for undiagnosed diabetes or pre-diabetes. The co-investigators are Saul Blecker and Ann Marie Schmidt, at Langone, and Yann LeCun at Courant. Link
Mark Rich has received an honorable mention in the CRA (Computing Research Association) Undergraduate Research Awards. Mark's project, carried out under the advisement of Prof. Lakshmi Subramanian, involved building a city-level traffic congestion detection and mitigation system that computes real-time traffic densities, based on data from noisy traffic cameras at different locations within a city. The system uses a belief network to interpret and integrate the data, and then leverages this information to accurately predict traffic congestion levels and potentially mitigate traffic jams. Mark is a senior with a double major in Economics and a joint major in Computer Science and Mathematics.
Craig Kapp has received an Outstanding Teacher Award for 2013.
Chris Bregler's work on applying motion capture technology to detecting terrorist activities in videos of crowds is featured in an article in the online Scientific American. Link. Story in NPR.
Zvi Kedem has received the Outstanding Contribution to ACM award for his leadership in rebuilding the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS) as a modern cognitive map of the computing field for the worldwide computing community. As editor-in-chief, Kedem managed the effort to revise and automate the key component that underlies the ACM Digital Library's search index infrastructure. Link
Evan Korth discusses hacking in a PBS OffBook video. Link.
The NYUAD International Hackathon for Social Good in the Arab World took place on Feb. 21-25. More than 80 students from 16 countries participated. The Hackathon was founded and is organized by Prof. Sana' Odeh. Congratulations to all involved! Link News Story
NYU has announced the launching of an initiative in Data Science and Statistics. The university-wide effort includes the creation of the Center for Data Science, the first such program in the United States. Prof. Yann LeCun is Director of the Center. The Center will have a masters degree program, accepting students for the fall of 2013, and plans to have a doctoral program starting at a later date. Link
A New York Times retrospective on graphics in 2012 features four projects from Chris Bregler's Motion Capture Lab: "Olympics Diving", "Olympics One with the Water", "What Romney and Obama's Body Language Says to Voters", and "Connecting Music and Gesture (The Maestro's Mojo, Alan Gilbert and the NY Philharmonics)". Link
The Entrupy system, developed by Lakshmi Subramanian and Ashlesh Sharma, for labelling works of art against counterfeiting, is featured in Forbes magazine as one of "Four Disruptive Technologies to Watch in 2013". Link
The Movement Lab and Digitas have announced a partnership program to co-create 3D Motion Capture Brand Experiences. Link
A front page article in NY Times discusses progress in deep learning and cites Yann LeCun's research. Link.
Profs. Joel Spencer and Margaret Wright and professor emeritus Martin Davis have been named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society, together with 21 other Courant Institute faculty. Link
The NYU Abu Dhabi Department for Computer Science, in associate with the NYUAD Institute, is excited to announce the 2013 NYUAD Annual Hackathon: Building Apps for Social Good in the Arab World. Link
Prof. Rich Bonneau is part of a research team that has analyzed how T-cells regulate their genomes. This understanding could lead to developing new therapeutic approaches for inflammatory diseases, such as Crohn's disease, multiple sclerosis, and arthritis. Link
"SuperC: Parsing All of C by Taming the Preprocessor" by Ph.D. student Paul Gazzillo and Professor Robert Grimm, presented at PLDI 12 (Programming Language Design and Implementation), has been nominated for a CACM Research Highlight by ACM SIGPLAN.). Link
The Regional Conference on Women in Computing in the Arab World, organized by Prof. Sana' Odeh, held on March 4 and 5 2012 at NYU Abu Dhabi, is featured in an article in the current issue of ACM's Women in Computing (pg 33-34). Link
A new New York City high school, the Academy for Software Engineering, has opened this fall with a freshman class of 100 students. Several members of the NYU Computer Science department are involved with this: Evan Korth is Chair of the Advisory Board; Deena Engel and Adam Meyers are members of the Advisory Board; and Mike Zamansky (BA 1989, MS 1995) is a member of the Advisory Board and has been one of the leading figures in getting the Academy established. Link
Ted Rappaport has received the IEEE William E. Sayle II Award for Achievement in Education. Congratulations! Link
The paper "Computing Extremal Quasiconformal Maps" by Ofir Weber, Ashish Myles and Denis Zorin has been awarded the 1st place Best Paper Award at the Eurographics/ACM Symposium on Geometry Processing.
