Recent CSE Alumni Achievements

CSE to host Bay Area Alumni Event, Aug. 13

The CSE department and alumnus Jeff Dean (B.S. 1990) will host a Bay Area CSE alumni event in Mountain View, California on Aug. 13, 2008 at the Computer History Museum. Dean, a Google Fellow, will be the event’s featured speaker. Institute of Technology Dean Steven Crouch will also be in attendance.

Dean is the 2007 recipient of the CSE Distinguished Alumni Award. He works at Google in the Systems Infrastructure Group. Dean’s contributions at Google range from low level libraries to high level components and services, all used extensively by various groups and products at Google as building blocks. Dean has helped design and implement five generations of the software to handle searches entered on Google.com, and played important roles in several of Google’s advertising products. Dean has also worked on key pieces of distributed systems infrastructure, including MapReduce and BigTable.

For more information about this event, please contact Anastacia Quinn Davis at aqdavis@umn.edu.

CSE alumna in Newsweek article about women embracing tech careers

In the Newsweek story, “Revenge of the Nerdette,” young women in high tech careers and fields are celebrated for bucking stereotypes and embracing their role in technological careers, while discussing the challenges they face as women in male dominated fields. In the story, CSE alumna Leah Culver (B.S. 2006), who started a social networking Web site called Pownce, discussed the challenges and said she had to convince employers she is competent, because she is an attractive woman.

Culver and the other women in the story bring to light many of the issues faced by women in computer science fields. To help CSE students and faculty address these issues and foster a sense of community, the department supports a Women in Computer Science group and activities and initiatives focused on women’s issues. To get involved in these efforts, please e-mail news@cs.umn.edu.

CSE Alumnus Arvind elected to the National Academy of Engineering

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) elected CSE Alumnus Arvind (M.S. '72, Ph.D '73) to be one of its new members this month. This national honor is the highest professional designation for an engineer. Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Since graduating from the University of Minnesota, he has become widely successful in the academic and business worlds, and is one of the most notable pioneers and practitioners in the computer science field.

Arvind is a trailblazer in several important fields in computer science and engineering, especially in the field of computer architectures. The most notable is his pioneer work on dynamic dataflow architectures and the functional programming language, id, designed specifically for dataflow computer architectures in 1980’s and 1990’s. He has also done influential work in formal methods that include semantics, lambda calculus, and term rewriting systems.

From 1986-1992, Arvind served as the Chief Technical Advisor for the United Nations, sponsoring a Knowledge Based Computer Systems project in India. Arvind also co-founded two highly successful companies based on his more recent work on hardware synthesis and verification, Sandburst – acquired by the Broadcom Corporation in 2006 and Bluespec Inc.

Steve Piazza and Lori Dietrich make CSE bequest

When Steve Piazza, (B.S. 1975) and his wife Lori Dietrich, (M.B.A. 1989) sat down to plan their wills, they decided to take the long view. They included two bequests to the University of Minnesota - one to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the other to the Carlson School of Management MBA program. Both gifts will create endowed scholarship funds which will provide support to students year after year.

Bequests often come from older alumni when they begin their estate planning. But for Lori and Steve the time was right. In 1970, Steve was discharged from the U.S. Navy. With only a high school diploma, he became acutely aware that his career options were limited. He had always planned to attend the

University, but until completing his military duty the funding was not available. Steve used the GI Education bill and part-time jobs to cover his college expenses.

After working in industry for several years, Steve was promoted to a management position charged with building a new department. This required him to hire many employees. Again Steve was made aware of the need for a potential employee to have a formal education since before he was provided with a list of candidates, others had “filtered” that list.

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