Gurdeep Singh Pall takes the reins of Microsoft's Skype division Imagine: You're stuck in the checkout line so you say to your phone, "Hey, am I running late?" In an instant, your phone considers the time of day, your location, your 2 p.m. appointment and the traffic between you and there. "Yup—you're running late," your phone responds. "Would you like me to call your appointment and tell them you'll be arriving at 2:15?" UO alumnus Gurdeep Singh Pall (pictured) says this future is closer than you think. Pall, MS '89 (computer and information science), a longtime Microsoft executive, was recently named corporate vice president for the Skype division. In his previous ...»

The title of his winning proposal was "Learning Tractable Graphical Models with Latent Variables." Funds from this award will be used to support his ongoing work with Pedram Rooshenas on designing new learning algorithms that guarantee efficient and accurate reasoning in the learned models. Google assigns faculty research awards biannually based on a competitive proposal process. In the Summer 2013 round of funding, Google received 550 proposals from 50 countries and made 105 awards. For more information: http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/08/google-research-awards-summer-2013.html ...»

An interdisciplinary team led by CIS Prof. Jun Li has been awarded the 2014 Incubating Interdisciplinary Initiatives (I3) award, sponsored by the Office of Research, Innovation & Graduate Education (RIGE) of the University of Oregon. The team includes Colin Koopman (Philosophy), Xintao Wu (UNC Charlotte), Eric Priest (Law), Zhibin Yang (Business), Kevin Butler (CIS), and Dejing Dou (CIS). Internet privacy has reached an unprecedentedly high level of risk. Protecting Internet privacy, however, is a daunting task as there are many open problems in almost every domain. Technically, the Internet is yet to become robust against traffic eavesdropping, hijacking, and various forms of tempering, ...»

CIS Associate Professor Anthony Hornof will receive two Best Paper Awards at CHI 2014, the leading international conference on human-computer interaction (HCI) research, which will be held in April in Toronto, Canada. The two papers are both on the topic of computational cognitive modeling, which is the study of building and evaluating computer programs that behave in some way like people. Cognitive modeling is useful in HCI because the models can be used to predict the usability of computer interfaces early in the user-interface design process. The first paper is entitled "Understanding multitasking through strategy exploration and individualized cognitive modeling" and is ...»

More Data, More Science and … Moore's Law? Thursday, April 24 7:30 - 8:30pm John E. Jaqua Center, 1615 E 13th Street, University of Oregon campus Refreshments to follow after the talk in Colloquium Room, Deschutes 220 Abstract In the same way that the Internet has combined with web content and search engines to revolutionize every aspect of our lives, the scientific process is poised to undergo a radical transformation based on the ability to access, analyze, and merge large, complex data sets. Scientists will be able to combine their own data with that of other scientists to validate models, interpret experiments, re-use and re-analyze data, and make use of ...»

CIS graduate student Hannah Pruse has been awarded a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) "helps ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and engineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master's and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions." Hannah was happily surprised to receive the NSF award, saying "The news came to me after I had taken an internship at a local game company. I ...»

Assistant Professor Boyana Norris has been awarded a grant of $30,000 from the Women in Science & Technology Fund of the College of Arts and Sciences to enable her to pursue activities that target the recruitment and retention of both women and minorities at all levels, including students and faculty, in the Department of Computer and Information Science. Dr. Norris will organize visits by distinguished speakers, usually women or minorities in academia or industry. The visitors will meet with faculty and students and be the honored guest at a banquet dinner with our Women in Computer Science group (WICS, see http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/groups/wics/). On a more regular basis, Boyana will ...»

Understanding the many facets of Internet connectivity is generally considered to be of critical importance for meaningfully assessing real-world Internet problems such as vulnerabilities to natural disasters (e.g. earthquakes, and hurricanes), economic disputes, malicious attacks (e.g. hijacking BGP), interdependencies and cascading failures (e.g. power grid), or network and data management issues (e.g. content distribution, cloud infrastructures). This has motivated significant efforts to measure, map, analyze, and visualize either the logical Autonomous Systems (AS) level or physical router-level structure of the Internet's topology over the past decade. Existing maps are known to be ...»

After successfully completing a summer internship at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), CIS Ph.D. student Yunfeng Zhang accepted an offer to continue working remotely as a part-time research assistant for PARC, while finishing his Ph.D. research at the University of Oregon. Yunfeng is working on a PARC project that is a multi-institution collaboration including PARC, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California Irvine, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Texas Houston, and numerous other top research labs. The project uses cognitive models—computer programs that simulate human information processing—to investigate the processes involved in human sensemaking. ...»

The Women in Computer Science (WICS) student group was approved for a $5,000 grant from Symantec. The grant will be used to continue and expand Project Hatch, an ongoing effort to introduce computer science concepts to Elementary, Middle, and High School students from local schools. During 2013-14 UO and Symantec volunteers will teach students Scratch, a widely-used drag-and-drop programming language developed at MIT. The intentions of Project Hatch are to help young people feel empowered by technology, to open their minds to the innumerable applications of programming and computer science, and to encourage creativity, imagination, and fun. The project was designed with especial focus on ...»

David Ozog, a Ph.D. student in the CIS department, has been awarded a Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) from the Department of Energy. Ozog is one of 10 students nationwide to receive the fellowship and the only Oregon recipient in this year’s group of awardees, which includes students from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, UC-Berkeley, and other top tier academic institutions. "This is a highly competitive fellowship that recognizes David’s academic accomplishments and future potential in computational science research," said Prof. Allen Malony, Ozog’s advisor. The award provides up to four years of support for doctoral studies in areas that focus on the use of ...»

Professor Dejing Dou is the leader of a multi-discipliny team that was recently awarded a 3-year $1.5M R01 grant from the NIH/NIGMS, entitled "Understanding the Mechanism of Social Network Influence in Health Outcomes through Multidimensional and Semantic Data Mining Approaches." Research in the design and implementation of the SMASH (Semantic Mining of Activity, Social, and Health data) system will address a critical need for formal ontologies, data mining, graph mining, and privacy preserving tools to help understand the influence of healthcare social networks on sustained weight loss, where the data are multi-dimensional, temporal, semantically heterogeneous, and very sensitive. The ...»