Spring 2009 in Recognition of His Outstanding Students Who Yahoo! Believes Are Doing Research in Very Performance in Academics and Research

University of Massachusetts Amherst Spring / Summer 2009 Significant Newsletter of the Department of Computer Science BITS Representation Discovery: A new frontier of CS research

epresentations are at the heart of computer science. To manipu- late data in software, information must fi rst be converted into Ra digital form. Finding a good representation for the converted data can make an enormous difference to the effi ciency with which the data is processed and stored. Fueled by the remarkable growth in sensing and storage technology, digital data has proliferated greatly in diversity and size: examples range the gamut from digital movies and music, personal image galleries, problem-solving and sensor traces from autonomous decision-making programs and physically embodied devices such as robots and sensor networks, and collaboration graphs representing scientifi c and social networks. “This explosion in high- dimensional data makes it imperative to fi nd effi cient algorithms for extracting low-dimensional regularities,” says Associate Professor Srid- har Mahadevan, co-director of the Autonomous Learning Laboratory. Representation discovery fi nds a new set of “features” Throughout human history, the development of new representations (or basis functions) for describing digital datasets, by harmonic analysis of the nonlinear geometry of the has had lasting signifi cance. To take a simple example, consider the space spanned by the data. problem of representing numbers: 4, IV, 1111, and 100 all denote the number “four” using a different basis (base 10, Roman, unary or base 1, and binary or base 2). Positional representations, such as base 10 and base 2, are widely used in science and technology. Rapid growth in multimedia content necessitates sophisticated compression algorithms; today we use JPEG, but far more effi cient representations will emerge in the next decade from recent theoretical breakthroughs in compressed sensing, adds Mahadevan. Can representation discovery be automated? Are there mathematical principles by which computers can discover optimal data-dependent representations? Mahadevan and his Ph.D. students are investigating these challenging questions. His recent research, funded by National Science Foundation grants, has been published in a new book. The research applies mathematical tools from the fi eld of harmonic analysis to digital data sets. Harmonic analysis decomposes all functions in a given space into atomic building blocks called basis functions. continued on page 4

News Fu awarded prestigious McGregor joins CS faculty 5 Sloan Research Fellowship McCallum elected ssistant Professor Kevin Fu is among 118 AAAI Fellow 3 researchers in the United States and Canada to Abe awarded a prestigious Sloan Research Fel- Awards lowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Lesser receives IJCAI Fu’s research focuses on ensuring the security and Award; named privacy of pervasive devices that must withstand IEEE Fellow 3 determined, malicious parties. His primary focus is on improving the security and privacy of pervasive Venkataramani receives healthcare and energy-constrained computational NSF CAREER award 2 architectures such as RFIDs and implantable medical devices. “A unifying char- acteristic is the need to strike a balance between security and usability,” says Fu. Alums “Too much security can make a system ineffective and unusable. A highly usable Franklin’s database system may fail to adequately protect sensitive resources. His approaches rely on research highlighted 10 a dual defense of energy-aware computation and cryptography.” continued on page 2 Signiﬁ cant Bits Spring / Summer 2009 News

Venkataramani receives NSF CAREER award

interconnecting diverse wireless edge networks. ssistant Professor Arun With his CAREER award, Venkataramani is working on AVenkataramani has re- the architecture, analysis, and implementation of a simple ceived a five-year Faculty Early network protocol stack that ensures robust performance Career Development (CAREER) across diverse wireless edge networks. In this project, he award from the National Science adopts an unusual approach: instead of trying to make pro- Foundation for his proposal “A tocols in otherwise well-connected environments robust to Robust Protocol Stack for Di- intermittent fluctuations or disruptions, he is designing for verse Wireless Edge Networks.” an extreme point in the design space—an always-partitioned “The growth and value of network or a DTN—and working back from those insights the Internet today are fueled by a variety of wireless edge to ensure robust performance of protocols even in well-con- networks including WiFi access points in homes and public nected mesh networks. places, wireless local area networks (WLANs) in workplaces, After receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Sciences from the cellular data services such as 3G, multi-hop wireless mesh University of Texas at Austin, Venkataramani held a visiting networks, wireless sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks faculty position at the University of Washington. In 2005 (MANETs), and delay-tolerant networks (DTNs),” says Ven- he joined the computer science faculty at UMass Amherst, kataramani. “This diversity poses fundamental challenges to where he currently leads the Advanced Networked Systems traditional network protocols that are fragile under highly Research Group. fluctuating loss, delay, and topology characteristics, and The CAREER program offers the NSF’s most prestigious completely break down in disruption-prone environments.” awards for new faculty members. It recognizes and supports The diversity increases management complexity—a network the early career-development activities of those teacher- administrator must pick from an intimidating number of scholars who are most likely to become the academic lead- protocol options and optimizations tuned to one environ- ers of the 21st century. In addition to Venkataramani, fifteen ment. These protocols have to be re-engineered in a different members of the department’s faculty have received previous environment—stifling innovation and the long-term value of CAREER awards.

