News and Announcements

The National Institutes of Health has awarded the University of Pittsburgh an $11 million, four-year grant to lead a Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Center of Excellence, an initiative that will help biomedical scientists capitalize more fully on large amounts of available data and to make data science a more prominent component of biomedical research. The Center for Causal Modeling and Discovery (CCMD) is a collaboration of researchers at Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and Yale University. The Center will develop and implement causal modeling and discovery algorithms to help address several key biomedical problems, including the discovery of cell signals that drive the development of cancer, the molecular basis for the onset and progression of several lung diseases, and the functional connections within the human brain.  Dr. Gregory Cooper is the Center Director and an ISP faculty member, as are several other CCMD investigators. Additional information is available at http://bd2k.nih.gov/FY14/COE/COE.html.

ISP faculty, Diane Litman's joint work with Katherine Forbes-Riley has been awarded the ISCA Best Paper Published in Speech Communication (2011-2013). The paper was selected by the Speech Communication editorial board under the coordination of Bernd Möbius, Editor-in-Chief and can be found under the following title:

Forbes-Riley, K. and Litman, D. Benefits and challenges of real-time uncertainty detection and adaptation in a spoken dialogue computer tutor. Speech Communication, vol 53, issue 9, pages 1115-1136, 2011