News

November 2024 - TTIC at SODA 2025

Recent TTIC Ph.D. graduate Shashank Srivastava was awarded the Best Paper and Best Student Paper awards at the ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2025) for his paper, “Improved List Size for Folded Reed-Solomon Codes.”

Srivastava’s research focuses on a critical challenge in coding theory: how to tolerate corruption in data by adding redundancy. Traditional methods face limitations when it comes to correcting more than 50% corruption. However, by producing a small list of potential candidates instead of attempting a single solution, much more corruption can be handled effectively, according to Srivastava.

“My results obtain an exponential improvement in the list size for folded Reed-Solomon codes,” Srivastava explains. His work presents an exciting advancement, showing that these codes, known to correct as many errors as possible, can achieve far better list sizes than previously thought, improving their efficiency and applicability in real-world scenarios.

The inspiration for this research emerged from earlier work Srivastava was doing on a different code family.

“Upon closer inspection, I realized I could give a simpler proof for the folded Reed-Solomon codes,” he said. “Combining this new proof with some existing techniques based on folded Wronskian determinants led to the final improvement.”

Congratulations to Shashank Srivastava for winning the SODA 2025 Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards and to TTIC authors for their papers at the conference:

Shashank Srivastava (TTIC), “Improved List Size for Folded Reed-Solomon Codes.”

Suprovat Ghoshal (Northwestern University and TTIC); Konstantin Makarychev (Northwestern University); Yury Makarychev (TTIC), “Constraint Satisfaction Problems with Advice.”

Raghuvansh R. Saxena (TIFR); Noah Singer (Carnegie Mellon University); Madhu Sudan (Harvard); Santhoshini Velusamy (TTIC), “Streaming Algorithms via Local Algorithms for Maximum Directed Cut.”

Avrim Blum (TTIC); Vaidehi Srinivas (Northwestern University), “Competitive strategies to use “warm start” algorithms with predictions.”

Julia Chuzhoy (TTIC); Merav Parter (Weizmann Institute of Science), “Fully Dynamic Algorithms for Graph Spanners via Low-Diameter Router Decomposition.”

Naren Sarayu Manoj, Max Ovsiankin (TTIC), “The Change-of-Measure Method, Block Lewis Weights, and Approximating Matrix Block Norms.”

Ohad Trabelsi (TTIC), “(Almost) Ruling Out SETH Lower Bounds for All-Pairs Max-Flow.”

November 2024 - Introducing TTIC’s New Faculty Members

We are thrilled to welcome five new faculty members to TTIC, one Assistant Professor and four Research Assistant Professors, each working on exciting research directions in their respective fields.

Shiry Ginosar, Assistant Professor, joins TTIC from the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science. Her research focuses on artificial social intelligence, including human-AI interaction, social learning, and computer perception. Professor Ginosar’s interdisciplinary approach draws from machine learning, psychology, and neuroscience to understand both natural and artificial intelligence. Her research has distinctly influenced the areas of video synthesis and social behavior prediction. She is also a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google DeepMind and has significantly impacted the fields of video synthesis and social behavior prediction.

“I came to TTIC because of the cutting-edge science and friendly community,” Professor Ginosar said. “TTIC had the nicest, most technically engaged, scientifically curious, and honest people of all the places I visited.”

Kanishka Misra, Research Assistant Professor (RAP), specializes in computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), and cognitive science, using AI models to investigate linguistic phenomena and conceptual meaning. His research has earned recognition with awards at top conferences, including EACL 2023 and ACL 2023.

“The RAP position offers unique flexibility and ample research funding,” says Professor Misra. “It’s the ideal role for developing an independent research program without external pressures. I’m thrilled to be here!”

Recently, in collaboration with his postdoc advisor Kyle Mahowald at UT Austin, Professor Misra studied how language models leverage indirect evidence in data to learn rare linguistic patterns, such as the AANN (article adjective numeral noun) structure—e.g., “a beautiful five days.” Going forward during his RAP term, he plans to expand this “controlled rearing” approach to study models trained on various modalities, including speech and vision, alongside text.

Zhewei Sun, RAP, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and specializes in natural language processing. Professor Sun’s research aims to enhance the robustness of NLP systems, particularly in handling creative and context-dependent language. By combining deep learning methods with linguistic and cognitive insights, his work has gained recognition at leading NLP conferences.

“The RAP position at TTIC is a unique opportunity that combines the best of two worlds,” Professor Sun said. “It offers complete academic freedom without the usual duties that are associated with a standard tenure-track position. I started considering the position seriously when I had the opportunity to interact with TTIC researchers during my advisor’s invited talk. I was very impressed by the TTIC community’s research vigor and enthusiasm.”

Professor Sun looks forward to collaborating with TTIC and University of Chicago students and faculties on projects of joint interest.

Jingyan Wang, RAP, holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University and focuses on statistical machine learning, with a focus on studying the role of people in evaluation problems. Professor Wang’s research improves systems in domains such as hiring and peer review, with an interdisciplinary approach spanning multiple fields. She has been honored with the Best Student Paper Award at AAMAS 2019 and recognized as a Rising Star in EECS and Data Science.

“TTIC is well-known for its research and impact in the field,” Professor Wang said. “When I was a Ph.D. student, I collaborated with a faculty member at CMU who was previously a RAP, listened to a talk given by a TTIC faculty member who was visiting us, and had a friend who was an intern and later a postdoc at TTIC.”

Professor Wang looks forward to hosting summer interns, collaborating with researchers, and continuing on her independent research agenda.

Tianhao Wang, RAP, recently completed his Ph.D. at Yale University. His research delves into the theoretical foundations of statistical learning, with a focus on high-dimensional statistics and deep learning. Professor Wang’s work is contributing to advancing our understanding of the mathematical principles behind modern machine learning.

We look forward to the exciting contributions these scholars will bring to TTIC!

October 2024 - Jinbo Xu’s AI Breakthrough Leads to 2024 Nobel Prize

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict protein structures, with one half going to David Baker for “computational protein design,” and the other half shared between Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper for their work on “protein structure prediction.” This award highlights the groundbreaking role AI now plays in biology, particularly in understanding how proteins fold into 3D shapes.

An early innovator in this revolution is Professor Jinbo Xu from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), whose 2016 research laid the foundation for the AI methods that eventually led to these Nobel-recognized achievements. Professor Xu was the first to recognize how deep learning—an advanced form of AI—could be applied to the protein folding problem, one of the most difficult challenges in biology. Understanding how proteins fold is crucial because their shape determines their function in the body, and misfolded proteins are often linked to diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Before Professor Xu’s work, scientists relied on methods like evolutionary analysis, which worked only for certain proteins. Professor Xu’s key innovation was using deep learning to predict protein structures more accurately, even for very complex proteins that were harder to analyze with traditional methods. His approach helped solve the protein folding problem and led to major advancements in understanding how proteins work, even the very challenging membrane proteins.

Professor Xu’s research also led to the creation of RaptorX, a widely-used tool for protein structure prediction, which has become a valuable resource for scientists around the world. According to a post by Serafim Batzoglou, Chief Data Officer of Seer and Stanford University professor of computer science, “Jinbo Xu is the first to develop the deep learning algorithm that was essentially reimplemented and enhanced in the original AlphaFold” (@s_batzoglou, 2024). Professor Xu’s pioneering method has been cited as a major influence on the development of AlphaFold, the AI system that transformed the field and played a pivotal role in the Nobel Prize recognition.

Professor John Moult, founder and chairman of CASP (Critical Assessment of Protein Prediction), further emphasized Xu’s impact, stating that his work “was quite influential” and demonstrated “the sort of things you might do with deep learning” (Moult, 2024). “I was excited to see AI for protein structure recognized by the Nobel Prize,” Professor Xu said. “Our 2016 paper showed for the first time that AI could be a very effective tool for studying proteins, and it has since changed the field.”

Professor Xu’s journey began during his Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo, where he combined his computer science expertise with the complex problem of protein folding. Though it was initially unclear if deep learning could work in this field, Professor Xu’s research proved that it could significantly outperform older methods, opening the door for AI’s broader use in biology.

According to Professor Xu, before 2016, machine learning had been used to study protein folding but was not very successful. It was unknown at the time if deep learning would be useful for the field.

“Starting in late 2016, other groups started to notice my article and research, and they started using my arguments,” Professor Xu said. “In 2018, quite a few groups implemented methods very similar to mine and a big performance leap was observed in CASP13. The field recognized that the deep learning proposed in my paper was very powerful.”

Looking forward, Professor Xu believes AI will continue to break new ground in biological research. One of the next big challenges, he notes, will be using AI to design drugs, though getting regulatory approval (such as the FDA) for AI-designed drugs remains a significant hurdle.

“I hope this recognition will inspire more researchers to explore AI’s potential in biology and chemistry,” Professor Xu said. “AI is changing so many fields, and this is just the beginning.”

Professor Xu received his B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China, an M.Sc. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo. He has held positions at both Waterloo and MIT and has received numerous awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and the NSF CAREER award. He has been a Professor at TTIC since 2005.

September 2024 - Diploma and Awards Ceremony 2024

On September 24, 2024, TTIC held its Diploma and Awards ceremony at The Study at the University of Chicago campus.

“Today we celebrate the significant accomplishments of our [students] over the last several years,” Matthew Turk, President of TTIC, said. “This year we have our largest graduating class ever. This is the culmination of years of hard work and effort, and I want to offer my congratulations to all of you and emphasize what a significant accomplishment this is.”

Ph.D. diploma recipients include: Lingyu Gao, Boqiao (Ben) Lai, Han Shao, Freda Shi, Shashank Srivastava, Kevin Stangl, Takuma Yoneda, and Davis Yoshida.

Lingyu Gao’s Ph.D. thesis was “Harnessing the Intrinsic Knowledge of Pretrained Language Models for Challenging Text Classification Settings.” She worked with her advisor, Professor Kevin Gimpel, on the research areas of natural language processing and computational linguistics. At the time of her graduation, she had started a position at Educational Testing Service as an AI engineer.

Gao expressed the importance of patience and hope in regards to her Ph.D. journey, when reflecting on her “wonderful time at TTIC.”

Ben Lai, advised by Professor Jinbo Xu, did his Ph.D. thesis on “Leveraging Deep Generative Model For Computational Protein Design And Optimization.” Lai’s research focus is on computational biology and bioinformatics, and machine learning and optimization. Lai has since joined Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago as an AI Fellow.

“I’m very grateful that I can be here today,” Lai said. “I hope all of you can stand here in a few years.”

Han Shao, advised by Professor Avrim Blum, was awarded Thesis of Distinction for her Ph.D. thesis “Trustworthy Machine Learning under Social and Adversarial Data Sources.”

“Coming to TTIC is one of the best decisions I have ever made in my life,” Shao said. “[Professor] Avrim Blum is the best advisor, and I really enjoyed the last few years of my life here. TTIC is a small community where everyone knows each other, students hang out together, and professors are supportive.”

Shao will spend this year as a postdoc at the Harvard Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, and she will join the University of Maryland as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science in fall 2025.

Freda Shi’s thesis, “Learning Language Structures through Grounding,” was also awarded a Thesis of Distinction. Shi worked with advisors Professor Karen Livescu and Professor Kevin Gimpel with a research focus on speech and language. She joined the University of Waterloo this year as an Assistant Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science and is a faculty member at the Vector Institute.

When reflecting on her time at TTIC, Shi said she enjoyed the social events and workshops, and she recalls fondly on organizing and presenting her work at TTIC student workshops, as well as her first workshop during her Ph.D. journey at the 2019 Midwest Speech and Language Days.

“The TTIC community has been incredibly welcoming and friendly to everyone,” Shi said. “I can’t even imagine a better one. I’m incredibly fortunate to have Professors Kevin Gimpel and Karen Livescu as my Ph.D. advisors. Over the past few years, they have offered me the highest level of freedom that I can imagine in terms of research topics, and have been incredibly supportive in everything.”

Kevin Stangl worked with advisor Professor Avrim Blum on machine learning theory. His thesis was titled “Fairness, Accuracy, and Unreliable Data”, and he joined the startup company HiddenLayer as a Research Scientist.

“Thank you to my family for coming, and thank you to all the staff at TTIC,” Stangl said. “Thank you in particular to my advisor, [Professor] Avrim Blum, who I just can’t say enough kind things about.”

Shashank Srivastava’s thesis, “Continuous Optimization for Decoding Errors,” was awarded a Thesis of Distinction. He worked under advisor Professor Madhur Tulsiani on algorithms and complexity.

“The atmosphere at TTIC is very supportive, and it is very likely that you will get the help you seek,” Srivastava said, as a piece of advice to future Ph.D. students. “I [also] believe that showing up in person helps in unexpected ways. Do that as much as you can.”

Srivastava will start as a postdoc, jointly at Rutgers and Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, this fall.

Takuma Yoneda’s Ph.D. thesis was titled “Generative Modeling Perspective for Control and Reasoning in Robotics.” Yoneda worked with his advisor Professor Matt Walter with a research focus on robotics, speech and language, and computer vision.

“I have many great memories at TTIC,” Yoneda said. “I remember we had a fantastic architecture tour on a boat, and I also liked the karaoke party where administrative staff and even some professors sang. I also really enjoyed the frequent opportunities to mingle and chat with other folks in the institute, at tea time, lunches, and other various events.”

Yoneda has started a new position as a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind.

Davis Yoshida’s Ph.D. thesis was titled “Making the Most of your Model: Methods for Finetuning and Applying Pretrained Transformers.” He worked with his advisor, Professor Kevin Gimpel, in the research areas of machine learning and natural language processing. Yoshida has started a position at Cotinua AI as a machine learning engineer.

“My favorite part of the TTIC community was how many kind and supportive people I met during my time there,” Yoshida said, reflecting on his experience.

Master’s within the Ph.D. program diploma recipients included Chung-Ming Chien, Melissa Dutz, Nirmit Joshi, Ron Mosenzon, Donya Saless, and Marcelo Sandoval-Castañeda. While TTIC does not have a terminal Master’s program in computer science, pre-candidacy students receive a master’s degree during the process of obtaining their Ph.D.

TTIC’s 2024 Outstanding TA Award, which recognizes a student’s stand-out dedication and effort as a teaching assistant, as nominated by students of the courses, was awarded to Nirmit Joshi.

“I would like to thank the community for the recognition,” Joshi said. “It was a great feeling to help students throughout the class and help them see concepts.”

The Diploma and Awards ceremony concluded with final remarks from President Matthew Turk.

“TTIC’s mission focuses on having impact, especially through our research and education, and there’s nothing that exemplifies this mission more than seeing our students receive their degrees,” Matthew Turk said. “We look forward to hearing about your future paths and achievements as you move on into the world and new positions, new experiences, and new challenges.”

Congratulations to award recipients and the graduating class of 2024!

September 2024 - TTIC takes home Outstanding Paper Award at ACL’24

Ph.D. candidate Davis Yoshida, former TTIC Assistant Professor Kevin Gimpel, and former TTIC Research Assistant Professor Kartik Goyal were recipients of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) Outstanding Paper Award for their paper, “MAP’s not dead yet: Uncovering true language model modes by conditioning away degeneracy.”

In this paper, Yoshida (TTIC), Gimpel (QuillBot), and Goyal (Georgia Tech) explore why current language models and translation systems, which are trained to predict the most likely sentences, often produce flawed results, known as “degenerate modes.” This issue has led to a shift away from methods to generate sentences based purely on high scores.

“All the language model outputs we’ve grown so familiar with in the past few years are generated by sampling from a probability distribution,” Yoshida said. “Why do this, rather than outputting the single highest probability response? Prior work has repeatedly found that doing so tends to lead to worse outputs, not better ones. Paradoxically, working harder in this way can lead to a worse result.”

“We propose that this degeneracy is caused by the low-entropy distractors or rare degenerate examples in the training data,” Professor Goyal said. “We propose a fix to this problem by finding modes under the trained language model’s conditional distribution which excludes the degenerate behavior. We show that the modes achieved by our method are high quality which paves way toward future research into developing better search methods for generating language from the language models.”

According to Professor Goyal, their team was intrigued by the surprising degenerate mode behavior of translation systems and language models. They were curious about working with conditional distributions of today’s language models, which are typically difficult to define accurately.

“This curiosity guided our experimental setup and findings,” Professor Goyal said.

Congratulations to Davis Yoshida, Kartik Goyal, and Kevin Gimpel!

August 2024 - Summer Youth Internship Program 2024

This summer, the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) launched a robotics internship for high school students as part of their outreach program. Led by faculty member Professor Matt Walter, the program featured a team of dedicated instructors: Julian Coward, a senior from the University of Illinois at Chicago; Kevin Wu, a master’s candidate at the University of Chicago; and Geno Lewis, a master’s student at the University of Chicago and a teacher at Kenwood High School.

From left to right: Julian Coward, Kevin Wu, and Geno Lewis

Geno Lewis, one of the instructors, learned about this unique opportunity through his connections at Kenwood High School. As an active participant at Kenwood High School’s Girls Who Code club, Geno was approached by TTIC’s Manager of Research Administration Rose Bradford, who sought to strengthen the outreach efforts with Girls Who Code and the Youth Internship Program (YIP) at TTIC and the University of Chicago. Rose had previously initiated the Girls Who Code chapter at Kenwood High School. Geno, who teaches computer science at Kenwood High School and is pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Chicago, was eager to contribute. He also had a grant to conduct research in Professor Matt Walter’s lab, making this internship a perfect fit for his summer schedule.

Kevin Wu, a master’s candidate at the University of Chicago, has been working in the Robot Intelligence through Perception Lab (RIPL) with TTIC’s Ph.D. students and was approached by Professor Matt Walter. Kevin recently completed a joint B.S. in Applied Mathematics and M.S. in Computer Science.

“[Professor Matt Walter] asked if I would be willing to help lead a summer course,” Kevin said. “We were interested in assembling a robotic arm, and I was really excited.”

Julian Coward, a senior at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has previously worked at TTIC as a youth intern in 2019 through a Chicago Public Schools internship program with Professor Matt Walter. Julian was excited to teach as an instructor when the opportunity arose through his connections with Rose Bradford and Professor Matt Walter.

The enthusiastic students selected for this program were Nina Lewis, Justin Chan, and Jae’Lyn Prewitt from Chicago Public Schools high schools. The interns took a hands-on approach to learning the fundamentals of robotics, computer science, and AI.

The motivation behind this program was clear: to inspire and educate the next generation of roboticists. Geno, Julian, and Kevin, all passionate about computer science and robotics, were excited to share their knowledge and help students develop practical skills. The six-week program, running from June 10 to August 2, was designed to provide a comprehensive learning experience.

“The internship curriculum was divided into two main parts: Python programming and robotics,” Kevin said. “Mornings were dedicated to fundamental Python topics such as basics, data structures, and programming principles. In the afternoons, students applied their knowledge hands-on.”

According to Kevin, the primary project of the summer internship was to build and program robotic arms, with the ultimate goal of developing a robot that could autonomously play tic-tac-toe.

“The first few weeks focused heavily on programming, gradually building up to more complex tasks,” Geno said. “Students learned how to get the robot to interact with an interface and eventually control itself.”

“My favorite aspect of teaching is getting to work with the students,” Julian said. “I also really enjoyed getting to work with younger kids, such as the Jackson Park Campers, when they toured the Robotics lab at TTIC. The students also enjoyed the various trips we took [such as touring Argonne National Laboratory.]”

Throughout the program, students were introduced to various concepts in robotics, including the history and future development of robotic arms, machine learning, and advanced topics like forward and reverse kinematics. By the second week, they were hands-on, building the robot arm and learning about its hardware components. The interns and instructors showcased their final project at Argonne South Side STEM Showcase at the Pullman National Historic Park on August 2, 2024, to wrap up the program.

“Engineering and robotics are some of the main fields where you’re actually encouraged to fail faster,” Julian said. “You aren’t shunned for it because the faster you make a mistake, the quicker you will learn from it and get to the outcome you want. I think robotics is a great field for students because of the active learning environment where mistakes are welcomed.”

The goal of the TTIC outreach program is to continue pulling from diverse pools of students from the South Side of Chicago, especially students who show an interest in STEM and particularly in computer science, robotics, artificial intelligence, and more. By offering programs like this, TTIC aims to inspire young minds and equip them with the skills needed for a future in robotics and technology. The success of this summer’s internship is just the beginning of many more exciting opportunities to come.

August 2024 - Kumar Kshitij Patel receives Distinguished Paper Award at IJCAI’24

[Kumar Kshitij Patel (TTIC Ph.D. candidate), jointly with collaborators Negin Golrezaei (MIT), Rad Niazadeh (University of Chicago), and Fransisca Susan (MIT) received a Distinguished Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2024) for their paper, “Online Combinatorial Optimization with Group Fairness Constraints.”

IJCAI 2024 took place in Jeju, South Korea, from August 3-8, 2024.

As digital marketplaces and services grow, it’s essential to ensure these platforms are fair and safe for everyone. This involves creating systems that treat all users equally, which is challenging because it requires solving exponentially large problems quickly.

To address this, the paper “casts the problem as a max-min game between a primal player aiming to maximize the platform’s objective and a dual player in charge of group fairness constraints,” and “[shows] that one can trace the entire Pareto fairness curve by changing the thresholds on the fairness constraints.”

“We saw many papers trying to get fair variants of specific combinatorial optimization problems for specific applications such as product ranking and assortment planning,” Patel said. “We wanted to understand if there is a universal reduction of an online combinatorial optimization problem with multiple groups and fairness constraints to online optimization with a single group.”

Such a reduction would be very insightful and simplify some of the literature, according to Patel, and ideas from multi-objective optimization prompted his team to believe this was possible.

“Our work precisely shows such a reduction,” Patel said.

Congratulations to Kumar Kshitij Patel, Negin Golrezaei, Rad Niazadeh, and Fransisca Susan!

May 2024 - TTIC at ICLR 2024

TTIC researchers present their work on deep learning used in the fields of artificial intelligence, statistics, and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision,, speech recognition, text understanding, incentive systems, and robotics at the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2024).

Congratulations to Sam Buchanan, Nirmit Joshi, Jiahao Li, Zhiyuan Li, Greg Shakhnarovich, Nati Srebro, Kshitij Patel, Gal Vardi, Matthew Walter, Lingxiao Wang, Takuma Yoneda, and TTIC courtesy faculty Haifeng Xu for presenting their papers, posters, and workshops:

• Druv Pai, Sam Buchanan, Ziyang Wu, Yaodong Yu, and Yi Ma, “Masked Completion via Structured Diffusion with White-Box Transformers.”
• Gon Buzaglo, Itamar Harel, Mor Shpigel Nacson, Alon Brutzkus, Nathan Srebro, Daniel Soudry, “How Uniform Random Weights Induce Non-uniform Bias: Typical Interpolating Neural Networks Generalize with Narrow Teachers.”
• Hong Liu, Zhiyuan Li, David Hall, Percy Liang, Tengyu Ma, [“Sophia: A Scalable Stochastic Second-order Optimizer for Language Model Pre-training.”(https://iclr.cc/virtual/2024/poster/19488)
• Jiahao Li, Hao Tan, Kai Zhang, Zexiang Xu, Fujun Luan, Yinghao Xu, Yicong Hong, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Greg Shakhnarovich, Sai Bi, “Instant3D: Fast Text-to-3D with Sparse-View Generation and Large Reconstruction Model.”
• Kaifeng Lyu, Jikai Jin, Zhiyuan Li, Simon Du, Jason Lee, Wei Hu, “Dichotomy of Early and Late Phase Implicit Biases Can Provably Induce Grokking.”
• Lijia Zhou, James B. Simon, Gal Vardi, Nathan Srebro, “An Agnostic View on the Cost of Overfitting in (Kernel) Ridge Regression.”
• Lingxiao Wang, Xingyu Zhou, Kumar Kshitij Patel, Lawrence Tang, Aadirupa Saha, “Efficient Private Federated Non-Convex Optimization With Shuffled Model.”
• Nirmit Joshi, Gal Vardi, Nathan Srebro, “Noisy Interpolation Learning with Shallow Univariate ReLU Networks.”
• Runzhe Wang, Sadhika Malladi, Tianhao Wang, Kaifeng Lyu, Zhiyuan Li, “The Marginal Value of Momentum for Small Learning Rate SGD.”
• Thomas Kleine Buening, Aadirupa Saha, Christos Dimitrakakis, Haifeng Xu. “Bandits Meet Mechanism Design to Combat Clickbait in Online Recommendation.”
• Xuefeng Liu, Takuma Yoneda, Rick Stevens, Matthew Walter, Yuxin Chen, “Blending Imitation and Reinforcement Learning for Robust Policy Improvement.”
• Zhenghan Fang, Sam Buchanan, & Jeremias Sulam, “What’s in a Prior? Learned Proximal Networks for Inverse Problems.”
• Zhiwei Xu, Yutong Wang, Spencer Frei, Gal Vardi, Wei Hu, “Benign Overfitting and Grokking in ReLU Networks for XOR Cluster Data.”
• Zhiyuan Li, Hong Liu, Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma, “Chain of Thought Empowers Transformers to Solve Inherently Serial Problems.”
• Zhiyuan Li, Yi Wang, Zhiren Wang, “Fast Equilibrium of SGD in Generic Situations.”

Congratulations, and have a great conference!

May 2024 - Dr. Ka Ye Lee joins TTIC’s Board of Trustees

TTIC is excited to announce Dr. Ka Yee Lee as the newest member of its Board of Trustees, beginning May 1, 2024. Dr. Lee is the David Lee Shillinglaw Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, and has been serving as Interim Dean of the Physical Sciences Division at the University of Chicago since February 2024.

Dr. Lee previously served as the fourteenth Provost of the University of Chicago from 2020 to 2023, and afterward assumed the position of Executive Vice President for Strategic Initiatives from March 2023 to February 2024. Dr. Lee’s research interests lie in the area of membrane biophysics; she has made significant contributions to the understanding of the structure and dynamics of lipid membranes as well as their interactions with proteins.

Among her honors, Dr. Lee was a Searle Scholar, a David and Lucile Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering, a Sloan Research Fellow, and a recipient of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Dr. Lee is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, the Biophysical Society, and the American Physical Society.

Dr. Lee earned her Sc.B. degree in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, followed by M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Applied Physics from Harvard University. She furthered her academic journey through postdoctoral training at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

April 2024 - Julia Chuzhoy and Sanjeev Khanna receive National Science Foundation CCF award

Professor Julia Chuzhoy (TTIC) and Professor Sanjeev Khanna (University of Pennsylvania, Adjoint Faculty at TTIC) were announced jointly as recipients of an NSF CCF award, beginning July 1, 2024 and ending June 30, 2028.

Professor Chuzhoy and Professor Khanna’s new awarded project, called “Fast Combinatorial Algorithms for (Dynamic) Matchings and Shortest Paths,” focuses on obtaining very efficient combinatorial algorithms for central graph problems, such as Maximum Matching, Maximum Flow, and Shortest Paths, in both the standard static and the dynamic settings.

Graphs are a central and extensively studied type of mathematical object, which can be used to represent many things, according to Professor Chuzhoy. A graph consists of a collection of vertices (or points), and a collection of edges that connect pairs of the vertices. For example, when thinking of a social media platform such as Facebook, vertices can be used to represent different people, while edges can represent pairs of people who are “friends” with each other. Another example is computer networks, where graph vertices can be used to represent computers, while direct links between the computers can be represented by edges.