FU NAMED SLOAN FELLOW – – – continued from page 1 selected to educate the public through national television). His recent work dispelled the widespread misbelief that The proliferation of low-power embedded computing RFIDs need special-purpose hardware for cryptography. has led to a change in how humans and computers interact. He demonstrated that a common block cipher is surprising- For instance, large numbers of people carry RFID-enabled ly feasible on an RF-powered, general-purpose Ultra-High car keys for anti-theft protection. Wireless pacemakers and Frequency RFID tag (RFIDSec). Previously, many RFID implantable cardioverter defibrillators use low-power micro- researchers invented lightweight cryptographic methods controllers to maintain healthy heart rhythms. Yet security that were later completely broken by cryptanalysis. Further often remains an afterthought because of a lack of under- proving that special-purpose hardware is not necessary standing of threat models and a belief that cryptography for RFID security, the FERNS random number generator requires expensive, special-purpose hardware. A fundamental allows an RFID tag to harvest physically random numbers problem that Fu investigates is how to provide security and from uninitialized SRAM because of process variation privacy under extreme resource constraints, such as comput- (IEEE Trans. on Computers). ing with little or no battery power. Fu’s planned research will investigate novel software His recent research introduced threat models for untradi- abstractions and compiler optimizations for securely per- tional contexts such as wireless, implantable medical devices forming general-purpose computation on computational and RFID-enabled, contactless credit cards. As a result of RFIDs—battery-free devices that must harvest RF energy fundamental flaws discovered in these devices, both the for computation. A key challenge is to make forward medical device industry and credit card industry have begun progress of computation despite continual interruptions to to embrace stronger models for security and privacy. More- power. Complete loss of RAM on the order of every 100 over, the FDA and FTC are reevaluating their regulations to ms makes the notion of a computational checkpoint funda- ensure patient safety and consumer privacy respectively. Fu’s mental to this emerging model of computing. Long-running work on medical devices further provides a number of zero- computations such as key derivation will benefit from such power defenses in the sense that no energy is drawn from the checkpoints. A second challenge is finding hardware-soft- primary battery to perform security operations. Rather, the ware abstractions that better match the energy constraints. agent asking to be authenticated must provide wireless power For instance, a computational RFID draws energy from that supplies the energy for the security operations. Related a continuously decreasing supply voltage from a small clinical results appeared at the American Heart Association capacitor. Because processors today are designed for a dis- Scientific Session (one of only two submissions out of 4,000 crete set of supply voltages, the processor will waste energy continued on page 6

2 Signiﬁcant Bits Spring / Summer 2009 News

Lesser receives Research Excellence Award; named IEEE Fellow

rofessor Victor Lesser received the 2009 International Professor Lesser’s research PJoint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09) focus is on the control and or- Award for Research Excellence, and the Institute of Electrical ganization of complex artificial and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has named Lesser as a Fellow. intelligence systems. Lesser is The IJCAI lifetime achievement award is given to a scien- considered a leading researcher in tist who has carried out a program of research of consistently the areas of Multi-Agent Systems/ high quality yielding several substantial results. Lesser is Distributed AI, Intelligent Distrib- recognized for his seminal work on the foundations of black- uted Sensor Networks, Real-time board control architectures and multi-agent systems and his AI, and Blackboard Systems. He foundational role in the formation of the multi-agent systems has also made contributions in community. the areas of speech and sound un- According to IJCAI, past recipients of the Research Excel- derstanding, diagnostics, adaptive lence honor are the most illustrious group of scientists from signal processing, intelligent user the field of Artificial Intelligence. They are: John McCarthy interfaces, and computer architecture. (1985), Allen Newell (1989), Marvin Minsky (1991), Ray- Lesser’s research accomplishments have been recognized mond Reiter (1993), Herbert Simon (1995), Aravind Joshi by many major awards over the years. Most recently, he was (1997), Judea Pearl (1999), Donald Michie (2001), Nils named co-winner of the 2008 International Foundation for Nilsson (2003), Geoffrey E. Hinton (2005), and Alan Bundy Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS) (2007). Influential Paper Award. In 2007, The IFAAMAS established By naming Lesser an IEEE Fellow, the organization rec- the “Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award” to recognizes his contributions to distributed intelligent systems ognize his career-long contributions to the field. and architectures. According to IEEE, the grade of Fellow Lesser joined the UMass Amherst Computer Science faculty recognizes unusual distinction in the profession and shall be in 1977 and is the director of the Multi-Agent Systems Lab conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an (MAS). He received his B.A. in Mathematics from Cornell extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE University in 1966, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from fields of interest. Stanford University in 1973. McCallum elected AAAI Fellow

