The International Neural Network Society (INNS) selected Distinguished Prof. Pierre Baldi as the recipient of the 2023 INNS Dennis Gabor Award for “remarkable contributions to the engineering of neural networks, applications of machine learning and related sciences.” Named for the esteemed electrical engineer and physicist who invented holography, the award recognizes outstanding individuals whose scientific life contributions to the field of neural networks have proven to be paradigm-changing and long-lasting. Prof. Baldi was honored to receive the award at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence in July 2024.

Work by UCI ICS doctoral students Gavin Kerrigan and Giosue Migiliorini, together with their advisor Prof. Padhraic Smyth, received an Outstanding Student Paper Award at the 2024 Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. Their research on functional flow matching generalizes recent deep generative models from discrete, vector representations to continuous functions, with diverse applications including the analysis of time-series data.

Congratulations to PhD student Justus Will and faculty Stephan Mandt and Pierre Baldi for being part of the team that won the Outstanding Dataset Paper award at the NeurIPS 2023 Conference, for their paper ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation. The ClimSim dataset introduced in the paper is the largest-ever data compendium designed for machine learning-enhanced physics research.

Computer Science Professor Rina Dechter of UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) is one of five co-principal investigators for a $5 million, multi-institutional National Science Foundation grant titled “Causal Foundations of Decision Making and Learning.” The grant, which aims to revolutionize AI decision-making by advancing the science of causal inference is a collaboration between UCI, Columbia University, and USC.

Researchers associated with the UC Irvine Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems published more than ten workshop and conference papers at the 2022 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. Highlights include an oral presentation by PhD students Alex Boyd and Sam Showalter, with Profs. Smyth and Mandt, on Predictive Querying for Autoregressive Neural Sequence Models; a tutorial by Yibo Yang and Stephan Mandt on Data Compression with Machine Learning; a talk by Prof. Pierre Baldi in the All Things Attention workshop; and papers in workshops on Deep Reinforcement Learning, Trustworthy and Socially Responsible Machine Learning, and Time Series for Health.

The Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine invites applications for tenure-track or tenured faculty positions beginning July 1, 2023. This faculty search targets applicants with research expertise in all aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning, broadly interpreted. Candidates should follow the online application instructions for Recruit opening JPF07847, and submit materials by December 15, 2022 in order to receive full consideration.

Congratulations to Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi for being named a 2022 Rising Star in Computer Networking and Communications by N2Women. Prof. Jyothi explores innovative applications of machine learning to systems and networking problems, including award-winning recent work characterizing the resilience of the internet to solar superstorms.

Congratulations to CML PhD student Robert Logan, and his advisor Prof. Sameer Singh, who received a Best New Task Paper Award at the 2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). Their method, FRUIT: Faithfully Reflecting Updated Information in Text, uses language models to automatically update articles (like those on Wikipedia) when new evidence is obtained. This work is motivated not only by a desire to assist the volunteers who maintain Wikipedia, but by the ways it pushes the boundaries of the NLP field.

Two faculty affiliated with the UCI Center for Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems have been elected as 2021 AAAS Fellows, joining 190 other AAAS Fellows at UC Irvine. Rina Dechter, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Research in the Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences, was elected for contributions to computational aspects of automated reasoning and knowledge representation, including search, constraint processing, and probabilistic reasoning, and for service to the computing community. Padhraic Smyth, Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science and Associate Director of the UCI Center for Machine Learning, was elected for distinguished contributions to the field of machine learning, particularly the development of statistical foundations and methodologies. Congratulations to them both!

Congratulations to each of Professors Stephan Mandt and Sameer Singh for recently being awarded prestigious CAREER awards for basic research from the National Science Foundation. Professor Mandt’s research will focus on a unified set of mathematical and statistical tools for resource-efficient deep learning, with expected applications to new methods for compressing both neural networks and their data (e.g., images and video), as well as new algorithms for faster training. Professor Singh will develop new techniques and methodologies to address vulnerabilities in current state-of-the-art natural language processing models based on deep learning by developing several techniques in support of more robust training and evaluation, with applications to automated methods for finding and detecting problems in such models, explaining them to users, and fixing them.