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Mr. Driscoll is an Engineer Fellow in Honeywell's research labs with 40 years experience in safety and security critical systems; including the aspects of hardware, software, and systems design. He currently is helping to apply TT-Ethernet to aerospace applications and is advancing formal methods tools for NASA. He was a principal designer of the SAE AS4710 PI-bus and the ARINC 659 SAFEbus, the only two backplane bus standards with significant fault tolerance. For this work, he was given Honeywell's highest award for technical achievement, the H. W. Sweatt award. He led the VHSIC fault tolerance program and helped design the VHSIC TM bus, which became the IEEE 1149 JTAG test bus. He led the effort to create the "Handbook for Data Network Evaluation Criteria" for the FAA. He has contributed to the electronics architecture design of the U.S. National Aerospace Plane, Space Defense Initiative, Light Helicopter Experimental, Boeing 777, NASA's Orion capsule, Advanced Launch System, and Honeywell's vetronics programs and unmanned underwater vehicles. Mr. Driscoll has developed cryptography specifically for real-time systems. Prior to joining Honeywell, he worked in the areas of voice and data cryptography for the U.S. Army Security Agency. Mr. Driscoll has 34 patents issued and a dozen pending covering safety and security critical real-time systems. He is a member of the select IEEE/IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance.
Bonnie K. Holub (formerly Bonnie Holte Bennett), Ph.D. is a founder and CEO of Adventium Labs, a non-profit research and development lab, focusing on the development of advanced software applications for complex systems, with a particular emphasis on automated reasoning, human-system interaction, and supporting architectures. In just over seven years of operation, this group has been awarded almost $14 million in research funding from a variety of government labs and industrial research organizations.
Dr. Holub earned her doctorate degree in Computer Science focusing on Artificial Intelligence from the University of Minnesota. She was a principal at Knowledge Partners of Minnesota, and was the founder and director of the Artificial Intelligence/High Performance and Parallel Computing Lab in the Graduate Programs in Software (GPS) at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. During her tenure from 1985 to 2004, GPS grew to become the largest graduate program in software in the world. Dr. Holub was also a Senior Research Scientist at Honeywell Labs from 1981-1995. She has over 30 publications in national and international journals and conference proceedings in the areas of automated prognostics and diagnostics, information fusion, and parallel computing. In 1993 the Minnesota Federation of Engineering Societies selected her as the “Minnesota Young Engineer of the Year.” She also has served over nine years on several community non-profit boards, and is an active volunteer in community events.
Dr. Ajay Bhushan Pandey is a distinguished alumnus of the Institute of Technology, earning his master’s in computer science in 2000 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 2003. Dr. Pandey is currently the managing director of the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd. (MSEDCL), the largest distributor of electricity in India.
After Dr. Pandey completed his Ph.D. he continued on his long-term mission to improve his home country and returned to India to renew his previous work in the Indian government. In his current role as managing director of the largest electricity distribution utility in India, he manages 70,000 employees and provides electricity to more than 14 million consumers. In the first 18 months under his leadership, he successfully led efforts to reduce distribution loss of electricity and raised annual revenue. He was also appointed as a member to the Indian government’s energy policy committee, an honored and influential position.
The University of Minnesota has selected CS&E 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.
CS&E alumnus Jeffrey Dean (B.S. 90) works at Google in California as Google Fellow in the Systems Infrastructure Group. He has a passion for building useful systems, and is willing to tackle any problem, no matter how daunting it looks. 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.
He 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. Bigtable is used underneath more than 80 Google products, and MapReduce is the primary system used for large-scale batch computations at Google. These and other contributions by Dean 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.
Dean received a B.S., summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota in Computer Science & Economics in 1990, and a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1996. Before joining Google, he worked for Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Lab in Palo Alto, where he worked on low-overhead profiling tools, design of profiling hardware for out-of-order microprocessors, and Web-based information retrieval. From 1990 to 1991, he worked for the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS, developing software to do statistical modeling, forecasting, and analysis of the HIV pandemic.