The computer vision research of Yann LeCun and his collaborators at five universities, and its applications to guiding self-piloted drones, are featured in an article in Popular Science. Link
The paper "Computing Extremal Quasiconformal Maps" by Ofir Weber, Ashish Myles and Denis Zorin has been awarded the first place Best Paper Award at the Eurographics/ACM Symposium on Geometry Processing. Link
The best paper prize at DEBS 2012 (Distributed Event-Based Systems) has been awarded to the paper "From a Calculus to an Execution Environment for Stream Processing" by Robert Soulé (Ph.D. NYU), Martin Hirzel (IBM Research), Buğra Gedik (Bilkent University) and Prof. Robert Grimm. Congratulations! Link.
Professors Yann LeCun, Mehryar Mohri, Ken Perlin, and David Sontag have each been awarded a Google Faculty Research Award. (Prof. LeCun's is joint with Eugenio Culurciello of Purdue.) Congratulations! Link
Prof. Ken Perlin, together with a team from the MIT Media Lab, has developed an augmented reality glove called T(ether), to enhance interaction between the physical and digital worlds. Link
A team of scientists at Google, including Marc'Aurelio Ranzato (Ph.D. NYU Computer Science, 2009), implemented a distributed neural network with 1 billion connection over a network with 16,000 processors(1000 machines). Applying "deep learning" to a dataset of 10,000,000 unlabelled images, the network achieved an accuracy of 15.8% in identifying 20,000 different categories, an improvement of 70% over the state of the art. An article in the New York Times reports the work; the article also quotes Prof. Yann LeCun on the application of deep learning techniques to speech recognition. Link. Click here to view the video: Link
A discussion between Yann LeCun and Josh Tenenbaum of MIT on artificial intelligence is featured in TechNews. Link
Yuichiro Takeuchi and Professor Ken Perlin won a Best Paper prize at the SIGCHI 2012 for "ClayVision : The (Elastic) Image of the City". Congratulations! Link
Nektarios Paisios's research on applying computer technology for the blind is featured in an article in Atlantic Magazine. Link
Erica Wolfe has been awarded an NYU President's Service Award for her work as President of both the Graduate Student Government and the Masters Association for Computer Science.
Tamar Schlick, Professor of Chemistry, Mathematics, and Computer Science has been named a Fellow of SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics). She is being conferred the fellowship for contributions to integration, optimization, and modeling techniques for the study of biomolecular structure and function. Dr. Schlick's research team develops innovative molecular modling, bioinformatics, and mathematical methods to study problems in DNA repair and fidelity mechanisms, chromatin folding, and RNA structure and function. Link
Chris Bregler's Motion Capture Lab has been working with Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, in applying motion capture technique to the gestures and motions of an orchestral conductor. Link.
The NYUAD Regional Collaborative Workshop on Women in Computing in the Arab World, organized by Sana' Odeh, took place on March 4-5. Forty Prominent international and regional women (CS professors, IT professionals and entrepreneurs) from 13 countries from the Arab World, the US and Canada. This unprecedented regional workshop explored the opportunities as well as the diverse challenges facing women in computing in the Arab World. Link
A research team led by Prof. Bud Mishra of NYU and Profs. Jason Reed and Jim Gimzewski of UCLA has developed a method to use nanoparticles to turn DNA molecule into a form of molecular braille that can be read in the scale of nanometers, using high-speed Atomic Force Microscopy. Link.
Brian Lehrer of CUNY TV interviews Prof. Evan Korth of New York University and Prof. Chris Wiggins of Columbia University about HackNY.
Video Link (Starts at the 20:00 mark)
Russell Power is one of the 12 recipients of the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowships for 2012. Congratulations to Russell and to Jinyang Li, his advisor!
