December 2007
Greg Ganger Recognized by ACM as a Distinguished Engineer
ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery) has named 20 of its members as recipients of a recently created recognition program for their contributions to both the practical and theoretical aspects of computing and information technology. The new ACM Distinguished Members include computer scientists and engineers from some of the world’s leading corporations, research labs, and universities who made significant advances in technology that are having lasting impacts on the lives of people across the globe.
“These prominent scientists and engineers have contributed breakthroughs in computing that drive the technologies which benefit our world,” said Stuart Feldman, president of ACM. “Their computing innovations address problems in virtually every industry, and make possible advances in communications, healthcare, finance, entertainment, environmental control, computer security, and many other real life applications. We are proud to recognize these dedicated men and women and to raise their profile in the computing community.”
Greg Ganger is one of 12 recipients who conducts his research at a university and recieved the honor in recognition of his work in data file and storage systems. Eight other recipients are from the industrial sector
For more information about the selection criteria and a complete list of 2007 Distinguished Members and their citation, click on http://distinguished.acm.org.
-- ACM Press release, Dec. 5, 2007
December 2007
Carlos Guestrin Awarded a 2007 IBM Faculty Fellowship
Congratulations to Carlos Guestrin, assistant professor in the Machine Learning Department and in the Computer Science Department at CMU on his receipt of an IBM Faculty Award. The award is part of a competitive worldwide program intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research, development and services organizations and promote courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines and geographies that are strategic to IBM.
November 2007
Scientists First to Use New Yahoo! Supercomputing Cluster
Yahoo! has launched a new program that will give university scientists an opportunity to advance systems software for distributed computing while using a 4,000-processor supercomputer cluster that the company calls M45. Carnegie Mellon scientists will be the first to take advantage of the M45, which is capable of more than 27 trillion calculations per second and boasts 3 trillion bytes of memory. Carnegie Mellon researchers Garth Gibson and Greg Ganger will instrument the system and evaluate its performance; computer science professors Jamie Callan and Christos Faloutsos will use M45 to solve information retrieval and large-scale graph problems; and faculty members Alexei Efros, Noah Smith and Stephan Vogel will tackle large-scale computer graphics, natural language processing and machine translation problems. "We are excited about collaborating with Yahoo! on system software research, helping to advance the state of the art and creating new research possibilities in a critical area," said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science.
-- CMU 8 1/2 x 11 News
For more information, see the Yahoo! press release: Yahoo! Launches New Program to Advance Open-Source Software for Internet Computing
September 2007
Anastasia Ailamaki wins European Science Prize
Anastasia Ailamaki, associate professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, is one of 20 scientists chosen for this year’s highly selective European Young Investigator (EURYI) Awards.
The EURYI program is designed to attract outstanding young scientists from around the world to create their own research teams at European research centers and includes five-year grants of 1 million to 1.25 million euros.
“It’s very exciting,” said Ailamaki, who joined Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Department in 2001. “Europe doesn’t have many prizes of this magnitude, so winning it is a huge distinction.”
Ailamaki will receive 1 million euros – almost $1.4 million – to establish a research team at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, where she has been a visiting professor since February.July 2007
Anastasia Ailamaki Awarded Finmeccanica Chair in Computer Science
Anastasia Ailamaki, associate professor in the School of Computer Science , has been awarded the Finmeccanica chair in the Computer Science Department for 2007-2009.
Endowed in 1989, the Italian Finmeccanica Fellowship "acknowledges promising young faculty members in the field of computer science."
The Finmeccanica Group ranks among the largest international firms in its operating sectors of aerospace, defense, energy, transportation and information technology. They are active in the design and manufacture of aircraft, helicopters, satellites, radar, power generation components, trains, information and technology services - to name but a few - and the realization of these systems via engineering and managerial skills, electronics, information technology and innovative materials.
July 2007
O'Hallaron Named New Director of Intel Research Pittsburgh
David O'Hallaron, associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, is the new director of Intel Research Pittsburgh. O'Hallaron, whose research focuses on scientific supercomputing, computational database systems and virtualization, assumed leadership of the Pittsburgh lab July 1. He succeeds Todd Mowry, who has returned to the university as an associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering.
-- ECE News Online
July 2007
Eleven CMU Professors Participate in Microsoft Faculty Summit
Eleven Carnegie Mellon professors, including eight from the School of Computer Science (SCS) and three from the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, attended Microsoft Research¹s 8th annual
Faculty Summit July 16-17 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash. The event, which draws about 350 academics from 175 institutions worldwide, is an opportunity for professors to meet with Microsoft researchers and product group engineers for in-depth discussions of computing problems and trends.
Carnegie Mellon attendees included Jamie Callan, Alexei Efros, Seth Copen Goldstein, Robert Kraut, Peter Lee, Roni Rosenfeld and Jeannette Wing from SCS, and Bruce Krogh, Jose Moura and Dawn Song from ECE. Luis von Ahn, a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow, also participated.
