PhD student Yarin Gal wins prestigious Google Europe Doctoral Fellowship in Machine Learning. This year 15 fellowships were awarded to new doctoral students across Europe. From the ‘Research at Google’ website:

“We introduced the Google Fellowship programme in 2009 in the United States to broaden our support of university research. Universities continue to be the source of some of the most innovative research in computer science, and in particular it is the students that they foster who are the future of our field. In 2010, we extended the fellowship programme to Universities in Europe.”

Press release: http://research.google.com/university/relations/fellowship_recipients.html

PhD student James Lloyd places third out of over 100 competitors in the Load Forecasting track of the Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2012 (GEFCom2012), sponsored by the IEEE Power & Energy Society. From the competition website:

“This competition will bring together the state-of-the-art techniques for energy forecasting, serve as the bridge to connect academic research and industry practice, promote analytics in power engineering education, and prepare the industry to overcome forecasting challenges in the smart grid world.”

Competition website and leaderboard: http://www.kaggle.com/c/global-energy-forecasting-competition-2012-load-forecasting

James Lloyd’s website: http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/lloyd/

Dan Roy‘s PhD dissertation, “Computability, inference and modeling in probabilistic programming”, has been selected as a winner of a MIT/EECS Sprowls Award, recognizing it as one of the best dissertations in Computer Science at MIT in 2011.

Simon Lacoste-Julien has been awarded a prestigious Research in Paris grant, and will take up further post-doctoral studies with Francis Bach in the SIERRA project team located in the joint INRIA/CNRS/Ecole Normale Superieure computer science laboratory, starting on September 1st 2011.

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Andrew Gordon Wilson has won the Best Student Paper Award at UAI 2011 for his work on Generalised Wishart Processes.  The Engineering Department’s news story can be found here.

Dan Roy awarded Newton International Fellowship, as well as a Fellowship at Emmanuel College.

Frederik Eaton has won a Notable Paper Award for his AISTATS 2011 paper on his approximation framework “A conditional game for comparing approximations“. A video of the associated talk is available on videolectures.net.

Neil Houlsby will be joining the lab on a doctoral fellowship from Google.

Ryan Adams and Zoubin Ghahramani have won the AISTATS 2010 Best Paper Award for their work on learning the structure of deep, sparse graphical models. The paper is available here.

Sebastien Bratieres has received a prestigious Yahoo Key Scientific Challenge Award to encourage leading, meaningful research into Internet technologies.