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Dr. Mitsuru Nagasawa, the founding President of the Toyota Institute of Technology at Chicago (TTIC), will retire this year. With his leadership, TTIC has developed active research and education programs in computer science, has become accredited to grant PhD degrees, and is active in the recruitment of graduate students and outstanding faculty. The Board of Trustees has appointed a committee of the Board, the Presidential Search Committee, to accept and review nominations and applications for the position of president, and to make a recommendation to the Board for an appointment. Inquiries can be sent to Stuart Rice at sarice@ttic.edu.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $408,305 to the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago for support of the project entitled "Algorithm and Web Server for Low-homology Protein Threading", under the direction of Dr. Jinbo Xu.

This award is effective July 1 , 2010 and expires June 30, 2013.

This grant is awarded pursuant to the authority of the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, as amended (42 U.S.C. 1861-75).

David McAllester has won the 2010 AAAI Classic Paper award for the paper “Systematic Nonlinear Planning" with David Rosenblitt, which appeared in the AAAI conference in 1991.

The AAAI Classic Paper award honors the author(s) of paper(s) deemed most influential, chosen from a specific conference year. Each year, the time period considered will advance by one year. The 2010 award is being given to the most influential paper(s) from the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1991 in Anaheim, California, and will be presented to Dr. McAllister at the AAAI – 10 conference in Atlanta, Georgia on July 11 - 15.

The papers are judged on the basis of impact, for example:

- Started a new research (sub)area
- Led to important applications
- Answered a long-standing question/issue or clarified what had been murky
- Made a major advance that figures in the history of the subarea
- Has been picked up as important and used by other areas within (or outside of) AI
- Has been very heavily cited

This award will be posted on the AAAI website soon. There was no award given in 2009.

Jinbo Xu was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Health effective May 14, 2010, and the project title is New Computational Methods for Data-driven Protein Structure Prediction. The budget for the first year is $268,555 and the project period is from the start date noted above to April 30, 2015.

The project described was supported by Award Number R01GM089753 from the National Institute Of General Medical Sciences. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences or the National Institutes of Health.

Karen Livescu hosted a regional speech research meeting, the 2nd Illinois Speech Day, on May 10, 2010. About fifty people from Illinois and farther away 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.

TTIC congratulates Jian Peng, a TTIC third-year Ph.D. student who was awarded the prestigious Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship this month (February 2010). The Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship is a two-year fellowship program for outstanding Ph.D. students, and supports men and women in their third and fourth years of Ph.D. graduate studies.

The fellowship award will cover 100 percent of recipient’s tuition and fees for two academic years (2010 and 2011), provide a stipend to cover living expenses while in school, a travel allowance for recipients to attend professional conferences or seminars, and offers recipients the opportunity to complete one salaried internship over the duration of the year following the award.

Jian works with TTIC’s professor Jinbo Xu on mathematical modellings in computational biology. His other research interests include machine learning and algorithms. For more information about Jian, check out his webpage.

Other TTIC News

TTIC News

Dr. Greg Shakhnarovich hosted a regional computer vision meeting, the 3rd Illinois Vision Workshop, on Tuesday, December 1. About fifty people from the Midwest and farther away participated. Among the institutions and companies represented, in addition to TTIC, were the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, the University of Illinois Chicago, Northwestern, the University of Michigan, University of Missouri, UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research, Carnegie Mellon, Eastman Kodak, and Cornell.

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).

TTIC's 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. The NSF website states, "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".

Julia's project focuses on the development of approximation algorithms and lower bounds for network optimization problems.

Workshop on Approximation Algorithms and their Limitations

Chicago, Feb. 8-10, 2009 | (Speaker list)

TTIC's Dr. Julia Chuzhoy organized a workshop on "Approximation Algorithms and their limitations". The goal of the workshop was to bring together researchers in the areas of approximation algorithms and complexity theory, and to present diverse angles of studying approximability.

The workshop succeeded in gathering outstanding researchers, who presented some of their newest results, shared their insights and discussed major open problems in the area of approximation. The workshop provided a great overview of the state-of-the-art research in the area of approximation, including the newest developments and the greatest challenges in the field.

Dr. Chuzhoy's comments on of the three-day 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."

A collaboration between TTIC, the University of Chicago and the University of California at Irvine officially tied for first place in the PASCAL Object Detection Challenge and achieved the highest average detection score in the competition. Participants of the team were Pedro Felzenszwalb and Ross Girshick (of the University of Chicago). David McAllester (of TTIC) and Deva Ramanan (University of California at Irvine).

The PASCAL Object Detection Challenge is an international competition to build computer systems that find objects in images. TTIC and the University of Chicago came in first in seven categories and first or second in 17 of the 20 possible categories. This is the second year TTIC and the University of Chicago teamed-up to enter this competition and the results have helped to further establish TTIC in the area of computer vision.

TTIC's Dr. Jinbo Xu had his work and recent success referenced in an article by the iSGTW (International Science Grid This Week,) a weekly newsletter promoting grid computing. iSGTW shares stories of grid-empowered research, scientific discoveries, and grid technology from around the world, and is jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation, through the Open Science Grid, and by the European Commission's Information Society and Media Directorate-General, through GridTalk.

Dr. Xu and his team had participated in the 2008 Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP) competition, sponsored by NIH, BioSapiens Network and the European Molecular Biology Organization, in which participants are given 120 proteins with unknown structures to predict. RAPTOR, molecular modeling software package developed by Xu, ranked second place out of 85 teams.

Jinbo Xu is the recipient of an award funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), in collaborative research with Dr. Tobin Sosnick (University of Chicago). The award is for just under $200,000 and covers three years. The grant is titled "Protein Structure Refinement using a Novel Moveset".

Dr. Stephen Smale was quoted in an article about the Rome Maths Festival

Ms. Sawa Okuno is a TTI (Japan) student who studied at TTIC for Fall Quarter 2007. An article about her experiences was printed in the Feb. 26, 2008 edition of the Chunichi Newspaper (of Central Japan).

Original Article

"One on One Talk With Worldwide Professors- Studied Abroad at TTIC"

By: Sawa Okuno

In the article, Ms. Okuno explains her goals of studying Computer Vision at a higher level, and getting the opportunity to study abroad. She explains her determination to succeed in leaning science and English, and how TTIC's Dr. David McAllester assisted her in this.

Dr. Daniel Huttenlocher, Cornell University, gave a talk on January 29 about Team Cornell's participation the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. This talk presented some of the key technologies, results from the semi-finals and finals, and plans for future research using the vehicle.

Pedro Felzenszwalb (University of Chicago), Deva Ramanan and David McAllester (of TTIC) recently did very well in the 2007 PASCAL visual object recognition challenge.

This is an international competition to build computer systems that find objects in images. For the 2007 challenge there were twenty kinds of objects to be found. There were 20 different competitions corresponding to the twenty types of objects. TTIC and the University of Chicago came in first in six categories and first or second in 14 of the 20 possible categories. This was the first time that TTIC and the University of Chicago entered this competition and the results will help to establish TTIC in the area of computer vision. The results should be posted on line in the next few weeks.

Jinbo Xu is the recipient of an award funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH), collaborative research with Dr. Tobin Sosnick (University of Chicago). The award is for just under $200,000 and covers three years. The grant is titled "High Accuracy Protein Structure Homology Modeling".

Lance Fortnow (TTIC adjunct professor) is starting a new journal - "ACM Transactions on Computation Theory".