2009 VIGRE Travel Recipients
Tamara Broderick, December 2009
In December 2009, I attended and spoke at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference and workshops and attended the associated Women in Machine Learning (WiML) workshop. WiML was a great opportunity to meet or reconnect with other women in the field of machine learning. The discussions and panels were particularly helpful in sharing ideas for collaborating, advertising research, and generally getting the most out of the research experience. Both WiML and NIPS featured talks on some of the most exciting current research in machine learning and were great educational experiences. Moreover, my accepted talk in the Mini-Symposium on Assistive Machine Learning for People with Disabilities was well-received and offered a chance to share my work on single-switch communication systems with an assistive technology audience. In particular, this talk may lead to the use of my method in future brain-computer interfaces. The talk was recorded to appear on videolectures.net and thus may reach an even wider audience.
Peter Ralph, January 2009
In January I traveled to Philadelphia, PA and Ithaca, NY to meet and collaborate with people there and to give two talks. The primary reason was to collaborate with Todd Parsons and his colleagues in Josh Plotkin's lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Todd is an expert on deriving stochastic processes as scaling limits of discrete biological systems. I learned a lot about choosing different scaling limits to obtain different limiting processes, and got to participate in the ongoing analysis of a particular problem. It was also stimulating to converse with the different members of the Plotkin lab, who are working on problems ranging from population genetics to linguistics. While there, I gave the Applied Math and Comp Sci Colloquium, as well as giving two smaller expository talks to the Plotkin research group. In Ithaca, I gave the Probability Seminar, and got several useful suggestions from people there on some current projects.
The trip was a very positive experience, both in terms of connecting with others working on similar problems, as well as being exposed to new ideas.
Vincent Vu, April 2009
I attended the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2009) held in Taipei, Taiwan. This year there was a special session on signal processing for neural spike trains---one of the application areas of my research. At the invitation of the organizers, I and my co-authors, Prof. Bin Yu and Prof. Rob Kass (CMU), contributed a paper to the special session. The NSF VIGRE Travel support allowed me to travel to Taipei to present our paper, "Some Statistical Issues in Estimating Information in Neural Spike Trains." This was an excellent opportunity because I was able to share my research and meet other researchers. One interaction with a scientist from RIKEN Brain Science Institute may lead to a future collaboration.