“Having efficient algorithms for basic graph problems is very useful,” Professor Chuzhoy said. “They are the bricks from which you can build solutions to various graph questions that arise from their many different applications.”

One such central graph question is Maximum Flow, which aims to send as much traffic as possible from point A to point B. As the amount of data to process becomes larger and larger, we need to solve problems on increasingly larger graphs, making it critical that algorithms for solving graph problems are very efficient. It is often increasingly the case that the classical polynomial-time algorithms are no longer sufficiently fast for tasks that need to be solved today. A recent very successful line of work has led to very efficient algorithms for Maximum Flow and several related problems. However, all these algorithms rely on continuous techniques, which have some drawbacks, making them difficult to use in some scenarios. One of the goals of this project is to design very fast combinatorial algorithms for Maximum Flow, that do not suffer from such drawbacks.

Another problem to be investigated in this project is Maximum Matching. A matching in a graph is a collection of edges that do not share vertices. Maximum Matching is a very basic and extensively studied graph problem, and yet all currently known algorithms for it are rather slow. Designing a faster algorithm for this problem is one of the major goals of this project.

The project will also investigate basic graph problems, such as Maximum Matching and Shortest Paths, in the dynamic setting.

“In classical computer science, you are given a fixed input, such as a graph, and you need to compute some output, such as a matching, but in real life, things are not always that simple,” Professor Chuzhoy said. “Sometimes you have a graph that changes over time, such as how people can ‘friend’ and ‘unfriend’ other people on Facebook, or how roads can become more or less congested which may affect the route that you are recommended to take home by your GPS or a phone. Dynamic algorithms are designed to deal with input that changes over time. In many cases, they are more useful and interesting because they reflect the real world. Surprisingly, dynamic algorithms also increasingly play a central role in getting fast algorithms for classical problems, where the input remains static. I find this connection very exciting, and we are planning to explore it further in this project.”

Professor Chuzhoy and Professor Khanna (University of Pennsylvania) have been collaborating on graph algorithms and other topics for many years, starting with when Professor Khanna hosted Julia Chuzhoy as a summer student at the University of Pennsylvania. As an adjoint faculty at TTIC, Professor Khanna regularly visits TTIC to collaborate with Professor Chuzhoy and to work on other projects.

April 2024 - Santhoshini Velusamy receives National Science Foundation award

Research Assistant Professor Santhoshini Velusamy was announced as a recipient of an NSF CRII funding award, beginning on April 1, 2024 through March 31, 2026.

The two-year funding award will be used to support Professor Velusamy’s research at TTIC as an early career researcher, as well as to fund research interns. Professor Velusamy’s research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms, particularly in streaming and other sublinear algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems.

Professor Velusamy’s awarded research abstract, “Streaming Approximability of Maximum Directed Cut and Other Constraint Satisfaction Problems,” focuses on the approximability of Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) in the streaming setting, the research focus of her Ph.D., which she received from Harvard University in 2023.

“While traditional research on CSPs assumes that the entire input is available to the algorithm, the big data boom has necessitated studying these problems in newer models of computation that are well-suited for processing very large datasets that can’t entirely fit in the algorithm’s memory,” Professor Velusamy said. “Most of my previous works focused on single-pass streaming algorithms, where the algorithm is allowed only one pass through the stream and the order in which the data arrives is decided by a malicious adversary. While this works as an excellent model in theory, in practice, the algorithms often have additional help.”

For example, according to Professor Velusamy, algorithms may be allowed multiple passes over the input or required to perform well only on inputs drawn from a certain distribution. They may also have access to quantum bits or a machine learning oracle that can predict the rest of the stream.

“In such scenarios, there may be algorithms that are exponentially more space-efficient than the best single-pass algorithms,” Professor Velusamy said. “My current research aims to design streaming algorithms for Max-DICUT and other CSPs in more general settings.”

Professor Velusamy started her position as a Research Assistant Professor in fall 2023. She learned about the RAP position at TTIC from her advisor, Madhu Sudan (Harvard University), who encouraged her to apply upon completing her Ph.D.

“Compared to other post-doctoral positions, this one gives me the most flexibility,” Professor Velusamy said. “I can pursue my own independent research. Chicago is a great place, and the proximity that TTIC has to the University of Chicago has been really great.”

February 2024 - Annual Student Workshop 2024

The 7th Annual Student Workshop took place on February 23, 2024 at TTIC. It included student talks, a poster session, an invited talk, and a panel discussion on “From Research to Job Search” for Ph.D. students. This year’s invited speaker was Behnam Neyshabur, a TTIC alum and senior staff research scientist at Google DeepMind.

Awards were presented for the Best Talk and Best Poster.

The Best Talk Award was a tie between Jiahao Li for his talk “Instant3D: Fast Text-to-3D with Sparse-View Generation and Large Reconstruction Model,” and Kavya Ravichandran for her talk “Nearly-tight Approximation Guarantees for the Improving Multi-Armed Bandits Problem.”

Kshitij Patel was the recipient of the Best Poster Award for his poster, “New Perspectives on Local SGD for Federated Learning.”

Thank you to the Organizing Committee: Han Shao, Chung-Ming Chien, Ron Mosenzon, Madhur Tulsiani, and Erica Cocom; and the Talk/Award Committee: Anand Bhattad, Liren Shan, Lingxiao Wang, Jiawei Zhou, and Sam Buchanan.

February 2024 - 2024 Midwest Robotics Workshop

The second annual Midwest Robotics Workshop will be held at TTIC on April 18-19, 2024. This workshop is free to attend, and all roboticists from the Midwest (broadly interpreted) are invited to participate.

The Midwest Robotics Workshop is intended to bring together roboticists from academia and industry in and around the Midwestern United States. The program will include invited talks, poster sessions, and will feature keynote speakers Nancy Amato (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Marcia O’Malley (Rice University), and Robert Wood (Harvard University).

A limited number of grants are available for student lodging at a nearby hotel for the evening of April 18 to encourage participation outside of the Chicagoland area.

The registration and abstract deadline and student lodging grant application deadline are on March 15, 2024.

Thank you to the organizers: Timothy Bretl (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Daniel Bruder (University of Michigan), Girish Krishnan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Ram Vasudevan (University of Michigan), and Matthew Walter (TTIC).

To learn more, view the program schedule, and to register, please click here.

January 2024 - TTIC Receives Generous Donation from Lenore and Manuel Blum

TTIC is thrilled to announce a significant philanthropic donation from distinguished computer scientists Lenore Blum and Manuel Blum. Their generous contribution has enabled the establishment of two faculty-endowed chairs at TTIC, marking both the institute’s first substantial private donation and its inaugural faculty-endowed chairs.

The Lenore Blum Endowed Chair has been awarded to Prof. David McAllester and the Manuel Blum Endowed Chair has been awarded to Prof. Julia Chuzhoy. These prestigious appointments aim to foster TTIC’s academic mission of supporting dynamic scholars and attracting top-tier talent.

Lenore Blum holds the title of Distinguished Career Professor Emerita of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She is renowned for her pioneering contributions to model theory, inductive inference, pseudorandomness, and computation over the reals. She is also a founder of the Association for Women in Mathematics. Lenore’s dedication to increasing female participation in STEM fields has earned her accolades such as the US Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.

Manuel Blum is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at both Carnegie Mellon University and UC Berkeley. His groundbreaking research on computational complexity theory and its applications to cryptography have earned him numerous accolades including the A.M Turing Award. In addition to his groundbreaking research, Manuel was thesis advisor to a Who’s Who of Theoretical Computer Science stars, including three Turing Award winners and a constellation of faculty at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California Berkeley, Stanford University, UCSD, USC, UC Irvine, Yale, the Weizmann Institute, and Penn, as well as the founder of Duolingo. Manuel is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Both Lenore and Manuel share a deep commitment to education and to nurturing young talent. They have been particularly impressed by TTIC’s focus on nurturing early-stage researchers and its unwavering dedication to Ph.D. candidates and early career scholars. With this gift, they are expressing their sincere affection and encouragement for our cohort of young researchers. Their decision to support TTIC was influenced in part by their recognition of the Institute’s unique position in the Midwest, as the “AI and Algorithms hub in Chicago.”

To commemorate TTIC’s 20th anniversary, Lenore and Manuel visited the Institute during the Academic Workshop held on November 9-10, 2023. During this visit, they witnessed firsthand the exceptional results achieved by TTIC over two decades of operation.

“Congratulations to TTIC on your 20th anniversary,” Lenore said. “TTIC is a world-class research institution that prioritizes educating the next generation of researchers. It is truly a great place to be a researcher. Our values align with those of TTIC as we have seen firsthand what they have accomplished over these past 20 years.”

TTIC extends its heartfelt gratitude to Lenore Blum and Manuel Blum for their invaluable support, which encourages the Institute in its pursuit of excellence in research and education.

January 2024 - ASRU Best Student Paper Award

TTIC students Chung-Ming Chien and Ju-Chieh Chou, University of Chicago student Mingjiamei Zhang, and TTIC Professor Karen Livescu won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2023 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2023) for their paper “Few-Shot Spoken Language Understanding via Joint Speech-Text Models.”

This paper addresses the persistent challenge of data scarcity in spoken language understanding tasks. By using a pre-trained joint speech-text model, the authors show it is possible to reduce the need for labeled speech data by a factor of 10 or more. The paper originated from a final project for TTIC 31220: Unsupervised Learning and Data Analysis, taught by Professor Livescu.

Despite the unique information present in speech and audio data, such as prosody, accent, and background acoustic environment, Chung-Ming said he firmly believes there is immense potential in exploring speech and text as an integrated entity, aiming to improve text models with speech and vice versa.

Congratulations Chung-Ming, Ju-Chieh, Mingjiamei, and Karen!

December 2023 - TTIC at NeurIPS 2023

TTIC researchers present their work on learning, generalization, and robustness of neural networks, Markov Decision Processes, strategic classification, eliciting user preferences, language-guided image editing, extracting information from StyleGAN, real-time question answering, event prediction in language modeling, explainable and fair clustering, streaming algorithms, accelerated training of networks, and more at the 2023 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

Congratulations to TTIC authors Anand Bhattad, Avrim Blum, Lee Cohen, Jungo Kasai, Zhiyuan Li, Hongyuan Mei, Omar Montasser, Pedro Savarese, Han Shao, Liren Shan, Nati Srebro, Matthew Walter, Ali Vakilian, and Gal Vardi presenting their papers:

• Lee Cohen, Yishay Mansour, Michal Moshkovitz, “Finding Safe Zones of Markov Decision Processes Policies.”
• Amit Daniely, Nati Srebro, Gal Vardi, “Most Neural Networks Are Almost Learnable.”
• Zeyu Jia, Gene Li, Alexander Rakhlin, Ayush Sekhari, Nati Srebro, “When is Agnostic Reinforcement Learning Statistically Tractable?”
• Amit Daniely, Nati Srebro, Gal Vardi. “Computational Complexity of Learning Neural Networks: Smoothness and Degeneracy.”
• Lijia Zhou, Zhen Dai, Frederic Koehler, Nati Srebro, “Uniform Convergence with Square-Root Lipschitz Loss.”
• Spencer Frei, Gal Vardi, Peter Bartlett, Nati Srebro, “The Double-Edged Sword of Implicit Bias: Generalization vs. Robustness in ReLU Networks.”
• Han Shao, Avrim Blum, Omar Montasser, “Strategic Classification under Unknown Personalized Manipulation.”
• Han Shao, Lee Cohen, Avrim Blum, Yishay Mansour, Aadirupa Saha, Matthew Walter, “Eliciting User Preferences for Personalized Multi-Objective Decision-Making through Comparative Feedback.”
• Kaiyue Wen, Zhiyuan Li, Tengyu Ma, “Sharpness Minimization Algorithms Do Not Only Minimize Sharpness To Achieve Better Generalization.”
• Khashayar Gatmiry, Zhiyuan Li, Tengyu Ma, Sashank Reddi, Stefanie Jegelka, Ching-Yao Chuang, “What is the Inductive Bias of Flatness Regularization? A Study of Deep Matrix Factorization Models.”
• Oscar Michel, Anand Bhattad, Eli VanderBilt, Ranjay Krishna, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Tanmay Gupta, “OBJECT 3DIT: Language-guided 3D-aware Image Editing.”
• Anand Bhattad, Daniel McKee, Derek Hoiem, David Forsyth, “StyleGAN knows Normal, Depth, Albedo, and More.”
• Jungo Kasai, Keisuke Sakaguchi, Yoichi Takahashi, Ronan Le Bras, Akari Asai, Xinyan Yu, Dragomir Radev, Noah Smith, Yejin Choi, Kentaro Inui, “RealTime QA: What’s the Answer Right Now?”
• Xiaoming Shi, Siqiao Xue, Kangrui Wang, Fan Zhou, James Zhang, Jun Zhou, Chenhao Tan, Hongyuan Mei, “Language Models Can Improve Event Prediction by Few-Shot Abductive Reasoning.”
• Konstantin Makarychev, Liren Shan, “Random Cuts are Optimal for Explainable k-Medians.”
• Anders Aamand, Justin Chen, Huy Nguyen, Sandeep Silwal, Ali Vakilian, “Improved Frequency Estimation Algorithms with and without Predictions.”
• Aditya Bhaskara, Sepideh Mahabadi, Ali Vakilian, “Tight Bounds for Volumetric Spanners and Applications.”
• Anders Aamand, Justin Chen, Allen Liu, Sandeep Silwal, Pattara Sukprasert, Ali Vakilian, Fred Zhang, “Constant Approximation for Individual Preference Stable Clustering.”
• Xin Yuan, Pedro Savarese, Michael Maire, “Accelerated Training via Incrementally Growing Neural Networks using Variance Transfer and Learning Rate Adaptation.”
• Yaodong Yu, Sam Buchanan, Druv Pai, Tianzhe Chu, Ziyang Wu, Shengbang Tong, Benjamin Haeffele, Yi Ma, “White-Box Transformers via Sparse Rate Reduction.”

Congratulations, and have a great conference!

November 2023 - Junior Theorists Workshop Fall 2023

The Fall 2023 Junior Theorists Workshop will be held jointly by TTIC and Northwestern University. The workshop will be held on Thursday, November 30, at Northwestern University (Mudd 3514), and on Friday, December 1 at TTIC (6045 South Kenwood Ave., Chicago, IL, 60637).

This workshop will focus on and feature junior researchers in all areas of theoretical computer science, with speakers including:

• Shyan Akmal (MIT)
• Linda Cai (Princeton University)
• Thuy-Duong Vuong (Stanford University)
• Kate Donahue (Cornell University)
• Bailey Flanigan (Carnegie Mellon)
• Max Hopkins (UCSD)
• Lunjia Hu (Stanford University)
• Arun Jambulapati (Simons Institute)
• He Jia (GA Tech)
• Allen Liu (MIT)
• Georgy Noarov (UPENN)
• Zihan Tan (Rutgers University)
• Arsen Vasilyan (MIT)
• Tegan Wilson (Cornell University)
• Yinzhan Xu (MIT)

Thank you to Dmitrii Avdiukhin (Postdoctoral scholar, Northwestern University) and Santhoshini Velusamy (Research Assistant Professor, TTIC) for organizing this workshop.

To view talk titles and abstracts, or to register, please click here.

November 2023 - TTIC Holds Workshop in Honor of 20th Anniversary

TTIC held a 20th Anniversary Workshop celebrating 20 years of excellence in research, education, and early-career training on November 9-10, 2023.

About 100 people attended the workshop, which featured student alumni, faculty alumni, current faculty, panel discussions, and a poster session, as well as a history and timeline of TTIC.

Speakers presented cutting-edge research on topics ranging from large language models to computational immunology to robotics to graph algorithms to computer vision, and more. Speakers included two TTIC student alumni: Karthik Sridharan (Associate Professor at Cornell University) and Shubham Toshniwal (Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA, NYC), nine faculty alumni: Sepideh Mahabadi (Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond), Mohit Bansal (Professor at UNC Chapel Hill), Suriya Gunasekar (Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Redmond), Adam Kalai (Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research New England), Audrey Sedal (Assistant Professor at McGill University), Harald Räcke (Associate Professor at the Technical University of Munich), Aly Azeem Khan (Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago), Qixing Huang (Associate Professor at UT Austin), and Thatchaphol Saranurak (Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan), as well as three current TTIC faculty: David McAllester, Karen Livescu, and Matt Walter.

The workshop also included an exciting poster session with posters by Kumar Kshitij Patel, Chung-Ming Chien, Hongyuan Mei, Saba Ahmadi, Kevin Stangl, Kavya Ravichandran, Jiading Fang, Ju-Chieh Chou, Takuma Yoneda, Peng Li, Shengjie Lin, Tianchong Jiang, David Yunis, Jiawei (Joe) Zhou, and Ankita Pasad on topics in machine learning, speech and language, robotics and embodied agents, computer vision, and cross-connecting directions.

The workshop additionally had two panel discussions: one on career issues and one speculating on the future of AI. The career panel featured Rob Nowak (UW-Madison), Shubham Toshniwal (NVIDIA), Julia Chuzhoy (TTIC), and Matthew Turk (TTIC) and included issues of choosing and changing research directions, the job application process, strategies for interviewing well, junior faculty life, and being a researcher in industry. The speculation panel consisted of Shai Ben-David (U Waterloo), Adam Kalai (MSR), David McAllester (TTIC), and Manuel Blum (CMU/UC Berkeley emeritus), and featured a wide-ranging discussion on possible futures for our dynamic field.

TTIC also hosted a dinner reception and banquet on November 8, 2023, at the Langham Hotel in Chicago to celebrate its 20th anniversary with students, faculty, staff, alumni, friends, and partners.

See more about the workshop here and learn more about TTIC’s history and growth here.

October 2023 - TTIC welcomes eight new faculty members

TTIC welcomed seven new Research Assistant Professors (RAP) and one new Assistant Professor to its faculty this fall: Professor Anand Bhattad, Professor Emily Diana, Professor Jungo Kasai, Professor Zhiyuan Li, Professor Theodor Misiakiewicz, Professor Liren Shan, Professor Santhoshini Velusamy, and Professor Jiawei Zhou.

Professor Anand Bhattad is a PhD candidate in Computer Vision at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Professor Bhattad was looking for a postdoctoral position when his advisor, Professor David Forsyth (UIUC), supported his idea to apply to TTIC.

“[Professor David Forsyth] fully supported my decision [to apply to TTIC’s RAP position] and was continuously pushing for me to have my application ready,” Professor Bhattad said. “There are so many fantastic people who have been here,” Professor Bhattad said.

Professor Bhattad is excited to prepare and teach a course during his term as a RAP.

“I call it ‘Past Meets Present,’” Professor Bhattad said. “The idea is to connect research that has happened very early in the years of computer vision research, let’s say before the year 2000, and then connect it to what’s happening right now.”

Professor Emily Diana received her PhD in Statistics and Data Science from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania before starting her term as a RAP. Her research interests include the intersection of ethical algorithm design and socially responsible machine learning.

Professor Jungo Kasai joined the faculty as a RAP this fall after completing his PhD at the University of Washington Seattle. His research interests include natural language processing, artificial intelligence (AI), and large language models.

“I’m particularly excited about the research freedom this position offers,” Professor Kasai said. “I’m very happy to continue my research and expand my collaboration circle.”

Professor Zhiyuan Li was a postdoc at Stanford University before joining the TTIC faculty as an Assistant Professor this fall. Professor Li learned about TTIC from his advisor, Professor Karthik Sridharan, during his time at Cornell University, who had gotten his PhD from TTIC.

Professor Li obtained his PhD from Princeton University, and his research interests include machine learning theory, deep learning, and computational and sample efficiency of optimization methods.

“I’m looking forward to the research collaboration with the amazing faculty of TTIC,” Professor Li said.

After completing his PhD in Statistics at Stanford University, Professor Theodor Misiakiewicz joined the TTIC community as a RAP. Professor Misiakiewicz was originally looking for postdoctoral positions when Professor Nati Srebro (TTIC) recommended the RAP position at TTIC to Professor Misiakiewicz.

“I know [Professor Nati Srebro], who I met regularly during workshops and conferences throughout my PhD,” Professor Misiakiewicz said. “He is one of the most active and influential researchers in machine learning theory, and I very much enjoyed interacting with him.”

According to Professor Misiakiewicz, the RAP position at TTIC was a great fit for what he was looking for: freedom, independence, and access to a community of top researchers to meet and collaborate with.

“After visiting TTIC for the first time, I further realized that not only TTIC has excellent and highly motivated faculty and students, it is also a very welcoming and friendly place,” Professor Misiakiewicz said.

Professor Liren Shan received his PhD from Northwestern University in Computer Science before starting his term as a RAP. His research interests include theoretical computer science and mathematics.

Professor Santhoshini Velusamy graduated from Harvard University with a PhD in Computer Science before joining the TTIC community as a RAP this fall. Professor Velusamy learned about TTIC’s RAP position from her advisor, whose former student had also applied.

Professor Velusamy’s research interests include combinational optimization and algorithms. She looks forward to designing and teaching a course during her term as a RAP, and she also looks forward to organizing and participating in outreach programs at TTIC and the University of Chicago.

“TTIC provides a vibrant and collaborative research environment, and the flexibilities and opportunities provided with the RAP position are what drew me here,” Professor Velusamy said. “I look forward to collaborating with the amazing researchers and students here.”

Professor Jiawei Zhou received his PhD from Harvard University and was affiliated with the Harvard/Cornell Natural Language Processing (NLP) group before starting his term as a RAP at TTIC.

“I learned about the RAP position because a former senior labmate from the Harvard NLP group, Sam Wiseman, was a RAP at TTIC after [obtaining his PhD],” Professor Zhou said. “The academic flexibility and the vibrant research environment associated with the position were very attractive to me, and the people that I heard of doing the RAP [position at TTIC] ever since I got to know the position are all outstanding researchers.”

TTIC invites applications for tenure-track faculty, visiting faculty, and RAP positions. While we welcome applications from many areas of computer science, we will give preference to candidates working in the following areas: machine learning, computer vision and computational photography, natural language processing and speech, robotics, computational biology, and algorithms and complexity theory. Learn more and apply for our faculty positions here.

A Research Assistant Professor (RAP) at TTIC is a fixed-term, non-tenure track faculty position. It is fully funded by the Institute and focuses on research. TTIC RAPs are independent, eligible to be PIs or co-PIs on grants, have no compulsory teaching duties, and are able to co-advise students, serve on thesis committees, and host summer interns if they wish. Learn more about our RAP position here.

September 2023 - Diploma and Awards Ceremony 2023

On September 19, 2023, the TTIC community came together to attend the 2023 Diploma and Awards Ceremony. Seven students completed the Ph.D. program and received their diplomas, and four students received their master’s degrees.

“We are celebrating our twentieth anniversary this year,” President Matthew Turk said. “This year also has the special distinction of being our largest graduating class and our largest incoming class as well.”

Ph.D. diploma recipients included Falcon Dai, Andrea Daniele, Omar Montasser, Rachit Nimavat, Shane Settle, Bowen Shi, and Qingming Tang.

Falcon Dai passed his thesis defense in August 2023, titled “On Reward Structures of Markov Decision Processes.” Dai worked with his advisor, Professor Matt Walter, on reinforcement learning and machine learning.

“I experienced the joy of unexpected discovery and the excitement of recognition,” Dai said. “We were frequently amazed by how the studies [we conducted] will be useful. [Research] could provide ideas for living a better life. It taught me to be optimistic and articulate.”

Andrea Daniele, who worked with advisor Professor Matt Walter, passed his thesis defense in May 2023, titled “Accessible Interfaces for the Development and Deployment of Robotic Platforms.” Daniele was heavily involved in the Duckietown project and began a new position as the Chief Technology Officer of Duckietown.

“[TTIC] had to believe in me when I had nothing to show,” Daniele said. “I was promising that I would do my best, but back then I had nothing to show for it… So I want to thank you all for believing in me when I wasn’t believing in myself.”

Omar Montasser passed his thesis defense in June 2023, titled “Theoretical Foundations of Adversarially Robust Learning.” He was advised by Professor Nati Srebro, and he has started a new position as a FODSI-Simons postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. In July 2024, Montasser will start as an Assistant Professor at Yale University in the Department of Statistics and Data Science.

“TTIC maintains a truly fantastic environment to pursue cutting-edge research,” Montasser said. “I am grateful for all the opportunities and fun that I’ve had while being here. From the weekly stimulating discussions in the machine learning reading group, to traveling to Japan and visiting TTIJ. I am thankful to [Professor Nati Srebro], [Professor Avrim Blum], and all the TTIC family, for an enriching Ph.D. journey in various ways and forms.”

Rachit Nimavat, whose thesis was titled “GraphTheory and Its Uses in Graph Algorithms and Beyond,” passed his defense in August 2023. His advisor was Professor Julia Chuzhoy.

“My favorite memories about [TTIC] are with student outings, from skiing to kayaking, from architecture tours to standup comedy shows,” Nimavat said. “It was fun to do all these with friends from [TTIC]!”

Shane Settle, who worked with advisor Professor Karen Livescu, passed his thesis defense in August 2023, titled “Neural Approaches to Spoken Content Embedding.”

“I wanted to thank the fellow students, faculty, and staff who helped to build the community into what it is today,” Settle said. “I especially wanted to thank [Professor Livescu] for all her guidance and patience over the years.”

Bowen Shi passed his thesis defense in August 2023, titled “Toward American Sign Language Processing in the Real World: Data, Tasks, and Methods.” His advisor was Professor Karen Livescu, and upon completing his program, he started a position as a Research Scientist at Meta AI.

“I have a lot of unforgettable memories during my Ph.D. years,” Shi said.

Qingming Tang passed his thesis defense in July 2023, titled “Speech representation learning: Learning bidirectional encoders with single-view, multi-view, and multi-task methods.” He worked with advisor Professor Karen Livescu, and has since started a position as a Senior Applied Scientist in Alexa Perceptual Technologies (APT) of Alexa AI.

Pre-candidacy and master’s diploma recipients included Ju-Chieh Chou, Anmol Kabra, Marziyeh Movahedi, and Haochen Wang. While TTIC does not currently have a terminal Master’s program in computer science, pre-candidacy students receive a master’s degree during the process of obtaining their Ph.D.

Two annual awards were also announced at the Diploma and Awards Ceremony.

TTIC’s 2023 Outstanding TA Award, which recognizes a student’s stand-out dedication and effort as a teaching assistant, was awarded to Xiaodan Du.

“I’m very grateful and I would like to thank the students for selecting me for this award,” Du said. “I think this experience as a TA was also a learning journey for me, and I really learned a lot.”

Deree Kobets, TTIC’s Controller, was announced as the recipient of the 2023 Latrice Richards Outstanding Administrator Award. This annual award recognizes an administrative staff member’s outstanding performance and dedication.

“This honor, it means that my community appreciates the hard work and effort that I put in every day,” Kobets said. “I enjoy working at TTIC primarily because of the community… it’s the group of people that you work with and the appreciation of your work that makes a difference.”

Congratulations to the graduating class of 2023!

September 2023 - TTIC students and faculty recognized at ICML 2023

Congratulations to Professor Karen Livescu, student Nirmit Joshi, student Kshitij Patel, Professor Nati Srebro, and Professor Lingxiao Wang for their recognition at this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023).

