John Savage has been selected to serve as a 2009 Jefferson Science Fellow for the U.S. State Department, where he will work on cyber related issues for one year. Fellows remain on call as science advisers to the State Department for an additional five years. The prestigious Jefferson Science Fellows program was established in 2003 as a way of elevating the role of science and technology in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. Funding is provided by the State Department, but participants are chosen by independent panels of experts at the National Academies of Science, based on the ...

James Hays and Alexei Efros (Asst. Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University) received an award to investigate the use of Internet imagery for image understanding tasks. Computer vision and computer graphics algorithms benefit from large amounts of training data, and websites such as Flickr and Picasa offer several orders of magnitude more training data than current data sets. However, the annotations and labels that accompany these images are sparse, noisy, and in some cases novel to the research community. James and Alexei are researching robust search and learning methods to address the challenges of this data -- massive scale and ...