December 18, 2014                                                                                                Vol. 17, No. 9
In This Issue

Forbes' Chief Insights Officer recently interviewed the co-founder of Appinions,

a company that Claire Cardie co-founded and is the Chief Scientist for. CEO
Larry Levy says, "I'd ... been involved with the National Science Foundation
and was one of the panelists for their SBIR grant process. So I knew some of the
best colleges that were producing great work in this area. I put a team onto  doing the research to find me people that were pulling together the best innovation in and around this area. That's how I got to Cornell" and to  contacting Cardie.

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Escobedo elected American Physical Society Fellow

Professor Fernando Escobedo was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society:


"For the elucidation and prediction of complex phases formed by block copolymers, elastomers, and colloidal suspensions of anisotropic particles, and the advancement of novel Monte Carlo simulation methods."

   Fernando Escobedo, as well as the others elected to Fellowship this year will be published in the March 2015 issue of APS News. The announcement will also appear on the Fellowship Page of the APS Home Page 

Joachims elected AAAI Fellow

Thorsten Joachims was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The AAAI Fellows program recognizes individuals for providing intellectual leadership and making outstanding contributions in the field of Artificial Intelligence. Thorsten is honored for his contributions to the theory and practice of machine learning and information retrieval. AAAI will celebrate the newly elected Fellows at a dinner during AAAI-15 in Austin, Texas, USA. The dinner will be held on Tuesday, January 27 at the Hyatt Regency Austin Hotel.   

Topaloglu promoted

Huseyin Topaloglu was promoted to full professor by the Cornell University Board of Trustees. His appointment began July 1, 2014. 

 EAS Professor Pryor named AAAS Fellow 

Sara C. Pryor, new Professor in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was one of six Cornell University faculty to become a 2014 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Professor Kay new honorary Professor of the University of Buenos Aires

Suzanne Mahlburg Kay, William and Katherine Snee Professor of Geological Sciences at Cornell University, is now an honorary professor (Profesora Honoraria) at the University of Buenos Aires. Kay is only the second honorary professor appointed in the geological sciences at the University of Buenos Aires.  The approval of the Kay appointment was in Resolucion 210/14 with the decision based on academic accomplishments at the global level and contributions to the University of Buenos Aires and other universities in Argentina through short courses and the collaborative field course with Cornell, which began in 1996. Another consideration was Kay's recent presidency of the Geological Society of America, which is the largest society dedicated solely to the Geological Science in the world.

ECE Postdoc Subhonmesh Bose named to inaugural class of Atkinson Postdoctoral Fellows in Sustainability

We can't control when the wind blows or when the sun shines, which makes renewable resources like wind and solar a challenge to integrate into the power grid. When the supply side is highly variable, how do we reliably procure and pay for power? As one of four inaugural postdoctoral fellows with the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Subhonmesh Bose's research will develop a mathematical framework and simulation platform to answer this fundamental question. 

Awards and honors   

 

James Davis, an Operations Research Ph.D. student who is co-advised by ORIE faculty Huseyin Topaloglu and David Williamson, was a finalist, and awarded honorable mention in the 2014 INFORMS George Nicholson Student Paper Competition, for his paper, "Assortment Planning under the Multinomial Logit Model with Totally Unimodular Constraint Structures".

  

Eoin O'Mahony, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science who is advised by David Shmoys, won the 2014 INFORMS Doing Good with Good OR - Student Paper Competition for his paper, "Smarter Tools for (Citi)Bike Sharing".

  

Emeritus Professor Robin Roundy was inducted as an INFORMS Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM) Fellow during the 2014 INFORMS conference last month in San Francisco. 

  

Professor �va Tardos was selected by the The International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics to deliver the Olga Taussky-Todd Lecture for the upcoming ICIAM 2015.

She was chosen for her numerous and deep contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, discrete algorithms and algorithmic game theory, and her ability to convey the basic ideas and inspire others to pursue them. The International
Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics is the most important international event in applied and industrial mathematics, held once every four years. The Olga Taussky-Todd Lectureship is an honor conferred on a "woman who has made outstanding contributions in applied mathematics and/or scientific computation".

  

Graduating Ph.D. student Anshumali Shrivastava, in work with Ping Li, received one of two best paper awards at NIPS 2014 for "Asymmetric LSH (ALSH) for Sublinear Time Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS)".  This is out of 414 accepted papers from 1678 submissions. One of the reviews (NIPS publishes  
reviews for accepted papers) states, "The result is very exciting, as it solves an important open problem, creating a method for fast hashing-based retrieval for an important class of similarities, that previously could only approximate dot product via cosine distances via Charikar's method. The detailed analysis showing viability and practical recipes for parameter settings ... is excellent, and provides a ready-to-use recipe to practitioners."

  

Deep neural networks are easily fooled!  Ph.D. student Jason Yosinski, together with coauthors from the University of Wyoming, is making news with work showing that "it is easy to produce images that are completely unrecognizable to humans, but that state-of-the- art DNNs believe to be recognizable objects with 99.99% confidence (e.g. labeling with certainty that white noise static is a lion)". This result hit number one on Hacker News, was written up by New Scientist,Gizmodo, phys.org, and Extreme Tech, and an article by Wired is anticipated.

  

A Cornell Ph.D. student earned a perfect score at the HackerRank national coding challenge last month, finishing in third place among approximately 600 other competitors from 87 universities across the country. Daniel Fleischman, a captain of Cornell's Association for Computing Machinery Programming Team, said his career in coding competitions began when he was urged by one of his undergraduate professors to participate in them.

  

Professor �va Tardos gave a lecture on "Efficiency of  Nash-equilibria in games and machine learning" as part of her inauguration as an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. A photo gallery of the event is available.

 
Undergraduate students Kevin Lee and Christopher Yu,
have both been selected for honorable mention for the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Male Researcher Award for Ph.D.-granting institutions 2015.
  

Design Competition for Diversity Programs

The Cornell University Diversity Council and the University Diversity Officers are sponsoring a competition for a new graphic that represents the university's Statement on Diversity and Inclusiveness, "Open Doors, Open Hearst, Open Minds." The new graphic will symbolize the rededication of Cornell's commitment to diversity and inclusion as part of celebrating the university's 150 years of rich and diverse history.

 

The design contest is open to current Cornell students, faculty and staff. Winning design will be based on effective illustration of the Statement on Diversity and Inclusiveness, artistic quality, and capability for reproduction in print and digital form. Prizes donated by the Cornell Store: grand prize of an iPad; two honorable mentions of $100 Cornell Store gift certificates. For full contest rules and directions for submitting entries, please visit: http://diversity.cornell.edu/content/call-entries.

 

Entries accepted until January 20, 2015.
Holiday Gift to the United Way

Looking for a gift this holiday season  that is more about community than traditional gifts?

     A contribution to any one of  United Way of Tompkins County's many member agencies in the name of family, friends, neighbors or co-workers, has staying, and caring power.
     United Way assists everyone, from the American Red Cross to Lifelong to the Y.
     Donate online or download a contribution card at http://unitedway.cornell.edu.

Seasons greetings, and thanks for considering a United Way contribution in the name of a friend or family member, as a special gift this holiday season.