Two UCLA Statistics Faculty Win Prestigious "PAMI Helmholtz Test-of-Time Award"

Congratulations to Song-Chun Zhu and Alan Yuille who won the “PAMI Helmholtz Test-of-Time Award”. This was awarded by the IEEE PAMI Technique Committee at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) held in Sydney in December 2013. They received this honor for the paper entitled, “Region Competition: Unifying Snakes, Region Growing, and Bayes / MDL for Multiband Image Segmentation”, which they co-authored in 1996. The paper developed a new algorithm called “Region Competition” which first linked statistical models of images to partial differential equations (PDEs) for image segmentation. The paper that wins the “PAMI Helmholtz Test-of-Time Award” is one that is frequently cited by other papers in computer vision, judged to have made a powerful impact to the field and must have been published by ICCV more than a decade ago.

Inferring "Dark Matter" from Videos

Our VCLA (Vision, Cognition, Learning and Art) research group built two low cost hex rotor helicopters to take aerial videos on Sep 11, 2013 in Malibu State Park. These videos captured the motion of 15 "actors" from our group playing different roles in various activities.  Designing and carrying out the activities required creativity and was a lot of fun for the participants.

In the aerial videos it is difficult to identify some objects due to view angle, distance or occlusions (without considering other cues).  These unidentified objects are called “dark matter”.   The purpose of this exercise was to collect data to test a novel model based on the cue of human activities in the scene.  This model, proposed by Dan Xie, Sinisa Todorovic and Song-Chun Zhu, will appear in Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2013.

Statistics/Social Sciences Tenure Track Faculty Position

Open-ranked tenured and tenure track position, joint in the Department of Statistics and a department or departments in the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles. We seek a faculty member contributing at the cutting edge to the development of statistical methodology relevant to the social sciences. We welcome candidates whose experience in teaching, research or community service has prepared them to contribute to our commitment to diversity and excellence. Duties include new course development, teaching, and methodological and collaborative research. Ph.D. required by date of anticipated appointment of July 1, 2014. Salary will be commensurate with education and experience. Please refer to Tracking Job #1015-1314-01 on all correspondence.

Reviews for the position begin October 1, 2013, and will continue until the position is filled. Interested applicants should apply at UCLA Academic Recruit at:

https://recruit.apo.ucla.edu/apply/JPF00072

Applicants should submit:

1) CV
2) Cover letter describing how their qualifications and interests would fit with the position description
3) Statement of Research
4) Statement of Teaching
5) Three letters of recommendation

For more information on the departments in the Division of Social Sciences see www.sscnet.ucla.edu.

All inquiries may be sent to Professor Mark Handcock at css@stat.ucla.edu.

UCLA is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer with a strong institutional commitment to excellence through diversity. Women and Minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

Announcing the R User Conference 2014 to be held from June 30 to July 3 2014 at UCLA

The annual useR! international R User conference is the main meeting of the R user and developer community. It is being held at UCLA from June 30 to July 3, 2014.  Please goto http://user2014.stat.ucla.edu for more details.