At the end of July, ICSI hosted its annual company picnic at Tilden Regional Park. The picnic is always a happy occasion and this year was no exception! Roughly 70 researchers, staff, and family members were able to attend for a bit of fun under the sun. The weather was beautiful as everyone took advantage of some time away from the office to enjoy food and refreshments.
Jiashi Feng is here on a short stay, visiting Vision.
Jiashi received his bachelor's degree from the University of Science and Technology in China. He is currently a PhD student at the National University of Singapore, with a focus on computer vision, machine learning research, and its applications to multimedia. His research is on object classification - the ability for a machine to understand the content of images. He works mostly on feature learning.
Alexandros Kapravelos is visiting Networking and Security for the summer, working with Chris Grier and Vern Paxson.
Alexandros is originally from Greece and received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Crete. He is now a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara, where he is finishing his third year. His research focuses on making the Web safer. He has done some work on browser fingerprinting, which allows a Web page to uniquely identify visitors.
The Teaching Privacy Team, a cross-disciplinary research group composed of computer scientists, educators, and social scientists at ICSI and UC Berkeley, works to educate the public about the privacy implications of the information shared publicly on the Internet. The work is funded by the National Science Foundation through the Geo-Tube project. The project seeks to help users, particularly younger ones, understand the ways in which it is possible to aggregate public and seemingly innocuous information from different media and Web sites to attack the privacy of users.
Researchers working on FrameNet Brazil, a machine-readable lexicon based on the original English FrameNet housed at ICSI, are helping build a trilingual dictionary – in English, Spanish, and Portuguese – in preparation for the FIFA World Cup soccer championships, which will be held in Brazil next year. The dictionary will have an emphasis on words and phrases related to tourism and soccer. FrameNet Brazil, or FN-Br, was established in 2007 and now comprises seven researchers and more than two dozen students, from undergraduates to postdocs.
Speech researchers at ICSI are hard at work on the Swordfish project, an ambitious effort to rapidly generate keyword search systems in a new language with modest resources. The ultimate goal would be to develop a system for a new language in a week using only a small amount of labeled training data (as little as 10 hours - most ASR systems are trained on hundreds or thousands of hours of labeled data).
In the last two weeks, ICSI has hosted two talks related to speech processing and one related to networking. You can check out all ICSI's videos on our YouTube account. Here are the three recent talks.
Audio and Multimedia researchers at ICSI are starting to work on a new big data project that aims to provide the scalability of diverse parallel processing at the productivity level of high-level languages.
The new SMASH project (Scalable Multimedia content AnalysiS in a High-level language) is a collaboration between researchers at ICSI and UCB and is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Two UC Berkeley students are working with our research initiatives team this summer on manipulation-resistant mechanisms for cloud computing. They will work with ICSI researchers Eric Friedman and Scott Shenker and UC Berkeley's Ali Ghodsi and Ion Stoica.
Researchers working on 
In the last two weeks, ICSI has hosted two talks related to speech processing and one related to networking. You can check out all ICSI's videos on our 
Two UC Berkeley students are working with our