Karen Livescu’s ICML 2013 paper “Deep Canonical Correlation Analysis” - joint with Galen Andrew at Google, former RAP Raman Arora (now a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University) and Jeff Bilmes at University of Washington - was honored as runner-up for the ICML 2023 Test of Time Award. As described in the award announcement, this paper was significant in two distinct ways:

“First, this paper proposed a principled approach to multimodal representation learning with a deep neural network. Such deep multimodal learning has become one of the highlights of recent advances in so-called generative artificial intelligence, highlighted by DaLLE, Stable Diffusion, etc. Second, this paper showed that it is possible to obtain good representation of data in an unsupervised way without relying on reconstruction of observations but by relating multiple views of the same observation within the representation space. This has inspired numerous recent algorithms on reconstruction-free self-supervised representation learning algorithms, such as contrastive learning.”

Students Kshitij Patel and Nirmit Joshi (TTIC), student Margalit Glasgow (Stanford University), Professor Lingxiao Wang (TTIC), and Professor Nati Srebro (TTIC) were awarded at the ICML Workshop on Federated Learning and Analytics in Practice the Best Student Paper Honorable Mention for their paper, “On the Still Unreasonable Effectiveness of Federated Averaging for Heterogeneous Distributed Learning.”

“While machine learning is getting popular, at its core, it is mostly about finding the best parameters of the model that can fit the data, which requires solving an optimization problem,” Joshi said. “As machine learning is being deployed at a large scale, this data may be distributed across many devices and it may not be possible for the devices to share their data with each other due to privacy, trust, or other such issues. In such situations, we seek to design an optimization algorithm that can find the best fit of the parameters of the data across all the devices.”

The most popular algorithm is the local stochastic gradient descent (Local SGD), which is used heavily in practice, according to Joshi.

“However, mathematically capturing its effectiveness has been challenging, leaving a huge gap between theory and practice,” Joshi said. “Our research tries to fill this gap.”

“We had a long line of work at TTIC trying to understand the above problem theoretically, and several works have been building on our work recently,” Patel said. “We wanted to make sense of some new results and offer counterpoints to take this discourse further.”

Congratulations to the students and faculty for their recognition by ICML 2023 and the ICML 2023 Workshop on Federated Learning and Analytics in Practice.

September 2023 - Two Research Assistant Professors complete their terms at TTIC

This summer, two Research Assistant Professors (RAPs) will be finishing their terms at TTIC and moving on to the next steps of their careers. Uniquely different from a postdoctoral position, RAPs at TTIC are members of the TTIC faculty and have many of the same privileges as faculty members. They are not required to teach, and while there are opportunities to gain teaching experience, not having the obligation to teach allows them to have more time for their own research interests.

Professor Lee Cohen will be finishing her one-year term this fall and will begin a postdoctoral position at Stanford University.

During her term as a RAP at TTIC, Professor Cohen’s research focus encompassed a range of projects centered around societal challenges within the realm of machine learning, such as the role of incentives, manipulation of features, and promoting fairness.

“I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with remarkable individuals during my time here at TTIC,” Professor Cohen said. “I’ve had the opportunity to work alongside exceptional TTIC students: Han Shao, Pushkar Shukla, and Kevin Stangl. Moreover, I’ve engaged with remarkable faculty members: Professors Avrim Blum, Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi, Nati Srebro, Matthew Turk, Ali Vakilian, and Matt Walter.”

Professor Cohen plans to continue her work in research and academia as she prepares for the next chapter of her career.

“My intention is to maintain the valuable connections I’ve forged during my time here, continuing to collaborate with the exceptional individuals I’ve had the privilege of working with,” Professor Cohen said. “Simultaneously, I am enthusiastic about the prospect of engaging with new and diverse collaborators, thus broadening the scope of my research pursuits.”

Professor Kartik Goyal finished his two-year term this summer and will join the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in fall 2023.

“I worked with a number of faculty members and students at TTIC and the University of Chicago, and found the collaborations to be very satisfying,” Professor Goyal said. “I am still continuing some of those collaborations because these projects are very interesting and intellectually stimulating.”

Professor Goyal worked on a range of projects during his term at TTIC and collaborated with many faculty members, students, and interns.

“I worked with Professor Kevin Gimpel and [student] Davis Yoshida on characterizing conditional modes in sequence models; [Professors] Karen Livescu and David McAllester, [student] David Yunis, [intern] and Yanhong Li on retrieval-based natural language generation; [intern] Jiamin Yang on semi-parametric machine translation modeling; and Dr. Jerry White on reinforcement learning for fine-tuning of language models,” Professor Goyal said. “I also worked [collaboratively] on various problems like diffusion models for language, sign language processing, and information extraction from medical texts.”

Professor Goyal also worked on energy-based language modeling, controllable natural language generation, and various digital humanities projects with researchers outside of Chicago.

Teaching and working with students was a highlight for Professor Goyal, who taught a course at TTIC during his term and hosted interns.

“I loved teaching the graduate-level natural language processing course at TTIC,” Professor Goyal said. “It was my first time instructing a course, and the student engagement and feedback during the course were very fulfilling. It also made me think more clearly about my area of research and how to best structure and convey the work in this area.”

Professor Goyal aims to continue developing his research program, stay active in various academic activities, and teach courses or mentor students.

A Research Assistant Professor (RAP) at TTIC is a fixed-term, non-tenure track faculty position. It is fully funded by the Institute and focuses on research. TTIC RAPs are independent, eligible to be PIs or co-PIs on grants, have no compulsory teaching duties, and are able to co-advise students, serve on thesis committees, and host summer interns if they wish. For more information or to apply, click here.

August 2023 - Chung-Ming Chien receives 2023 GSSA from Taiwan

Chung-Ming Chien, a second-year PhD student at TTIC, was awarded as a recipient of the 2023 Government Scholarship to Study Abroad (GSSA) from the Taiwan Ministry of Education.

According to the Ministry of Education in Taiwan, the GSSA was created “in order to strengthen the strength of the country, strengthen the international experience of outstanding young people in [Taiwan], reward students from disadvantaged groups, and encourage outstanding young people in Taiwan to study for postgraduate degrees in well-known foreign universities.”

“I grew up in Taiwan and had many wonderful years there,” Chung-Ming said. “I also got my first taste of doing research during my undergraduate and master’s years in National Taiwan University. So it means a lot to me to receive this special recognition from Taiwan.”

Chung-Ming joined the TTIC community as a PhD student in fall of 2022. His area of focus is in machine learning in speech and natural language processing (NLP).

“I’d love to explore the use of machine learning on spoken and written languages, especially trying to develop methods that exploits the similarity between them to improve speech processing technologies,” Chung-Ming said.

Chung-Ming joined Meta Fundamental AI (FAIR) Labs this past summer, where he was excited to work on large-scale projects involving speech and language modeling, and will be returning to TTIC this fall, where he is a part of the Speech and Language Group at TTIC.

“Working with [Professor Karen Livescu] at TTIC is a great opportunity to achieve my goals,” Chung-Ming said. “I’m happy that my advisor has been very supportive and always [gave me] valuable ideas related to my research. TTIC also gave us enough resources which helped me focus on the research. Both of them definitely made my PhD journey more enjoyable and easier.”

July 2023 - Happy 20th Anniversary to TTIC

July 1, 2023, we mark the beginning of TTIC’s 20th year in operations.

TTIC officially opened for operation in September of 2003 and was founded by the Toyota Technological Institute (TTI), in Nagoya in Japan, a small private engineering school with an endowment provided by the Toyota Motor Corporation.

Since its opening, TTIC students and faculty have routinely published their results at top conferences and have been recognized with distinctions and awards, such as Google Faculty awards, NSF fellowships, Microsoft PhD fellowships, Google PhD fellowships, the Michael and Sheila Held Prize, multiple best paper awards in flagship conferences, and many others.

PhD alumni have gone on to post-doc, researcher and faculty positions at top ten computer science departments. Others work at top tech companies such as Google, Tesla, Meta AI and FAIR, Microsoft Research, and more.

Academic achievements are not the only area we have had tremendous growth in. The Institute also prides itself on its community. Each and every community member and their contributions have been vital to the growth and success of the Institute. We are grateful for every student, faculty, staff, and friends who have made our community so vibrant and welcoming.

On January 27, 2023, a survey was sent out to the community to vote on a logo to represent the 20th anniversary of TTIC. Out of 9 different designs, the logo presented here was the one with the highest number of votes from respondents.

The official Institute colors are used, as well as an arrow that points to the right. This arrow represents our growth and symbolizes our dedication to move forward and become even stronger as we continue our mission to achieve international impact through world-class research and education in fundamental computer science and information technology.

This logo will represent TTIC’s 20th anniversary for the academic year of 2023-2024.

We are thankful to everyone who has been a part of our journey and has supported our community and Institute. As TTIC continues to grow, we are excited to see what more the Institute and our community members will accomplish in the future.

June 2023 - Jinbo Xu announced as an ISCB Fellow Class of 2023

Professor Jinbo Xu was selected as an ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology) Fellow in the Class of 2023 for the discovery of computational methods and development of software programs that have revolutionized protein structure prediction.

Beginning in 2009, the ISCB Fellows program was created to honor members who have distinguished themselves through outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics. This year marks the 14th anniversary of the program, and the 2023 Fellows will be recognized during the ISMB/ECCB 2023 conference on July 23-27, 2023.

This selection for the Class of 2023 is shared with: Bissan Al-Lazikani, UT MD Anderson Cancer Centre; Ana Conesa, Institute for Integrative Systems Biology; Lenore Cowen, Tufts University, Arne Elofsson, Stockholm University, Oliver Kohlbacher, University of Tübingen’ Heng Li, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; Harvard Medicine School’ Luay Nakhleh, Rice University; Francis Ouellette, Bioinformatics.ca; Shoba Ranganathan, Macquarie University; Russell Schwartz, Carnegie Mellon University; Roded Sharan, Tel Aviv University; Fabian Theis, Helmholtz Munich Computational Health Center; Cathy Wu, University of Delaware; and Jinghui Zhang, St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.

See the original announcement here.

June 2023 - 2023 Summer Workshop Program

We are pleased to announce TTIC’s 2023 Summer Workshop Program, which will consist of a variety of workshops throughout August and September.

All workshops will be hosted at TTIC, 6045 South Kenwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60637.

August 17-18: DavidFest and YishayFest

These celebratory/milestone birthday workshops are in honor of TTIC’s David McAllester, and friend-of-TTIC Yishay Mansour. YishayFest will be August 17 and DavidFest will be August 18. The workshops will feature talks by Nina Balcan, Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Pedro Felzenszwalb, Shafi Goldwasser, Sham Kakade, Adam Kalai, Haim Kaplan, Michael Kearns, Michael Littman, Mehryar Mohri, Fernando Pereira, Deva Ramanan, Rob Schapire, and Shai Vardi.

Organizers: Avrim Blum (TTIC), Lee Cohen (TTIC).

Learn more here.

Click here to register.

August 21-23: NSF-TRIPODS Postdoc Workshop

This workshop will bring together postdocs from all the different NSF-TRIPODS institutes. Our plan is to have research talks by postdocs, and panel discussions by faculty and industry researchers on career and other issues. We hope this will be a fun and intellectually-stimulating event as well as a chance to build a TRIPODS postdoc community. Panelists include Pranjal Awasthi (Google NYC), Maryam Fazel (U Washington), Abolfazl Hashemi (Purdue), Piotr Indyk (MIT), Ermin Wei (Northwestern), Becca Willett (UChicago), and Steve Wright (UW-Madison).

Organizers: The Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL)

Learn more here.

Click here to register.

September 8-9: New Frontiers in Federated Learning

The primary aim of this workshop is to connect the theoretical underpinnings and practical applications in research on Federated Learning: We will cover multiple areas related to Federated Learning, including Distributed optimization, Privacy, Mechanism Design, and also some topics related to fairness. We also plan to hold brainstorming and mentoring sessions to catalyze new ideas and discuss new starting points, ideas, questions, or applications.

Organizers: Kumar Kshitij Patel (TTIC), Aadirupa Saha (Apple, ML Research), Nati Srebro (TTIC), Lingxiao Wang (TTIC), Zheng Xu (Google)

Learn more here.

Click here to register.

September 12-13: Midwest Computational Biology Workshop

The 2023 Midwest Computational Biology Workshop, hosted at TTIC on September 12-13, will explore emerging topics in the field of computational biology, covering a spectrum of algorithmic and machine learning challenges to address biological questions. The workshop will bring together a wide range of participants from different backgrounds (computer science, biology, medicine) and positions (undergrads, grad students, faculty, and industry professionals). The workshop aims to initiate new interdisciplinary interactions and collaborations by connecting these researchers. The workshop will be organized around three sessions: genomics, immunology, and protein structure. Each session will include invited talks about current research and open problems and a discussion period to brainstorm collaborative solutions.

Organizers: Aly Azeem Khan (University of Chicago), Derek Reiman (TTC), Jinbo Xu (TTIC)

Click here to register.

To view all 2023 Summer Workshop Program workshops, click here.

June 2023 - New Horizons in Theoretical Computer Science Summer School

New Horizons in Theoretical Computer Science is a free, week-long online summer school that will take place from June 12-16, 2023. This workshop will expose undergraduates to exciting research areas in theoretical computer science, contain several mini-courses from top researchers in the field, and encourages applications from students that are members of groups that are currently under-represented in this field.

The summer course is organized by the Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science (CATCS) of the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), with support from TTIC. Thank you to organizers Shuchi Chawla, UT Austin; Ran Libeskind-Hadas, Claremont McKenna; Adam Smith, Boston University; and Madhur Tulsiani, TTIC.

For the full list of instructors or to learn more information, please visit newhorizons.ttic.edu.

May 2023 - Siddharth Bhandari receives ACM India 2022 Doctoral Dissertation Award

Professor Siddharth Bhandari, TTIC Research Assistant Professor, was announced the recipient of the ACM India 2022 Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation, titled “Exact Sampling and List Decoding.” His dissertation developed new techniques, analyses and tools in two areas of theoretical computer science, including sampling colorings of graphs and list-decoding error-correcting codes.

Professor Bhandari’s doctoral dissertation work was done at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India.

Professor Bhandari is currently a Research Assistant Professor (RAP) at TTIC. His current research focuses on coding theory, information theory, sampling algorithms, and treatment effect estimation.

Read the ACM announcement here.

April 2023 - In Memoriam of Mark Hogan, former Advisor to the Board

TTIC is deeply saddened to share the news that Mr. Mark Hogan, former Trustee (2013-2015) and Advisor to the Board (2015-2023), passed away on April 16, 2023, at 71 years old. Mr. Hogan was born on May 15, 1951.

Mr. Hogan received a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Business Administration/Management, served as the university’s football manager, and then earned his MBA from Harvard University. A former General Motors executive, Mr. Hogan served as a Toyota Motor Corporation Board Member and as President of Dewey Investments LLC prior to his passing. Mr. Hogan also held a variety of management and executive positions, including serving as the President and CEO of Vehicle Production Group LLC, and as President of Magna International.

We are grateful to Mr. Hogan for his professional leadership, partnership, wisdom, and friendship. Our hearts go out to Mr. Hogan’s family, friends, and colleagues during this difficult time.

March 2023 - TTIC co-sponsors the 2023 Midwest Machine Learning Symposium

TTIC is a proud sponsor of the 2023 Midwest Machine Learning Symposium, which will be held May 16-17 at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) Dorin Forum, 725 W Roosevelt Rd, Chicago, IL 60608.

Kartik Goyal, Research Assistant Professor at TTIC, will be one of the presenting speakers.

The Midwest ML Symposium aims to convene regional machine learning researchers for stimulating discussions and debates, to foster cross-institutional collaboration, and to showcase the collective talent of ML researchers at all career stages.

The call for posters is currently open. The deadline for poster submission is March 31, and accepted posters will be announced on April 16.

To learn more, view the list of speakers, or submit a poster, click here.

March 2023 - Introducing three new members of the TTIC community

TTIC welcomed three new members to its community earlier this year: Dr. Chen Dan, postdoctoral researcher; Dr. Siddharth Bhandari, Research Assistant Professor (RAP); and Dr. Aditya Bhaskara, visiting scholar.

Dr. Chen Dan obtained his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2022. He joined the TTIC community as a postdoctoral researcher this year, working with Professor and Chief Academic Officer Avrim Blum. Dr. Dan previously worked with Professor Blum at Carnegie Mellon University from 2016-2017, as well as at TTIC as a visiting student in the summer of 2018.

Dr. Dan’s main research interests include statistical learning theory and adversarial robustness in machine learning theory. He looks forward to working with the TTIC community and producing unique research.

“I am so happy to be back at TTIC once again,” Dr. Dan said.

Dr. Siddharth Bhandari obtained his PhD from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Before joining the TTIC community as a RAP, Dr. Bhandari was a Simons-Berkeley postdoctoral fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California at Berkeley.

Dr. Bhandari learned about the RAP position at TTIC when he was completing his PhD at TIFR from his advisor, Dr. Prahladh Harsha, who was also previously a RAP at TTIC.

“I thought the RAP position was a great fit for me because of its flexibility,” Dr. Bhandari said. “Plus, there are some great researchers around to collaborate.”

A RAP at TTIC is a fixed-term, non-tenure track faculty position that is fully funded by the Institute and focuses on research. Unlike postdocs, RAPs are members of the TTIC faculty, both in title and in substance. To learn more about TTIC’s RAP position, click here.

Dr. Bhandari looks forward to expanding his research horizons and taking advantage of conducting research in depth. His research interests lie broadly in the field of randomized computation. Outside of his research, Dr. Bhandari enjoys playing cricket or soccer.

Dr. Aditya Bhaskara is a visiting scholar at TTIC on a sabbatical. He has been a faculty member at the University of Utah for the last six years, where he currently serves as an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing. His research interests are in theoretical computer science and machine learning.

“TTIC is one of the best places for theoretical machine learning, so it was a great fit in terms of area,” Dr. Bhaskara said. “I also have collaborators at Northwestern, so I thought it would be a good idea to spend a full year in Chicago, splitting time between the two institutions.”

Dr. Bhaskara looks forward to interacting with TTIC faculty, visitors, and students, and finding new collaborations.

“I’ve so far been very impressed with the level of activity, the range of talks, and the general atmosphere,” Dr. Bhaskara said.

December 2022 - 2022 Junior Theorists Workshop

The 2022 Chicago Junior Theorists Workshop will be held jointly by Northwestern University and Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) on January 5-6, 2023. The focus of this workshop will be on junior researchers in all areas of theoretical computer science.

The workshop will be held at Mudd 3514 Northwestern University, 2233 Tech Drive, Evanston, IL 60208 on Thursday, January 5, 2023, and at TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60637 on Friday, January 6, 2023.

Thank you to our organizers Ali Vakilian and Suprovat Ghoshal.

For more information, the schedule, and to view the list of speakers, click here.

To register, click here.

December 2022 - Jinbo Xu and colleagues receive grant for AI research

Professor Jinbo Xu was announced a recipient of a Marshall and Arlene Bennett Family Research Program funding award in partnership with the University of Chicago and the Weizmann Institute of Science (WIS) in Israel to support collaborative research in artificial intelligence.

Professor Xu is collaborating with Professor Tali Dekel (WIS) and Professor Sarel Fleishman (WIS). Professor Fleishman (WIS) has developed cutting-edge atomistic methods PROSS and FuncLib for optimizing protein stability and activity, Professor Xu developed the first deep-learning method for protein structure prediction, revolutionizing the field and inspiring DeepMind’s AlphaFold, and Professor Dekel (WIS) developed cutting-edge deep-learning methods for image and video analysis.

The completion of their project, “Deep learning for protein optimization and design,” will furnish innovative, experimentally validated deep-learning approaches for protein design and broaden participation among students from under-represented groups in both Chicago and Israel.

See the University of Chicago’s announcement for more details. To view all awardees and full abstracts, click here.

November 2022 - 2022 Annual Student Workshop

The sixth Annual Student Workshop was held in person on Friday, November 18, 2022, at TTIC. The agenda included student talks, a poster session, and an invited talk from the University of Chicago Assistant Professor Aly Azeem Khan.

Awards were presented for the Best Talk and Best Poster.

The Best Talk Award was a tie between Kshitij Patel for his talk, “Distributed Online and Bandit Convex Optimization,” and Freda Shi for her talk, “Language Models are Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoners.”

The award for Best Poster was given to Anmol Kabra and his poster, “Exponential Family Model-Based Reinforcement Learning via Score Matching.”

From left to right: PhD candidates Anmol Kabra, Kshitij Patel, Freda Shi, and Max Ovsiankin

Thank you to the Talk/Award Committee, Professors Ali Vakilan, Lee Cohen, and Hongyuan Mei. A special thank you to this year’s Organizing Committee: PhD candidates Ben Lai and Max Ovsiankin, Professors Karen Livescu and Madhur Tulsiani, and Student Services and Admissions Administrator Erica Cocom.

November 2022 - TTIC Industry Open House 2022

On December 9, 2022, TTIC will host an Industry Open House to introduce companies to the cutting-edge research conducted at TTIC and to foster long-term strategic relationships between potential industry partners and our faculty, postdocs, and students. The Open House will be hosted at the Institute: 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637.

We invite industry representatives interested in learning more about TTIC and opportunities for short and long-term partnerships to attend.

The Open House will include research presentations by faculty, an interactive poster session, and focused discussions between participants and Institute researchers. The program offers organizations a unique opportunity to pursue meaningful, mutually beneficial partnerships with the TTIC research community, and provides access to emergent talent through strategic recruiting.

The deadline to register is December 2, 2022. For more information, to view the schedule, or to register, click here.

October 2022 - TTIC welcomes five new Research Assistant Professors

This fall, TTIC welcomed five new Research Assistant Professors (RAPs): Dr. Sam Buchanan, Dr. Lee Cohen, Dr. Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi, Dr. Ohad Trabelski, and Dr. Ali Vakilian.

Dr. Sam Buchanan, a recent Columbia University PhD graduate, said TTIC has been on his radar since he started graduate school. He was influenced by a series of papers written by Prof. Nathan Srebro, a few of Prof. Srebro’s former PhD students, and former RAPs.

Dr. Buchanan said he is most looking forward to working on fundamental problems in machine learning with the “outstanding folks” at TTIC. His main research interests include the analysis of algorithms for high-dimensional data with low-dimensional structure.

“I feel very fortunate to be here now, continuing this line of research,” Dr. Buchanan said.

Dr. Lee Cohen learned about TTIC’s RAP position from her PhD advisor at Tel Aviv University, Yishay Mansour, when she was searching for a job in the United States. Dr. Cohen said she is most excited to collaborate with people at TTIC.

“In my research area, machine learning theory, I consider TTIC to be one of the leading institutions,” Dr. Cohen said. “Together with the great atmosphere and the talented people who are highly motivated to collaborate and advance research forward, TTIC seems like a perfect place to conduct research.”

Dr. Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi recently graduated from his doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania. He found the RAP position at TTIC to be a great fit because it gives him an opportunity to grow as an independent researcher while letting him implement his own research agenda.

“In particular, TTIC offers great resources to me to establish my research in ethical algorithm design,” Dr. Sharifi-Malvajerdi said. “I like the collaborative culture of TTIC through which I can meet and collaborate with great researchers.”

During his time at TTIC, Dr. Sharifi-Malvajerdi said he plans to use the opportunities he has to conduct research that addresses societal challenges such as fairness when using algorithms in making decisions for people. His primary research interest is in machine learning with ethical and societal constraints.

Dr. Ohad Trabelsi obtained his PhD at Weizmann Institute of Science under the supervision of Prof. Robert Krauthgamer in 2020 followed by a postdoctoral fellowship there, and finished another postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan before starting at TTIC. He became interested in TTIC after learning about the RAP position.

“My interest in TTIC has been due to the freedom, independence, and peace of mind it gives RAPs, but also its physical proximity to multiple other research institutions and the community being fostered,” Dr. Trabelsi said.

Dr. Trabelsi’s main research interests include fine-grained complexity and the design of algorithms, focusing on problems such as the maximum flow problem. He most looks forward to conducting quality research, collaborating with other researchers, and experiencing life in Chicago, which is something he has always wanted to do.

Dr. Ali Vakilian graduated in September of 2019 with a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as a postdoctoral scholar at the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL), hosted by TTIC, before joining TTIC as a RAP this fall. Dr. Vakilian also completed an internship at TTIC in the summer of 2017, where he got first-hand experience of TTIC’s research culture.

“TTIC is a world-class institute in my research of interests, which are algorithms and machine learning,” Dr. Vakilian said. “What I really like about TTIC is the great faculty, students, and visitors. As a RAP, I have the flexibility to both shape my own research agenda and collaborate with other wonderful researchers at TTIC. Last but not least, TTIC is one of the most welcoming, friendly, and inclusive places I have seen in my career so far.”

Dr. Vakilian plans to spend his time as a RAP to expand his research profile further and collaborate with students, postdoctoral scholars, and other faculty.

A RAP at TTIC is a fixed-term, non-tenure track faculty position that is fully funded by the Institute and focuses on research. Unlike postdocs, RAPs are members of the TTIC faculty, both in title and in substance. To learn more about TTIC’s RAP position, click here.

October 2022 - October Conference on Ethics in Data and AI

TTIC is co-sponsoring the Data, Artificial Intelligence, and the Ethical Imperative Conference on October 7-8, 2022, which be hosted at the Keller Center (University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy) at 1307 E 60th St, Chicago, IL 60637. This two-day, student-organized conference will include panel discussions and keynote speakers from experts in Data and Artificial Intelligence from academia, industry, government, and Chicago community organizations to discuss the implications of these technologies in our society and the complex ethical questions raised by the rise of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data. Topics covered include the ethics of privacy and ownership, bias and fairness, transparency and explainability, the role of data in society, and the future of data. This conference is sponsored by the MS in Computational Analysis and Public Policy (MSCAPP), the Data Science Institute (DSI), the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), and the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence (CAAI).

Click here to view the agenda.

Registration is free but limited. For more information and to register, click here.

September 2022 - TTIC Diploma and Awards Ceremony 2022

On September 20, 2022, the TTIC community came together to attend the Diploma and Awards Ceremony, which was held at The Study at University of Chicago. Four students received their Ph.D. diplomas, four students received their master’s diplomas, and annual awards were given for Outstanding TA and the Latrice Richards Outstanding Administrator Award.

Ph.D. diploma recipients included Mingda Chen, Chip Schaff, Shubham Toshniwal and Igor Vasiljevic.

Mingda Chen, who worked with advisor Prof. Kevin Gimpel, passed his thesis defense in July 2022, titled “Leveraging Natural Supervision for Language Representation Learning and Generation.” He has since started a position as a Research Scientist at Meta AI. Chen said his favorite memory at TTIC was the first year of his Ph.D. program when TTIC held a karaoke party because of how many people attended and how happy everyone was.

Charles “Chip” Schaff, whose thesis was titled “Neural Approaches to Co-Optimization in Robotics,” passed his thesis defense in August 2022 with an Honors: Thesis of Distinction. Schaff worked with advisor Prof. Matthew Walter, and started a position as an Autopilot Engineer at Tesla.

“My favorite memory from TTIC [was] creating and presenting fun demos for Robotics Week at the Museum of Science and Industry, such as the checker’s bot,” Schaff said. “The demos were a lot of fun to make and show off.”

Pictured above: Chip Schaff, student; and Matthew Walter, Professor.

Pictured above, from left to right: Avrim Blum, Chief Academic Officer; Chip Schaff, student; Matthew Walter, Professor; and Matthew Turk, President.

