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Thanks for making the Rice Machine Learning Workshop on  January 24, 2017 a great success!  Over 400 attendees participated in a range of sessions on not just new machine learning theory and algorithms but their applications in the energy, medical, financial, and legal industries.

Rice University faculty speakers:  Genevera Allen on sparse learning, Richard Baraniuk on advanced data analytics, Paul Hand on machine vision, Ankit Patel on deep learning, and Anshumali Shrivastava on large-scale learning.

Industry speakers:  Thomas Halsey (ExxonMobil) on machine learning in the energy industry, Satyam Priyadarshy (Halliburton) on machine learning in the upstream oil and gas industry, Craig Rusin (Medical Informatics Corp.) on patient informatics; Hardeep Singh (VA Hospital Houston) on reducing medical misdiagnosis through machine learning, and Alan Lockett (CS Disco) on machine learning in the legal domain.

Keynote speaker:  Alfred Spector (Two Sigma)

See you next year at ML@RICE 2018!

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How thin can a camera be?  Very, say Rice University researchers who have developed patented prototypes of their technological breakthrough.

FlatCam, invented by the labs of Rice DSP faculty members Richard Baraniuk and Ashok Veeraraghavan, is little more than a thin sensor chip with a mask that replaces the lenses in a traditional camera.

Making it practical are the sophisticated computer algorithms that process what the sensor detects and converts the sensor measurements into images and videos.  More info.

Press coverage:

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John Treichler, Rice DSP alum, distinguished visiting professor, and pioneer in the development of digital signal processing (DSP), has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Now the president of Raytheon Applied Signal Technology of Sunnyvale, Calif., Treichler was cited by the NAE for his “contributions to digital signal processing and its applications to national intelligence gathering.” John is celebrated for inventing the “constant modulus” adaptive filtering algorithm, which is used to compensate for interference, such as multipath echoes, on communication signals.

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DSP alum Chinmay Hedge (PhD, 2012) has won the Best Paper Award at the 2015 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) for the paper "A Nearly-Linear Time Framework for Graph-Structured Sparsity" written with his collaborators Piotr Indyk and Ludwig Schmidt from MIT.

This is great momentum for starting in as an Assistant Professor at Iowa State University. Congratulations, Chin!

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Richard Baraniuk, the founder and director of OpenStax and Rice University's Victor E. Cameron Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named recipient of the 2015 IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal.

The medal, presented annually since 1956 by the former Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is given for outstanding contributions to education in the fields of interest to the organization. Baraniuk was specifically cited for his "fundamental contributions to open educational resources for electrical engineering and beyond."  The medal will be presented at the IEEE Honors Ceremony June 20 in New York City. Mulligan is a former president of IEEE.

Baraniuk founded Rice-based Connexions in 1999 to bring textbooks and other learning materials to the Internet. OpenStax grew from that effort as a way to provide high-quality, peer-reviewed, college-level textbooks to students worldwide. The books are free to download and can be printed at low cost.  The OpenStax library includes textbooks for college physics, sociology, economics, anatomy and physiology, and separate biology books for majors and nonmajors. Since its launch in 2012, OpenStax books have been selected for use by more than 1,100 college courses and downloaded nearly a million times, saving students more than $30 million.