Prof. Alan Siegel, together with Profs. Stanley Ocken and Ethan Aken of CUNY spoke to the Pelham Math Committee about the need for a strong K-12 math curriculum and about the inadequacies of the current "Investigations" curriculum. Read More: Link
Two alumni of the Computer Science Department are featured in the article "NewYork tech: 12 people to watch in 2012" in the New York Daily News. Rebecca Zhou (CS minor) organized the "Raise Cache" event last November to raise funds for HackNY. Alex Iskold (MSCS) is the founder of GetGlue, a social network based on entertainment. Read More: Link
The Academy for Software Engineering, a new New York City public high school, will be opening this fall. Prof. Evan Korth will be Chair of the Advisory Board for the school. The school was inspired by Stuyvesant High School's successful program led by Computer science Teacher Mike Zamansky who is an alumnus of the Computer Science department (BA, MS). Professors Adam Meyers and Deena Engel also serve on the Advisory Board. Read More: Link
MuseAmi, a music software engine created by a team including Yann LeCun, was presented at the International Consumer Electronics Show. Read More in an articel in the Philadelphia inquirer: Link
A story on CNN Money about the growing popularity of the CS major and the job opportunities it offers features interviews with Prof. Evan Korth and NYU CS major Tal Safran. Link.
Chris Harrison, who got his BA and MS from the NYU Computer Science department, and is now a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon, is on the Forbes magazine list of top 30 scientists under 30. Article in Forbes.
Evan Korth is featured in a Wall Street Journal article on the increasing popularity of Computer Science for undergraduate students. Link
Deena Engel's class "Literary Archives and Web Development" has been cited in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education as an exemplar of the kind of training in technical skills that current humanities graduate students should get. Read More.
The first International Hackathon for the Social Good in the Arab World was held October 28-30 at NYU Abu Dhabi. The event brought together 50 student participants, from colleges in the Middle East and the US, and more than 20 experts acting as speakers, mentors, and judges, for three-days of intensive programming. NYU-NY undergraduates Max Stoller and Tengchao Zhou, teaming with Monir Abu Hilal from PSUT (Jordan) won second prize for their application "OpenMena", a web-based resource designed to provide government data in an accessible format for computer programmers. Read More
The Human Proteome Folding Project, led by Richard Bonneau, has used the World Community Grid to solve problems of predicting protein function. The project has run on 1.5 million CPUs worldwide, totalling to date 500,000 CPU years. See a short video. Or read the paper.
RaiseCache, a night-long event with party and fashion show, was held on Nov. 17. It was organized as a fundraiser for hackNY by Rebecca Zhou, who graduated NYU in 2011 with a major in Economics and a minor in Computer Science. Read More. And see videos, including a message from Mayor Bloomberg.
The 4th HackNY hackathon, organized by Prof. Evan Korth of NYU and Chris Wiggins of Columbia, met October 1-2 at NYU, attracting more than 300 registrants from 40 schools in the US and Canada. Congratulations to NYU students David Coss and Michael Bartnett, who won first prize for their project MidiPHON! Read More.
Chris Bregler is working on using motion capture technology to identify potential security threats, such as people carrying hidden bombs, via patterns of movement. Story in Scientific American
The New York Post calls Prof. Nathan Hull's iPhone programming course "today's hottest course". Read More.
The first NYUAD International Hackathon for Social Good in the Arab World will take place Thursday October 27-Sunday October 30 at NYU Abu Dhabi. The event is being organized by Prof. Sana Odeh. Information is available at http://nyuad.nyu.edu/institute/hackathon-2011.html
Funding is available to cover expenses for both students and faculty who wish to attend.
In an article in the New York Sunday Times, Prof. Chris Bregler discusses the use of motion-capture technology in the animation of chimpanzees in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes". Read More.
The Courant Institute has established the Risk Economics Lab for Decision Metrics, which will apply a range of computational methods to researching geopolitical and socioeconomic issues, such as aging and health trends, immigration, and consumer behavior. The lab is supported by a $1 million leadership pledge from the David K.A. Mordecai and Samantha Kappagoda Charitable Trust. The acting director is Roy Lowrance, a doctoral student in computer science, working with Prof. Yann LeCun. Read More
Dr. Alicia Abella, Executive Director of the Innovative Services Research Department at AT&T Labs, has been appointed to the Presidential advisory commission on educational excellence for Hispanics.Dr. Abella was a computer science major and mathematics minor at NYU; she received her Bachelor of Science in 1990. Read More
Professors Evan Korth and Chris Wiggins (Columbia) are "People to Watch in Silicon Alley" according to Crain's New York. Link
Prof. Bud Mishra has been awarded the "Distinguished Alumnus Award" from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
Researchers at NYU’s Computer Science Department have adopted an innovative data collection method for their latest work in the area of computer vision-a music video created by the Dutch progressive-electro band C-Mon & Kypski. The full article is available from NYU Today.