Shubham Toshniwal passed his thesis defense, “Efficient and Interpretable Neural Models for Entity Tracking,” in August 2022. He worked with advisors Karen Livescu and Kevin Gimpel, and now works as a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR).

“Overall I’m grateful for the freedom which Prof. Livescu, Prof. Gimpel, and TTIC gave me in conducting research,” Toshniwal said. “I also loved the small size of TTIC where you feel connected with everyone. A Ph.D. is a long commitment and there are bound to be ups and downs in this journey. Try to stay positive and trust the sincerity of the process.”

The outdoor activities Toshniwal did with his friends at TTIC, such as skiing and paintball, remain his favorite memories.

Pictured above: Karen Livescu, Professor; and Shubham Toshniwal, student.

Pictured above: Shubham Toshniwal, student.

Igor Vasiljevic, whose advisor was Prof. Greg Shakhnarovich, passed his thesis defense, “Neural Camera Models,” in August 2022. Vasiljevic has since started a position as a Research Scientist at Toyota Research Institute.

“I’ll always remember the great experience I had [at TTIC],” Vasiljevic said.

Pictured above: Igor Vasiljevic, student; and Greg Shakhnarovich, Professor.

Pictured above, from left to right: Avrim Blum, Professor and Chief Academic Officer; Igor Vasiljevic, student; Madhur Tulsiani, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies; Matthew Turk, President; and Greg Shakhnarovic, Professor.

Pre-candidacy and master’s diploma recipients included Xiaodan Du, Jihao Li, Max Ovsiankin and Kavya Ravichandran. While TTIC doesn’t currently offer a separate master’s program, pre-candidacy students receive a master’s degree during the process of obtaining their Ph.D.

Pictured above, from left to right: Max Ovsiankin, student; Kavya Ravichandran, student; and Madhur Tulsiani, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies.

Xiaodan Du’s research is focused on machine learning and computer vision, and he is working with advisor Prof. Greg Shakhnarovich.

Jiahao Li, whose advisor is Prof. Greg Shakhnarovich, is focusing his research on computer vision.

Max Ovsiankin, who is working with advisor Prof. Yury Makarychev, is focusing his research on algorithms and complexity.

Kavya Ravichandran’s research is focused on algorithms and complexity and machine learning and optimization. She is working with advisors Prof. Avrim Blum and Prof. Nati Srebro.

Two annual awards were also announced at the Diploma and Awards Ceremony.

TTIC’s 2022 Outstanding TA Award, which recognizes a student’s dedication and effort as a teaching assistant, was a tie between two students: Max Ovsiankin and Haochen Wang.

“Teaching is far more difficult than it appears, but it is more rewarding to see students having gone through that material,” Ovsiankin said. “My advice is that there is always room for improvement, but also to be confident in the things you do know and what you are able to offer.”

“I want to thank [Igor Vasiljevic] for creating the first set of materials, and I want to thank ‘super IT man’ [Adam Bohlander] for making the material available online,” Wang said.

Pictured above, from left to right: Max Ovsiankin, student; and Haochen Wang, student.

The recipient of the 2022 Latrice Richards Outstanding Administrator Award was Mary Marre, Administrative Assistant to Faculty. This award is given each year to recognize an administrative staff member’s hard work and dedication.

“The TTIC administrative team is so talented and they work so hard, and for me to get this type of recognition is really a great honor,” Marre said. “I’ve met so many amazing people at TTIC and it has made me become a better person.”

Pictured above: Jessica Jacobson, Chief Financial Officer and Director of Operations; and Marry Marre, Administrative Assistant to Faculty.

“TTIC alumni go on to achieve great things,” President Matthew Turk said. “Congratulations to our graduates, and we wish you the best on your next steps.”

September 2022 - Three Research Assistant Professors complete their terms at TTIC

This summer, three Research Assistant Professors (RAPs) finished their terms at TTIC and moved on to the next steps of their careers. Unlike most postdocs, RAPs at TTIC are in a unique position where they have many of the same privileges as faculty members, without being required to teach. While there are opportunities to gain teaching experience, not having the obligation to teach allows them to have more time for their own research interests.

Prof. Bradly Stadie finished his two-year term at TTIC this September and has since joined Northwestern University’s Department of Statistics and Data Science as an Assistant Professor. Prof. Stadie’s research is in the field of reinforcement learning.

“Working with [student Takuma Yoneda] was for sure the highlight for me,” Prof. Stadie said. “He’s very effective and able to produce strong results.”

Prof. Stadie said his biggest takeaway was that he wished he had started to collaborate with graduate students earlier.

“It was the most fun I had at TTIC, and it’s a shame I waited a year to start,” Stadie said.

Prof. Brian Bullins joined TTIC as a RAP in September 2019. Having spent three years at TTIC conducting research in the areas of optimization and machine learning alongside TTIC Prof. Nathan Srebro, he is now starting a new position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. His time spent at TTIC was like being a professor-in-training, and gave him the opportunity to see what it would be like to advise his own students, Prof. Bullins said.

“My biggest takeaway would be just how kind and welcoming the TTIC community has been, alongside the incredible opportunity the RAP position has provided for supporting my research,” Prof. Bullins said.

To read more about Prof. Bullins’s time at TTIC, read his highlight article here.

After completing his one-year term at TTIC, Prof. Raymond Yeh joined the faculty at Purdue University in a tenure track position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science starting in fall 2022. His research focused on developing algorithms to learn effective models ranging across several domains including audio, language, and vision.

Prof. Yeh said that his favorite part about the TTIC community was the amazing research environment and the talks hosted at TTIC, and the opportunity to focus more on research before starting his position at Purdue.

To learn more about Prof. Yeh’s experience, see his feature article here.

TTIC’s RAP alumni have made significant contributions to the Institute, and we wish them all the best in the next stages of their careers. To learn more about TTIC’s RAP position, see here.

August 2022 - Shafi Goldwasser joins TTIC’s External Advisory Committee

After many years of service, Prof. Richard (Dick) Karp is stepping down from our External Advisory Committee (EAC). Dr. Karp is a towering figure in theoretical computer science, with many foundational results in the field. He is the winner of the ACM Turing Award, the National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize. It has been wonderful for TTIC to have an association with Dr. Karp and we thank him for his many years of service and valuable advice.

We also welcome Prof. Shafi Goldwasser, who has agreed to join our EAC in his place. Dr. Goldwasser is a Turing Award winner (and winner of many other awards, and a member of the National Academy of Science and National Academy of Engineering). She is director of the Simons Institute, with affiliations at UC Berkeley, MIT, and Weizmann. We are delighted that Dr. Goldwasser has agreed to join our EAC, and we expect she will be able to give us insights and helpful perspectives from her various roles.

TTIC’s EAC is a team of world-renowned faculty from top universities who provide the Institute with an external perspective and valuable advice on academic matters. The EAC also plays an advisory role in faculty promotion cases. We are delighted to have this distinguished team of external academic advisors.

Thank you to our other EAC members: William T. Freeman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Takeo Kanade, Carnegie Mellon University; and Eva Tardos, Cornell University.

August 2022 - Celebrating the life of former President, Dr. Sadaoki Furui

TTIC is deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of Dr. Sadaoki Furui, TTIC’s former President (2013-2019) and Chair of the Board of Trustees (2019-2021). President Furui was the institute’s second president since its founding in 2003, beginning his appointment in April 2013 and stepping down in June 2019. He was then appointed the Chair of TTIC’s Board of Trustees and served until 2021.

Dr. Furui was a leader in the field of speech processing, playing an important role in improving natural communication between humans and machines. He authored and co-authored more than 1,000 papers and books in the fields of speech recognition, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing, and he received numerous awards and honors for his outstanding contributions, including a Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Korosha), one of the two highest prizes given by the Japanese Government, as well as the Okawa Prize for his pioneering contributions to and leadership in the field of computer-based speech recognition and understanding.

Dr. Furui’s tenure as President involved overseeing 50% growth in the size of TTIC’s faculty, staff and student body, doubling of TTIC’s endowment, and strengthening ties and partnerships with renowned academic and research institutions around the globe.

Dr. Furui shared his love of music, including performing flute concerts for the TTIC community. And he could often be found on the campus tennis courts playing TTIC’s PhD students. We are grateful to Dr. Furui for his professional and academic leadership, and also for sharing his love of life with our community in many ways. Dr. Furui’s warmth and kindness enriched us all.

Our hearts go out to his wife Hikaru, his family, and all of his colleagues, friends, and former students around the world whose lives were enriched by knowing Dr. Furui.

August 2022 - TTIC joins UIC, Northwestern, UChicago, and IIT in NSF TRIPODS Phase II award

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a TRIPODS Phase II award to TTIC faculty Avrim Blum, Julia Chuzhoy, Yury Makarychev, and Nati Srebro, along with researchers from UIC, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and the Illinois Institute of Technology, and in partnership with researchers at Google NYC, together forming the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL).

IDEAL will involve more than 50 researchers working on key aspects of the foundations of data science across multiple disciplines. The research will center around the foundations of machine learning, high-dimensional data analysis and inference, and data science and society. Topics include foundations of deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning and logic, network inference, high-dimensional data analysis, trustworthiness and reliability, fairness, and data science with strategic agents. See the NSF announcement for more details.

August 2022 - TTIC to host “Representation Learning Theory” workshop

TTIC is pleased to announce the second workshop of its 2022 Summer Workshop Program, “Representation Learning Theory” on August 4-5. This workshop is organized by Yasaman Bahri (Google), Quanquan Gu (UCLA), Yuanzhi Li (CMU), and Aarti Singh (CMU).

Modern machine learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of applications. However, representation learning relies heavily on the structure of input data, and we have only simplistic tools to measure, quantify and understand data. With the rapid progress and quickly shifting understanding in this field, this workshop focuses on the theory of representation learning.

The workshop will consist of talks from world-leading experts in machine learning and theory and panel discussions at the end of each workshop day. The workshop will be hosted at TTIC, 6045 S Kenwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60637. Remote attendance is available via Zoom.

For the list of invited speakers, schedule and registration, click here.

July 2022 - Prof. David McAllester Receives Open Philanthropy Funding Award for the Study of AI Safety

Open Philanthropy has awarded TTIC’s Prof. David McAllester $700k for two years to research in the area of AI safety. Open Philanthropy identifies outstanding giving opportunities, makes grants, follows the results, and publishes its findings. Its mission is to give as effectively as it can.

A central question in AI safety is the potential that a future artificial general intelligence (AGI) system will fail to understand the actual intent of requests or mission statements as distinct from literal or logical meaning. This work proposes tracking the ability of machines to select actions as described in natural language in response to open domain requests as stated in natural language. Current language models provide a framework for investigating this issue. Current systems are presumably extremely limited and yet, tracking the state of the art in request and mission interpretation seems central to assessing AI safety in the long term.

McAllester has a long standing interest in the quest for AGI and in AI safety and teaches the TTIC course, “Fundamentals of Deep Learning.”

July 2022 - TTIC President Matthew Turk appointed as a new member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council

Matthew Turk, President of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), was appointed as a new member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council by the Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The CCC Council is comprised of 20 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing, and six new members will begin their three-year terms starting July 1.

“The CCC Council has been quite effective in mobilizing and advocating for the computing research community, including envisioning future research challenges and opportunities, advancing new programs, and communicating with policymakers and the broader public,” Dr. Turk said. “I’m very much looking forward to engaging with this committee and its great members in supporting the computing research community in a variety of ways.”

In addition to Dr. Turk, the new appointees include: David Jensen, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Rada Mihalcea, University of Michigan; Raj Rajaraman, Northeastern University; Randal Burns, John Hopkins University; and Pam Wisniewski, University of Central Florida.

July 2022 - TTIC and Microsoft Research to host summer workshop

TTIC is pleased to announce the “New Models in Online Decision Making for Real-World Applications” workshop as part of its 2022 Summer Workshop Program series on July 13-15. The workshop, hosted by TTIC, is sponsored by TTIC and Microsoft Research, and is organized by Yonathan Efroni, Akshay Krishnamurthy, Aldo Pacchiano and Aadirupa Saha of Microsoft Research, NYC.

This workshop aims to present a broad overview of the contemporary decision-making models that are being actively researched. It also aims to provide networking opportunities for researchers and practitioners and discussion at scale.

Click here to learn more and to register.

June 2022 - TTIC and UChicago will host the MADLab 2022 Summer Workshop

Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and the University of Chicago will be hosting the MADLab 2022 Summer Workshop on June 14-15. This workshop is organized by the Air Force Research Laboratory-sponsored Center of Excellence on Machine, Algorithms and Data in which faculty from TTIC, the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin Madison participate.

On June 14, the workshop will take place at the John Crerar Library, home of the University of Chicago’s Department of Computer Science at 5730 S. Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637.

On June 15, the workshop will take place at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, 6045 S Kenwood Ave, Chicago, IL 60637.

For more information and to view the workshop schedule here.

May 2022 - Avrim Blum and colleagues receive the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) announced that TTIC’s Chief Academic Officer, Prof. Avrim Blum is a recipient of the The ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for fundamental contributions to the development of differential privacy. This award is shared with Irit Dinur, Weizmann Institute; Cynthia Dwork, Harvard University; Frank McSherry, Materialize Inc.; Kobbi Nissim, Georgetown University, and Adam Davison Smith, Boston University. These researchers’ separate but related key papers formed a definition of differential privacy which captures the kind of privacy needed in statistical settings, where individual information must be protected while still allowing for discovery of common trends. These fundamental works created a vibrant and multidisciplinary area of research, leading to practical deployments of Differential Privacy in industry and by the U.S. Census Bureau, among other applications.

The authors also showed that their definition includes post-processing and composition properties that facilitate design, analysis, and applications of differentially private algorithms. The Laplace and the Gaussian noise mechanisms, which show differentially private analogs of statistical query learning algorithms, also grew out of the Kanellakis recipients’ work on differential privacy.

The ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing and impact people using technology everyday. This award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000 and is endowed by contributions from the Kanellakis family, with additional financial support provided by ACM’s Special Interest Groups on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT), Design Automation (SIGDA), Management of Data (SIGMOD), and Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), the ACM SIG Projects Fund, and individual contributions.

About ACM

ACM is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

Video courtesy of the Association for Computing Machinery.

April 2022 - IDEAL presents spring quarter 2022: High-Dimensional Data Analysis

The Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL), an NSF-supported collaborative institute across Northwestern, TTIC, and the University of Chicago, is presenting a special spring quarter on High-Dimensional Data Analysis.

The special spring quarter will focus on new methods and techniques for working with high-dimensional data. Topics including clustering, algorithms for massive data sets, dimensionality reduction, sketching, and low-distortion embeddings will be investigated. The initiative will involve workshops, seminars, and graduate-level courses. Some events will be virtual. Those interested in participating can complete IDEAL’s participation request form here.

Upcoming workshops include:

• April 22: Workshop on Clustering
• May 4: Seminar by Chandra Chekuri (UIUC)
• May 13: Workshop Algorithms for Massive Data Sets
• May 27: Workshop High-Dimensional Geometry and Analysis

The IDEAL events page has more event details.

Professors Konstantin Makarychev, of Northwestern University, and TTIC’s Yury Makarychev are organizing the events and initiatives for the spring special quarter. Prof. Yury Makarychev “expects that the special quarter will bolster research in high-dimensional data analysis at TTIC and our partner institutions and will be highly valuable for PhD students, postdocs, and faculty.”

Questions about the IDEAL initiative can be directed to admin@ideal.northwestern.edu.

December 2021 - TTIC PhD Candidate Freda Shi awarded Google PhD Fellowship

Earlier this fall, fourth-year PhD Candidate Freda Shi was awarded a Google PhD Fellowship in Natural Language Processing. Her proposal centered around research that will be reflected in her PhD thesis, which will discuss learning language structures through grounding signals. The fellowship is a two-year award, but has the potential to be extended to three years.

“I really appreciate that Google awarded me this fellowship. My research focuses on two sub-areas of NLP and their intersection, parsing and grounded language learning. These areas have become less popular these days, compared to the more popular trends that work on very large pretrained models. I used to be less confident about whether I’m going in the right direction, so I appreciate Google recognizing my research, and showing me that my research is indeed recognized by the community. That’s a great mental support to me,” she said.

Shi was encouraged to apply for the fellowship by her advisors, Professors Kevin Gimpel and Karen Livescu. Applying for this type of fellowship is quite time consuming, and Google has a particularly lengthy application process. The award includes financial support that can be used for a variety of research projects over the course of the fellowship, as well as a Google mentor. In addition to her official mentor, she has friends who currently work at Google that have provided advice and encouragement.

Her advice to other students who want to apply for opportunities like this in the future is to ask for recommendation letters as early as possible, to make sure recommenders will have enough time to write their letters, and to take the time to polish their research statements. While it takes a while to gather all of these materials and craft the best possible research statement, Shi recommends repurposing documents like these for multiple applications.

As far as her future career plans, Shi is considering working for Google, as well as applying for faculty positions at various academic institutions. She has also thought about other potential opportunities, like farming, working for a financial institution, or becoming a middle or high school teacher.

November 2021 - TTIC PhD student Keziah Naggita is the co-creator of CA², an online platform that helps researchers find peer-to-peer collaborators

While attending conferences and networking with other early-career researchers in computer science, third-year PhD student Keziah Naggita noticed that many of them were experiencing the same difficulties. Her peers were struggling to find people to collaborate with on research, or people with similar research interests to share ideas and have meaningful discussions.

Naggita has also been interested in addressing the question of how to include more people from marginalized groups in the research community, and one of the major problems is access. She believes one of the biggest barriers to students from these groups entering academia is that many of these students come from schools that lack the proper resources, and lack access to research opportunities.

“I think the desire to go to grad school is usually sparked by interest in research, so in the beginning, I was thinking of a way to match PhD students at larger research universities with undergrad students from underserved communities. But then, after talking to a few people, I realized there is a lot of bureaucracy in fostering these collaborations and sustaining them,” said Naggita.

Usually, to find mentors or internship opportunities in academia, students have to have a certain GPA, provide multiple letters of recommendation, and jump through several other bureaucratic hoops. This leaves students from marginalized groups at a disadvantage. Naggita believes that if some of these barriers were to be removed, and people were simply able to connect with each other on research areas that interest them, it could foster a passion for research that will lead more students from these underrepresented groups to pursue graduate school and careers in academia and research.

“Those are the main reasons for creating the platform, trying to bridge the gap between socializing, like talking about collaborations, and ensuring that everyone has access to these opportunities in a way that fosters meaningful collaboration,” she said. This would create a simple path for students and early-career researchers to find people to read their resume, collaborate on a paper, or simply discuss their areas of interest with other people who can provide insight and encouragement. Naggita has been working on this project for the past year with her collaborator Christopher Nsimbe.

The possible collaborations formed on CA² could span from peer to peer to mentor/mentee relationships, and the potential for projects is very open-ended. “It’s really dependent on what any two people’s mutual interests are, whether it’s a research project, a blog, or something else, as long as it has some sort of research component, or some sort of academic endeavor in it. The idea is if I’m starting out in a research area, I might be interested in knowing if it is even a viable area to work in, and that would require finding information about potential conferences within that area, and seeing that there are communities of people that work within that area,” she said.

Naggita’s main area of research is human-centric machine learning, and as she is about halfway through the PhD program at TTIC, she is keeping her options open as to what the future could hold. At this point, the platform is openly available for registration, and she and Nsimbe have already seen people using CA² to connect.

“I’m doing this because I think a lot of people would benefit from it, I would have benefited from it a couple of years ago. We’re putting this out there for people to use and gauge how useful it is, and maybe what kind of feedback we get in terms of what people want, and on what they find most useful,” she said.

If you are interested in finding your own collaborators and making new connections in your research area, create a CA² account here. Users can also share job openings, established communities, CFPs for upcoming conferences and workshops, and invite connections to conferences and workshops.

September 2021 - Five Research Assistant Professors complete their terms at TTIC

This summer, five Research Assistant Professors finished their terms at TTIC and moved on to new stages in their careers. Professor Mina Karzand completed her term at the end of June, and Professors Sepideh Mahabadi, Steve Hanneke, Arturs Backurs, and Sam Wiseman finished their time at the Institute at the end of August.

Prof. Wiseman is now an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at Duke University. His main area of research is Natural Language Processing, and while he was at TTIC, he mainly worked with Professor Kevin Gimpel, Professor Karen Livescu, TTIC students Shubham Toshniwal, Mingda Chen, and Lifu Tu, and University of Chicago students Zewei Chu and Xiaoan Ding.

Having specialized in algorithms for massive data, Dr. Mahabadi will be continuing as a Senior Research Scientist in the Algorithms Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington. At TTIC, her main mentors were Professor Julia Chuzhoy and Professor Yury Makarychev, and she worked closely with fellow RAP Dr. Backurs, TTIC student Kavya Ravichandran, and UChicago student Zihan Tan.

Dr. Backurs has also joined Microsoft Research as a Senior Researcher, his main area of research being fine-grained complexity and natural language processing. At the Institute, he mainly worked with Professor Avrim Blum, Prof. Makarychev, Prof. Gimpel, fellow RAPs Dr. Mahabadi and Prof. Wiseman, Prof. Karl Stratos, Mr. Chen, and visiting student Neha Gupta.

“I really appreciated the opportunity to be at TTIC! These three years allowed me to change my research directions more towards applied computer science and gave me time to decide on where I want to be in the future,” said Dr. Backurs.

Prof. Hanneke is now an Assistant Professor at Purdue University. He specializes in machine learning algorithms, and will be teaching a course on learning theory this fall. To learn more about his experience at TTIC, read his RAP Alumni Highlight.

Prof. Mina Karzand has joined the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Davis as an Assistant Professor. Her research interests lie in machine learning, information theory, statistics, theoretical computer science, and applied probability theory. While at TTIC, she worked closely with Professor Nati Srebro and his group.

All of our RAP alumni have made significant contributions to the Institute, and made a lasting impact on our students and faculty members. We wish them all the best in their new roles, and hope to see their continued success. For more information on the RAP role, see this article.

August 2021 - TTIC introduces new Research Assistant Professors

This fall, TTIC is happy to welcome five new Research Assistant Professors. Their areas of research range from computational biology to computer vision and machine learning, and they are all eager to arrive on campus and meet their new colleagues. The RAP role at TTIC is unique, allowing abundant opportunities for unconstrained research, student mentorship, and optional teaching experience, without many of the burdens of traditional postdoctoral roles.

Recent University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign PhD graduate Dr. Raymond Yeh first heard about TTIC from one of his advisors, Professor Alexander Schwing. Prof. Schwing spent some time at TTIC himself as a PhD student, and when he received an email advertising the Research Assistant Professor position, he told Dr. Yeh that it would be a great opportunity.

When Dr. Yeh first began applying for roles after graduation, he looked at both tenure track and research assistant opportunities. Fortunately, he secured both the RAP role at TTIC for the 2021-22 academic year, and a tenure track position at Purdue University that begins the following fall. His main motivation for taking the RAP position is to give himself a gap year to focus on research, before jumping into an assistant professorship.

During his year at TTIC, Dr. Yeh will be conducting research at the intersection of machine learning and computer vision. He is specifically interested in developing algorithms that can enable computers to learn from the world effectively.

“The key to doing this successfully is determining how we should represent the world. A general theme that I’ve been working on is how we can incorporate known properties into machine learning models, such as symmetry.” said Dr. Yeh.

He became interested in this area of research as an undergraduate, studying electrical engineering. Initially, he worked mainly in the audio domain, and on signal processing. Then, as deep learning began to gain popularity, different learning-based methods became more available. Dr. Yeh feels that it was a natural transition from signal processing to machine learning, and from focusing on audio to vision.

Dr. Yeh is looking forward to joining the faculty at TTIC this fall, and collaborating with his new colleagues. “During the interview process with TTIC, I got a really good impression of the faculty and students. Because of the similarity in research areas, the communication is really effortless. I don’t have to explain a lot of the background of my current research, they just know. I feel like it just clicks, they understand what I want to do,” he said.

After spending close to 11 years in Urbana-Champaign at the University of Illinois, he is excited to spend the next year in Chicago and experience city life. Outside of work, he enjoys playing badminton, going to the gym, and trying new restaurants.

Dr. Lingxiao Wang sees moving to Chicago this fall as a new adventure. He is looking forward to continuing existing collaborations with TTIC students and faculty, as well as exploring new areas of research. A recent University of California, Los Angeles graduate, Dr. Wang primarily conducts research in machine learning.

He first came across the Institute from reading academic journals, and noticing that many great papers came from TTIC. After searching online, he found that TTIC is a prestigious Institute with high calibur researchers, professors, and students. He also heard great things about TTIC from his advisor, Professor Quanquan Gu, who had previously visited the Institute.

Within machine learning, his research focuses on privacy-preserving machine learning. “Machine learning has become more powerful nowadays, and different machine learning algorithms can be used in your daily life. For example, we can use machine learning algorithms to build strong recommendation systems to expand social networks, or even to predict medical outcomes for patients. However, the data we use to train those models often contains sensitive personal information,” said Dr. Wang.

He believes that privacy is so important because if people do not feel comfortable sharing their data, it can’t be used to help improve their daily lives. Especially, for example, in a hospital setting where that data could help doctors predict what health concerns to look for in the future.

Studies have shown that existing machine learning models can be highly vulnerable to privacy attacks. Some types of models, such as deep neural networks, can memorize all of the private information in the data sets used to train them.

“I can see many privacy concerns where we apply machine learning algorithms to solve real world problems. My research goal is to address those privacy concerns by developing more efficient and effective privacy preserving machine learning algorithms. I want to develop superfast, highly accurate algorithms that use private data while providing rigorous privacy guarantees. We want to learn from the private data without learning the private data,” he said.

Dr. Wang sees himself pursuing a career in academia, and hopes to find a tenure-track position after his time in the RAP program. In his free time, he enjoys playing sports, like soccer, and swimming.

Dr. Derek Reiman has interned at TTIC for many summers since 2016, and is happy to be returning to the Institute as a faculty member this fall. Having recently received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago, he is looking forward to the autonomy that the RAP role provides, as well as the opportunity to mentor students.

As an intern at TTIC, Dr. Reiman began working with Dr. Aly Azeem Khan, who was then an RAP himself. “He’s been instrumental in my academic growth, and like a mentor to me. He will be one of my key collaborators when I come to TTIC,” he said. Dr. Khan is currently a member of the research faculty in the Department of Pathology at University of Chicago.

The freedom that the RAP role allows will give him the opportunity to continue collaborative projects with colleagues at both TTIC and UChicago, and continue to grow his network. Dr. Reiman conducts research in computational biology, focusing on using deep learning frameworks to analyze disease related datasets for the microbiome.

“Moving forward, I want to start integrating the microbiome with the immune system and see how they interplay in the development and severity of diseases. For example, with inflammatory bowel disease, diabetes, and even many cancers, there’s this interplay between the microbiome, the immune system, and how humans respond to treatment, or how the disease progresses,” said Dr. Reiman.

He originally became interested in this area of computer science after spending several years working as a software developer, and wanting to try something new. He was intrigued by the relationship between biology and computer science, as well as significant developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning. In modern day biology, so much data is generated that humans would never be able to analyze it all. Computational biology leverages AI to find patterns in the data, and make inferences about the data based on those patterns. From there, a lab biologist can further validate those findings.

