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 (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.

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.

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.

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.

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. In addition to these accomplishments, Arvind served on many editorial boards of major technical journals and chaired program committees for numerous professional conferences and associations. He also co-authored a book in 2001, entitled Implicit Parallel Programming in pH.

Arvind’s stellar contributions to the field of computer science have already resulted in many other prestigious honors, such as both the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow distinction, the IEEE - Charles Babbage Outstanding Scientist Award, the University of Minnesota Computer Science and Engineering department’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and the I.I.T. Kanpur - Distinguished Alumnus Award.

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. Steve knew that many good candidates never reached his point in the interview process simply because they did not have the right “letters” after their name.

Lori grew up in a small town where she also realized that a formal education increased her job options. Her parents were blue collar workers without great financial assets. However, her parents encouraged all of the children to attend college and provided what funding they could. Lori used that parental funding and part-time jobs to complete her undergraduate degree.

These experiences and many others have led Lori and Steve to realize that a person’s career path is greatly influenced by obtaining a college education. The education opens “doors” and “opportunities” for that person. It is up to that person to keep the doors open.

Lori and Steve readily state that “Our college educations gave us the opportunities we needed. With our bequests, we want to unlock doors for others.”

Lori is Director of Finance for Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly LLP, a Minneapolis law firm. Steve works in software development for DataCard Corporation, a Minnetonka “Secure ID and Card Personalization Solutions” company.

Soundbyte, Fall 2004-Winter 2005

Jerry was born in Saint Paul where he also attended elementary school and a final year of high school. In between he attended school in Indiana. After completing high school, he enrolled in St. Thomas College. Then, the start of the Korean War prompted him to withdraw from his studies and enlist in the Air Force. In 1954, after four years in the Air Force, he was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant, and he returned to higher education, this time at the University of Minnesota where he earned a B.S. in Mathematics in 1958.

After three years of teaching high school students math and physics, Jerry was awarded an NSF fellowship for graduate study in mathematics at the University of Notre Dame. Following the completion of his studies for a Master's degree, he started his career in higher education at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington in 1962. He took a leave of absence after three years to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics from Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. He returned to full time work at Gonzaga in 1968, completing his dissertation in 1969.

Shirley Bergum was born in Iowa but grew up in Minnesota. She and Gerald were married in 1951. Between 1952 and 1963, they had nine children, six girls and three boys. In 1968, they became foster parents for a one-year-old boy. In 1970 the Bergums decided that they wanted to move back to the Midwest. In order to keep their foster son, by then loved dearly by the entire family, they had to adopt him. This lengthy, complex procedure was finally completed in 1974. In 1970, they moved to Brookings, South Dakota, where Jerry took a position in the Mathematics Department at South Dakota State University. The Mathematics and Electrical Engineering faculty at SDSU began teaching computer science courses in 1974.

Over time a group of the faculty thought that the University should offer a degree in computer science. Some thought that a combination of mostly mathematics courses and programming language courses would be sufficient. Jerry disagreed, being sure that there was more to computer science. In 1984, he returned to the University of Minnesota to become a graduate student again, this time in computer science, so that he could find out what the field was all about. Here he found out that he had been correct. With a much greater knowledge of the field, he returned to SDSU in 1985 as temporary head. In 1987 he was asked to be the first permanent head of the department, a position he kept until he retired on June 30, 2000.

Dr. Bergum was also active professionally, serving as the editor of the Fibonacci Quarterly, an international mathematics journal, publishing over sixty articles in seven different refereed journals, and authoring and/or editing seven mathematics books. He was active in the Mathematical Association of America, becoming the first person from South Dakota to ever become the President, as well as Governor, of the North Central Section of the Mathematical Association of America. In 1994, he was the first person from the North Central Section to be awarded the certificate of meritorious service.

Gerald and Shirley Bergum have generously decided to support the University of Minnesota and in particular the Department of Computer Science and Engineering by establishing a testamentary bequest to provide endowed scholarships to students of academic merit. Making a gift of an endowment is a meaningful way to make a long lasting impact on the University of Minnesota and those it serves. Our heartfelt thanks to them both!

--Bobbie Othmer

Soundbyte, 2002