rofessor Andrew McCallum was elected as a Fellow of Amherst in 2003, McCallum Pthe Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intel- was Vice President of Research ligence (AAAI) “for significant contributions to the theory and Development at WhizBang and application of information extraction, natural language Labs, a company that uses ma- processing, data mining, machine learning, and their integra- chine learning for information tion.” The AAAI will celebrate the newly elected Fellows at extraction from the Web. In the a dinner during IJCAI-09 in Pasadena, California on July 14. late 1990’s he was a Research His research interests are in information extraction, Scientist and Coordinator at knowledge discovery from text, statistical natural language Justsystem Pittsburgh Research processing, machine learning, and graphical models. The main Center, where he spearheaded the goal of McCallum’s research is to dramatically increase our creation of CORA, an early research paper search engine that ability to mine actionable knowledge from unstructured text. used machine learning for spidering, extracting, classifying He is especially interested in information extraction from and citation analysis. McCallum received his Ph.D. from the the Web, understanding the connections among people University of Rochester in 1995, followed by a post-doctoral and between organizations, expert finding, social network fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University. analysis, and mining the scientific literature. Toward this end, he and his group develop and employ various methods in statistical machine learning, natural language process- We welcome your support ing, information retrieval and data mining—tending toward ifts like yours help the department in many ways, probabilistic approaches and graphical models. He is one of from funding departmental seminars by outstanding the pioneers in the development of conditional random fields. G scientists and assisting undergraduate research, to helping As a demonstration of his research, his group has created the new faculty establish their research programs. General research paper search engine at www.rexa.info. support in particular helps us continue activities that en- McCallum is the Director of the Information Extraction rich our educational and research programs. Thank you. and Synthesis Laboratory (IESL). Prior to joining UMass

