Impressive scientific imagination and effective showmanship by graduate students doing research in the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute's Intelligent Systems Division were on view at the August 24 student research competiton, an annual event  now in its second year.

Wesley Kerr, left, won both best paeper and best presentation awards, given by ISI division director Yiga Arens.

Papers submitted by students pursuing computer science degrees at ISI were reviewed by a group of research staff and graduate students who selected a number of those for oral presentation and posters. The Friday audience  of 35 faculty and students listened to the presentations, viewed the posters and voted on the best among them. Division director Yigal Arens presented the awards following the voting.

Best Paper:
Wesley Kerr, Training AI Using Video Games, a system in which children playing with a website game train AI agents to make semantic decisions.

Best Paper Runner Ups:
Daniel Hewlett & Shane Hoversten, In Search of Deep Semantics with Sheep
Jacob Everist, Sensorless Mapping in Cramped Environments

Best Presentation:
Wesley Kerr, Training AI Using Video Games

Best Presentation Runner Ups:
Steve DeNeefe, Automatic Learning of a Synchronous Tree-Insertion Grammar for Translation.
Snehal Thakkar & Matthew Michelson, FastMash: Easily Building Web Integration Applications

Best Poster:
Martin Michalowski, Approximating Constraint Models Using Problem Instance Data

Best Poster Runner Up:
Rutu Mehta, Abduction for Discourse Understanding

A special award was given to the Best Reviewer, Jon May.

“I would like to thank all those involved in putting together this wonderful event,” said Arens. “The students who wrote and submitted papers, the reviewers, the staff who as always made sure that everyone present was well fed, and last but not least, Steve DeNeefe, Wes Kerr, and Jason Riesa who worked hard to organize it.”