Jessica Chang and Prof. Dennis Shasha have published a book outlining a method for storing programs inside DNA that simplifies nanocomputing computation at the molecular level. The theory comes out of the thesis research carried out by Ms. Chang for her master's degree in mathematics, supervised by Prof. Shasha. The full article is available from NYU Today.
Five students in the computer science department --- Susana Delgadillo, Kelsey Lee, Elizabeth Pelka, Erin Schoenfelder and Albert Yau --- worked on a research project preparing documentation for the computational art work "33 Questions Per Minute" by Raphael Lozano-Hemmer, in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The documentation facilitates conservation decisions about this work in particular and provides a model for this process for such works in general. Susana, Kelsey, Elizabeth, and Albert are computer science majors; Erin is a web programming minor. The project was supervised by Deena Engel of the Computer Science dept at NYU and by Glenn Wharton of MOMA and the NYU Department of Museum Studies. Link
Congratulations to CS undergrad Jiao Li for being named a recipient of the Dean's Undergraduate Research Fund (DURF) Grant for Spring 2011. Jiao's research studies algorithms for solving Boolean satisfiability problems on highly parallel architectures. He is working with Prof. Clark Barrett and Dr. Morgan Deters. DURF Grants are awarded each year by the College of Arts and Sciences to undergrads to help defray the cost of conducting their research. Recipients are chosen through a competitive process, based on the merits of their research proposals.
Angjoo Kim, a senior majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics, has been awarded a Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Congratulations! The late Anita Borg herself got her doctorate in computer science at NYU in 1981.
Professor Yann LeCun has received a grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) to develop a bird-sized, self-flying plane that could navigate through both forests and urban environments Link
Marsha Berger has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in a class of 212 new members and 16 foreign Honorary Members. Marsha will be inducted at a special ceremony on October 1. Link
Xinxin Zhang, a student in the Computer Science master's program, has been awarded an internship at Pixar Labs by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences for summer 2011.
Almost 300 students participated in the 24-hour HackNY Hackathon, held at NYU and organized by Prof. Evan Korth of NYU and Prof. Chris Wiggins of Columbia. See the Wall Street Journal article. Rob Spectre in Business Insider gives "Four Reasons Why the hackNY Kids are Really Smart."
HackNY, organized by Evan Korth of NYU and Chris Wiggins of Columbia, will be doubling the size of its summer program this year. HackNY Doubles Effort To Match Top Tech Students With NYC Startups. In recent weeks HackNY has been praised by Mayor Bloomberg and featured in an article in the New York Times.
The first annual CTED (Center for Technology and Economic Development) conference will take place at NYU Abu Dhabi on March 8. Link
CTED is a multidisciplinary research lab at NYU-AD that focuses on combining economic principles, technological advances, and human-centric design to create innovative solutions for the problems experienced in emerging regions.
Jinyang Li and Rob Fergus have been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships for 2011. Michael Freedman of Princeton, who received his Ph.D. from the NYU CS Dept in 2007, was also awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. Link
Aaron Hertzmann of the University of Toronto, who got his Ph.D. from the NYU CS department in 2001, received the 2010 Steacie Prize for exceptional research by a scientist or engineer aged 40 or younger carried out in Canada. Hertzmann is the second computer scientist to receive the Steacie prize since the award's inception in 1964. Link
Richard Cole and Olof Widlund will be named Silver Professors. Silver Chairs, funded by an endowment to the University from alumnus Julius Silver, are awarded in recognition of outstanding scholarly contributions.
The Bôcher Prize, awarded by the American Mathematical Society, recognizes “the most notable paper in analysis published during thepreceding six years.” The AMS awarded the prize to Assaf "for introducing new invariants of metric spaces and for applying his new understanding of the distortion between various metric structures to theoretical computer science." Link
Bud Mishra has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Congratulations! Link
Antony Kaplan, a senior doing a joint major in Computer Science and Physics, has won "Honorable Mention" in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards for 2011. Antony has won the award for two research projects he carried out. First, under the supervision of Prof. Douglas Schmidt of Vanderbilt University and Prof. Jinyang Li, he developed a set of tools for implementing applications of many different kinds in a cloud computing environment. Second, under the supervision of Prof. Margaret Wright, he did an in-depth study of the errors made by the Excel program in numerical computation.