Signiﬁcant Bits Spring / Summer 2009 3 Research

MAHADEVAN – – – – – – – – continued from page 1

In Fourier analysis, data over time or space is decomposed walks capture high- as a combination of frequency-oriented eigenvector bases; frequency variations. wavelet analysis uses multiscale bases that combine time Mahadevan is collabo- and frequency or space and frequency. Traditional har- rating with Professor monic analysis is in the setting of Euclidean spaces. “Many Mauro Maggioni, a real-world digital datasets have a non-Euclidean geometry, mathematician at Duke but are compressible since they lie on a lower-dimensional University, on a gen- mathematical surface or manifold that can be modeled as a eralization of wavelets graph,” says Mahadevan. “The challenge of applying har- to discover multi-scale monic analysis to digital data is that the basis functions are representations from not pre-specified, but need to be themselves discovered from digital data. One the graph representation of the data manifold.” interesting application Representation discovery is a pre-processing step that pre- is extracting multiscale cedes conventional data mining or machine learning. Com- regularities from text monly studied problems in machine learning include classify- documents or web ing data into discrete categories, clustering data into groups Mahadevan’s research into repre- pages by constructing sentation discovery has just been without being given associated labels, taking optimal actions wavelet embeddings published in a new book in solving sequential decision problems using reinforcement of text documents, learning, and learning to predict real-valued functions by says Mahadevan. This approach automatically discovers regression. Representation discovery facilitates all of these topic hierarchies significantly faster than previous methods inference methods by constructing customized data-depen- using parametric probabilistic models. Another exciting dent representations that exploit the geometry of the space, application is constructing new compression methods in and problem-specific objectives such as discrimination or 3D graphics. Wavelet-based methods outperform Fourier- decision-making. based methods for approximating 3D objects on graphs; Search engines illustrate the use of Fourier representa- the latter uses global eigenvectors derived from the object’s tions. GoogleTM uses the PageRank score for indexing web graph topology, while the former constructs multiscale basis pages, derived by diagonalizing a matrix representing a ran- functions that are much more adept at approximating sharp dom walk on the web graph. The eigenvector correspond- discontinuities. ing to the highest frequency or eigenvalue of the random Can machines discover new representations that outper- walk matrix yields the PageRank scores. This 1-dimensional form human-engineered ones? Google relies on machine-dis- representation can be enhanced using additional eigenvec- covered Fourier representations, as it is not feasible to index tors, yielding a new set of coordinates that embeds the web billions of web pages by hand! Similarly, the vast amount graph into Euclidean space reflecting its nonlinear geometry. of data generated by a sensor network, a team of robots, Mahadevan’s research group is exploring a generalization of the next-generation of 3D cameras and movies, genetic Fourier analysis on graphs in artificial intelligence. One ap- research, and a host of other applications will be so large plication involves designing a new generation of autonomous that computer-discovered representations will be essential. agents that solve sequential decision problems by learn- “The challenge,” says Mahadevan, “is to devise principled ing new representations of the state space during problem and scalable computational frameworks by which comput- solving. Examples of such agents include game playing ers can discover new ways to represent data. The ultimate programs, robots that navigate around crowded home or aim of algorithmic representation discovery is not just to office environments, and a variety of industrial applications facilitate efficient processing of digital data, but to also un- in manufacturing and scheduling. Previously, such problems derstand the internal representations and algorithms in our were solved by carefully constraining the search space using brains that guide our everyday decision-making. human-designed representations. Now, agents engage in a Professor Mahadevan received his Ph.D. from Rutgers representation discovery phase by doing a random walk in University in 1990. He worked at the IBM T.J Watson the state space, building a graph of the visited states; har- Research Center until1993. Prior to joining UMass Amherst monic analysis discovers a new representation of the state in 2001, he was a faculty member in the computer science space. Such computer-discovered representations enable departments at the University of South Florida in Tampa, some optimization problems to be solved 50 times faster and at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Mahade- than previously hand-tuned representations. van has written two books, one on Robot Learning (pub- Can Fourier representations such as PageRank be im- lished by Kluwer Academic Press in 1993), and the other on proved? A new mathematical framework called wavelets Representation Discovery using Harmonic Analysis, pub- has emerged that addresses the limitations of eigenvector lished by Morgan Claypool in 2008. He has authored over representations. Unlike Fourier analysis, wavelets are based 90 papers in a variety of topics in artificial intelligence and on the principle of dilation. New multiscale representations machine learning. He is an Associate Editor for the Journal emerge by analyzing the powers of the random walk matrix of Machine Learning Research. His recent research on rep- on graphs. Longer random walks reveal coarser properties, resentation discovery was presented in a number of invited and correspond to slowly varying processes. Shorter random tutorials at leading conferences in AI and machine learning.

4 Signiﬁcant Bits Spring / Summer 2009 News

McGregor joins CS faculty

ndrew McGregor joined the department as an Assis- (COLT 2007), a Special Issue of tant Professor in January. His research interests are in Transactions on Database Systems Aalgorithms for processing massive data sets and data for Best Papers from the 27th streams; computing with noisy or incomplete data; cluster- ACM SIGMOD International Con- ing; communication complexity; coding and information ference on Management of Data / theory. Principles of Database Systems “Processing massive data sets and computing with data (PODS 2007), a Special Issue of that may be noisy or inconsistent are two of the major chal- Theoretical Computer Science for Best Papers from the 31st lenges that computer science faces today,” says McGregor. International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Pro- “Traditional notions of ‘efficient computation’ need to be gramming (ICALP 2004), and the ACM Special Interest Group reconsidered when monitoring Gbps network traffic or on Algorithms and Computation Theory’s (SIGACT’s) “Signifi- mining petabytes of search engine data. New theoretical cant papers on new areas” (1 of 13 from 2007). and practical challenges arise from constraints on how data Prior to joining the department’s faculty, McGregor held is accessed and the need to process ‘uncertain’ data (e.g., postdoctoral researcher positions at Microsoft Research data from conflicting sources, incomplete logs, noisy chan- (Silicon Valley) and at the University of California, San Diego, nels, and imperfect sensors).” Information Theory and Applications Center. He received his McGregor’s research focuses on the design of efficient al- Ph.D. and M.Eng. in Computer Science from the University of gorithms and the study of complexity in this new paradigm. Pennsylvania in 2007 and 2002, respectively. He also received This includes processing data streams and massive graphs, a Certificate of Advanced Study in Mathematics and a B.A. in clustering data, and understanding underlying theoretical Mathematics from the University of Cambridge, in 2001 and issues such as communication complexity and space com- 2000, respectively. During graduate school, McGregor spent plexity in stream computation. Other areas of his research a summer at the Rutgers’ Center for Discrete Mathematics & include coding and information theory; network design and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) and three summers optimization; and priced information. His work appears in at Bell Labs. a range of applied and theoretical venues including those “This is a great department and I am very happy to be focused on databases, data mining, information theory, here,” says McGregor. “I think it is the perfect place to pursue machine learning, and theoretical computer science. my research goals and I am also very excited to be discovering Notably, McGregor’s research has appeared in a Special new research opportunities as I get to know the faculty and Issue of Journal of Machine Learning for Best Papers from students of the department. In fact, I doubt that you could find The Twentieth Annual Conference on Learning Theory a happier and more collaborative environment!”

