News

Yann Lecun and Rob Fergus work on Deep Thought
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. [more]

Creating a network like Facebook, only private
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. [more]

HackNY - A Hackathon for Students
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]

Math whizzes turn to tech startups
For students like Adler Perotte, small companies' chief attractions over Wall Street include interesting problems and more flexible work schedules. [more]

Technology and Entrepreneurship explored at Inaugural NYC Hackathon
The inaugural, 24-hour "Hackathon" took place in Warren Weaver Hall this April 2-3. The 24-hour event hosted by HackNY brought 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 introduced and demoed their technologies; students then had 24 hours to develop their own products and demos. The full press release is available from NYU Today.

MuseAmi Hopes to Take Music Automation to New Level
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 featured on the Science Channel
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 [here]

Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus selected for a 3-year DARPA-sponsored program
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]

Subhash Khot wins NSF's Waterman Award
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!
[more]

WinC (Women in Computing) awarded Google RISE award
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]

Graduate Student Adriana Lopez receives AT&T Labs Fellowship
Adriana Lopez has been awarded a AT&T Labs Fellowship, a three-year fellowship given to outstanding under-represented minority and women students pursuing PhD studies in computing and communications-related fields. [more]

Graduate Students Narzisi and Wichs receive IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards
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. " [more]

Graduate Students Krishnan and Lopez receive Awards from Microsoft
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. [more]

Google Lime Scholarship Awarded to Doctoral Student, Nektarios Paisios 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.
[more]

Multitouch Screens Could Enliven New Devices
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. [more]

New Computer Modeling Program Can Help Hospitals Prepare For The Worst
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. [more]

Chris Bregler Receives $1.47 Million Grant to Enhance Motion Capture Tools
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. [more]

NYU Computer Science Students Make Awesome iPhone Apps
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. [more]

Ben Jai, Google Server Architect, revealed Google's data center secrets at their Efficient Data Center Summit on April 1, 2009.
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. " [more], YouTube Video

Bud Mishra named a IEEE fellow.
Bud Mishra was named a Fellow of the IEEE in January 2009, for "contributions to the mathematical modeling of robotic grasping". [more]

Ken Perlin to direct new Games for Learning Institute.
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. [more]

SIGSOFT Impact Paper Award.
Amir Pnueli (and co-authors) received a 2008 "Impact Paper Award" of the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT).

IAS/NYU/Princeton/Rutgers NSF "Expeditions" grant.
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". [more]

Margaret Wright receives an honorary doctorate from KTH.
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". [more]