-- CMU 8 1/2 x 11 News
June 2007
Priya Narasimhan to participate in Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science Priya Narasimhan and Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Burak Ozdoganlar have been selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's 13th annual U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, Sept. 24 - 26 at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash.
From http://www.nae.edu/nae/NAEFOE.nsf: "The Frontiers of Engineering program brings together through three-day meetings a select group of emerging engineering leaders from industry, academe, and government labs to discuss pioneering technical work and leading edge research in various engineering fields and industry sectors. The goal of the meetings is to introduce these outstanding engineers (ages 30-45) to each other, and through this interaction facilitate collaboration in engineering, the transfer of new techniques and approaches across fields, and establishment of contacts among the next generation of engineering leaders."
--CMU 8 1/2 x 11 News
May 2007
Best Paper Awards for Jimeng Sun, Hui Zhang and Christos Faloutsos
Teams from Carnegie Mellon won the best paper award in both the research and application tracks at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Conference on Data Mining this past April. The research track winner was "Less Is More: Compact Matrix Decomposition for Large Sparse Graphs" by Jimeng Sun, Yinglian Xie, Hui Zhang and Christos Faloutsos. The application track winner was "Harmonium Models for Semantic Video Representation and Classification" by Jun Yang, Yan Liu, Eric Xing and Alexander Hauptmann.
-- CMU 8 1/2 x 11 News
April 2007
Elie Krevat NDSEG Fellowship
Congratulations
to Elie Krevat, who has been selected
to receive a 2007 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. The NDSEG Fellowship is sponsored and funded by the Department of Defense (DoD). NDSEG selections were made from a pool of more than 3,400 applications
by the Air Force Research Laboratory/Air Force Office of Scientific
Research (AFRL/AFOSR), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Army Research Office (ARO), and the DoD High Performance Computing
Modernization Program Office (HPCMP). The NDSEG Fellowship covers tuition and required fees for three years at any accredited U.S. college
or university that offers advanced degrees in science and engineering. In addition, the NDSEG Fellowship will provide a yearly stipend.
March 2007
Mike Kasick Awarded NSF Graduate Fellowship
ECE student Mike Kasick has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. CMU had 8 awardees in all, with only one from ECE.
The fellowship provides funding for a maximum of three years that can be used over a five-year period, including a stipend of $30,000 per twelve-month fellowship period. Mike is advised in his research on problem diagnosis by Priya Narasimhan.
March 2007
PDL Researchers Awarded Best Paper at SIGMETRICS 2007
The program chairs of SIGMETRICS 2007, which will be held from June 12-16 in San Diego, CA, have announced that the Best Paper Award will be given to a team of researchers from the Parallel Data Lab (PDL) for their work, "Modeling the Relative Fitness of Storage." The authors are graduate students Michael Mesnier (ECE), Matthew Wachs (CS), Raja Sambasivan (ECE), CS postdoctoral research fellow Alice Zheng, and their faculty advisor, Greg Ganger, PDL director and Professor of ECE and CS.
The paper was chosen from among the 29 accepted (and many others submitted) for publication at the conference, which focuses on the measurement and modeling of computer systems.
SIGMETRICS is the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Special Interest Group (SIG) for computer/communication system performance. SIGMETRICS promotes research in performance analysis techniques as well as the advanced and innovative use of known methods and tools.
February 2007
Three CMU Computer Science Researchers Awarded Sloan Fellowships
Three Sloan Fellowships in computer science have been awarded to CMU faculty this year: Jennifer C. Mankoff , HCII, Priya Narasimhan, ECE and ISR, and Dawn Song, ECE and CSD.
A Sloan Fellowship is a prestigious award intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Currently a total of 118 fellowships $45,000 fellowships each year are awarded annually in seven fields: chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics. Only 16 are given in computer science each year so CMU once again shines. Since the establishment of the fellowships in 1955, 32 Sloan Fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.
February 2007
PDL Researchers win Best Paper Award at FAST 2007!
Congratulations to Bianca Schroeder and Garth Gibson for bringing a Best Paper Award home from the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2007), which was held in San Jose, CA this year. The award was given for their research on "Disk Failures in the Real World: What Does an MTTF of 1,000,000 Hours Mean to You?"
PDL researchers have been well received at past FAST conferences as well, winning best student paper awards in 2002 ("Track-Aligned Extents: Matching Access Patterns to Disk Drive Characteristics", Schindler, et al.) and in 2004 ("A Framework for Building Unobtrusive Disk Maintenance Applications", Thereska et al.). In 2005 the PDL brought home both best paper awards for work on "Ursa Minor: Versatile Cluster-based Storage", Abd-El-Malek et al. and "On Multidimensional Data and Modern Disks", Schlosser et al.
January 2007
Dawn Song Selected for College of Engineering Award
Dawn Song is among the three ECE faculty members who won awards from the College of Engineering this year. Song, Assistant Professor of ECE and Computer Science, received a George Tallman Ladd Research Award, which is granted in recognition of outstanding research, professional accomplishments, and potential.
-- with info from ECE News Online
More PDL news here.