Ganesan named Lilly Fellow

he UMass Amherst Center for Teaching (CFT) named on-body sensor, fuel-cell based PDA, TAssistant Professor Deepak Ganesan as a Lilly Teaching or a more efﬁcient data center,” says Fellow for the 2009-2010 academic year. Lilly Fellows are se- Ganesan. While the core focus of lected on the basis of their promise in teaching and research, the course will be from a Computer their interest in undergraduate teaching and in developing Science viewpoint, it will draw on innovative teaching skills, and their potential for making a recent developments in renewable positive impact on the teaching culture in their department, energy technologies from Mechani- college, and broader campus community. cal and Electrical Engineering, and For his Lilly project, Ganesan plans to create an inter-dis- micro fuel-cell technologies from ciplinary course on Green Computing that prepares students Chemical Engineering and Polymer for designing next generation of energy-efﬁcient computing Sciences. systems. His course will cover 1) techniques in green comput- Ganesan’s course will position ing across a myriad of computing devices that we interact undergraduate students to be more with in our daily lives, including sensors, handhelds, laptops, competitive in this growing market. In addition, the course can personal computers, servers, and data centers, and 2) the role be a facilitator for increased collaboration across several depart- of green energy in computing, including use of micro-genera- ments at UMass Amherst that are actively involved in research tors that harvest solar, vibration, thermal, WiFi, and wind on renewable energy and new energy sources, including Com- energy, as well as new battery technologies such as micro fuel puter Science, Engineering, Chemistry, and Polymer Sciences. cells. Previous Lilly Teaching Fellows include ten members of the “As a semester-long project, students will be asked to department’s faculty. design a green computing system such as a thermal-powered

Signiﬁcant Bits Spring / Summer 2009 5 News

Department hosts distinguished lecturers

Disk Drives” in October. Dr. Wolf, a former faculty member s part of the 2008-2009 at UMass Amherst, spoke on how times have changed from ADistinguished Lecture 25 years ago when a 1 gigabyte hard drive was the size of a Series, the department selected washing machine and cost about $100,000 to the advances prominent researchers from aca- of the magnetic recording ﬁeld today. demia and industry. In November, Lydia E. Kavraki, Noah Harding Professor Richard Clarke, Chairman of of Computer Science at Rice University, presented “Robots, Good Harbor Consulting and Molecules, and Physical Computing.” During the talk, she key advisor on national security discussed how the experience gained through sampling-based for the last four U.S. Presidents, methods in robotics has led to algorithms for characterizing spoke in April on “The Missing the ﬂexibility of biomolecules for drug discovery. Pieces of the Three 21st Century In April, Eric Horvitz, Principal Researcher and Research Wars: Iraq, Afghanistan, and Area Manager, Microsoft Research Adaptive Systems & Interaction Group, spoke on “Intelligence, Interaction, and DLS speaker Richard Cyberspace.” Clarke was this Clarke told students: year’s Sidney Topol Distinguished the Open World.” His research interests span theoretical and “For those of you study- Lecture Series speaker. The Topol practical challenges in machine reasoning and learning, deci- ing computer science, you Series was established through sion making under uncertainty, human-computer collabora- have continued employ- the generosity of Sidney Topol, tion, and information retrieval. ment for the rest of the UMass Amherst alumnus, class Joan Feigenbaum, Grace Murray Hopper Professor of 21st century.” of 1947. Topol is regarded as a Computer Science at Yale University, gave a presentation telecommunications pioneer who in May on “Approximation in Privacy Preserving Mecha- helped forge the cable-satellite connection that triggered the nisms.” Her research interests include Internet algorithms, growth of cable television in the United States. computational complexity, security and privacy, and digital Jack Wolf, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineer- copyright. More recently, she has worked on basic algo- ing at the University of California, San Diego spoke on “The rithms for massive data sets, particularly those generated in Amazing Growth of the Storage Capacity of Magnetic Hard network operations and business-to-consumer e-commerce. Yahoo! partners with CS faculty to advance cloud computing research