The 2010 ACM Gordon Bell prize for outstanding achievement in high-performance computing has been awarded to a team from Georgia Tech, NYU and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The NYU members of the team are Shravan Veerapaneni and Denis Zorin. The team was led by George Biros who was a postdoc at NYU in 2000-2003. They created a blood-flow simulation of 260 million deformable red blood cells flowing in plasma, topping the previous largest blood-flow simulation (of 14,000 cells) by four orders of magnitude. It ran at 700 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) on the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge.The code is based on the kernel-independent version of the fast multipole method developed at NYU by Lexing Ying (PhD, Computer Science, 2004), George Biros and Denis Zorin. Link
Denis Zorin and his co-authors have received the "Most Cited Paper Award" from the journal "Computer Aided Geometric Design" for their paper "Discrete quadratic curvature energies" published in 2007. The paper presents an algorithm for computing the forces involved in surface bending, a critical step in simulating materials such as cloth, as well as many other types of geometry processing algorithms. The method is orders of magnitude faster than earlier algorithms.
Bud Mishra and co-authors Vera Cherepinsky of Fairfield University and Ghazala Hashmi of BioArray Solutions Ltd have developed a new mathematical model for DNA hybridization. Link
Evan Korth and the other co-founders of HackNY are on the Business Insider's list of 100 coolest NY Tech People. Link
Yann LeCun has developed vision systems for mobile robots based on convolutional neural networks, which learn from examples how to interpret what they see. Yann LeCun's work is featured as a cover story in the October 23 issue of The Economist. Link
He is also collaborating with researchers at Yale on the ``NeuFlow'' chip, which may soon be guiding self-driving cars. The NeuFlow chip can process a stream of megapixel images in real time. Link
The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $3.75 millon dollar grant to the BigPlant project, a collaborative effort between Dennis Shasha and scientists at the NYU Center for Genomics, the American Museum of Natural History, the New York Botanical Garden, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The goal of the project is to understand the evolutionary relationships among a wide variety of plant species, and to discover genes that are likely to contribute to economically and environmentally important traits, by applying machine learning techniques to genomic data. Link
More than 200 students from 33 universities gathered Saturday afternoon to attend HackNY's fall Hackathon at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Fourteen companies, including Meetup, Aviary and Drop.io, demoed their APIs before students settled into couches and chairs to brainstorm ideas while noshing on catered burritos. Link
Tech@NYU’s second NYU Startup Week, a series of widely diverse speakers and content focused on tech entrepreneurship , was held Oct. 4 - Oct. 9. Link
Chris Bregler discusses the use of motion capture in treating athletic injuries on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. Link
Diaspora*, the open-source social networking alternative developed by four NYU students, has released its code. Users will be allowed to download the code used to build the new service and begin exploring and enhancing the Diaspora* software. Link The developers of Diaspora* have been featured in an article in New York Magazine.
The Haifa Verification Conference award committee gave the award this year to five people who played a pivotal and continuous role in building and promoting the Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) community, including Clark Barrett. Link
NYC technology community leaders, Nate Westheimer (NYTech organizer), David Lerner (Columbia University Tech Ventures), and Charlie O'Donnell (First Round Capital, nextNY) cite Professor Korth's hackNY initiative as an important reason NYC's startup ecosystem is thriving and rising. Link 1 -- Link 2-- Link 3
Professor Dennis Shasha and coauthor Cathy Lazere have published a new book on Natural Computing, featuring profiles of 16 scientists who are pushing computer science beyond traditional boundaries Link. Professor Shasha also discussed the future of biologically-based computing in this article in the Guardian.
