Center for Computational Learning Systems @ Columbia University

CCLS Research

WordsEye Team with Daniel Bauer from CCLS wins grand prize for the New York State Business Plan Competition

Submitted by Manoj on Sun, 05/19/2013 - 9:47am

PhD Students Bob Coyne and Daniel Bauer (CCLS), along with team advisor Prof Julia Hirschberg and Neelam Brar from the Columbia-London EMBA-Global program, have won the $100,000 grand prize for the New York State Business Plan Competition. The Columbia team was chosen from among 430 teams from nearly 60 colleges and universities across the state. The team won for WordsEye, a natural language processing system that creates 3D scenes from simple textual descriptions.

New director of CCLS - announcement from Kathy McKeown, Director, IDSE

Submitted by Manoj on Tue, 04/09/2013 - 11:58pm

I am pleased to announce that Rebecca Passonneau has agreed to take over as Director of CCLS. Becky has been a member of CCLS for about seven years now (as her linked in account just reminded me) and was actively involved in the administration of CCLS over the past two years as acting associate director during the transition from Dave's reign as Director. Becky has been active in research efforts involving speech and dialog, multimodal processing, summarization evaluation, ConED projects, among many others. We are moving to a model similar to the chair model used in CS where director will serve for three years and may be elected to a second term by CCLS research scientists.

Please join me in welcoming Becky into her new position effective immediately.

CCLS's Apoorv Agarwal awarded an IBM PhD fellowship

Submitted by Manoj on Sun, 02/24/2013 - 3:24pm

Apoorv Agarwal, a PhD student in the Computer Science department who is working with Owen Rambow at the Center for Computational Learning Systems, has been awarded an IBM PhD Fellowship for 2013-2014. The award follows a highly competitive worldwide selection process. Apoorv's research at Columbia concentrates on extracting social networks from written documents, by identifying the "social events" which make up our social relations. For detecting social events, Apoorv uses advanced natural language processing methods including syntactic and semantic parsing, and machine learning approaches based on tree kernels. While an intern at IBM's Watson group in the past, Apoorv worked on improving the Watson system and on porting it to the medical domain.

CCLS NLP group sweeps the 2013 NAACL submissions

Submitted by Manoj on Wed, 02/20/2013 - 2:20pm

The CCLS NLP group sweeps the 2013 paper submissions to the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. This year, the paper acceptance rate to this prestigious conference is 30% for long papers, and 32% for short papers. Of the 140 papers at the conference, eight papers will be from CCLS NLP members, amounting to 6% of the program.

Congratulations CCLS NLP!

The papers are:

CCLS Senior Research Scholar Dr. Roger Anderson featured in a program from the BBC and PBS called "Inside the Megastorm"

Submitted by Manoj on Thu, 11/15/2012 - 10:28pm

CCLS Senior Research Scholar Dr. Roger Anderson will be a featured scientist in the Nova program from the BBC and PBS called "Inside the Megastorm" explaining the importance and integration of the electric grid with other infrastructures in NYC in the face of Sandy, and what to do next in NYC to prepare for climate change. It will premier on November 18th, Sunday night at 7pm on Channel 13 in NYC and nationally on your PBS stations.

To know more about this program, please visit - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/inside-the-megastorm.html.

In Memoriam: David L. Waltz

Submitted by Sam on Fri, 03/23/2012 - 3:08pm

David L. Waltz, Director here at the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University and prominent computer scientist, passed away on March 22nd at a hospital in Princeton, NJ. He was 68 years old.

To celebrate Dave's life and legacy through personal tributes, a page has been set up, which can be found here - Tributes to David Waltz.

If you would like to add a tribute to this page (messages and/or images), please send them through email to manojccls [dot] columbia [dot] edu (Manoj Pooleery.)

Prof. Vapnik Wins Pair of Honors

Submitted by Sam on Tue, 02/14/2012 - 1:48pm

Computer Science Professor Vladimir Vapnik has won two significant awards for his career contributions.

Vapnik won the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Instititute.

Dr. Owen Rambow receives a Google Research Award

Submitted by Sam on Thu, 12/08/2011 - 5:39pm

Normalization of i18n Treebanks

In a joint project with Lori Levin (CMU) (who independently received a related Google award), Owen Rambow will define a syntactic representation which will abstract as much as possible from language-specific differences.

Dr. Nizar Habash receives a Google Research Award

Submitted by Sam on Thu, 12/08/2011 - 3:39pm

Preserving Morphological Richness in Poor-Pivot-based Statistical Machine Translation

The proposed effort addresses the weakness of using a morphologically poor language (English) as a pivot/bridge in statistical machine translation between morphologically rich languages (Hebrew and Arabic).

Dave Waltz receives Distinguished Service Award!

Submitted by Sam on Thu, 06/09/2011 - 11:42am

Dr. David Waltz was selected as the 2011 recipient of the AAAI Distinguished Service Award. The award was established in 1999 to honor an individual for extraordinary and sustained service to the artificial intelligence community.