A particular subject he hopes to explore during his time at TTIC is developing different methods of controlling the microbiome landscape. His current work focuses on developing these landscapes and identifying how certain treatments or lifestyle changes can affect a person’s health. He hopes to develop a platform to help researchers test certain therapies to determine the best options for patients with various diagnoses.

In the future, Dr. Reiman hopes to work in both academia and industry. He interned at Tempus while working on his PhD as well as TTIC, and enjoyed working with the immunotherapy team. He hopes to find a balance between the two that will allow him to conduct research he is passionate about, and apply it to real-world situations.

In his free time, he enjoys playing video games and watching films, especially animation. He also loves going to music festivals with friends, and practicing MMA (mixed martial arts).

To learn more about our other new RAPs, Dr. Kartik Goyal and Dr. Hongyuan Mei, please read their welcome article.

August 2021 - Blake Woodworth and collaborators take Best Paper at COLT 2021

At the 34th Annual Conference on Learning Theory, PhD Candidate Blake Woodworth, together with his co-authors, won a Best Paper award for their paper titled “The Min-Max Complexity of Distributed Stochastic Convex Optimization with Intermittent Communication.” The paper was written in collaboration with TTIC Professor Brian Bullins, Professor Nati Srebro, and Weizmann Institute of Science Professor Ohad Shamir.

This comes two years after Woodworth and his co-author Ayush Sekhari won a COLT Best Student Paper award at the 2019 conference, for the paper “The Complexity of Making the Gradient Small in Stochastic Convex Optimization.” Sekhari is a Cornell PhD student, who was then a visiting student at TTIC. This paper was a collaborative work with TTIC alum and Cornell Professor Karthik Sridharan, Prof. Srebro, Prof. Shamir, and Dr. Dylan Foster.

Woodworth recently defended his PhD thesis, and will be starting a postdoctoral position in the fall at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. He will be working with Professor Francis Bach, in the Departement d’Informatique.

To learn more about Woodworth, his research, and experience at TTIC, see his Student Highlight article.

August 2021 - 5th Annual Student Workshop

On Tuesday, August 10, TTIC held its 5th Annual Student Workshop virtually. The workshop included student posters, short and long student talks, a keynote talk from former TTIC Research Assistant Professor and Partner Research Manager at Microsoft Dr. John Langford, as well as a panel discussion. Panelists included Dr. Langford, Senior Researcher at Microsoft and former RAP Dr. Suriya Gunasekar, UC Berkeley Professor Nika Haghtalab, and University of Chicago Professor Eric Jonas.

Awards were given for Best Long Talk, Best Short Talk, and Best Poster.

The award for Best Long Talk was given to Omar Montasser, for his talk titled “Adversarially Robust Learning with Unknown Perturbation Sets.” Best Short Talk was awarded to Bowen Shi, for his talk “Fingerspelling Detection in American Sign Language.” The award for Best Poster was tied between Han Shao and her poster “Robust Learning Under Clean-Label Attack,” and Ankita Pasad’s poster “Layer-Wise Analysis of a Self-Supervised Speech Representation Model.”

This year’s Student Workshop was organized by Kshitij Patel and Gene Li, and hosted on Zoom and Gather.Town.

July 2021 - Dr. Ostendorf has been promoted to Vice Provost for Research at the University of Washington

TTIC congratulates Trustee Dr. Mari Ostendorf on her promotion to Vice Provost for Research in the Office of Research at the University of Washington beginning September 1, 2021. We wish her success in her new role as she continues to serve on TTIC’s Board of Trustees.

Dr. Ostendorf has served as the Associate Vice Provost for Research since 2017, and is the Endowed Professor of System Design Methodologies in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Washington. She has been a member of TTIC’s Board of Trustees since 2017. In her new role in the Office of Research, she will lead UW in collaborative research efforts and seek to continue expanding the university’s robust research portfolio.

Along with serving in these roles, Dr. Ostendorf is a widely recognized researcher in the area of speech and language technology. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Washington State Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the IEEE along with several other prominent affiliations and recognitions. To learn more about Dr. Ostendorf’s new role, see the University of Washington’s announcement.

June 2021 - TTIC welcomes new Research Assistant Professors

This fall, TTIC will be welcoming Kartik Goyal and Dr. Hongyuan Mei as Research Assistant Professors (RAPs). Goyal will be receiving his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University this summer, and conducts research in natural language processing and machine learning. Dr. Mei, a recent Johns Hopkins University PhD graduate, has a background in electrical engineering and computer science, and is interested in designing machine learning methods that have real-life applications. They will be joining three other incoming RAPs in September.

Goyal first heard about TTIC after meeting Professors Kevin Gimpel and Karen Livescu at professional conferences. He also knew colleagues from Carnegie Mellon who had gone on to be RAPs at TTIC, and heard about their positive experiences. After learning more about the Institute and the RAP position from Prof. Gimpel, he decided to apply.

“My research is at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning. I would say I’m generally interested in developing probabilistic models that explain the generation of different artifacts that we see as data. I’m also interested in applications related to digital humanities, for example, computational analysis of mechanisms behind production of historical documents,” said Goyal.

His professional career in computer science began with an interest in machine learning, which led to thinking about the latent structures behind the surface form text that we see online. He finds this interesting because it not only uncovers something about the regular structure that underlies the surface of texts on the internet, but it also touches on patterns behind large textual documents that we find in our daily lives.

As an RAP, Goyal is looking forward to collaborating with the rest of the faculty at TTIC, and taking his research in new directions. He is also excited about taking part in the campus culture, mentoring students, and gaining more teaching experience. “I feel this will give me great experience for my future academic career aspirations,” he said.

When he isn’t in the classroom or conducting research, Goyal enjoys rock climbing and bouldering. Though he has never visited Chicago before, he is looking forward to moving to the city and exploring everything that it has to offer.

Dr. Mei will be returning to Chicago after spending the last several years in Baltimore, Maryland at Johns Hopkins. He previously completed his master’s degree at the University of Chicago, and spent time at TTIC working with Professor Matthew Walter. Along with former RAP Professor Mohit Bansal, now at UNC Chapel Hill, they conducted research on understanding human natural language, especially in navigational language commands. They also worked on generating language descriptions for complex data records.

“Because I spent time at TTIC, I was already impressed by how knowledgeable and supportive the faculty members and students are. I know that TTIC is a place that can offer a lot for people’s careers, and I personally enjoyed my experience there. I anticipate that I will benefit more when I join as an RAP in the fall,” said Dr. Mei.

His main area of research is machine learning, particularly, neural probabilistic modeling. Basically, he wants to create models that can predict the future when given past information. For example, the model could read patient health records at a hospital, and predict future medical events such as when the patient will need to come back, and what type of treatment they will need. The next step in this research will be to extend the models to handle a wider variety of data, and integrate them into a reinforcement learner. One example could be an intelligent assistant that can suggest visiting schedules and treatments for patients, which it believes will improve their health conditions.

Dr. Mei is looking forward to having the freedom and independence to continue this research and expand his research expertise. “I can work on the projects that I find most exciting, and have flexibility to explore the areas I haven’t done over the course of my PhD. That level of flexibility and independence is something really amazing,” he said. “And the colleagues and students here are amazing. RAPs have the opportunity to collaborate with other faculty members as well as PhD students. The quality of the students at TTIC is hard to find at other places.”

The possibility of building intelligent agents that can predict and influence the future, either in physical robots or in software form, is something that he is very passionate about. Dr. Mei hopes that this research will be applicable to several different areas, not only healthcare. This concept could also be applied to education, through online learning platforms that could help individuals learn more efficiently by assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and provide tools to improve in certain areas, and excel in others.

Outside of work, Dr. Mei enjoys spending time with friends, going to the gym, and eating good food. He is happy to be returning to Chicago, as he fondly remembers the years he spent here as a graduate student, and he’s looking forward to jogging along the lakefront again.

To meet the rest of our incoming RAP class, and stay up to date on the latest news from TTIC, follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

June 2021 - TTIC takes first place in Real Robot Challenge

In the fall of 2020, TTIC participated in the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems’ Real Robot Challenge. Conducted remotely from August to December, participants wrote code that was run on robots that were all housed at Max Planck in Stuttgart, Germany. TTIC’s team won first place in the challenge, led by PhD students Charles Schaff and Takuma Yoneda.

For the Real Robot Challenge, the Max Planck Institute collaborated with Mila, Google, and New York University among other organizations to develop a claw-like robot with three “fingers” that can manipulate items. A number of these robots were built for the challenge, so that each team had remote access to their own robot. In phase one, the code was run in simulation. The challenge robots were housed in black boxes, with controlled lighting and cameras mounted throughout the box.

In phase 2, the goal was to have the robot manipulate a cube. It had the potential to do this in several different ways, such as picking it up, flipping it over, or turning the cube. In phase 3, this was repeated with more difficult shapes to manipulate, like a rectangular prism (cuboid).

“The overall goal was to explore the dexterity with which robots can manipulate objects. The challenge tasked the teams with developing algorithms that allowed the robot to move the cube to an arbitrary specified location off the ground in the robot’s workspace with a given orientation,” said TTIC Robotics Professor Matthew Walter. “So they had competitors go through a series of benchmark rounds, where they could train their models in simulation or on the real robot. Every two weeks, teams would upload their code, and the organizers would evaluate it and give them a score back.”

After running their code on the real robots, the teams would receive video of the robot completing the tasks, as well as all of the data recorded by the robot so they could see exactly how it worked and gain helpful insights for their next trial. “It’s important to have that introspection capability where you can watch the video and see what went wrong. You want the data from the robot itself, so you can look under the hood and say, why did it drop it?” said Professor Walter.

A key aspect of machine learning is benchmark tasks, a series of tasks (typically datasets, not physical hardware) that are common across institutions or various parties with clear metrics that people can evaluate one another against. This helps us have a better understanding of how much progress is being made, where open problems exist, and how algorithm A compares to algorithm B.

This has been true in machine learning, and more specifically, computer vision, natural language processing, and speech recognition for some time now. In robotics, it has been difficult to create these benchmarks. Traditionally with robotics, individuals build their own robots, which have different sensors on them that work in different ways, making it quite difficult to set a level playing field.

Somewhat recently, the ability to create that level playing field has become easier with more commonly available platforms. In the robotics lab at TTIC, there is a robot called Baxter, a relatively affordable robot that, like its successors, has helped to standardize research platforms. The robots can be set up with the same sensors, and they can all be given the same objects to manipulate.

“In machine learning, researchers are getting more interested in robotics and other embodied domains, but most of the work is done in simulated environments. Now, there can be a set of clear metrics and clear tasks, so we can evaluate different algorithms against one another,” said Professor Walter.

TTIC is continuing to work with Max Planck and other participating universities, such as University of Washington, Stanford, and NYU, on a paper as well as organizing the next version of the competition.

June 2021 - TTIC RAP Bradly Stadie to give long presentation at ICML 2021

TTIC is pleased to announce that Research Assistant Professor Dr. Bradly Stadie will be giving a long presentation at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in July of 2021. His paper, “World Model as a Graph: Learning Latent Landmarks for Planning,” was selected from 5,513 submissions to be one of 166 long presentations at ICML 2021, which will be held virtually this year.

The ICML is a highly renowned global organization known for presenting and publishing the best in machine learning research. Only about 22% of submissions were accepted for presentation at this year’s conference, the majority being short presentations. In order to be selected for a long presentation, a paper must be of exceptional quality, and cover a topic that is of particular interest to the machine learning community.

Dr. Stadie previously had a paper accepted as a poster presentation at ICML 2020, and is excited to be giving a long presentation with his colleagues this year. In many ways, this year’s presentation is a follow up on his work from last year, after making improvements and diving more deeply into this area of research. The paper centers around problem solving in robots, and draws connections between old and new computer science methods.

“The core problem is that for many tasks we want robots to accomplish, the problem horizon is usually very long, anywhere from a couple seconds to a couple minutes. In order to solve longer tasks like this, the robot has to know how to break down a problem into subproblems. Humans are intuitively really good at this sort of thing, sequentially listing the steps that you would take to solve a problem. But that’s not a natural capability for robots, so you need algorithms that can handle that kind of temporal reasoning,” said Dr. Stadie. This breaking down of a larger problem into smaller components is called “planning” in academic terms.

One of the key takeaways from this research is that robots need to know how long they should be planning, and how often to replan. If a robot tries to redo its plan too often, it will get confused, because it hasn’t had enough practice at sticking to one plan and seeing what happens. For this project, Dr. Stadie and his colleagues created an algorithm to help the robot decide how long it should execute a given plan. Using this system, the robot is only allowed to replan after a set amount of time.

“There’s a lot of work in classical computer science regarding graph search, and how we should use search methods when planning. For a long time, reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning have not been taking full advantage of all of this prior work, and the two communities were somewhat separate. I’m excited because there’s a big research community that is interested in classical graph search methods. But many of them haven’t been as interested in deep reinforcement learning. I hope we can start building bridges between these groups of people.”

This paper found that substantial progress in robotics can be made by leveraging graph search in the context of deep reinforcement learning. Dr. Stadie and his co-authors, Lunjun Zhang and Dr. Ge Yang, hope to continue to see more work in deep reinforcement learning that draws from other areas of computer science. For more information on this research, and videos of their algorithm in simulation, visit the paper website.

May 2021 - NIH awards grant to University of Chicago researchers exploring law enforcement language on police radios

Article courtesy of The University of Chicago, Division of the Social Sciences. Written by Sarah Steimer.

The study will analyze police scanner audio to find whether nuances in language increase the likelihood of adverse interactions between law enforcement and male minority youth.

The scratchy sounds and staccato voices heard over police scanners are easy to ignore as background noises. They hum along in newsrooms, on police procedurals or even in a curious citizen’s home. But University of Chicago researchers are betting that these communications — specifically, the language used — could shed light on adverse interactions between law enforcement officers (LEOs) and male minority youth (MMY).

The research — led by Margaret Beale Spencer, the Charles L. Grey Distinguished Service Professor in Comparative Human Development, and data scientist Christopher Graziul — was recently awarded a grant from the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers have two long-term goals for the study. The first is to understand how the ways in which officers and dispatchers describe incidents may impact the quality of police encounters with MMY. The second is to develop an effective assessment tool and training program for LEOs that would reduce the incidence of negative outcomes.

To reach those goals, the team will undertake a first-of-its-kind analysis of procedural language based on broadcast police communications. The first step will be to develop a data processing pipeline to transcribe communications into machine-readable text. The researchers will then determine the marginal effect of differences in procedural language on the probability of an adverse event between LEOs and MMY — for instance, are there differing outcomes when a MMY is described as “agitated” versus “excited?” Lastly, the team will assess the potential efficacy of a training program based on this analysis for reducing youth trauma given untoward police and male minority youth interactions.

The crux of the study — and what Spencer suggests may have drawn NIH interest — is its theoretical orientation.

“What this research does is different,” she says. “It emphasizes the role of human development processes and the significance of context, which includes history and, importantly, the history of relationships between policing professionals and minority communities.”

The study uses an inclusive human development perspective to understand police behavior under conditions of stress — which are common. “If the very language they’re using is inclining them to untoward outcomes, it’s important to understand and to test the validity of the assumption,” Spencer says.

Spencer’s work has focused on the major adults in the lives of young people. She’s explored how such adults’ actions (or reactions) toward adolescents could be changed to improve interactions — especially concerning young people of color, whom Spencer says are members of a devalued community.

Spencer emphasizes the need to start from a perspective of shared humanity and human vulnerability. But there’s an imbalance between risks and protective factors or supports: People of color are often only viewed as having primarily risks. If policymakers do not understand the individuals for whom the supports are designed, those supports are unlikely to make sense or to have a positive impact.

“That’s why you do this work, to make sure that policing can be experienced by diverse communities as a source of support, given that they are paid public dollars to support and to protect all,” Spencer says. “If they’re being trained with a perspective of devaluation for particular communities, well, they’re not serving that purpose. It is critical to approach this work with a particular understanding about the shared humanity of all Americans.”

The research uses Spencer’s phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory (PVEST) as its theoretical framing, which highlights the natural development of reactive coping strategies in response to stress. Radio communications are a window into how LEOs react to and share vital information about stressful situations.

“Understanding radio communications as a reflection of real-time LEO responses grounds our research in human experience,” Graziul says. “This perspective differentiates our project from applications of data science where, for example, police records are used to predict LEO risk of involvement in an adverse event. The strength of our data is its ability to capture the process of policing professionals acting or reacting in response to service calls, as opposed to a recounting of events after the fact. Computational tools enable us to make sense of how these events unfold and to scale up this analysis significantly.”

But before the team can apply this theoretical framing, it needs to comb through the speech patterns and language used in an audio archive including over 30,000 hours of broadcast police communications. This will require the development of a data processing pipeline that will allow for the transcription of communications into machine-readable text.

Graziul says once he downloaded thousands of hours of radio transmissions, he faced a few roadblocks to processing the audio files. First, Karen Livescu—associate professor at Toyota Technology Institute at Chicago, an expert in speech and language processing, and a co-Investigator on the project—pointed out that the noise in these recordings is often at the same frequency as the human voice, making it difficult to distinguish between the two. And when it comes to using commercial speech-to-text software, that technology is based on conversational English; but police communicate using language that is more task-oriented and represents a subset of the English language. Lastly, the team would need to build its own automatic speech recognition model to process their audio archive because the information being communicated on police radios is extremely sensitive.

The team is working with Shomir Wilson at Pennsylvania State University, who specializes in AI and privacy, to help them understand how to remove such sensitive information as addresses, names, and medical conditions. Related, the audio is being transcribed on a secure server, never on transcribers’ computers.

But transcribers’ sensitivities are being considered as well: “Managing a group of transcribers is not just about making assignments and making it efficient,” Graziul says. “We also are trying to think proactively about preventing secondary traumatic stress, which can occur when transcribers come across emotionally disturbing content.”

In addition to analyzing the use of language on police radios, the team plans to release an open source tool that will allow others to automatically transcribe police radio broadcasts in their local communities.

“To me, one of the most exciting parts of this project is making a new data source available to others, especially a data source that provides such rich information about policing in practice,” Graziul said. “Given current technology, I was surprised that someone had not already tried to make use of this publicly available data.”

The study’s basis, execution and goals are all viewed through the lens of human development and context. The researchers hope to locate and remove assumptions in LEO-MMY interactions, allowing for a greater appreciation of each group’s shared humanity.

“This work has the potential — using authentic, basic science, and applied scholarship — to make a difference,” Spencer says. “And we’re very excited about the opportunity.”

May 2021 - TTIC welcomes new members to the Board of Trustees

The Board of Trustees of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago is pleased to announce the appointment of three new members, Dr. Kavita Bala, Dr. Juan de Pablo, and Dr. Kazuo Hotate. Their appointment terms begin on May 12, 2021.

Dr. Kavita Bala is currently Dean of the Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, as well as a faculty Fellow with the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future. She is also the Lead Scientist at GrokStyle, a company that develops visual search recognition software. Dr. Bala co-founded the company in 2015, and it was acquired by Facebook in 2019.

Dr. Juan de Pablo is the Vice President for National Laboratories, Science Strategy, Innovation, and Global Initiatives, and the Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. Dr. de Pablo is also a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Dr. Kazuo Hotate is the President of the Toyota Technological Institute in Nagoya, Japan. He is a member of several prestigious academic and professional societies, including the Science Council of Japan (SCJ), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP).

The new Board Chair is Dr. Eric Grimson. He succeeds Dr. Sadaoki Furui, former President of TTIC. Dr. Grimson is the Chancellor for Academic Advancement at MIT CSAIL, has served on TTIC’s Board of Trustees since 2015, and is an advisor on the institute’s External Advisory Committee. TTIC is grateful to Dr. Grimson for his dedication and service and we are confident that under his leadership, the board will continue to strive for excellence and help TTIC grow as a world-class institution.

May 2021 - Professor Karen Livescu honored by the International Speech Communication Association

The Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago is pleased to congratulate Prof. Karen Livescu on being elected a fellow of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). The ISCA honors a select number of members each year who have made significant contributions to their field, and fellows are nominated by their peers. The ISCA began its fellowship program in 2007, honoring exceptional members of the speech communication research community.

Prof. Livescu has been recognized for her “contributions to articulatory modeling, to speech representation learning, and to bridging the gaps between speech research, machine learning and natural language processing”. She will be presented with this award at the INTERSPEECH 2021 conference in Brno, Czech Republic, by ISCA President Prof. John Hansen. The conference will be held from August 30 to September 3.

A member of TTIC’s faculty since 2008, she has won a number of awards and honors for her work in speech and language processing. Prof. Livescu was also selected to be an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer this year. TTIC is proud to have such decorated, innovative faculty members, who inspire the next generation of leading computer scientists.

April 2021 - Trustee Angela Olinto elected to two prestigious professional societies

TTIC Trustee Angela Olinto has been recognized for her distinguished achievements in the field of astroparticle physics by two prestigious professional societies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) and National Academy of Sciences (NAS). This year, the NAS new member class included a record number of women, commending them for groundbreaking research in their respective fields.

Prof. Olinto is the Dean of the Physical Sciences Division of the University of Chicago, and the Albert A. Michelson Distinguished Service Professor in the UChicago Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. She has been a member of TTIC’s Board of Trustees since 2018, and is one of two TTIC trustees to be elected to the AAAS this year, joining Prof. Charles Isbell of Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing.

We would like to congratulate Prof. Olinto on her impressive accomplishments, and thank her for her contributions to the Board of Trustees. We look forward to our continued partnership with Prof. Olinto and the University of Chicago, and wish her the best of luck in her future endeavors.

April 2021 - Trustee Charles Isbell elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago is pleased to announce that Board of Trustees member Charles Isbell has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Isbell is a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, the John P. Imlay, Jr. Dean of the Georgia Tech College of Computing, and the Executive Director of the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing. He has been a member of TTIC’s Board of Trustees since 2018.

Prof. Isbell is one of 252 newly elected members this year, including Sanjay Gupta, Kara Swisher, Fei-Fei Li, and Oprah Winfrey. The Academy was founded in 1780 by our nation’s founding fathers, with the intention of honoring excellence and bringing together leaders from a variety of fields. Since 1780, they have elected over 13,500 members.

TTIC congratulates Prof. Isbell on this great achievement, and is proud to have such decorated scholars on our Board of Trustees. We wish him all the best in his future endeavors, and look forward to his continued success.

April 2021 - TA’s Needed for Summer School: New Horizons in Theoretical Computer Science

From May 31 to June 4, 2021, an online summer school will be offered to undergraduate computer science students who are interested in expanding their knowledge of theoretical computer science and its applications.

The school is co-organized by TTIC Professor Madhur Tulsiani, Havard University Professor Boaz Barak, University of Texas at Austin Professor Shuchi Chawla, and the Committee for the Advancement of Theoretical Computer Science (CATCS) of the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (SIGACT).

Throughout the week, students will engage in several mini-courses taught by top researchers in the field. Instructors are from institutions such as Penn State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, and Microsoft Research. The courses will introduce undergraduate students to various research areas within theoretical computer science, and provide resources to students from groups that are currently underrepresented in the field.

TA’s will be responsible for planning team building activities and icebreakers, leading small study groups, providing mentorship to students, and monitoring questions in the chat during lectures, among other duties. The time commitment is 27-33 hours from May 24 to June 11, 2021, with 20 hours required during the week of the course. Compensation for TA’s will be $500 in total.

To apply for a TA position, fill out the application, and have a faculty advisor send a short recommendation to summer-school-admin@boazbarak.org. Recommenders should use the subject line “TA recommendation for <<Your Name>>”. Applications are particularly encouraged from PhD students from underrepresented groups who have a passion for teaching and increasing diversity in the field. The application deadline has been extended until all spots are filled.

March 2021 - TTIC student Naren Manoj awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Second-year PhD student Naren Manoj has been awarded a 2021 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. With only 2,000 fellows named each year, the program provides funding and other resources to a select group of scholars pursuing graduate research in STEM fields. The acceptance rate in 2019 was 16%, from a pool of 12,200 applicants.

Manoj studies theory and algorithms for machine learning, and is co-advised by TTIC Professors Yury Makarychev and Avrim Blum. “People use machine learning extensively now, and it’s becoming more and more common to use it in various critical application areas. Knowing the fundamental limits of these algorithms and when they work and when they don’t is important, so that people who need them in applications where safety is very critical know exactly what they’re getting into,” said Manoj.

He is currently interested in a few different problems, including those in the field of robust learning. Specifically, looking at when the data that an algorithm is trying to learn from is corrupted, but the user still wants to learn something from that data. For example, if a malicious party were to come in and tamper with the training set, or the set of data that the user is trying to learn the model from, with the intent of causing unwanted behavior at runtime.

“I’m looking at several models within that space and trying to see whether we can come up with robust learning algorithms there. I’m also thinking about randomized, numerical linear algebra, which is an important part of machine learning. I’m still pretty early in the program though, so I’m trying to figure out where I want to live in the intersection of theory and practice, among other things,” said Manoj. “I’m just wrapping up course requirements. Next spring will be my last set of required courses, and I have to take the qualifying exam soon. Then, I can focus exclusively on my research for the next several years.”

Part of Manoj’s motivation for applying to the program was to practice organizing his thoughts around a research agenda. There were several components to the application, including a personal statement, a summary of his research interests, a research plan detailing how he would execute the project and share his results, and how the research would be beneficial to science or society as a whole. Applicants propose a project that is scaled to span three to five years, which is just over half of the duration of TTIC’s degree program. “My plan right now is to do good research and see where that takes me,” he said.

For students hoping to apply to this program in the future, Manoj recommends getting advice from advisors and senior students about the research proposal. As the research proposal receives such serious scrutiny, writing that document well is key to a successful application. He also suggests efficiently repurposing documents, as it is very similar to a graduate school application.

“I think the program has some interesting benefits,” said Manoj. “One thing that I found was that I might be able to get travel allowances that would allow me to attend more conferences. Having additional freedom to do that is even more peace of mind, which is really nice.” He is looking forward to attending conferences in machine learning when COVID-19 regulations allow.

March 2021 - TTIC addresses violence against people of Asian descent

On March 18, 2021 President Turk released a statement to the TTIC community regarding the recent surge in violence against people of Asian descent. Amplifying the words of the University of Chicago’s Provost Ka Yee C. Lee, and Dean of Students Michele Rasmussen, President Turk shared the following via email:

TTIC stands firmly with UChicago in opposing all bias, racism, and acts of hate and violence. The surge in anti-Asian rhetoric, discrimination, and violence in this country is extremely disturbing. The murders in the Atlanta area were a shock to us all.

To those in the TTIC community who are Asian or of Asian descent, you are integral to TTIC, as our colleagues, students, teachers, leaders, and friends. We value and appreciate you. TTIC stands in solidarity with you.

To all, please consider taking advantage of campus resources if you have experienced bias, feel threatened in any way, or want to seek or offer support. Additionally, don’t hesitate to contact HR Director Amy Minick or myself if you’d like to discuss any issues related to your safety or well-being at TTIC or our commitments to equity and inclusion.

March 2021 - Special Topics: Algorithms for Massive Data

In Spring Quarter 2021, Sepideh Mahabadi will be teaching a new course, Special Topics: Algorithms for Massive Data. This course will cover the theoretical aspects of computation over massive data.

While classical algorithms can be too slow, or require too much space on big data, in this course students will focus on designing algorithms that are specifically tailored for large datasets. Moreover, they will learn about different computational models that capture various aspects of computation over massive data, such as streaming algorithms and sub-linear time algorithms.