Concert pianist Robert Taub has found a new inspiration, and a great partner in Yann LeCun: together they're realizing the musician's dream of creating software that can read and transcribe music, correct notes, and more. Link
Professor Korth goes to bat for New York City's technical talent pool in this article comparing the startup environments of New York and Boston. Link
The National Science Foundation has given a $2.85 million grant to NYU-Poly to launch "an innovative graduate education program to educate scientists and engineers to address the increasingly complex issues surrounding information security and privacy." The program will enlist faculty from across NYU departments, including the Courant Institute, and includes funding for graduate students. The full release is available from NYU Today. Link
Spencer Greenberg, a Courant PhD student, has cofounded Rebellion Research, a company that uses machine learning to make investment decisions. Link
On Monday July 5, CBS News did a feature on the Makerbot, a variation of a 3D printer which creates plastic models from 3d computer images. Courant Professor Evan Korth provided the last word on where he sees this machine in our future: on every deskop, as an appliance which will revolutionize the way people interact with the objects in their lives. Link
New York University’s Movement Laboratory has reconstructed Yankee closer Mariano Rivera’s pitching motion to offer an animated three-dimensional look at how he appears before hitters. The video is part of an online feature, “Mariano Rivera, King of Closers,” at NYTimes.com. The Yankee pitcher is also featured on the cover of this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. More
NYU, in collaboration with Virginia Tech and the University of Milan, has created GOALIE: a new data mining algorithm developed by NYU's Courant Institute, which measures the timing of cellular processes. Courant's Bud Mishra reports that GOALIE will play a part in the larger goal of integrating data mining with modeling tools to better understand and represent biology on a cellular level. Link
Jihun Yu, a doctoral candidate in New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, has been selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to participate in a summer internship program designed to provide real-world experience to students interested in careers in motion picture computer graphics, technology, and research. Yu was one of five interns chosen by the Academy’s Science and Technology Council. More
A new orginization named HackNY is working to steer recent college grads away from big financial firms and towards NYC's smaller start-up companies. Professors from NYU and Columbia have noticed their math and computer science students finding less satisfaction in today's big businesses, and more room for growth and opportunity in new, growing companies which can more uniquely utilize their skills. HackNY connects these bright prospects with a future of more individualized, creative work. Link
NYU Computer Science professors Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus are working on a set of algorithms named Deep Thought, a new step in the way computers analyze data. Their work, funded by the Pentagon's Darpa agency, allows for a computer to generate its own analytic criteria. When fully realized, the project will eliminate countless man hours of data entry, and would make a machine able to recognize everything from a face in a crowd to sarcasm in a sentence. Link
A few months back, four geeky college students, living on pizza in a computer lab downtown on Mercer Street, decided to build a social network that wouldn't force people to surrender their privacy to a big business. It would take three or four months to write the code, and they would need a few thousand dollars each to live on. Link
Inspired by Yahoo's Open Hack Day NYC, HackNY held its inaugural hackathon on the NYU campus, giving students the opportunity to hone their skills in a 24-hour hackathon, along with networking with several tech startups from the NYC area. In a terrific event, students from over 30 different area schools attended (some as far as Pennsylvania), listened to startups pitch their technology, formed teams and ideas, hacked through the night and came out on the other side with working demos to show off. [video]
For students like Adler Perotte, small companies' chief attractions over Wall Street include interesting problems and more flexible work schedules. Link
The inaugural, 24-hour "Hackathon" will take place in Warren Weaver Hall this April 2-3. The 24-hour event hosted by hackNY will bring more than 100 students from 20 different New York-area universities to work with datasets and technologies from the hottest NYC startups—including Foursquare, 10gen, Aviary, Chartbeat, and Hot Potato—at NYU's Courant Institute. Startups will introduce and demo their technologies; students will then have 24 hours to develop their own products and demos. The full press release is available from NYU Today.
Professor Yann LeCun is co-founder of MuseAmi, which builds tools for musicians and was recently written up by the Wall Street Journal's Digits blog. The company also employs former NYU Master of Science student, George Tourtellot.