ahoo! Inc. has expanded its partnerships with four top and applications research. To help overcome this obstacle, Yuniversities to advance cloud computing research. The Yahoo! is granting these universities access to the Yahoo! University Massachusetts Amherst, with Carnegie Mellon cloud computing cluster, also known as M45. The cluster University, University of California at Berkeley and Cornell has approximately 4,000 processor-cores and 1.5 petabytes University, will use Yahoo!’s cloud computing cluster to of disks. conduct large-scale systems software research and explore Jim Kurose, dean of the College of Natural Sciences and new applications that analyze Internet-scale data sets rang- Mathematics, says, “Our vision is to improve upon current ing from voting records to online news sources. Professors technology through the processing of large data sets. Using David Smith, James Allan, and R. Manmatha will use the Yahoo’s supercomputing cluster, we will enable data-inten- Yahoo! Cluster for their project “Mining a Million Scanned sive research using a collection of over a million scanned Books: Data-Intensive Processing for Better Search, Analysis, books gathered by the Internet Archive. This collection and OCR.” includes 8.5 terabytes of text and half a petabyte of scanned Until now, academic researchers have had limited access images, a data set which we would not be able to undertake to Internet-scale supercomputers for conducting systems without the use of M45.”

FU NAMED SLOAN FELLOW – – – continued from page 2 curity and the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, and appeared in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal on slack time of combinational logic blocks when the clock among other national and international media exposure. frequency is lower than necessary for a given supply voltage. “I am looking forward to using the Sloan Fellowship to “The mismatch between today’s hardware abstractions and more aggressively carry out my research to improve security continuously fluctuating supply voltage leads to inefficient and privacy in energy-sensitive problem domains ranging execution—making advanced cryptography and complex from Internet-enabled pacemakers to contactless credit cards computations more difficult to achieve,” says Fu. to battery-free computers embedded in critical infrastruc- Fu’s research received best paper awards from USENIX Se- ture,” says Fu.

6 Signiﬁcant Bits Spring / Summer 2009 Awards

First Annual Awards Ceremony a success

n Friday evening, May 1, 2009, alums, students, “It was a privilege and a pleasure for the department to faculty, friends and family filled the Mullins Cen- have this opportunity to recognize the outstanding achieve- Oter Massachusetts Room for the department’s First ments of these truly distinguished alums and advocates,” Annual Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy (OAA) says Osterweil. “We wanted to let our entire community Awards Banquet. The event was established to recognize the know how proud we are of these people and the work that outstanding accomplishments of students and graduates of they have done. We look forward to doing this annually.” the department’s degree programs and to acknowledge the The award citations and more details on the careers of the support of important friends of the department. OAA awards recipients, along with photos of the event, are Department Chair Andrew Barto and James Kurose, posted at www.cs.umass.edu/oaa2009. Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, During the evening celebration, current students and welcomed the attendees and gave an overview of the depart- recent alums were also recognized. The undergraduate and ment. graduate awards were generously sponsored by Yahoo!, a Professor Leon J. Osterweil, chair of the OAA awards member of the department’s Industrial Affiliates Program. committee, presented awards to the following 2009 OAA Professor Robbie Moll, Department Associate Chair, pre- awards recipients: sented the following Outstanding Undergraduate Awards to • Outstanding Achievement in Management: students in this year’s graduating class: P. Anandan (Ph.D. 1987), Managing Director of • Overall Achievement in Computer Science: Michael Krainin Microsoft Research India • Achievement in Artificial Intelligence: David Smith • Achievement in Networking: Justin Aquadro • Outstanding Achievement in Technology • Achievement in Software: Patrick Correia Development: Carol A. Broverman (Ph.D. 1991), • Achievement in Systems: Matthew Laquidara Senior Corporate Manager, Enterprise Medica- • Achievement in Theory: David Maletz tion Informatics and Decision Support, Clinical Professor James Allan, Graduate Program Director, pre- Informatics Research and Development, Partners sented the following Outstanding Graduate Student Awards Healthcare Systems, Inc, Boston, MA for 2008: • Outstanding Achievement in Research: • Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award: Peter Desnoyers Michael J. Franklin (B.S. 1983), Professor, • Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award: Charles Sutton Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, • Outstanding Synthesis Project Award: Dov Katz Computer Science Division, University of Califor- • Outstanding Synthesis Project Award: Marek Petrik nia Berkeley, and co-Founder of Truviso, Inc. • Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award: Zongfang Lin • Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award: Philipp Weis • Outstanding Support for the Department: Alums and friends also spent the afternoon of May 1 at a Joyce L. Plotkin, President Emerita, poster session showcasing the research activities of the vari- Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council ous laboratories within the department, and at a round-table • Outstanding Achievement in Education: discussion at which the OAA awards recipients discussed Debra J. Richardson (Ph.D. 1981), Professor of their careers and reflected on their time at UMass Amherst. Informatics and the Ted and Janice Smith Family Nominations are now being accepted for the 2010 Foundation Dean of the Donald Bren School of Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy Awards. Nomina- Information and Computer Sciences at the Uni- tions should be sent by email to Leeanne Leclerc (leclerc@cs. versity of California, Irvine umass.edu) and should consist of: • The name, title, email, phone number and organizational • Outstanding Achievement in Research: affiliation of the nominee, Tuomas Sandholm (Ph.D. 1996), Professor of • The name(s), email(s), phone number(s) of the Computer Science and Director, Agent-Mediated nominator(s), Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory, Carnegie • A brief biography summarizing the nominee’s career (no Mellon University, and Founder of CombineNet, more than one page), Inc. • A statement of the nominee’s outstanding achievements in • Outstanding Achievement in Entrepreneurship: the award category, Steven Willis (B.S./BDIC 1978), Founder of Well- • A very brief (no more than 25 word) suggested citation to fleet Communications and Argon Networks be written on the OAA winner’s award plaque. The department would like to thank all those who partici- • Outstanding Contributions to Society: pated in these successful events. We look forward to seeing Bryant W. York (Ph.D. 1981), Professor, more alums at next year’s event. Computer Science Department and Co-Director, Laboratory for Learning and Adaptive Systems, Portland State University