The course will also offer some of the algorithmic techniques and tools for solving problems over massive data, such as sampling, sketching, dimensionality reduction, and computing efficient summaries of the data (such as core-sets).

“I decided to teach this course to provide an opportunity for interested students to become familiar with the area of algorithms for big data, use the techniques developed in the course in other areas, be able to read recent papers in the area, and ideally start conducting research in this area,” said Mahabadi.

Spring Quarter begins on Monday, March 29. If you are interested in taking this course, please reach out to your academic advisor. This is a theoretical course, and enrollment is open to both graduate students and advanced undergraduate students with a strong background in algorithms and discrete mathematics.

February 2021 - Trustee Mari Ostendorf elected to the National Academy of Engineering

The Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago would like to congratulate Board of Trustees member Mari Ostendorf on being elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Prof. Ostendorf is the Endowed Professor of System Design Methodologies at the University of Washington, and has been a member of TTIC’s Board of Trustees since October 2017.

Prof. Ostendorf has been recognized for her “contributions to statistical and prosodic models for speech and natural language processing and for advances in conversational dialogue systems.” Membership to the academy is one of the highest professional distinctions in the Engineering community, with only 106 new U.S. members elected this year.

TTIC is proud to have outstanding scholars such as Prof. Ostendorf serving on our Board of Trustees, and we look forward to her continued success. She will be formally inducted into the NAE on October 3, 2021 during the academy’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

February 2021 - TTIC Celebrates Women in Science

In honor of International Day of Women and Girls in Science, female students, researchers, and professors at TTIC came together to create this video. Please enjoy watching the video to learn more about their research and why they chose to pursue careers in computer science.

January 2021 - Symposium on Women in Theoretical Machine Learning offers Connections for Female Researchers

On Friday, April 9, 2021, TTIC will be co-sponsoring a symposium on women in theoretical machine learning along with the IAS School of Mathematics and the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation (IMSI).

The goals of this symposium are to encourage collaborations, tighten relationships, and strengthen connections for female researchers in theoretical machine learning, computer science, applied mathematics, and statistical inference.

This event will offer an opportunity to enhance professional skills in a friendly environment. Participation is encouraged from graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, professors, and researchers from the industry. As the symposium will be held virtually, worldwide participants are welcome.

Speakers will include Jelena Diakonikolas (University of Wisconsin - Madison), Stefanie Jegelka (MIT), Po-Ling Loh (University of Wisconsin - Madison), Caroline Uhler (MIT), and Rachel Ward (The University of Texas at Austin). The event is being organized by Xiaoxia Wu (TTIC and University Chicago) and Mina Karzand (TTIC), and advised by Rebecca Willett (University of Chicago).

The symposium will run from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. CST, and will be hosted on GatherTown and Zoom. The full schedule will be released in February, 2021, and the application closes at 11:59 p.m. CST on April 1, 2021.

The Women in Theoretical Machine Learning Symposium precedes IMSI’s workshop on The Multifaceted Complexity of Machine Learning, which will take place (virtually) from April 12-16, 2021.

January 2021 - President Matthew Turk named 2020 ACM Fellow

Matthew Turk, President of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, has been named a 2020 Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s leading computing society.

Dr. Turk was recognized for his “contributions to face recognition, computer vision, and multimodal interaction.”

The distinction of Fellow is the ACM’s highest membership grade, awarded to less than 1% of members worldwide for outstanding accomplishments in the field of computing. ACM Fellows are nominated by their peers, with nominations reviewed by a distinguished selection committee. 2020’s ACM Fellows represent 15 countries, including the United States, Japan, Israel, China, and the United Kingdom.

“This year our task in selecting the 2020 Fellows was a little more challenging, as we had a record number of nominations from around the world,” said ACM President Gabriele Kotsis. The ACM will formally recognize the 2020 Fellows at its annual Awards Banquet, to be held in San Francisco in June.

Before becoming the third President of TTIC in 2019, Dr. Turk was Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he co-directed the Four Eyes Lab, pursuing research in imaging, interaction, and innovative interfaces. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and the IAPR and was the Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies. He holds a B.S. from Virginia Tech, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Ph.D. from MIT.

Additional information about the 2020 ACM Fellows, as well as previously named ACM Fellows, is available through the ACM Fellows site.

Dr. Turk joins TTIC Professor and Chief Academic Officer Avrim Blum in the ranks of ACM Fellows. Dr. Blum was recognized as an ACM Fellow in 2007 for contributions to learning theory and algorithms.

December 2020 - IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer

TTIC Associate Professor Karen Livescu has been appointed to the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s 2021 Class of Distinguished Lecturers. The Distinguished Lecturer Program provides a means for IEEE Chapters to have access to well-known educators, authors and recognized experts in the fields of signal processing to lecture at Chapter meetings.

November 2020 - Admissions Open House

Toyota Technological Institute of Chicago invites you to participate in a virtual Admissions Open House on Friday, December 4, at 11:00 am (Chicago time) via Zoom. TTIC faculty and students will present an overview of the Institute and the PhD program followed by open Q+A. Applicants have an opportunity to learn more about the PhD program, the TTIC academic community, and ask questions.

Advanced registration is required to attend this event: https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0sd-qtqjIiGNSvTbVmkw_aRKjK71PugaoW

November 2020 - TTIC announces its operational plans for Winter 2021

Winter Quarter 2021

• Monday, January 11 - Friday, March, 19
• January 11-15, all TTIC and UChicago courses will be conducted remotely.
• Jan 18- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (no class)
• Jan 19- In-person instruction begins for courses with this option.
• Feb 12- Break day
• Mar 13-15- Reading Days (consult instructors about if class is meeting)
• Final exams will be March 16-19.
• Mar 19- Last day of winter quarter

For anyone traveling over the holidays and returning to Chicago, the City of Chicago has an Emergency Travel Order which requires self-quarantine for 14 days after arriving in Chicago from select high-infection states. TTIC members should observe this quarantine period and monitor all your symptoms before coming to campus and TTIC facilities.

Courses for Winter Quarter 2021

All TTIC courses for winter will have remote participation capability for those registered.

In-person attendance is not required for any TTIC course for Winter quarter. All are categorized as remote.

Specific questions about TTIC courses or delivery format should go directly to the instructor and/or your advisor.

Any in-person instruction during Winter Quarter will be socially distanced and every participant will be required to wear a mask. This is true for both TTIC and UChicago courses. Classrooms all over campus will provide hand sanitizer, and will have an updated cleaning schedule. Instructors and students are personally responsible for daily self-monitoring of symptoms, wearing masks while on campus, frequent hand-washing, and maintaining social distance. Everyone who returns to campus will be required to take safety training, and to sign an attestation that they will follow the new protocols including daily monitoring and not coming to campus if they’re symptomatic. (You only need to complete training once. Your ID card will be given building access after completion.)

Access to TTIC Facilities in Winter

The public health goal is to limit the spread of COVID-19, and this is best achieved by distancing people. Any work and activity that can be done remotely should continue to be conducted remotely.

TTIC facility access is operating at limited occupancy. For questions: contact@ttic.edu

Ongoing Public Health Situation + TTIC Plans

Public health and safety is the reason that TTIC, the world of academia, and nearly every country on Earth is making changes to lifestyle and business operations.The TTIC community can expect that any return to campus and TTIC facilities will include strict adherence and enforcement of CDC guidelines, as well as those of the University of Chicago, local, state and federal government.

Please keep in mind that plans under the COVID-19 pandemic situation is shifting for everyone, around the globe. Plans will continue to change. TTIC will issue updates with the community as we move through the quarter. We intend to continue to promote and value interactivity, connecting, and accessibility regardless of our proximity. If you have questions or concerns at any point, please reach out to TTIC for assistance.

Instructions for if you may have been exposed or have learned you are positive for COVID-19 can be found on the TTIC COVID-19 Resources page.

We will continue to closely monitor conditions locally and regionally. We will adapt our plans as needed.

Partnering with UChicago

TTIC is working with the University of Chicago and coordinating facility access, campus protocols, health services, facility cleaning services, student services, and curriculum offerings. TTIC and UChicago operations will match in most instances.

Spring Quarter 2021

TTIC’s COVID-19 Response Group will continue meeting and processing changing factors as they relate to public health, and the Institute’s operations. As we move through winter quarter, the TTIC community will be notified of any changes to plans, and updates for future plans. We anticipate announcing plans for Spring Quarter 2021 in early March 2021. For now, Spring Quarter will begin on Monday, March 29.

October 2020 - Google PhD Fellowship

TTIC PhD Candidate Mingda Chen has been awarded a Google PhD Fellowship in Natural Language Processing. Google PhD Fellowships directly support graduate students as they pursue their PhD, as well as connect them to a Google Research Mentor.

The Google PhD Fellowship Program was created to recognize and support outstanding graduate students who seek to influence the future of technology by pursuing exceptional research in computer science and related fields.

Mingda is interested in machine learning and natural language processing (NLP), with an emphasis on neural latent variable models for NLP, and scalable language pretraining using naturally-occurring supervision. He is advised by Prof. Kevin Gimpel. Congratulations, Mingda!

August 2020 - TTIC is part of an award collaboration of NSF and the Simons Foundation to uncover foundations of deep learning

TTIC’s Prof Nathan Srebro is a collaborator in one of two new awards through the Mathematical and Scientific Foundations of Deep Learning, or MoDL, program.

The National Science Foundation Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Engineering (ENG), and the Simons Foundation Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences have partnered to jointly sponsor the two new research collaborations through MoDL focused on explicit topics involving some of the most challenging questions in the general area of Mathematical and Scientific Foundations of Deep Learning. The interdisciplinary projects seek to understand and develop the theoretical foundations for deep learning networks. Deep Learning is part of a broader family of machine-learning methods that uses artificial neural networks to digest large amounts of raw data inputs and train AI systems without direct human supervision.

Each team is receiving a total of $10 million over the next five years. The funding will allow collaborating teams to embark on ambitious research projects, conduct student and recent doctoral degree recipient training from across the above-listed multi-disciplinary spectrum, host workshops and summer schools, and provide open access to results.

The Collaboration on the Theoretical Foundations of Deep Learning team is led by Prof. Peter Bartlet at the University of California, Berkeley and other academic partners include Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, University of California San Diego, Hebrew University, and University of California, Irvine. The team aims to study the mathematical mechanisms that underpin the practical success of deep learning; explain the limitations of current methods; and expand the accuracy and applicability of deep learning systems.

Complementing NSF’s National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes, the MoDL program supports collaborations between mathematicians, statisticians, electrical engineers and theoretical computer scientists. In addition to ambitious research projects, the program will train students, host workshops and summer schools, and provide open access to results. As the need for data scientists grows, the benefits of programs like this one become clear. The interdisciplinary focus will build mathematical foundations and advance the understanding of deep learning and AI and enable the national workforce.

August 2020 - Special Quarter on Theory of Deep Learning (Sept - Dec 2020)

TTIC, as part of the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL), will co-host a Special Quarter on the Theory of Deep Learning beginning in September 2020.

IDEAL is a multi-discipline (computer science, statistics, economics, electrical engineering, and operations research) and multi-institution (Northwestern University, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, and University of Chicago) collaborative institute that focuses on key aspects of the theoretical foundations of data science. The institute supports the study of foundational problems related to machine learning, high-dimensional data analysis and optimization in both strategic and non-strategic environments. The primary activity of the institute are thematically focused quarters which coordinate graduate course work with workshops and external visitors. IDEAL is an HDR TRIPODS institute supported by the National Science Foundation.

The autumn Special Quarter on Theory of Deep Learning is organized by Nathan Srebro (TTIC), Zhaoran Wang (Northwestern University), and Dongning Guo (Northwestern University). The special quarter will be held virtually on the gather.town platform, providing access to classes, meetings, seminars, and water-cooler interactions.

To register or learn more about IDEAL’s Special Quarter on Theory of Deep Learning, and future events through IDEAL, visit the IDEAL website.

July 2020 - TTIC announces its operational plans for Autumn 2020

Autumn Quarter 2020

Tuesday, September 29 - Friday, December 11

The possibility remains that dates may shift, based on public health and state or federal recommendations.

• September 29 - October 2 - Autumn quarter week 1. No in-person instruction
• October 5 - Courses may hold in-person sessions
• October 5 - November 20 - Courses held remote, in-person, or hybrid
• November 23 - November 27 - Thanksgiving week; no courses
• November 30 - Remainder of autumn quarter is remote only
• December 5 - December 7 - Reading period
• December 8 - December 11 - Final Exam period

New Student Orientation will be an online experience.

September Diploma and Welcome Ceremony will be an online, live experience.

Those participating in any in-person autumn activity at TTIC (when available) should arrive in Chicago and monitor for any illness/ COVID-19 symptoms 2 weeks prior to any presence on campus. If you are arriving in Chicago from a Level 3 classified country, you must quarantine for 2 weeks, per the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH). The City of Chicago has an Emergency Travel Order which requires quarantine after arriving in Chicago from select high-infection states.

Courses in Autumn 2020

All TTIC courses for autumn will have remote participation capability for those registered.

TTIC students will have priority for any in-person Autumn courses. New TTIC students will have priority to register for List A courses that may meet in-person, followed by returning TTIC students, and then UChicago students. In-person attendance is not required for any TTIC course for Autumn quarter.

Specific questions about TTIC courses or delivery format should go directly to the instructor and/or your advisor, from August.

Any in-person instruction during Autumn Quarter will be socially distanced and every participant will be required to wear a mask. This is true for both TTIC and UChicago courses. Classrooms all over campus will provide hand sanitizer, and will have an updated cleaning schedule. Instructors and students are personally responsible for daily self-monitoring of symptoms, wearing masks while on campus, frequent hand-washing, and maintaining social distance. Everyone who returns to campus will be required to take safety training, and to sign an attestation that they will follow the new protocols including daily monitoring and not coming to campus if they’re symptomatic. (More details will be shared at a later date.)

Students and instructors should be prepared to transition to a remote format, as future shutdowns may be possible.

Access to TTIC Facilities in Autumn

The public health goal is to limit the spread of COVID-19, and this is best achieved by distancing people. Any work and activity that can be done remotely should continue to be conducted remotely. Future plans for building access will be communicated once renovations are complete and a process for safe access is determined.

Services and Support

TTIC services and support continue, most administered remotely.
All support services will continue during normal business hours (between 9:00am and 4:00pm).

Visitors

Only select classifications of visitors will be eligible for access to TTIC facilities in Autumn Quarter: registered students taking in-person TTIC courses, UChicago students advised by TTIC faculty (attending an in-person meeting only when the advisor is present), and regular UChicago collaborators. Any other visitors must be specifically approved in advance by the Chief Academic Officer or Chief Financial Officer.

Any visitor will be required to pre-arrange the visit and follow the same procedures and guidelines (including signing an attestation form) as TTIC personnel.

TTIC-Sponsored Travel

TTIC continues to suspend all institute-sponsored international and domestic travel until further notice.

Ongoing Public Health Situation + TTIC Plans

Public health and safety is the reason that TTIC, the world of academia, and nearly every country on Earth is making changes to lifestyle and business operations.The TTIC community can expect that any return to campus and TTIC facilities will include strict adherence and enforcement of CDC guidelines, as well as those of the University of Chicago, local, state and federal government.

Please keep in mind that plans under the COVID-19 pandemic situation is shifting for everyone, around the globe. Plans will continue to change. TTIC will issue updates with the community as we move through the quarter. We intend to continue to promote and value interactivity, connecting, and accessibility regardless of our proximity.

Partnering with UChicago

TTIC is located on the UChicago campus, and TTIC is in full agreement with the University: success of all our planning for the coming academic year rests with each member of the campus community consistently taking steps to help keep themselves and our community safe. We will ask every person on campus to uphold a new commitment, to help prevent the spread of COVID-19.

TTIC and UChicago operations will match in most instances.

TTIC Plans for Winter Quarter 2021

TTIC’s COVID-19 Response Group will continue meeting and processing changing factors as they relate to public health, and the Institute’s operations. We anticipate to be able to announce plans for Winter Quarter 2021 (which begins in January) in November 2020, before the Thanksgiving break.

July 2020 - Prof. Steve Hanneke co-recipient of COLT 2020 Best Paper Award

At the 33rd Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), held virtually July 9-12, 2020, Prof. Steve Hanneke received the Best Paper Award for a paper entitled “Proper Learning, Helly Number, and an Optimal SVM Bound” and co-authored with Olivier Bousquet, Shay Moran, and Nikita Zhivotovskiy.

July 2020 - TTIC Welcomes New Faculty

TTIC is pleased to announce that 4 new Research Assistant Professors will begin work at the institute in Fall 2020. TTIC’s Research Professors are non-tenure track faculty in three-year appointments with no teaching requirements and receive endowment-provided independent research funding. The RAP program) provides a constant stream of energetic, talented, young faculty to the institute, allowing TTIC to be nimble and quickly move into new and developing areas, and helping to position researchers to launch successful careers.

• Filip Hanzely
• Mina Karzand
• Audrey Sedal
• Bradly Stadie

June 2020 - TTIC supports those demanding an end to intolerance, discrimination, marginalization, and bigotry

TTIC’s Mission Statement says: “TTIC is committed to the values of human freedom, dignity, prosperity, and diversity.” President Turk confirmed in an internal mail to the TTIC community on Tuesday that the Institute is firmly committed to those values, and supports those demanding an end to intolerance, discrimination, marginalization, and bigotry. Racism and discrimination have devastating effects on society. Silence plays a key role in upholding and supporting narratives that contribute to systems of oppression and injustice.

The recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, along with too many others, have caused profound new grief and adversely affect our lives and the lives of those we care about in significant ways. We must individually and collectively reflect on the lives lost unnecessarily, and the systemic problems and challenges we all face as a society. The unnecessary race-based killings and violence must end.

May 2020 - TTIC continues remote operation for Summer Quarter 2020

Due to the ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic and state and federal public health regulations, TTIC will continue to operate remotely through the 2020 summer quarter (June 22 through August 28). The institute’s top priority is the safety of faculty, students, staff and partners.

We appreciate the cooperation, understanding and support we have received in these unusual times.

For questions about TTIC’s COVID-19 operations, email contact@ttic.edu

May 2020 - Dr. Mitsuru Nagasawa

TTIC is sad to share news of the passing of Dr. Mitsuru Nagasawa, the founding President of TTIC (2001-2010) and President Emeritus (from 2010). Dr. Nagasawa passed on May 8, 2020 at the age of 97. His fellowship and leadership made the foundation on which TTIC has ever grown.

President Mitsuru Nagasawa (President of TTI Japan, at the time) proposed a plan to make a department-sized school of computer science in the United States, was instrumental in locating TTIC on the Univ of Chicago campus, and securing the funding to make it a reality. In 2001, President Nagasawa and University of Chicago’s President Don Randall signed the first Memorandum of Understanding, linking the two schools in partnership.

Dr. Nagasawa oversaw the incorporation of the institute, initial faculty hiring, enrolling the first students to the PhD program, and seeing the first PhD graduation. He helped the institute achieve accreditation, secured the institute endowment, and initiated sound policy, principles and structures that would allow TTIC to grow, develop, and achieve.

April 2020 - Spring Quarter 2020 COVID-19 Update

TTIC is continuing to closely monitor the unfolding situation regarding the COVID-19 outbreak and appropriate actions to keep ourselves and our communities healthy and safe. TTIC is now fully remote, including remote spring quarter courses starting this week. We are having effective remote talks, meetings, and social times, so we are still engaged in learning, working, and all aspects of an academic community. Welcome to spring quarter!

March 2020 - TTIC Moves to Remote Learning for Spring 2020

Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, TTIC’s top priority is to keep its faculty, students, staff and partners safe. With that goal in mind, the institute will be moving its spring curriculum to remote learning for the spring quarter 2020. All students registered in TTIC courses (or UChicago cross-listings) for Spring will be notified by Friday, March 20 if their course will still be held remotely, or if the course has been canceled. Please watch for an email from the course instructor. We appreciate everyone’s understanding and patience in these unusual times.

February 2020 - Alumni News

Graduates of TTIC’s PhD program have been appointed to research and academic positions at top institutions, and have received recognition from international academic associations. Recent alumni job placements and other highlights are below:

• Somaye Hashemifar: Senior AI Scientist, Genentech

• Jianzhu Ma: Walther Assistant Professor in Cancer Molecular Genetics and Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Purdue University

• Mohammadreza Mostajabi: Research Engineer, Zendar

• Behnam Neyshabur: Senior Research Scientist, Google

• Jian Peng: 2020 International Society of Computational Biology Overton Prize

• Hao Tang: Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Edinburgh

February 2020 - TTIC Alumnus Jian Peng to be awarded the 2020 Overton Prize

TTIC Alumnus, Jian Peng (PhD 2013) is to be awarded the 2020 International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB) Overton Prize. The prize is awarded annually for outstanding accomplishment by a scientist in the early to mid stage of his or her career. Laureates have made significant contribution to the field of computational biology either through research, education, service, or a combination of the three. The Overton Prize is often considered the most prestigious award for a young scientist in the field of Computational Biology. Dr. Peng will receive the Overton Prize at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2020 conference in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, July 12-16, 2020 and will present a keynote address during the conference.

Dr. Peng is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and College of Medicine (by courtesy), at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the Institute of Genomic Biology (affiliate), Cancer Center at Illinois (affiliate), and National Center of Supercomputing and Applications (affiliate). He conducts research in structure-based, genome scale prediction. His TTIC PhD advisor was Dr. Jinbo Xu, Professor at TTIC.

Articles profiling Dr. Peng and other ISMB award recipients of 2020 will be available in the ISMB 2020 focus issue of the ISCB newsletter later this year, as well as the ISCB Society Pages in OUP Bioinformatics, and F1000 Research ISCB Community Journal.

February 2020 - Student Workshop

TTIC holds its annual workshop highlighting student research on Feb. 21, 2020. All are welcome!

January 2020 - Julia Chuzhoy to be awarded the NAS Held Prize 2020

Congratulations to Julia Chuzhoy, to be awarded the National Academy of Sciences Michael and Sheila Held Prize for advances in discrete optimization and structure of graphs. The award honors outstanding, innovative, creative, and influential research in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimization, or related parts of computer science, such as the design and analysis of algorithms and complexity theory.

Prof. Chuzhoy is recognized for her influential work on algorithms for routing in networks, which has introduced powerful new techniques and resolved deep open questions in the fields of graph algorithms and structural graph theory. She will be honored in a ceremony during the National Academy of Sciences’ 157th annual meeting, with 14 other awardees spanning the physical, biological, and medical sciences.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and - with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine - provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

Prof. Chuzhoy joined TTIC in 2007, and is a full professor. Her research area is theoretical computer science, with the main emphasis on the design and analysis of algorithms for graph optimization problems, structural graph theory, and hardness of approximation proofs. She is a recipient of the NSF Career award, Sloan Research Fellowship, and she was an invited speaker at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians. Prof. Chuzhoy also has a personally maintained website which can be found at https://www.ttic.edu/chuzhoy

Full details of the award and acknowledged work: http://www.nasonline.org/programs/awards/2020-awards/Chuzhoy.html

January 2020 - Call for Proposals: 2020 Summer Workshop Program

TTIC announces its 3rd annual Summer Workshop Program. Workshop proposals are due February 25, 2020.

January 2020 - Recent Trends in Theoretical Computer Science Workshop

Announcing Recent Trends in TCS Workshop on January 31st, 2020 at TTIC.

December 2019 - TTIC accepting PhD applications

TTIC is accepting applications to its PhD program. Applications may be submitted at any time of the year, however, to guarantee full consideration for September admission, applications must be received by January 1, 2020. Areas of interest for prospective students include machine learning and optimization, theory of computation and algorithms, natural language processing, speech technologies, computer vision, robotics, computational biology, and areas adjacent to these. TTIC is committed to increasing the diversity of its student body, and we especially encourage applications from women and from other groups underrepresented in our field.

Apply Today

October 2019 - Announcing TTIC’s Distinguished Lecture Series 2019/20

October 2019 - Advances in Natural Language Understanding

Researchers from Google AI and TTIC, including PhD candidate Mingda Chen and assistant professor Kevin Gimpel, created ALBERT, a model with state-of-the-art performance on several natural language understanding tasks. The story was covered by VentureBeat and Fortune, among others.

October 2019 - President Investiture Event

TTIC officially welcomes new president Dr. Matthew Turk with a full day of open events on Oct. 4.

September 2019 - TTIC Welcomes New Faculty

TTIC is pleased to announce that 3 new Research Assistant Professors will begin work at the institute in Fall 2019:

• Brian Bullins | PhD - Princeton University
• Mrinmaya Sachan | PhD - CMU
• D.J. Sutherland | PhD - CMU

TTIC’s Research Professors are non-tenure track faculty in three-year appointments with no teaching requirements and receive endowment-provided independent research funding. The RAP program provides a constant stream of energetic, talented, young faculty to the institute, allowing TTIC to be nimble and quickly move into new and developing areas, and helping to position researchers to launch successful careers.

TTIC also welcomes Visiting Scientist Travis Dick, who received his PhD from CMU.

September 2019 - September Summer Workshops

Our summer workshop program continues in September with workshops on computational biology and clustering.

August 2019 - August Summer Workshops

TTIC hosts two exciting workshops in August on combining machine learning and algorithm design.

August 2019 - TTIC Welcomes Summer Visiting Students

TTIC welcomes 17 visiting students during summer 2019

June 2019 - TTIC PhD Students awarded both COLT 2019 Best Student Paper awards

At the 32nd Conference on Learning Theory (COLT), held in Phoenix, Arizona, on June 25-28, 2019, both Best Student Paper awards went to TTIC PhD students.

TTIC PhD student Omar Montasser for the paper, “VC Classes are Adversarially Robustly Learnable, but Only Improperly” with TTIC Research Assistant Professor Steve Hanneke and TTIC Professor Nathan Srebro. Omar will present the paper at COLT on Thursday, June 27 at 2:20pm.

TTIC PhD student Blake Woodworth and Ayush Sekhari (TTIC visiting student) for the paper, “The Complexity of Making the Gradient Small in Stochastic Convex Optimization” with Dylan Foster, Ohad Shamir, (TTIC visiting student alumnus), Karthik Sridharan (TTIC PhD alumnus), and TTIC Professor Nathan Srebro. Blake will present the paper at COLT on Thursday, June 27 at 5:20pm.

In addition to the awarded papers, TTIC PhD student Pedro Savarese will be presenting his paper, “How do infinite width bounded norm networks look in function space?” with Itay Evron, Daniel Soudry and TTIC Professor Nathan Srebro on Wednesday, June 26 at 2:10pm.

Congratulations to Blake and Omar on their awards, and to all of the TTIC authors for their excellent work represented at COLT 2019!

June 2019 - TTIC bids farewell to President Sadaoki Furui

Sadaoki Furui Farewell Reception

Friday, June 28, 2019

2:00pm - 4:00pm (Open House)

Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

6045 S. Kenwood, 5th Floor

• 2:00pm: Celebration begins

• 2:30pm: Program, Flute & Piano Concert

• 3:00pm: Celebration continues

Hors d’oeuvres and open bar available

Attire: Come as you are

May 2019 - Jinbo Xu Receives RECOMB 2019 Test of Time Award

TTIC Professor Jinbo Xu, together with Professor Bonnie Berger of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dr. Rohit Singh, will be receiving the Test of Time Award at the RECOMB 2019 conference in Washington D.C. this May 2019, for the 2007 publication, “Pairwise Global Alignment of Protein Interaction Networks by Matching Neighborhood Topology.” RECOMB 2019 conference is the 23rd edition of a series of algorithmic computational biology conferences bridging the areas of computational, mathematical, statistical and biological sciences and is one of the top two conferences in Computational Biology. Professor Xu has also received the Best Paper award in RECOMB 2014 for his work entitled, “MRFalign: Protein Homology Detection through Alignment of Markov Random Fields” and the Best Poster award in RECOMB 2009 for his work entitled, “Boosting Protein Threading Accuracy”.