Yann LeCun's learning robot is featured on the Science Channel's TV series "Sci Fi Science" hosting by physicist Michio Kaku. The episode entitled "Buillding a Sci Fi Robot", first aired on January 19, features a segment on Yann LeCun's LAGR mobile robot, which automatically teaches itself to navigate off-road environments using on-line machine learning methods. More information on the NYU LAGR is available Link
Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus have been selected for a 3-year DARPA-sponsored program entitled "Deep Learning", slated to start this month. LeCun and Fergus are part of team that includes Prof. Yoshua Bengio from Universty of Mentreal and Ronan Collobert for NEC's research lab in Princeton, NJ. Deep Learning designates a new class of machine learning techniques that allows machines to learn internal representations of complex data and sensory inputs by using a combination of unlabeled and supervised learning. Unsupervised learning, requiring small amount of labeled data, and large amount of easily-obtainable unlabeled data. [more]
We are delighted to announce that Subhash Khot has been chosen to receive the extremely prestigious Alan T. Waterman Award. This award is given annually by NSF to an outstanding young researcher in any field of science and engineering supported by NSF. Subhash joins a very distinguished recipient list; only two computer scientists have won this award in the past.
Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director for Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at NSF, has written: "We in CISE are thrilled to have Subhash named the Waterman winner. Subhash is a brilliant theoretical computer scientist and is most well known for his Unique Games Conjecture. He has made many unexpected and original contributions to computational complexity and his work draws connections between optimization, computer science, mathematics."
Congratulations to Subhash!
Link
NYU's WinC (Women in Computing) has been awarded the Google RISE Award for the second consecutive year to fund our outreach event to NYC high school girls. WinC will be teaming up with Google and Princeton's GWISE for the third year to host a a Full-Day of Engineering and Computer Science Instruction for NYC High School Girls at the Kimmel center, NYU on Friday April 30th from 8 am - 4pm. [Event website] [Google Rise website]
Giuseppe Narzisi and Daniel Wichs, computer science doctoral students, have received IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards. The Fellowship Awards Program "is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study. " Link
Dilip Krishnan and Adriana Lopez, graduate students in computer science, have received a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship and a Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarship, respectively. The awards are given to outstanding students in the areas of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Mathematics. Link
Nektarios Paisios, computer science doctoral student, has received a 2010-2011 Google Lime Scholarship for Students with Disabilities. In addition to the scholarship, recipients of the award, which is based on academics, innovation, and leadership, are invited to attend an all-expenses-paid networking retreat at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. Link
Ilya Rosenberg, Ken Perlin and a small team of computer scientists from New York University's Media Research Lab hope to bring a new kind of multitouch to everything from new e-readers to musical instruments, with their new company, Touchco. Link
A new and novel computer modeling platform developed through intensive, multidisciplinary collaboration at New York University can help hospitals and cities to be more prepared for catastrophic public health scenarios. Link
This semester, NYU's Computer Science department offered the class "iPhone Programming", where students learned to write code in order to create working iPhone applications that could even be sold in the App Store. The students' projects can be seen at the NYU Computer Science Spring Showcase on Wednesday, May 6 from 5pm to 9pm. Link
Benchiao Jai, Department of Computer Science Ph.D., presented "Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts. " Link, YouTube Video
New York University Computer Science Professor Chris Bregler has received a $1.47 million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) to enhance his laboratory's previous work on motion capture and computer vision. Link
Bud Mishra was named a Fellow of the IEEE in January 2009, for "contributions to the mathematical modeling of robotic grasping". Link
Ken Perlin will direct a new Games for Learning Institute (G4LI). This institute, funded by Microsoft Research and announced in October 2008, is a multidisciplinary and multi-department gaming research alliance for supporting games as learning tools for mathematics and science in middle school. Link
Margaret Wright received an honorary doctorate of technology from KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), Stockholm, in November 2008, for "major contributions to applied mathematics in its widest meaning". Link
Amir Pnueli (and co-authors) received a 2008 "Impact Paper Award" of the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT).
Subhash Khot, Assaf Naor and collaborators at Princeton, Rutgers, and the IAS received one of the first four "Expeditions" NSF grants. Their research, to "understand, cope with, and benefit from intractability", seeks to bridge fundamental gaps in understanding the boundary between the computationally tractable and the intractable problems. Expeditions grants are awarded for research on "far-reaching agendas that promise significant advances in the computing frontier and great benefit to society". Link
The Courant Institute has established the Risk Economics Lab for Decision Metrics, which will apply a range of computational methods to researching geopolitical and socioeconomic issues, such as aging and health trends, immigration, and consumer behavior. The lab is supported by a $1 million leadership pledge from the David K.A. Mordecai and Samantha Kappagoda Charitable Trust. The acting director is Roy Lowrance, a doctoral student in computer science, working with Prof. Yann LeCun. Read More