Signiﬁcant Bits Spring / Summer 2009 7 News

Faculty News In March, Assistant Professor Andrew McGregor was an organizer of the DIMACS/DyDAn Work- Professor Jack Wileden was appointed Associ- ing Group on Streaming, Coding, and Compres- ate Dean for Advising of our College of Natural sive Sensing: Unifying Theory and Common Sciences and Mathematics. Applications to Sparse Signal/Data Analysis and In June, Professor Andrew Barto gave a keynote Processing held at Rutgers University. address at the Multidisciplinary Symposium on Associate Professor Brian Levine and Assistant Reinforcement Learning in Montreal. He will Professor Gerome Miklau organized the First also give a keynote address at the Conference on Annual Northeast Digital Forensics Exchange Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence Workshop held in New York City in July. The (PReMI-2009) to be held in Delhi, India in second annual workshop will be held at UMass December. Amherst in 2010. They are working on the Distinguished University Professor Bruce Croft workshops with CS alum Ping Ji (Ph.D. ’03) and gave a keynote address at the 2009 31st Europe- partners from John Jay College and U. of New an Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) Hampshire. Levine and Miklau have received in April. In addition, Croft received a Yahoo! a campus Research Leadership in Action Grant Research Faculty Research Grant for his work for their workshop. on transforming long queries. The Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Security invited Levine to serve as a member of the office’s Arnold Rosenberg gave an ACM Distinguished Privacy Working Group (PWG), chaired by State Secretary Speaker presentation at Oklahoma State Uni- Kevin Burke. versity in April. In addition, he recently com- In other news, Levine and his wife Amy welcomed their first pleted his textbook, The Pillars of Computation child, Elena, to the world on November 16, 2008. Theory: State, Encoding, Nondeterminism, to be published in the Springer Universitext series. Assistant Professor Kevin Fu, working with graduate student Shane Clarke, received Institute Professor James Allan received an IBM Open for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) Collaborative Faculty Award and an IBM UIMA Scholar Program funding for the project “Re- Innovation Faculty Award in recognition of his search on securing medical cyberinfrastructure.” research achievements. In May, Fu and his wife Teresa announced the Assistant Professor Deepak Ganesan was named birth of their first child, Henry. to the Chancellor’s new Junior Faculty Fellows Assistant Professor Erik Learned-Miller, his wife Program. Faculty members across schools and Carol, and big sister Sierra announced the ar- colleges will meet with the Chancellor to discuss rival of Emma on January 17. new campus initiatives, problem solve areas of concern, and serve as a voice for their colleagues Adjunct Professor Kathryn Mckinley was named on issues of importance to UMass Amherst’s an ACM Fellow for contributions to compilers junior faculty. and memory management. McKinley is a Pro- fessor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agen- Dispute resolution cy (DARPA) awarded a mathematical challenges grant to Adjunct Professor Ileana Streinu for workshop her project “Algorithmic Origami and Biology.” eon Osterweil, Lori Clarke, and Norman Sondheimer In other news, Streinu’s recent solution to the Lof the Computer Science Department, along with “reach problem,” a long-standing open problem Legal Studies Professor Ethan Katsh, organized and in robotics, with numerous practical ramifica- hosted a workshop on “Dispute Resolution in a tions, was publicly announced at the Discrete Connected Health Care World” in May in Washington, Differential Geometry meeting held at the D.C., upon request by the National Science Founda- prestigious Oberwolfach Mathematical Research Institute in tion and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Germany. Streinu and her Linkage Lab have also organized Services. The workshop was aimed at anticipating the the Workshop on Geometric constraints with applications in need and opportunities for online dispute resolution as CAD and biology. electronic medical records, a high priority of the Obama Adjunct Professor Lee Spector was named administration, are implemented more widely. The Editor-in-Chief of the Genetic Programming workshop is part of a multi-year research collaboration and Evolvable Machines journal. In addition, between the National Center for Technology and Dis- Spector is co-PI on a grant to Hampshire College pute Resolution and the Electronic Enterprise Institute, from the Sherman Fairchild foundation for a both based on campus. program integrating innovation in technology, art and design.