May 2019 - Midwest Speech and Language Days

On May 2-3, TTIC will host Midwest Speech and Language Days, a two-day workshop that brings together speech and language researchers in order to increase awareness of relevant research activity and foster collaboration in the region.

April 2019 - Announcing TTIC’s Distinguished Lecture Series 2019

April 2019 - Google PhD Fellowship

TTIC PhD Candidate, Blake Woodworth, has been awarded a Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning. The fellowship directly supports graduate students for two years as they pursue their PhD, with full tuition and fees plus a stipend for living expenses, travel and personal equipment, and connects them to a Google Research Mentor.

The Google PhD Fellowship Program was created to recognize exemplary PhD students in computer science and related disciplines and acknowledge their contributions to their areas of specialty and provide funding for their education and research.

Blake is interested in the areas of optimization and machine learning theory, and works under the advisement of Prof. Nathan Srebro. Blake was also awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2017. Congratulations, Blake!

March 2019 - Gavilán

TTIC’s Mark Hallen and Duke’s Bruce Donald target drug resistance with Gavilán

March 2019 - Matthew Turk Named Third President of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

Announcement

Chair of the Board of Trustees, Masatami Takimoto, announces the appointment of Dr. Matthew Turk as the next President of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Turk was appointed by TTIC’s Board of Trustees by a unanimous vote and will succeed Sadaoki Furui on July 1, 2019, with a formal inauguration in the fall of 2019. Furui announced in October 2018 that he planned to step down after two terms (just over six years) as president. Furui will remain in office until June 30 before the presidency is officially transitioned to Turk on July 1.

Furui called Turk the ideal person to lead TTIC into the next exciting stage of growth for the institute. Furui expects the institute to continue on its trajectory for great levels of accomplishment and innovation, and he hopes that accelerates with the appointment of the new president.

Chair Takimoto praised the work of the Board’s presidential search committee, which was led by trustee Eric Grimson, and worked hard since spring 2018 to ensure a successful outcome to the nationwide search. President search committee chair, Eric Grimson, said about Turk, “He is the perfect candidate to lead TTIC to the next level of excellence. He brings to TTIC an exceptional track record in research, teaching and innovation, especially in computer vision and human-computer interfaces. And his background in academic administration, coupled with his experience in industrial research labs, position him well to strengthen TTIC’s connections with the growing Chicago innovation ecosystem.”

Matthew Turk said of his new appointment, “I am deeply honored and thrilled to have the opportunity to serve as the next president of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, and I am grateful to the TTIC Board of Trustees for giving me the chance to serve in this capacity. In its short history, TTIC has become a world-class computer science institute with a distinctive research profile and a dynamic and collaborative culture. The Institute is well-positioned to accelerate its momentum and surpass the impressive strides it has already achieved in its mission of international impact through research and education. I look forward to working closely with the Board and the entire TTIC community – faculty, students, staff, and partners – to further the mission, explore new opportunities for excellence and impact, and support TTIC’s unique scholarly community. I am particularly excited to get to know the people of TTIC, learn more about their recent and planned research, and to explore the wonderful city of Chicago.”

Biography

Matthew Turk is a full professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a primary appointment in the Department of Computer Science, where he serves as department chair, and a secondary appointment in Media Arts and Technology. He brings a dynamic background of academic, industry, and entrepreneurial experience to the role of president. In 2000, Turk founded the Vision Technology Group at Microsoft Research, and he brings additional industry experience gained in working with a small Silicon Valley company and a large aerospace company. In 2014, he co-founded a startup company that spun out from NSF-funded research in his lab and was acquired in 2016. His background of industry and entrepreneurial experience is unique, complementing his twenty years in academia.

Turk earned a PhD in 1991 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with his dissertation, “Interactive-Time Vision: Face Recognition as a Visual Behavior,” leading to an “Outstanding Paper” award (1991) and a “Most Influential Paper of the Decade” award (2000). Turk’s MS is from Carnegie Mellon University in Electrical and Computer Engineering (1984), and his BS is from Virginia Tech in Electrical Engineering.

About TTIC

Founded in 2003, TTIC is a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute, dedicated to basic research and graduate education in computer science. Its mission is to achieve international impact through world-class research and education in fundamental computer science and information technology. The Institute is distinctive to the American educational scene in its unique combination of graduate education and endowed research.

TTIC offers a PhD program leading to a doctorate in computer science, and focuses primarily on theoretical computer science (algorithms and complexity), applications of machine learning (computational biology, computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, and speech), and scientific computing (including numerical analysis, numerical optimization, and signal processing). It has degree granting authority in the State of Illinois and is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.

TTIC is located in Hyde Park on the University of Chicago campus and has a close affiliation with the University of Chicago Computer Science Department. The institute was founded by the Toyota Technological Institute (TTI), in Nagoya, Japan, as well as Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC), and maintains a strong relationship via collaboration and goodwill activity.

February 2019 - ITA 2019

Professor Nati Srebro led a plenary session at the 2019 Information Theory and Applications Workshop (ITA 2019) at San Diego, California on February 12, 2019. The workshop is an annual gathering of researchers working broadly on information theory and its applications in diverse areas of science and engineering. The plenary sessions of the workshop focus on important emerging topics. The week-long annual event drew about about 400 invited participants as well as over 200 student participants.

February 2019 - Student Workshop

TTIC holds annual workshop highlighting student research. All are welcome!

November 2018 - Summer Workshop Program

TTIC announces 2019 Summer Workshop Program

October 2018 - TTIC welcomes members of Chicago’s tech industry to attend our Industry Open House

On October 12th, TTIC is hosting an Industry Open House to introduce companies to the cutting-edge research conducted at TTIC, and to establish relationships with our faculty and students. The day will include presentations by several TTIC faculty members, a student-led interactive poster session, and a working lunch to explore opportunities for engagement. The Open House will conclude with break-out sessions to allow for more detailed discussions between participants and individual faculty members.

Please see the Industry Open House website for more information, including the link for registration.

September 2018 - TTIC Welcomes New Faculty

TTIC is pleased to announce that 7 new Research Assistant Professors will begin work at the institute in Fall 2018. TTIC’s Research Professors are non-tenure track faculty in three-year appointments with no teaching requirements and receive endowment-provided independent research funding. The RAP program) provides a constant stream of energetic, talented, young faculty to the institute, allowing TTIC to be nimble and quickly move into new and developing areas, and helping to position researchers to launch successful careers.

• Arturs Backurs | PhD - MIT
• Allyson Ettinger | PhD - University of Maryland, College Park
• Steve Hanneke | PhD - CMU
• Sepideh Mahabadi | PhD - MIT
• Thatchaphol Saranurak | PhD - KTH Royal Institute of Technology
• Sam Wiseman | PhD - Harvard University
• Michael Yu | PhD - University of California, San Diego

August 2018 - AI Driving Olympics (AI-DO)

TTIC will be taking part in the inaugural The AI Driving Olympics (AI-DO), a new competition focused around AI for self-driving cars. AI-DO 2018 will take place December 7, 2018, at Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), the premiere machine learning conference, in Montréal. This is the first competition with real robots to take place at a machine learning conference. AI Driving Olympiad “Robotarium” live environments begin in October and will be remotely accessible online for evaluation. Entries that score best will be run during the live event at NIPS 2018 to determine the winners.

TTIC joins 5 other academic institutions: ETH Zürich (Switzerland), Université de Montréal (Canada), National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan), Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (USA), Tsinghua University (China) and Georgia Tech (USA), and two industry co-organizers: nuTonomy, an Aptiv company, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the first-of-its-kind event.

Read more about the competition here.

August 2018 - TTIC Welcomes Summer Visiting Students

TTIC welcomes 17 visiting students from 11 universities during summer 2018

June, 2018 - Prof. McAllester awarded 2018 Longuet-Higgins Prize

David McAllester was awarded the 2018 Longuet-Higgins Prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision. The prize recognizes a paper in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) from ten years ago, and was awarded to Prof. McAllester’s 2008 paper with Pedro Felzenszwalb and Deva Ramanan entitled, “A Discriminatively Trained, Multiscale, Deformable Part Model.”

Since 2005, the prize is given annually by the Technical Committee on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TCPAMI) at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, and recognizes CVPR papers from ten years ago with significant impact on computer vision research. The prize is named after theoretical chemist and cognitive scientist H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins.

June, 2018 - TTIC President Search Underway

In the spring of 2019, Dr. Sadaoki Furui’s appointment as President of the Institute concludes, and he will be retiring from the position. President Furui is the institute’s second president since its founding in 2003, began his appointment in April 2013, and at the time of retirement, will have served two three-year terms.

To continue progress and enhance its contributions to computer science and higher education, TTIC is now seeking a president to lead its operations and community. Reporting to TTIC’s Board of Trustees, the president is the Institute’s chief executive officer and bears responsibility and accountability for the entirety of its operations. Leading a tenure-track faculty of eleven, 8 research assistant professors conducting postdoctoral research, a highly motivated staff of 10 and a student body of 30, the president will be charged with growing the Institute both in size and in reputation, enhancing the quality and number of its key partnerships (especially with TTI in Japan and the University of Chicago), maintaining and enhancing its fiscal well-being and nurturing an optimal environment for scholarship and teaching. Accomplishing these ends will require a leader with a Ph.D. in computer science or related field, a history of successful management and leadership within a complex, highly-productive university environment, the willingness and ability to serve as the Institute’s principal public representative and advocate, and an entrepreneurial spirit.

The Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago is doing cutting-edge work in a discipline very much “of the moment” to all of society. Its president will have the opportunity to expand on this important work both in capacity and in impact.

The full institute overview and role of the desired candidate can be found in the Leadership Profile document. Inquiries, nominations and applications are invited. For fullest consideration, applicant materials should be received by August 31, 2018. Candidates should provide a resume or curriculum vitae, a letter of application that addresses the responsibilities and requirements described in this leadership profile and the names and contact information of five references. Candidate confidentiality will be respected and references will not be contacted without prior knowledge and approval of candidates. Inquiries and application materials should be sent via email to the Institute’s consultants, Dennis M. Barden and Elizabeth K. Bohan of Witt/Kieffer, at TTICPresident@wittkieffer.com. Questions also may be directed to the consultants through the office of Laurie Adams at 630-575-6152.

June, 2018 - PLOS Computational Biology Research Prize 2018

Professor Jinbo Xu’s Paper Accurate De Novo Prediction of Protein Contact Map by Ultra-Deep Learning Model has been awarded the PLOS Computational Biology Research Prize 2018 in the category Breakthrough Advance/Innovation.

June, 2018 - Midwest ML Symposium

The Midwest ML Symposium (MMLS) aims to convene regional machine learning researchers for stimulating discussions and debates, to foster cross-institutional collaboration, and to showcase the collective talent of machine learning researchers at all career stages.

June, 2018 - Allyson Ettinger

TTIC Welcomes Allyson Ettinger as a new Research Assistant Professor arriving Fall 2018.

June, 2018 - Midwest Robotics Workshop

On June 14 & 15, TTIC will host the Midwest Robotics Workshop, which brings together robotics researchers and practitioners from throughout the Midwest for two exciting days of talks, interactive presentations, and networking.

May, 2018 - Making Machine Learning More Robust

MADISON – Artificial intelligence has become so smart and commonplace that most people accept computer-generated restaurant recommendations or movie suggestions without blinking an eye. Underneath the virtual surface, however, much remains mysterious in the realm of machine learning, where systems attempt to mimic the remarkable way humans learn.

Current machine learning capabilities aren’t up to the task for handling highly complex, rapidly changing, or uncertain environments, and artificial intelligence can easily be tricked by false information from a clever adversary—critical situations for national defense.

In an effort to build the next generation of machine-learning methods to support its needs, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Air Force Research Laboratory have awarded $5 million to establish a university center of excellence devoted to efficient and robust machine learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The center also includes researchers from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Called the Machines, Algorithms and Data Lab (MADLab), the center is led by Robert Nowak, the McFarland-Bascom Professor in electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison and an adjoint professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Central to the new center’s mission is finding a deeper understanding of fundamental concepts in machine learning and then leveraging that insight into building data-efficient, operationally robust computer programs for national defense needs. However, innovations emerging from the center could benefit the lives of people worldwide, and Nowak believes the next generation of machine learning algorithms will not only bolster national defense capabilities, but also benefit civilians. “Our aim is to make machine learning more effective and broadly applicable,” he says.

Today’s machine learning techniques use massive amounts of data that humans have analyzed and labeled—preparing systems to operate in well-understood and well-defined environments. Essentially, with data and algorithms, we program machines to teach themselves.

However, some of the most sensitive types of information, like covert intelligence, often consist of poorly labeled or incomplete datasets, which currently can confound machine learning algorithms. Additionally, analyzing the types of data—like electromagnetic signals or hyperspectral imagery—that arise in tactical environments can be more complicated than parsing patterns from more common information sources such as photographs, sounds or texts.

“Modern machine learning methods can be unexpectedly fragile, which is particularly sobering when they are used in medicine, defense or autonomous vehicles,” says center collaborator Rebecca Willett, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UW-Madison and ellow of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. “By understanding fundamental aspects of how and why different approaches work, we can better prevent failures.”

Future artificial intelligence methods will be required to help systems learn and make decisions without large amounts of human-labeled data. They also must perform in degraded or changing environments, and even determine how and when to ignore manipulated data.

“Machine learning has advanced considerably in recent years, but current systems require huge amounts of training data,” Nowak says. “Machines learn, but not as efficiently as people.”

Not yet.

At the MADLab, researchers will pursue four main avenues to make machine learning more efficient and robust. The scientists will work to teach computers to automatically select the most informative data for training, so that humans waste less time labeling unimportant information.

They will attempt to boost efficiency by making the coding that powers machine learning more similar to human brain patterns. Another goal is to ensure that machine learning algorithms perform predictably, even when faced with corrupt or incomplete data. And finally, the researchers will develop strategies to protect machine learning systems from attacks.

Because of its breadth of expertise, UW-Madison is an ideal location for the MADLab—and the new center will be an important addition to an already thriving community of data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence research on the campus.

“MADLab harnesses the collective talent of world-renowned researchers who already have made significant contributions to machine learning,” says Nowak, who also leads the machines, algorithms and data research effort in the UW-Madison Grainger Institute for Engineering and is a fellow of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the university. “Data science and machine learning research is thriving at UW-Madison. MADLab and the National Science Foundation funded Institute for Foundations of Data Science in Wisconsin Institute for Discovery are working together to develop the science and technology of tomorrow.”

Center collaborators also include UW-Madison electrical and computer engineers Mikko Lipasti and Dimitris Papailiopoulos; Jerry Zhu and Yingyu Liang from the UW-Madison Department of Computer Sciences; and Greg Shakhnarovich and Karen Livescu from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

– Sam Million-Weaver, (608) 263-5988, millionweave@wisc.edu or Adrienne Nienow, (608) 262-2638, ahee@wisc.edu

April, 2018 - Michael Yu

TTIC Welcomes Michael Yu as a new Research Assistant Professor arriving Fall 2018.

April, 2018 - Sam Wiseman

TTIC Welcomes Sam Wiseman as a new Research Assistant Professor arriving Fall 2018.

April, 2018 - TTIC Robots at the Museum of Science and Industry

TTIC students demo robots at the Museum of Science and Industry for National Robotics Week

April, 2018 - Midwest Theory Day 2018

TTIC will host the 68th Midwest Theory Day (actually a two-day workshop) on April 12-13.

March, 2018 - Thatchaphol Saranurak

TTIC Welcomes Thatchaphol Saranurak as a new Research Assistant Professor arriving Fall 2018.

March, 2018 - Arturs Backurs

TTIC Welcomes Arturs Backurs as a new Research Assistant Professor arriving Fall 2018.

March, 2018 - Steve Hanneke

TTIC Welcomes Steve Hanneke as a new Research Assistant Professor arriving Fall 2018.

March, 2018 - Sepideh Mahabadi

TTIC Welcomes Sepideh Mahabadi as a new Research Assistant Professor arriving Fall 2018.

February, 2018 - Karthik Sridharan named Sloan Research Fellow

TTIC alumnus Karthik Sridharan (PhD 2012), now a Cornell University Assistant Professor, was named a 2018 Sloan Research Fellow. Karthik focuses on theoretical machine learning and was advised by TTIC Associate Professor, Nathan Srebro.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation identifies those that “…represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada.”

Congratulations, Karthik!

January, 2018 - Best Paper Award at APBC2018

TTIC researchers win best paper award at APBC 2018. The paper, titled “RaptorX-Angle: real-value and confidence prediction of protein backbone dihedral angles through a hybrid method of clustering and deep learning,” was authored by TTIC visiting student Yujuan Gao, TTIC postdoc Sheng Wang, Yujuan’s advisor Minghua Deng, and Prof. Jinbo Xu.

January, 2018 - TTIC Mourns the Passing of Tatsuro Toyoda: Chairman Emeritus, Founding Chair of the Board, and Dear Friend

TTIC is mourning the loss of Institute Chairman Emeritus and visionary business leader Tatsuro Toyoda, who passed on December 30 at the age of 88.

Mr. Toyoda was son of the founder of Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC), and led the company’s climb to become one of the world’s top auto makers. Mr. Toyoda served as TMC’s seventh president, stepped down as president in 1995, and continued to serve the corporation as an adviser, a title he held until his death.

Mr. Toyoda upheld the wishes and convictions of his father, Kiichiro Toyoda, throughout his own career, one of which was, “Always be studious and creative, striving to stay ahead of the times.” Honoring this belief led to Mr. Toyoda’s championing and support of education and research initiatives, including his dedication and focus to the ongoing efforts of the Toyota Technological Institute (in Japan) and the founding and flourishing of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.

Mr. Toyoda was the founding Chairman of the Board for TTIC from 2002, and served until October 2013 when he was made the first Chairman Emeritus.

Mr. Toyoda’s generosity in the support of education and research, and his dedication of time, service, and attention to the success of TTIC are part of his legacy that we will continue to appreciate.

November 2017 - Sadaoki Furui named Honorary Professor

President Sadaoki Furui named Honorary Professor by Tokyo Institute of Technology

November 2017 - Student Workshop

TTIC holds annual workshop highlighting student research. All are welcome!

October 2017 - Summer Workshop Program

TTIC announces 2018 Summer Workshop Program

October 2017 - Jinbo Xu gives keynote at IEEE ICCABS

Professor Jinbo Xu is one of three keynote speakers at the IEEE 7th International Conference on Computational Advances in Bio and Medical Sciences (ICCABS).

September 2017 - Announcing TTIC’s Distinguished Lecture Series 2017/18

September 2017 - Blake Woodworth receives NSF Fellowship

TTIC PhD student Blake Woodworth received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

September 2017 - Featured article in Cell Systems

Article by Professor Jinbo Xu and colleagues entitled “Folding Membrane Proteins by Deep Transfer Learning” is a featured article in the latest issue of Cell Systems.

September 2017 - TTIC CAO Installment Symposium, Convocation and Commencement

TTIC welcomes new Chief Academic Officer Avrim Blum and thanks David McAllester for his years of service.

August 2017 - ICML 2017 - Test of Time Honorable Mention

Prof. Nati Srebro wins Test of Time Honorable Mention for his paper titled: Pegasos: Primal estimated sub-gradient solver for SVM

August 2017 - TTIC Welcomes Summer Visiting Students

TTIC welcomes 21 visiting students from 12 universities during summer 2017

April 2017 - Vehicle Tracking with Deep Learning

TTIC’s Matt Walter and CMU’s Dong-Ki Kim use deep learning based method to track vehicles.

April 2017 - TTIC is pleased to announce that Avrim Blum will be the new CAO starting in August 2017

The Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) is pleased to announce that Avrim Blum will be joining TTIC in August 2017 as Professor and Chief Academic Officer. Prof. Blum, who is joining TTIC from Carnegie Mellon University, is well-known for his work at the intersection of Machine Learning and Theoretical Computer Science. Throughout his career he has proven himself both as an outstanding scholar and as an effective and visionary leader.

Prof. Blum received his bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics with computer science from MIT, and his master’s and PhD also from MIT, both in computer science. His academic accomplishments are widely recognized: Prof. Blum is an ACM Fellow, and recipient of the ICML/COLT 10-Year Best Paper award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and NSF National Young Investigator Award, among others.

As the Chief Academic Officer, Prof. Blum will lead TTIC in cementing its accomplishments to date, as well as developing further as a thriving academic institution, toward its mission of achieving international impact through fundamental research and education.​

April 2017 - Robots at the Museum of Science and Industry

TTIC students demo robots at the Museum of Science and Industry for National Robotics Week

February 2017 - Protein Contact Map Prediction

Prof. Jinbo Xu’s work on predicting protein contact maps using ultra-deep learning referenced in The Economist

January 2017 - TTIC research on bias and artificial intelligence

Research by TTIC professor Nati Srebro on recognizing and addressing racial/gender bias in artificial intelligence algorithms was covered by The Guardian, Digital Trends, and ProPublica.

November 2016 - TTIC holds Student Workshop 2016

TTIC held its first Student Workshop 2016 on Tuesday, November 7th. The full day event included student talks, student poster sessions, a panel discussion and a student-alumni chat session. Prizes were awarded for Best Talk and Best Poster.

Best Talk:

Herman Kamper “Unsupervised speech recognition using acoustic word embeddings”

Best Poster: a tie.

Blake Woodworth “ Tight Complexity Bounds for Optimizing Composite Objectives” David Kim “Improved Approximation for Node-Disjoint Paths in Planar Graphs”

The Student Workshop will be a new annual workshop at the Institute intended to highlight, support and develop student talent.

October 2016 - President Furui named a Person of Cultural Merit

TTIC’s President, Sadaoki Furui has been awarded a Person of Cultural Merit (Bunka Korosha), one of the two highest prizes given by the Japanese Government. The honor is awarded annually to select people who have made outstanding cultural contributions. The award ceremony takes place at the Imperial Palace on Japan’s Day of Culture (November 3). President Furui was selected for his contributions to science and technology in the areas of speech and phonetic engineering. The Japan News article

September 2016 - Announcing TTIC’s Distinguished Lecture Series 2016/17

August 2016 - TTIC welcomes 27 visiting students during summer 2016

Summer is a great time to visit both Chicago and TTIC! This year we welcome 27 visiting students from 17 universities

July 2016 - Professor Jinbo Xu’s work mentioned in Science

May 2016 - President Furui to give keynote talk at the Open House of the National Institute of Informatics

President Sadaoki Furui will be giving a keynote talk at the Open House of the National Institute of Informatics (NII), in Tokyo, Japan, titled “Prospects and Issues of AI and Autonomous Driving” on May 27.

April 2016 - TTIC research featured in the NVIDIA Newsletter

Recent work by TTIC professors Michael Maire and Greg Shakhnarovich and University of Chicago student Gustav Larsson working at TTIC was highlighted in the NVIDIA Accelerated Computing Newsletter. They have developed a fully automatic image colorization system using deep learning and GPUs. Read the article and access the full paper it is based on, here.

April 2016 - Midwest Vision Workshop to be held at TTIC

On April 14-15, TTIC will host the Midwest Vision Workshop. This is a regular regional meeting of computer vision researchers, providing a forum for presenting recent work, informal discussion and exchange of ideas. The meeting, which included oral presentations and poster sessions, draws participants from TTIC, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Indiana University, Michigan State, Washington University in St. Louis, and other institutions. The two-day program will include talks and poster presentations.

March 2016 - PhD Candidate Hao Tang wins Best Student paper Award, ICASSP2016

TTIC student and PhD Candidate, Hao Tang, has received a Best Student Paper Award at IEEE ICASSP conference held in Shanghai, China, in March. The winners of the IEEE ICASSP2016 Speech and Language Processing Student Paper Awards were announced in the Opening Ceremony and Awards Presentation at the conference.

March 17-18, 2016 - First Annual Midwest Robotics Workshop to be held at TTIC

TTIC will host the first annual Midwest Robotics Workshop (MWRW). The workshop is intended to bring together roboticists from academia and industry in and around the Midwestern United States. It is an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to share their work and to network with one another, with the goal of creating a more cohesive and vibrant robotics community in the Midwest. The workshop will feature invited talks by leading researchers, and an exciting collection of oral presentations and interactive poster sessions.

TTIC organizer: Matthew Walter (mwalter@ttic.edu)

December 17, 2015 - President Furui to give keynote talk at APSIPA ASCM

TTIC’s President Sadaoki Furui has been invited to give a keynote talk at Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference, being held December 16-19, 2015 in Hong Kong. The talk is titled “Whither Speech Recognition? - Deep Learning to Deep Thinking” Event details can be found here. (http://www.apsipa2015.org/keynote.htm)

September 10, 2015 - Prof. Li-Yang Tan awarded Best Paper Award for FOCS 2015

TTIC Research Assistant Professor Li-Yang Tan is awarded Best Paper Award at the The 56th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2015) for the paper “An Average-Case Depth Hierarchy Theorem for Boolean Circuits,” co-authored with Benjamin Rossman and Rocco Servedio. FOCS is the flagship conference sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and covers a broad range of theoretical computer science.

May 7, 2015 - Midwest Speech and Language Days 2015

May 7th & 8th, 2015
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago
6045 S. Kenwood Ave, Chicago, IL - 5th Floor

Midwest Speech and Language Days (MSLD) is a 2-day meeting held at TTI-Chicago that continues and expands upon the tradition of Illinois Speech Day and the Midwest Computational Linguistics Colloquium. Presenters and attendees come from Midwest universities and research institutions. The goal of the workshop is to increase awareness of speech and language research going on in the region and to foster collaboration among sites.

Please visit the link for presenters and schedules for both days. http://home.ttic.edu/~mbansal/msld2015.html

TTIC organizers: Mohit Bansal: mbansal@ttic.edu, Karen Livescu: klivescu@ttic.edu and Kevin Gimpel: kgimpel@ttic.edu

February 16, 2015 - President Furui to give Distinguished Lecture at Northwestern University

TTIC’s President Sadaoki Furui has been invited to give a distinguished lecture at Northwestern University’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department on Wednesday, February 18, at 2pm. The talk is titled “Machine Learning Techniques for Automatic Speech Recognition, including Recent Work at TTIC.” The lecture will be held at Ford ITW Auditorium (Room 1-350). Event details can be found here.

December 16, 2014 - Midwest Vision Workshop to be held at TTIC

On December 16-17, TTIC will host the Midwest Vision Workshop. This is a regular regional meeting of computer vision researchers, providing a forum for presenting recent work, informal discussion and exchange of ideas. The meeting, which included oral presentations and poster sessions, draws participants from TTIC, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Indiana University, Michigan State, Washington University in St. Louis, and other institutions. The two-day program will include talks and poster presentations.

