Newsletter March 2009 In this issue: Editorial | Events | Spotlights | News | Conferences | Funding | Groups | Jobs EDITORIAL Welcome to the March issue of the CTSB newsletter. This month's faculty spotlight features Assistant Professor and CTSB affiliate Jason Hartline (EECS). You also have the chance to meet PhD candidate Mengxiao Zhu and read about this issue's featured research project KaraokeCallout. The CTSB colloquium series continues with Brian Scassellati (Yale) who will talk about Social Robots and Human Social Development on March 5th at 4pm (Frances Searle 1-483). Please note a change for March's Thank CTSB It's Friday event. Due to TSB recruitment weekend, this month's TCIF event will take place on Friday, March 13th. Enjoy reading this issue and we look forward to hearing from you. - Christopher Riesbeck (Acting Director, CTSB) EVENTS Upcoming CTSB events to mark in your calendar: Colloquium Series Brian Scassellati (Yale) will visit Northwestern on March 5, 2009 at 4pm (Francis Searle 1-483) to discuss Social Robots and Human Social Development. Visit the CTSB colloquium page for further details. If you would like to arrange a meeting with any of the CTSB speakers, please contact Patti Bao . Thank CTSB It's Friday! TCIF will be on March 13th in the CTSB (Frances Searle, 2-431) from 12pm-2pm. If you have specific ideas of activities you would like to see or showcase at TCIF this winter quarter, please contact Lindsey Lumley at l-lumley@northwestern.edu. SPOTLIGHTS Faculty Spotlight: Jason Hartline Dr. Hartline's current research interests lie in the intersection of the fields of theoretical computer science, game theory, and economics. With the Internet developing as the single most important arena for resource sharing among parties with diverse and selfish interests, traditional algorithmic and distributed systems approaches are insufficient. Instead, in protocols for the Internet, game-theoretic and economic issues must be considered. A fundamental research endeavor in this new field is the design and analysis of auction mechanisms and pricing algorithms. His hobbies include playing sports such as ice hockey, soccer, volleyball, and ultimate; appreciating arts such as fashion, theater, and dance; and participating in sporty-arts such as lindy hop and aerial acrobatics. Dr. Hartline joined the EECS department (and MEDS, by courtesy) in January of 2008. He was a researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley from 2004 to 2007, where his research covered foundational topic of algorithmic mechanism design and applications to auctions for sponsored search. He was an active researcher in the San Francisco bay area algorithmic game theory community and was a founding organizer of the Bay Algorithmic Game Theory Symposium. In 2003, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Aladdin Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2003 with advisor Anna Karlin and B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1997. Student Spotlight: Mengxiao Zhu Mengxiao Zhu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Northwestern University. She holds degrees in Communication (M.A.) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Computer Science (B.E. & M.E.) and Science and English (B.S.) from the University of Science and Technology of China. Her research areas include Organization Theory and Systems Analysis, Social Network Analysis, Emergence of Socio-technical Networks, Agent-based Modeling and Complex Social Systems. She is also a member of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group led by Professor Noshir Contractor. She has been involved in several NSF and NIH-funded projects focusing on computer-mediated communication in emergency response teams, and on the development of knowledge networks and the dynamics of collaborations both in the real world, within companies and research institutions, and in virtual worlds, such as Second Life and Everquest II. Research Spotlight: Karaoke Callout KaraokeCallout is a game you play over a cell phone, where you challenge your friends to sing Beatles songs better than you. KaraokeCallout runs on Nokia S60 phones and has been tested on the Nokia 6682 and the Nokia N70. By June 2009, the game will also be an iPhone application. The user selects a song and sings it into the cell phone. The audio is sent to a server which rates the quality of the singing by measuring how closely it resembles a canonical example of the song stored in the server database, sending a score back to the user. The user may then challenge anyone in the phone's contact list to sing the same song. An SMS text challenge is sent to the challenged person's cell phone. The challenged person sings the song, attempting to better the performance of the challenger. This challenge may then be repeated, with either party selecting a new song with which to "call out" the other party. Over the course of an interaction, numerous examples of each party's singing are created and stored. These may then be used to train a Query By Humming system to the idiosyncrasies of each user's singing, as well as providing new query targets for the system. Currently, only Beatles songs are available, but the developers hope to add more music in the future. Stay tuned! By June 2009, KaraokeCallout will have an official website. For more information, visit the Interactive Audio Lab Karaoke Callout website. Project members include Assistant Professor Bryan Pardo (EECS), and undergraduate students Jeff Hentschel and Anda Bereczky. Faculty & Student News Roundup Aggelos K. Katsaggelos (EECS) has been elected as one of 59 Fellows of SPIE, an international society for light-based research, for achievements in Image and Video Processing. Ken Forbus (EECS) was elected as a member of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society. Joan Chiao (Psychology) along with T. Harada, H. Komeda, Z. Li, Y. Mano, D.N. Saito, T.B. Parrish, N. Sadato, and T. Iidaka co-authored "Neural Basis of Individualistic and Collectivistic Views of Self" to appear in Human Brain Mapping in an