Alumni Relations

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Recent CSE Alumni Achievements

Bay Area Alumni Event August 13, 2009

Please join us for the Second Annual Bay Area Alumni Gathering hosted by the University of Minnesota Institute of Technology, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Computer History Museum
1401 N. Shoreline Boulevard
Mountain View, CA 94043

  • 6 p.m. Hors d’oeuvres Reception
    Meet Institute of Technology Dean Steven L. Crouch, Department of Computer Science and Engineering Head Vipin Kumar, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Head David Lilja, and local University of Minnesota alumni for an evening of socializing and networking. The museum will be open and docents will be available to guide tours.
  • 7 p.m. Lecture
    Hear a lecture by Stanford University professor and University of Minnesota alumnus Gary Glover, who will discuss his research regarding new technology involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Register online here.

CSE Alumnus Jeff Dean Elected to National Academy of Engineering

Photo of Jeff Dean

CSE alumnus Jeff Dean (B.S. 1990) was one of 65 new members recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering. This national honor is the highest professional designation for an engineer.

Dean is a Google Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group. His 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. Some prominent examples of his work are MapReduce, which is a system for simplifying the development of large-scale data processing applications, and BigTable, which is a large-scale semi-structured storage system used in a variety of Google products. These and other contributions by Jeff play a critical role in the scaling of Google's web search system so that it can handle thousands of queries per second over billions of documents in fractions of a second.

Dr. Dean received a B.S., summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota in Computer Science & Economics in 1990, and subsequently received a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He is the 2007 recipient of the CSE Distinguished Alumni Award.

CSE Alumnus Arvind to Receive University’s Highest Award

Picture of Arvind

The University of Minnesota has selected CSE alumnus Arvind to receive its Outstanding Achievement Award. The award is the highest nondegree award conferred upon distinguished alumni by the University. The award recognizes graduates of the University who have attained unusual distinction in their chosen fields.

Arvind is the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). Arvind's research interests are synthesis and verification of large digital systems described using Guarded Atomic Actions; and Memory Models and Cache Coherence Protocols for parallel architectures and languages.

Arvind will receive his award in a special ceremony Friday, September 26, 2008. Following the ceremony, he will present his talk Mobile Phones and Multicores: Programming Nightmare or Architectural Renaissance from 1:30-2:30pm in 101 Walter Library.

CSE to host Bay Area Alumni Event, Aug. 13

Picture of Jeff Dean accepting the CSE Distinguished Alumni Award

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.

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CSE Alumni Achievements

Alumni Profiles

Brian Bailey (Ph. D. 2002) received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. Bailey is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois-Urbana.

Chen Even (B.A. 1989) was appointed chairman of the board of directors for a biodiagnostics company, Glycominds Ltd., which specializes in glycan biomarkers for disease diagnosis and management. Even is the Senior Corporate Vice President of Commercial Operations and board member for the Italian diagnostic company, DiaSorin.

Dean Hougen (Ph.D. 1998) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Oklahoma.

Richard Keeney (B. S. 1986) ran for a seat on the Prior Lake City Council in 2007, but lost by approximately 100 votes. Keeney is employed by Electronics for Imaging with an office in Eagan, Minn. Since graduating, Keeney has authored nearly a dozen U.S. Patents and received a Scientific and Engineering Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1991.

Kurt Krebsbach (Ph.D. 1993) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at Lawrence University.

Steve Lindfors (M.S. 1976) completed a new APL interpreter. The features include complex numbers, user-defined functions, recursive functions, and both real and complex simultaneous equations.

Colin McMillen (B.S. 2003), a doctoral candidate at Carnegie Mellon University, received a Best Paper Award at the Twenty-Second Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07) for his paper entitled ‘Thresholded Rewards: Acting Optimally in Timed, Zero-Sum Games.’

Nancy Reed (Ph.D. 1995) was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.


Info Box

Get involved! Mentor a student through the IT Mentor Program

CSE alumni are invited to participate in the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Technology Mentor Program, in which students are matched with professionals working in science, math, and engineering fields. Matches are made considering factors like common interests and areas of expertise.

Participating alumni will have the chance to introduce students to their business, exchange ideas with a new generation of leaders, and help a promising student succeed. Mentors not only gain personal satisfaction, but they also help their company with recruitment and community service efforts.

The time commitment is approximately two hours per month, October 2007 through April 2008. University staff provides the training, guidance, and invitations to campus activities, including professional meetings, lectures, and sporting events.

Registration begins in September. More information can be found at the IT Mentor Program page. The deadline to register for the 2007-2008 season is September 30. For more information, contact the Institute of Technology Alumni Society at 612-626-8282 or at .

Thank you for supporting IT students!