Chad Jenkins, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, has been awarded a three-year $380,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research. This grant, titled "Learning Predictive Motion Vocabularies for Kinematic Tracking and Activity Recognition", will support Jenkins' neuro-inspired research on learning the basic building blocks of human motion, or motion primitives, leading to their use for robot perception.

Important computational challenges exist in acquiring and analyzing large amounts of human motion. Existing work in this area has addressed some of these challenges for learning and vision-based tracking methodologies, but has been limited to relatively small datasets. Using new ...

Sorin Istrail, the Julie Nguyen Brown Professor of Computational and Mathematical Sciences and Professor of Computer Science and director of the Center for Computational Molecular Biology, has received a $65,000 targeted research seed fund award for scientific computing. This award was bestowed by the Office of the Vice President for Research and funded by the Office of the Provost.

Istrail will use the seed money to begin a groundbreaking project: Computationally reconstruct a single protein molecule folding in vivo. Istrail says meeting this goal would go a long way toward advancing the science of genomics and improving human health ...