upcoming issue. Pablo Boczkowski (Communication) authored "Rethinking hard and soft news production: From common ground to divergent paths" for the January 2009 issue of the Journal of Communication. Peter Dinda (EECS), along with J. Miller and J. Lange, co-wrote "EmNet: Satisfying the Individual User Through Empathic Home Networks: Summary" for the ACM SIGMETRICS 2009 proceedings to be held in June. Funding Opportunities Note: the following list is not exhaustive. You can help by alerting us to relevant opportunities. NSF - Petascale Computing Resource Allocations In 2011, a new NSF-funded petascale computing system, Blue Waters, will go online at the University of Illinois. The goal of this facility is to open up new possibilities in science and engineering by providing computational capability that makes it possible for investigators to tackle much larger and more complex research challenges across a wide spectrum of domains. The purpose of this solicitation is to invite research groups that have a compelling science or engineering challenge that will require petascale computing resources to submit requests for allocations of resources on the Blue Waters system. Proposers must be prepared to demonstrate that they have a science or engineering research problem that requires and can effectively exploit the petascale computing capabilities offered by Blue Waters. Proposals from or including junior researchers are encouraged as one of the goals of this solicitation is to build a community capable of using petascale computing. Full proposals due March 17, 2009. NSF - Science and Technology Centers: Integrative Partnerships The Science and Technology Centers (STC): Integrative Partnerships program supports innovative, potentially transformative, complex research and education projects that require large-scale, long-term awards. STCs conduct world-class research through partnerships among academic institutions, national laboratories, industrial organizations, and/or other public/private entities, and via international collaborations, as appropriate. They provide a means to undertake important investigations at the interfaces of disciplines and/or fresh approaches within disciplines. STC investments support the NSF vision of advancing discovery, innovation and education beyond the frontiers of current knowledge, and empowering future generations in science and engineering. Proposals may only be submitted by the following: Preliminary proposals and invited full proposals may be submitted by U.S. academic institutions that have research and degree-granting education programs in any area of research supported by NSF. The lead institution is expected to develop multi-institutional partnerships or arrangements with other universities/colleges, national laboratories, research museums, private sector research laboratories, state and local government laboratories, and international collaborations that enable the Center to attain its strategic goals. Applications due April 30, 2009. CTSB Exploration Grants We encourage faculty and graduate students to collaborate across departments on projects that might potentially lead to larger grant proposals. We are interested in supporting the hire of undergraduates as a part of these collaborative teams. Please contact Chris Riesbeck for further details. Conference Submission Deadlines IJCAI 2009 Workshop on Intelligent Systems for Assisted Cognition in Pasadena, California (July 12, 2009). Submissions due March 6, 2009. SSST-3 3rd Workshop on Syntax and Structure in Statistical Translation in Boulder, Colorado (June 5, 2009). Submissions due March 6, 2009. NLP for Educational Applications 4th Workshop on the Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications in Boulder, Colorado (June 5, 2009). Submissions due March 6, 2009. MT Summit Machine Translation Summit XII in Ontario Canada (August 26-30, 2009). Workshop proposals due March 6, 2009. Research papers due April 28, 2009. IDC 2009 International Conference on Interaction Design and Children in Como, Italy (June 3-5, 2009). Short papers and demos due March 6, 2009. Workshop position papers due April 8, 2009. PACLING 2009 Conference of the Pacific Association of Computational Linguistics in Sapporo, Japan (September 1-4, 2009). Submissions due April 15, 2009. UBICOMP 2009 11th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing in Orlando, Florida (September 30 - October 3, 2009). Submissions due April 17, 2009. IVA 09 9th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (September 14-16, 2009). All papers due April 17, 2009. ACL-IJNLP 2009 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing in Suntec, Singapore (August 2-7, 2009). Short papers due April 26, 2009. GESPIN 2009 Gesture and Speech Interaction at the Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland (September 24-26, 2009). Papers due May 1, 2009. Upcoming Conferences and Workshops Voice Search Conference 2009 in San Diego, California (March 2-4, 2009). HRI 2009 4th Human-Robot Interaction Conference in San Diego, California (March 11-13, 2009). ICA 2009 8th International Conference on Independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation in Paraty-RJ, Brazil (March 15-18, 2009). AAAI 2009 Spring Symposium on Intelligent Narrative in Palo Alto, California (March 23-25, 2009). ICCPOL 2009 Language Technology for the Knowledge-based Economy in Hong Kong, Hong Kong(March 26-27, 2009). Reading Groups If you would like to advertise a reading group, write to let us know. Employment Opportunities If you would like to advertise job openings within your research group or lab, please e-mail , providing a brief description of the position(s) available, and any skills / experience required. You can sign-up, manage the way you receive the CTSB newsletter, or forward the current newsletter to a colleague, via the CTSB newsletter management page CENTER FOR TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR Northwestern University | Frances Searle Building, #2-431 | 2240 Campus Drive | Evanston, IL 60208 | USA http://ctsb.northwestern.edu