CS&E News Briefs

Pen-Chung Yew Is Named New CS&E Department Head

On March 14, 2000, Dean H. Ted Davis announced the selection of Pen-Chung Yew as the new head of Computer Science and Engineering.  Professor Yew’s appointment will begin on June 19, 2000 and will continue for five years.

Guidant Foundation Creates Fellowship Fund

The Guidant Foundation has made a commitment to establish an expendable fellowship fund.  Funds in the amount of $16,666 will be disbursed to Computer Science each year for a two year period and will be used to provide fellowship grants to no more than three students in a calendar year.  Each recipient will be designated as a Guidant Foundation Grant Recipient.

The Guidant Corportion is a world leader in the design and development of cardiovascular medical products.  Guidant’s devices help patients with heart disease return to active and productive lives.  The Guidant Corpora-tion provides physicians with leading-edge technologies for improved patient management and clinical outcomes.

Gopalan Nadathur Begins Work in the Department

Gopalan Nadathur officially joined the department on February 1, 2000, as an associate professor with tenure.  Nadathur received his B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur,his M.E. in Automation from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania.  His research interests include programming language design and implementation, declarative and specification languages, compilation techniques, reasoning about programs, program transformation, formal methods, meta-programming, computational aspect of logic, and knowledge presentation.  Nadathur comes here from Loyola University in Chicago.

Baoquan Chen Accepts Faculty Position

Baoquan Chen will join the department faculty Fall Semester.  He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Xidian University, China, his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and a second M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from SUNY at Stony Brook.  His research interests include computer graphics and scientific visualization, especially on image-based rendering, volume rendering and manipulation, volume multi-resolution representation, antialiasing of texture mapping, graphics architecture design, physical-based modeling of natural phenomena and texture synthesis.  He comes to the  department after doing a postdoc at the Media Research Laboratory of New York University.

Distributed Robotics Wins Award

The Center for Distributed Robotics team under the directorship of Professor Nikos Papanikolopoulos, won “The Best Video” award, with a cash prize of $1000, at the IEEE-ICRA 2000 conference held April 24-28, 2000, in San Francisco.

Faculty on Leaves of Absence and Sabbaticals

Faculty on leaves of absence Fall Semester will include Jaideep Srivastava and David H. C. Du.  Both are working at startup companies in California.

Yousef Saad will be on sabbatical, spending half the year in France and half at the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute working on research projects.

Returning from sabbatical are Maria Gini and Dan Boley.  Wei-Tek Tsai is returning Fall Semester from a leave of absence, part of which was spent at Arizona State.

Vipin Kumar Co-organizes Workshop

Vipin Kumar co-organized an IMA workshop on Text Mining April 17-18, 2000.  The workshop was jointly sponsored by West Group, IMA (Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications), AHPCRC (Army High Performance and Computing Research Center), and MSI (Minnesota Supercomputing Institute).

Jaideep Srivastava Promoted to Professor

Jaideep Srivastava was promoted to a full professor, with tenure effective June 19, 2000.

Professors David Fox and James Slagle Have Retired

James Slagle announced his retirement effective January 17, 2000.  Jim had been with the department for 15 years.  He plans to make his home in Houston, Texas.

David Fox, former department head, announced his retirement effective Fall Semester 1999.  David had also been with the department 15 years.  He will divide his time between his lake home in Michigan and a new home in South Carolina.

Recently Received Grants

  • "Algebraic Recursive Multilevel Solvers: Advances in Scalable and Robust Parallel Linear System Solution Methods" to Yousef Saad and Maria Sosonkina (UM, Duluth), National Science Foundation, $469,839, 06/01/2000-05/31/2003.

  • "VHS to VRML: Extensions to the 3-D Video Camera-Based Modeling" to Richard Voyles, Point Cloud Inc., $78,773, 05/15/2000-05/27/2001.

  • "Localized Approach to Quality-of-Service Routing" to Zhi-Li Zhang, National Science Foundation, $299,919, 07/01/2000-06/30/2003.

  • "High Performance Spatial Visualization of Traffic Data" to Shashi Shekhar, CTS/USDOT, $122,929, 01/01/2000-02/28/2001.

  • REU supplement to "CAREER: Resource Management for Parallel and Distributed Systems" to Jon Weissman, National Science Foundation, $5,000, through 07/31/00.

  • "Real-time Ethernet for Process Control" to Zhi-Li Zhang, Honeywell, Inc., $32,002, 01/01/2000-12/31/2000.

  • "Binary Code Re-Optimization for IA-64" to Wei-Chung Hsu, Intel Corporation, $132,849, 03/01/2000-02/28/2001.

  • "CISE Research Instrumentation: Cluster Computing for Knowledge Discovery in Diverse Data Sets" to George Karypis, Maria Gini, Joseph Konstan, John Riedl and Shashi Shekhar, $74,516, 02/01/2000-01/31/2003.

  • "Bounds of Net Delays and their Application for Timing Optimization in Routing" to Eugene Shragowitz, Intel Corporation, $50,000, 12/15/1999-06/14/2001.

  • "Detecting Driver Fatigue through the Use of Advanced Face Monitoring Techniques" to Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, USDOT/CTS, $79,218, 12/01/1999-12/31/1999.

  • "Monitoring Weaving Sections" to Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos, USDOT, $99,138, 12/01/1999-11/30/2000.

  • "CISE Experimental Partnerships: Prototyping the Superthreaded Architecture" to Pen Yew and David Lilja (ECE), National Science Foundation, $336,086, 09/15/1999-08/31/2000.