September 22, 2014 - TTIC student Zhiyong Wang, TTIC Professor Jinbo Xu, and UNC-Charlotte Professor Xinhua Shi awarded the ACM SIGBio Best Student Paper Award

The 5th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM BCB 2014) awarded TTIC student Zhiyong Wang, TTIC Professor Jinbo Xu, and UNC-Charlotte Professor Xinhua Shi the ACM SIGBio Best Student Paper Award for “CNVnet: Combining Sparse Learning and Biological Networks to Capture Joint Effect of Copy Number Variants.” The conference is a premier forum for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research encompassing disciplines of computer science, mathematics, statistics, biology, bioinformatics, and health informatics.

August 14, 2014 - Karthik Sridharan, TTIC Ph.D. 2012, Assistant Professor, Cornell University

Congratulations to Karthik Sridharan, Ph.D. Alumnus 2012, who has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. Karthik has been a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Statistics of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania since 2012 and his primary interest is theoretical machine learning. Karthik’s homepage.

August 14, 2014 - Jian Peng, TTIC Ph.D. 2013, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Congratulations to Jian Peng, Ph.D. Alumnus 2013, who has accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Jian has been working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mathematics and the Computation and Biology Group in CSAIL at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2012 and his primary interest is in the design and application of both efficient algorithms and effective statistical modeling techniques, especially for processing, integrating and analyzing the vast datasets in genomics, systems biology and molecular biology. Jian’s homepage.

July 14, 2014 - Prof. Jinbo Xu’s group wins Warren DeLano Award for Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics, ISMB 3DSIG 2014

TTIC’s (PhD Candidate) Jianzhu Ma, (Postdoc) Sheng Wang and Prof. Jinbo Xu won the Warren DeLano Award for Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics, ISMB 3DSIG 2014 for “MRFalign: remote protein homology detection through alignment of Markov Random Fields.” 3DSIG is an ISMB satellite meeting on Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics. This work also won the Best Paper Award at RECOMB 2014 and the best poster award at the 2013 Zing conference for protein and RNA structure analysis. ISMB and RECOMB are the top 2 conferences in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology.

June 30, 2014 - Prof. Mohit Bansal awarded Best Long Paper Honorable Mention at ACL 2014

At the June 2014 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2014), Prof. Mohit Bansal was awarded the Best Long Paper Honorable Mention for the paper “Structured Learning for Taxonomy Induction with Belief Propagation” by Mohit Bansal, David Burkett, Gerard de Melo and Dan Klein.

Apr 30, 2014 - Prof. Jinbo Xu’s group wins Best Paper Award at RECOMB 2014

TTIC Professor Jinbo Xu and his group of two TTIC students, Jianzhu Ma and Zhiyong Wang, along with postdoc Sheng Wang, won the Best Paper Award at the 18th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB 2014) in April. RECOMB is one of the top two bioinformatics conferences in the world. The winning paper is titled, ““MRFalign: Protein Homology Detection through Alignment of Markov Random Fields.”

Apr 22, 2014 - Prof. McAllester awarded ICLP Test of Time Award

TTIC Professor and Chief Academic Officer, David McAllester is being awarded the 20-year “Test of Time Award” at the 30th International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP) in Vienna, Austria in July 2014. McAllester will be recognized for his 1994 paper CLP (Intervals) Revisited, coauthored with F. Benhamou and P. Van Hentenryck. The ALP 20-year Test of Time award identifies the most influential paper from the ICLP proceedings 20 years prior that stood the test of time.

Sept 27, 2013 - 10th Anniversary Symposium

As a part of TTIC’s 10 year anniversary celebration, the institute will hold an Anniversary Symposium on September 27, 2013, open to the computer science community. Our exciting line-up of confirmed speakers can be found on the event web site.

Time: 9-6 with continental breakfast at 8:30

Refreshments will be served, RSVP not required.

Location: TTIC 6045 S. Kenwood Ave. Chicago, IL 60637. Room 530

Sept 9, 2013 - Prof. Chuzhoy invited to speak at International Congress of Mathematicians

TTIC’s Julia Chuzhoy has been invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians to be held in Seoul, South Korea in August of 2014. She will be a Mathematical Aspects of Computer Science section speaker.

The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is the largest conference for the topic of mathematics, with the first meeting held in August of 1897. It meets once every four years. The Fields Medals, the Nevanlinna Prize, the Gauss Prize, and the Chern Medal are awarded during the congress’ opening ceremony. Each congress is memorialized by a printed set of Proceedings recording academic papers based on invited talks intended to be relevant to current topics of general interest.

Aug 15, 2013 - Prof. Raquel Urtasun co-author of CVPR 2013 Best Paper Runner-Up Award

Raquel Urtasun was awarded the 2013 IEEE Conference of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Best Paper Runner-Up Award (sponsored by IBM Research) at the June Conference in Portland, OR, along with Marcus Brubaker and Andreas Geiger.

The paper was entitled Lost! Leveraging the Crowd for Probabilistic Visual Self-Localization.

May 28, 2013 - Prof. Ben Moseley co-winner of SPAA’13 Best Paper Award

TTIC’s Benjamin Moseley is a co-winner of the Best Paper Award at the 25th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2013) being held in Montreal, Canada on July 23-25. He co-authored the paper with Ravi Kumar, Sergei Vassilvitskii and Andrea Vattani. The paper is titled, “Fast Greedy Algorithms in MapReduce and Streaming”.

May 9, 2013 - Midwest Vision Workshop held at TTIC

On May 9, TTIC again hosted the Midwest Vision Workshop. This is a regular regional meeting of computer vision researchers, providing a forum for presenting recent work, informal discussion and exchange of ideas. The meeting, which included oral presentations and poster sessions, drew more than 40 attendees from TTIC, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and other institutions. The next Midwest Vision Workshop is expected to be held in the Autumn.

May 2-3, 2013 - Midwest Speech and Languages Days held at TTIC

Midwest Speech and Language Days was held at TTI-Chicago on May 2-3, 2013, expanding upon the tradition of the annual Illinois Speech Day to include more research in natural language processing and linguistics. The workshop included more than 60 participants from TTIC, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Northwestern University, Rush University, Ohio State University, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, and others. As in previous years, it provided a forum for interaction among researchers from nearby speech and language research communities, featuring several sessions of talks and posters. Keynote presentations were given by Jim Glass from MIT, Yotaro Kubo from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, and TTIC’s new president Sadaoki Furui. The full program can be found here (http://home.ttic.edu/~kgimpel/MSLD2013.html). The next workshop is planned for Spring 2014.

Apr 1, 2013 - Dr. Sadaoki Furui appointed as President

The Board of Trustees has appointed Dr. Sadaoki Furui to a three-year term as President effective on April 1, 2013. Dr. Furui is currently Professor Emeritus at the Academy for Global Leadership and University Contents Utilization Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is engaged in a wide range of research on speech analysis, speech recognition, speaker recognition, speech synthesis and multimedia processing, and has authored or coauthored over 900 published articles. His B.S., M.S., and Ph. D. degrees are all from the University of Tokyo.

From 1978 to 1979 he was with the Staff of the Acoustics Research Department at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, as a visiting researcher working on speaker verification. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), and the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan (IEICE). He was President of the Acoustical Society of Japan (ASJ), ISCA, the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA), and the Permanent Council for International Conferences on Spoken Language Processing (PC-ICSLP).

He has served on the IEEE Technical Committee on Speech and MMSP and on numerous IEEE conference-organizing committees. He was an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Speech Communication, the Transaction of the IEICE, and the Journal of the ASJ. He is also an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Computer Speech and Language, the Journal of Speech Communication, and the Journal of Digital Signal Processing.

He received the Yonezawa Prize and the Paper Awards from the IEICE (1975, 88, 93, 2003), and the Sato Paper Awards from the ASJ (1985, 87). He received the Senior Award from the IEEE ASSP Society (1989) and the Achievement Award from the Minister of Science and Technology, Japan (1989). He received the Book Award from the IEICE (1990). He received the Achievement Award from the IEICE (2003), the Signal Processing Society Award from the IEEE (2005), the Achievement Award from the Japanese Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (2006), the Purple Ribbon Medal from Japanese Emperor (2006) and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the IEICE (2007). He also received the ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement (2009), the IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award (2010), and the NHK (Nippon Hoso Kyokai: Japan Broadcasting Corporation) Broadcast Cultural Award (2012).

He served as Dean of the Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering (2007-2009) and Director of Institute Library (2009-2011) at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has also supervised the 21st Century Center of Excellence (COE) Program entitled “Framework for Systematization and Application of Large-scale Knowledge Resources” (2003-2008).

Mar 31, 2013 - Dr. Rice resigns as Interim President

Dr. Stuart A. Rice, who has served TTIC as Dean from October 2006, and then as Interim President since October 2010, has announced his resignation from the latter position effective March 31, 2013. Under his leadership, TTIC continued its growth and development in research and education programs in fundamental computer science. Dr. Rice was instrumental in the search for a new president, the efforts to improve TTIC’s financial resources and stability, the recruitment of highly qualified Board members, and building upon strong collaboration with both the Toyota Technological Institute in Japan and the University of Chicago. He will continue to serve as a Trustee.

Mar 5, 2013 - Dr. Sadaoki Furui awarded Okawa Prize

Dr. Sadaoki Furui, Professor Emeritus; Professor, Academy for Global Leadership; Director of the University Contents Utilization Center, Tokyo Institute of Technology; and President-Elect of TTIC, has been awarded the Okawa Prize by the Okawa Foundation in Japan.

He received the award on March 5, 2013, at an international symposium at Tokyo Technological Institute.  His award was based on pioneering contributions to and leadership in the field of computer-based speech recognition and understanding.  He received a certificate, a gold medal and a cash award of ten million yen.

The Okawa Prize is intended to pay tribute to and make public recognition of persons who have made outstanding contributions to the research, technological development and business in the information and telecommunications fields, internationally.

Feb 27, 2013 - Professor Madhur Tulsiani awarded NSF CAREER grant

Professor Madhur Tulsiani is the recipient of the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant.

The grant is awarded by the National Science Foundation to support junior faculty in their research and educational activities. Quoting from the NSF website: “The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations”.

Professor Tulsiani’s project is entitled Understanding Polynomial Structure Analytically and Algorithmically.

Dr. Tulsiani is the fourth TTIC professor with a currently awarded NSF CAREER grant.o

Oct 19, 2012 - Prof. Julia Chuzhoy co-winner of FOCS 2012 Best Paper award

Julia Chuzhoy was a co-winner of the best-paper award at the 53rd Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2012) being held in New Brunswick, NJ, on October 21-23. She co-authored the paper with Shi Li, who was her summer intern in the summer of 2011. The paper was titled, “A Polylogarithimic Approximation Algorithm for Edge-Disjoint Paths with Congestion 2”.

Sept 20, 2012 - Prof. Karen Livescu co-author of a best student paper at Interspeech 2012

A paper co-authored by former TTIC summer student Preethi Jyothi, Prof. Eric Fosler-Lussier of Ohio State University, and Prof. Karen Livescu was awarded an ISCA Best Student Paper award at the Interspeech conference September 9-13, 2012. The paper is titled “Discriminatively learning factorized finite state pronunciation models from dynamic Bayesian networks.” The conference included about 700 papers, and 3 Best Student Paper awards were given.

July 1, 2012 - Dr. Sheng Wang won the Warren DeLano Award for Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics

In ISMB 3DSIG 2012, Dr. Sheng Wang won the Warren DeLano Award for Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics for his work entitled protein structure alignment beyond spatial proximity, which is implemented as DeepAlign (available at http://home.ttic.edu/~jinbo/software.htm). (July 2012) The Warren DeLano Award for Structural Bioinformatics and Computational Biophysics was established in 2010 in association with the with the DeLano foundation in memory of Warren DeLano, the creator of PyMol and an advocate of free software in academia. Prizes are awarded based on scientific merit and are selected by the scientific committee members.

May 7, 2012 - Illinois Speech Day held at TTIC

The 4th Illinois Speech Day was held at TTI-Chicago on May 7, 2012. The workshop included participants from TTIC, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Northwestern University, Rush University, Ohio State University, and others. As in previous years, it provided a forum for interaction among researchers from the nearby speech processing and speech science research community. The workshop included a keynote lecture by Julia Hirschberg from Columbia University, as well as several sessions of talks and posters. The full program can be found here. The next workshop is planned for Spring 2013.

Mar 28, 2012 - Prof. Yury Makarychev awarded NSF CAREER grant

Professor Yury Makarychev is the recipient of the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant.

The grant is awarded by the National Science Foundation to support junior faculty in their research and educational activities. Quoting from the NSF website: “The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations”.

Professor Makarychev’s project focuses on Metric Geometry Techniques for Approximation Algorithms. The award is effective July 1, 2012 and expires June 30, 2017.

Feb 15, 2012 - Prof. Jinbo Xu Awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced on February 15, the selection of 126 outstanding researchers drawn from 51 colleges and universities across the United States and Canada as recipients of the distinguished Sloan Research Fellowships for 2012. One recipient was Professor Jinbo Xu of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Xu’s research interests lie in computational molecular biology.

Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars in recognition of achievement and the potential to contribute substantially to their fields. Potential fellows must be nominated for recognition by their peers and are subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars.

In the Press Release, Dr. Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation states, “Today’s Sloan Research Fellows are tomorrow’s Nobel Prize winners. These outstanding men and women are responsible for some of the most exciting science being done today. The Foundation is proud to support them during this pivotal stage of their careers.”

The $50,000 fellowships are awarded in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, and physics.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in New York City, established in 1934 and makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economic performance. www.sloan.org

Jan 12, 2012 - Midwest Vision Workshop held at TTIC

The 5th Midwest Vision Workshop (formerly Illinois Vision Workshop) was held at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago on Thursday January 12, 2012. The workshop drew more than 40 participants, including researchers from TTIC, University of Chicago, Indiana University, University of Illinois, and University of Michigan. It provided an opportunity for members of computer vision community in the Midwest to present their recent work in the form of talks and posters, get informal feedback and exchange ideas. The next workshop will be held in late Spring 2011 in Ann Arbor, MI.

Jan 11, 2012 - Professor Jinbo Xu awarded NSF CAREER grant

Professor Jinbo Xu is the recipient of the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant.

The grant is awarded by the National Science Foundation to support junior faculty in their research and educational activities. Quoting from the NSF website: “The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations”.

Professor Xu’s project focuses the Exact and Approximate Algorithms for 3D Structure Modeling of Protein-Protein Interactions.

Nov 14, 2011 - Presidential Search Continues

The Presidential Search Committee reported to the Board of Trustees on October 5 that it is continuing its work to search for the best person to serve as the next President. While the Committee is several months into the search effort, it will still accept and review nominations and applications for the position of president.

Any inquiries regarding the search can be sent to Stuart Rice at sarice@ttic.edu.

Nov 11, 2011 - Devi Parikh receives the Marr Prize

Devi Parikh received the Marr Prize for her co-authorship of a paper “Relative Attributes” that was presented at the13th International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 2011. Her co-auther was Kristen Grauman, an assistant professor at the University of Texas, Austin. The Marr Prize is a prestigioius award in computer vision given by the Committee of the International Conference on Computer Vision. Named after David Marr, the Prize is considered one of the top honors for a computer vision researcher.

Sept 9, 2011 - TTIC Professors Selected for NIPS Plenary Presentation

The paper “Consistency and Generalization Bounds for Latent Structured Probit and Ramp Loss” by David McAllester and Joseph Keshet was just selected for an oral (plenary) presentation at the NIPS 2011 conference in December. Only 20 papers out of 1,400 submissions were selected for plenary presentations.

May 11, 2011 - TTIC Hosts Illinois Speech Day 2011

TTIC continues in 2011, the tradition of hosting the Illinois Speech Day. Illinois Speech Day is a day-long meeting consisting of presentations and discussion on the theme of computational models of speech. Presenters are faculty, postdocs, and students at University of Chicago, Northwestern, UIUC, and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Presentations include completed and ongoing work, with the goal of fostering interaction among the attending parties. To register for attendance, see the program, or get directions, visit the event website: https://home.ttic.edu/~jkeshet/Illinois_Speech_Day_2011.html

February 17, 2011 - TTIC’s Stuart Rice is Awarded the 2011 Wolf Prize in Chemistry

TTIC’s Interim President, Dr. Stuart Rice, has been awarded the prestigious 2011 Wolf Prize in chemistry. Sharing the prize with him this year are Ching Tang of the University of Rochester, and Krzysztof Matyjaszewski of Carnegie Mellon University.

The Wolf Prize is an international award that has been presented most years since 1978 to living scientists and artists for “achievements in the interest of mankind and friendly relations among peoples … irrespective of nationality, race, color, religion, sex or political views.” The Wolf Prizes in physics and chemistry are often considered the most prestigious awards in those fields after the Nobel Prize.

The Wolf Foundation has said about Dr. Rice, “Professor Stuart A. Rice (born 1932, USA) has influenced the course of virtually every aspect of contemporary physical chemistry, and has shaped its directions broadly and powerfully. He has been a leader in most thematic areas of chemical physics. Rice´s great advances in organic solids led directly to his distinctive later work on the dynamics of single molecules and on phase transition behavior. This, in turn, led to his epoch-making research on the photonic control of chemical reactions. Rice´s original and pioneering investigations (both theoretical and experimental) into the properties of organic solids helped to define and to characterize a panoply of behaviors, and to conceptualize and formulate a coherent set of concepts, such as exciton behaviors, radiationless transitions, light absorption and emission.”

This coming May, Dr. Rice will receive his award from the President of the State of Israel in a special ceremony at the Knesset Building (Israel’s Parliament), in Jerusalem. For more info: www.wolffund.org.il

February 15, 2011 - Prof. Julia Chuzhoy Awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced on February 15, the selection of 118 outstanding researchers as recipients of the distinguished Sloan Research Fellowships for 2011. One recipient was Professor Julia Chuzhoy of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Chuzhoy’s research interests lie in theoretical computer science, with a focus on the area of approximation.

Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars in recognition of achievement and the potential to contribute substantially to their fields. Potential fellows must be nominated for recognition by their peers and are subsequently selected by an independent panel of senior scholars.

In their Press Release, Dr. Paul L. Joskow, President of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation states, “The scientists and researchers selected for this year’s Sloan Research Fellowships represent the very brightest rising stars of this generation of scholars. The Foundation is proud to be able to support their work at this important stage in their careers.”

The $50,000 fellowships are awarded in chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, evolutionary and computational molecular biology, neuroscience, and physics.

For a complete list of 2011 winners, visit: www.sloan.org/fellowships/page/21

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is a philanthropic, not-for-profit grant making institution based in New York City, established in 1934 and makes grants in support of original research and education in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and economic performance. www.sloan.org.

December 13, 2010 - Midwest Vision Workshop held at TTIC

The 4th Midwest Vision Workshop (formerly Illinois Vision Workshop) was held at TTI-Chicago on Monday December 13. The workshop drew more than 40 participants, including researchers from TTIC, University of Chicago, Indiana University, University of Illinois, and University of Michigan. It provided an opportunity for members of computer vision community in the Midwest to present their recent work in the form of talks and posters, get informal feedback and exchange ideas. The next workshop will be held in late Spring 2011 in Ann Arbor, MI.

December 11, 2010 - Midwest Theory Day held at TTIC

TTIC has hosted the 61st Midwest Theory Day on Dec. 11, 2010. Midwest Theory Day is a biannual meeting which aims to bring together computer theorists and people generally interested in theoretical computer science. The theory day had a packed schedule, that featured a number of invited talks by some of the leading local theoreticians, as well as many short talks by local students, postdocs and faculty. With almost 50 people attending from all over Midwest, this was a great opportunity to listen to new results, discuss research in an informal atmosphere, and get to know each other better. More information available here: https://home.ttic.edu/~yury/midwest2010/

October 6, 2010 - President Nagasawa retires, Dr. Rice appointed as Interim President

Dr. Mitsuru Nagasawa, the founding President of TTIC in 2001, retired effective at the end of the Board of Trustees meeting on Friday October 1. Under his leadership, TTIC developed active research and education programs in fundamental computer science, became accredited to grant PhD degrees, and is active in the recruitment of outstanding graduate students and faculty. He will continue to serve as a Trustee.

Dr. Stuart A. Rice, who has served as Dean for TTIC since October 2006, was appointed by the Board of Trustees to serve as the Interim President upon the recommendation of the Presidential Search Committee. He was also appointed to serve as a Trustee concurrent with this appointment.

Dr. Rice, the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Physical Chemistry at the University of Chicago, earned the following degrees:

• Bachelor’s degree in 1952 from Brooklyn College,
• Master’s and doctorate from Harvard University in 1954 and 1955, respectively.

He remained at Harvard as a Junior Fellow for two years and then joined the faculty of The University of Chicago in 1957, where he has remained since.

Professor Rice has served the university in a wide variety of capacities during his fifty-three year tenure. He served as the director of the James Franck Institute (the university’s center for physical chemistry and condensed matter physics) from 1961 to 1967. He was Chairman of the Department of Chemistry from 1971 to 1976 and was Dean of the Physical Sciences Division from 1981 to 1995.

Dr. Rice is currently on the Board of Governors at Argonne National Laboratory, managed by and affiliated with The University of Chicago, as well as Tel Aviv University. He has served as editor for Chemical Physics Letters and Advances in Chemical Physics, and co-authored several physical chemistry textbooks with Stephen Berry and John Ross.

Professor Rice’s was awarded the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific prize awarded in the United States, in 1999. He is a Fellow of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1970 Professor Rice was awarded the Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the nation’s oldest prize for undergraduate teaching, and a highly esteemed faculty award at The University of Chicago.

Over the course of his career, Rice has shaped much debate on theoretical physical chemistry. He is cited on the National Medal of Science “for changing the very nature of modern physical chemistry through his research, teaching and writing, using imaginative approaches to both experiment and theory that have inspired a new generation of scientists.” With over 100 doctoral students to his credit, Stuart Rice has had a great impact on the field of physical chemistry simply through the number of research scientists he has trained.

October 6, 2010 - Presidential Search Continues

The Presidential Search Committee reported to the Board of Trustees on October 1 that it is continuing its work to search for the best candidates to serve as the next President. While the Committee is several months into the search effort, it will still accept and review nominations and applications for the position of president.

Any inquiries regarding the search can be sent to Stuart Rice at sarice@ttic.edu.

September 16, 2010 - David McAllester and UoCTTI team win “Lifetime Achievement” Prize

At the PASCAL Visual Object Classes Challenge Workshop 2010 held in September in Crete, Greece, Prof. David McAllester was awarded a “Lifetime Achievement” prize as one of the authors of “Discriminatively Trained Deformable Part Model,” also known to VOC participants as the “UoCTTI” object detector.

Quoting from the award announcement: “First submitted to the PASCAL VOC challenge in 2007, this detector has now become a core component of many classification, segmentation, person layout and action classification submissions. We honour the contribution made to the community by the innovation and success of the method and its free distribution.”

“Discriminatively Trained Deformable Part Model” authors:
Pedro Felzenszwalb and Ross Girshick (University of Chicago), David McAllester (Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago) and Deva Ramanan (University of California, Berkeley, formerly of TTIC)

The publication can be found on Prof. McAllester’s webpage.

June 29, 2010 - Prof. David McAllester awarded AAAI Classic Paper award

Prof. David McAllester and David Rosenblitt have won the 2010 AAAI Classic Paper award for the paper “Systematic Nonlinear Planning”, which appeared in the AAAI conference in 1991, for “contributing seminal principles of systematic nonlinear planning, with wide-ranging influences on the evolution of research on automated planning.” The award will be presented at the AAAI - 10 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, July 11-15.

June 2, 2010 - Illinois Speech Day hosted at TTIC

TTIC hosted a regional speech research meeting, the 2nd Illinois Speech Day, on May 10, 2010, organized by Prof. Karen Livescu. About fifty people from Illinois and beyond participated. Among the institutions represented, in addition to TTIC, were the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of Washington, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University. The program can be found here.

February 11, 2010 - Jian Peng awarded Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship

TTIC congratulates Jian Peng, a third-year TIC Ph.D. student who was awarded the prestigious Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship, a two-year fellowship program for outstanding Ph.D. students supporting students in their third and fourth years of Ph.D. graduate studies. Jian works with Prof. Jinbo Xu on mathematical modeling in computational biology. His other research interests include machine learning and algorithms.

December 1, 2009 - 3rd Illinois Vision Workshop hosted at TTIC

TTIC hosted a regional computer vision meeting, the 3rd Illinois Vision Workshop, organized by Prof. Greg Shakhnarovich. About fifty people from the Midwest and beyond participated. Among the institutions and companies represented, in addition to TTIC, were the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, the University of Missouri, UC Berkeley, Microsoft Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Eastman Kodak, and Cornell.

October 1, 2009 - TTIC is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission

The Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools announced that the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago is now recognized as an accredited institute of education in computer science. The HLC is the regional commission recognized by the US Department of Education for the North Central region of the United States.

Quoting Dr. Mitsuru Nagasawa, president of the Institute: “Accreditation is an intensely rigorous but highly rewarding process. It has been invigorating to watch the academic process unfold. The institute has talented and determined faculty, students and staff, and we all share in this success.”_

February 13, 2009 - Prof. Julia Chuzhoy awarded NSF CAREER grant

Prof. Julia Chuzhoy is the recipient of the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant. The grant is awarded by the National Science Foundation to support junior faculty in their research and educational activities. Quoting from the NSF website: “The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations”.

Prof. Chuzhoy’s project focuses on the development of approximation algorithms and lower bounds for network optimization problems.

February 10, 2009 - TTIC hosts Workshop on Approximation Algorithms and their Limitations

Prof. Julia Chuzhoy organized a 3-day workshop on “Approximation Algorithms and their Limitations”, held at TTIC. The goal of the workshop was to bring together researchers in the areas of approximation algorithms and complexity theory, and to present diverse angles for studying approximability.

Prof. Chuzhoy’s comments on the workshop: The workshop was an opportunity to gather excellent researchers, who presented many outstanding new results. It was great to see how vibrant and full of activity this research community is, with new exciting research directions emerging. The informal workshop atmosphere has been great for exchanging ideas, open problems and for fostering new research connections.”

February 2, 2009 - TTIC moves to new facility

TTIC has expanded since it was founded in 2003, and, after six successful years at the University of Chicago Press Building, the Institute has moved to a new facility.

TTIC now occupies the fourth and fifth floors of the 6045 S. Kenwood Building on the University of Chicago campus. The space consists of nearly 30,000 square feet and includes two conference rooms, three meeting rooms, four student study rooms, a robotics laboratory, a cafe, and an idea lounge. The space boasts views of the Chicago skyline, the Midway Plaisance, the gothic University of Chicago campus, and Lake Michigan. Students, faculty and staff enjoy open, comfortable and interactive common spaces that encourage conversation, the sharing of ideas, and collaboration. There is a dramatic atrium in the center of the space with floating walkways and a grand staircase.

President Mitsuru Nagasawa’s comments on the new space: “This space is a physical manifestation of the progress and growth of TTIC since its inception. The faculty, students, and staff have performed beyond my early expectations, and we are well on our way to achieving international impact through world-class research and education in fundamental computer science and information technology. These are exciting times, full of challenge and opportunity. We are fortunate to meet them with strong leadership, teamwork, vision and commitment, all within an environmentally responsible new home built for the needs we face today and anticipate for tomorrow.”

The Institute looks forward to welcoming guests, new students and faculty to its new home.