Dr. Joseph Konstan

Joseph Konstan received the George Taylor Career Development Award. This award recognizes exceptional contributions to teaching by a candidate being considered for tenure at the rank of associate professor and carries with it a $5,000 award to be used for professional development in teaching and research.

Dr. Mats Heimdahl

Mats Per Erik Heimdahl was named a 1999 McKnight Land-Grant professor. This award provides the recipient with a research grant of $24,000 the first year and either an additional $24,000 grant or a 50% paid leave the second year. In addition, two months of summer salary are provided.

Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos was the first recipient of the department's Creative Faculty Award, receiving $2500 in discretionary funding. The award was created last year by Dean H. Ted Davis. The department is looking for industrial sponsorship for the award in future. years. If you are interested in providing sponsorship, please contact Jaideep Srivastava at 612-625-4012.

Dr. Wei-Chung Hsu will join the department in January 2000 as an associate professor in the Digital Technology Center. Dr. Hsu received his B.S. in Computer Science and his M.S. in Computer Engineering from the National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He comes to the department with experience as a computer architect at Cray Research Inc. at Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and a run-time optimization architect and senior technical contributor to the Enterprise Servers Group at the Hewlett Packard Company of Cupertino, California. His interests include processor and system architectures, processor and system performance, compiler optimizations, and run-time optimization systems.

Dr. George Karypis was offered a position as part of the technology initiative. Dr. Karypis is already a member of the department paid from grantfunds. His new appointment is a re-newable 3-year contract which is tied specifically to research in genomics." Dr. Karypis earned a Ph.D. in Com-puter Science from the University of Minnesota in 1996. His research has been focussed on algorithms for scientific computing and is currently ex-panding to related topics such as data mining, and genomics. His Ph.D. work on graph partitioning has had a major impact in several areas, but most notably in high-performance computing.

One of Dr. Karypis's biggest accomplishments has been to develop an efficient graph partitioning algorithm - called MeTis - and to distribute it freely on the Web. There are probably tens of thousands of users of MeTis in applications that include CAD, high-performance computing, databases, and genomics. Dr. Karypis is also known worldwide for the book on parallel algorithms which he co-authored with Kumar, Grama, and Gupta. This is currently the best book on the market on parallel algorithms. Widely used to teach this topic of increasing importance on campuses around the world, it has become a de-facto reference.

Dr. Karypis has been recruited in part because of his recent strong interest in applying computer science concepts and techniques to the field of genomics. This extremely important new research direction, in which many other universities are also seeking a presence, fits in perfectly with the mission of the Digital Technology Center.

Professor Jon B. Weissman will join the faculty Fall Semester 1999 as an assistant professor. Professor Weiss-man received his B.S. in applied mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon and his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Virginia. He has been an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio since 1995. His research interests include distributed systems, metacomputing, scheduling and resource management, I/O, software fault tolerance, parallel processing, scientific applications and operating systems. Professor Weissman holds a National Science Foundation CAREER award which supports his scheduling research.

Professor Joseph A. Konstan invites companies, non-profit organization, community groups, and others to propose projects for students enrolled in Computer Science 5115: User Interface Design, Evaluation, and Implementation. This course is a redesign of CSci 5110, with a new focus on getting students out to meet real users and solve real problems.

Students work on projects in groups of three to five, usually including on non-major from a design, psychology, or engineering discipline. These groups will interview and observe users, perform task analysis, and design and evaluate two to three interface prototypes. These prototypes will be evaluated using usability engineering processes including user tests.

To be considered for the course, a project must provide access to the current or eventual users of the system. The project must also focus on interface issues, rather than data processing or other back-end computation. Good projects include, but are not limited to, web sites and applications with interactive content, new graphical interfaces to existing text-based applications, and applications for computerizing paper processes. Students will select 15-20 of the proposed projects in the first weeks of September 1999, and will complete and present their designs in December.

If you have an idea of a project that would benefit your company or organization, please contact Jake Vo at vo@cs.umn.edu to request a project proposal kit or call Professor Konstan at 612-625-1831.

"High Performance Algorithms for Electronic Materials," to Yousef Saad and James Chelikowsky (Chemical Engineering and Materials Science), from National Science Foundation, $234,000, 02/15/99-01/31/2000.

"An Investigation of New Approaches to Critical-Systems Survivability," to Mats Heimdahl, from M.I.T./DARPA, $97,070, 01/01/99-12/07/99.

"Mechanisms for Secure and Robust Agent-Based Distributed Computing - REU Supplement," to Anand Tripathi, from the National Science Foundation, $5,000, 06/15/99-09/30/00.

"Application Design and Workflow Synthesis from Business Process Models," to Mats Heimdahl, from Camelot IS-2 International, Inc., $5,754, 03/01/99-05/31/99.

"Scheduling Algorithms and Applications Development," to Vipin Kumar and George Karypis, from NASA, $80,000, 04/01/99-10/31/99.

"Electronic Commerce," to David H.C. Du, from Talent Information Management LLC, $25,967, 02/15/99-07/15/99.