To learn more, visit Jeffrey Dean’s Web page.
This year’s distinguished alumni award recipient, Dr. Krantz, is currently Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at MTS Systems Corporation, a global supplier of testing products and industrial sensors. MTS testing products help customers accelerate and improve their design, development, and manufacturing processes and are used for determining the mechanical behavior of materials, products, and structures. Dr. Krantz has also held the positions of Vice President of Engineering and Technology for MTS’ Test Division, Vice President, Advanced Systems Division, and Program Manager in the Advanced Systems Division. Prior to coming to MTS, Dr. Krantz was an Engineering Fellow at Honeywell Defense Systems Division and Alliant Techsystems Inc.
His technical accomplishments are seminal and span a variety of technical areas. He wrote the AVOS CP/M-based operating system for the blind and visually impaired in the early 1980’s. Working for Honeywell in the late 1980’s, he was a systems engineer helping to prototype several remotely-piloted and autonomous land vehicle concepts for the military. He wrote the Ada-based Aladdex operating system for the DARPA Aladdin multiprocessor. During this time, he was a lead developer of the automatic fire control system for the Paladin M109E5 Howitzer, the first fielded military system using embedded Ada software. At MTS in the 1990’s, he worked with Prof. Maria Gini (he was awarded a CS&E Ph.D. working under her guidance) and Prof. Max Donath on various aspects of system architecture and localization subsystems for mobile robots, including RoboCart and the MnDOT SafeTruck. He was one of the main developers of the DARPA Distributed Robotics program Scout robot working with Prof. Nikos Papanikolopoulos, defining operational concepts, mechanical designs and writing the first set of embedded software. During this same period, he developed several systems for AeroMet Corp, DARPA, the Army Research Lab, and Lockheed Martin for 3-D direct fabrication of titanium components using laser-additive manufacturing. Working with Profs. Sue Mantell, Dennis Polla, Ramesh Harjani, and others, he was the PI and systems engineer for a novel remotely-queried embedded wireless strain sensor using RFID technology and MEMS strain sensors. He was project engineer for several large-scale seismic research shaker tables, including the multi-table system at the Bridge Structures Lab at UNR. He has published two books and has publication credits on about 60 articles in various trade magazines and academic journals.
For his original contributions and leadership in the areas of Computer Graphics and Animation, and their application to the Media Arts and Sciences. Weinberg established the Computer Graphics Group at Cray Research and developed computer graphics software and systems for NASA's Johnson Space Center, Lockheed Electronics, and Digital Productions.
Weinberg's research interests include computer animation, scientific visualization, visual effects and entertainment technology. As digital movie production expands to include distributed computing facilities, he and his colleagues are increasingly dependent on high-speed, worldwide networks to review and revise digital film clips, computer animation and virtual sets remotely. They also rely on increasingly powerful graphics workstations and encounter software issues similar to those that challenge researchers that use computing in the sciences.
Johnson's company developed Visio, a graphics program able to perform a wide variety of tasks with a low degree of difficulty. Visio was an immediate hit, quickly becoming the best-selling drawing program in the marketplace.
In September 1999, Microsoft acquired Visio in a deal valued at $1.3 billion. "Our biggest motivation to approach Microsoft was to capitalize on their global marketing," Johnson says. "We're dealing with high-volume software purchasing, beyond personal purchases in a computer store."
Johnson and his wife now live in Seattle, where he is vice president of Microsoft's business tools division. In fall 2001, they donated $1.5 million to the University. Their gift will fund the new Digital Design Consortium, a joint research and educational venture among University faculty in architecture, computer science, and other fields.
By combining design and digital technology, consortium researchers aim to create new tools that expand the boundaries of complex design modeling and allow designers to translate their ideas into multi- dimensional sketches. It's a natural fit for Johnson, whose University studies encompassed both fields.