8 Signiﬁcant Bits Spring / Summer 2009 News

Researcher News In May, Sebastian Riedel joined the Information Extraction & Croft publishes Synthesis Laboratory (IESL) as a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Guilherme Dutra Gonzaga Jaime is a Visiting Scholar with the information Networks Lab. He is a Ph.D. student at the Federal University retrieval textbook of Rio de Janeiro. Dongmei Chen, Associate Professor and Director of the Engi- istinguished University Pro- neering Department at Ningxia University in China, is a Visit- Dfessor Bruce Croft recently ing Professor with the Center for Knowledge Communications. published a textbook with Addison-Wesley entitled Search Matteo Leonetti, a Ph.D. student from the Sapienza University Engines: Information Retrieval of Rome, is a Visiting Scholar with the Autonomous Learning in Practice. The book is a collaboration of Croft and Laboratory. two UMass Amherst Computer Science Ph.D. alums, Andre Schulz joined the Linkage Lab as a Postdoctoral fellow, Donald Metzler (’07) and Trevor Strohman (’08). funded by the German Science Foundation. This is the first book on search engines and information retrieval (IR) that is aimed primarily at undergraduates. It is designed to give students the understanding Graduate fellowships and awards and tools they need to evaluate, compare, and modify search engines. The programming exercises in the book raduate students Jacqueline Kenney and Benjamin make extensive use of Galago, a Java-based open source Ransford have received 2009 National Science Foun- G search engine developed by Strohman. dation Graduate Research Fellowships, and Henry Feild Croft received a UMass Amherst Samuel F. Conti received Honorable Mention in the competition. The Faculty Fellowship Award in 2007-08 and spent a Graduate Research Fellowship provides three years of sup- significant amount of that time working on the book. port for graduate study leading to research-based master’s Metzler is a research scientist in the Search and Com- or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are putational Advertising group at Yahoo! Research, and in the early stages of their graduate study. The competitive Strohman is a software engineer in the Google search Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) invests in quality division. graduate education for a cadre of diverse individuals who demonstrate their potential to successfully complete graduate degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of Student News the National Science Foundation. In another recent award, Robotics Lab graduate student Graduate student TJ Brunette received the Best Poster Award Scott Kuindersma has been awarded a prestigious NASA at the 8th Community Wide Experiment on the Critical Graduate Student Research Program Fellowship for his Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction proposal entitled, “Dexterous Mobility and Manipulation.” (CASP8). With this Fellowship, he will receive funding for up to three Daniel Amirault was selected for Honorable Mention in the years while pursuing his Ph.D. Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Un- Graduate students Greg Druck and Henry Feild are dergraduate Award competition for 2009. Amirault was also recipients of 2009-2010 Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges named a William F. Field Alumni Scholar for 2009. (KSC) Program Awards. Druck and Feild are two of twenty Gregory Walter, an undergraduate majoring in Computer students honored nationwide with this competitive award Science and Mathematics, received the Luise Bronner Schol- created to support a limited number of outstanding Ph.D. arship for spring 2009 in recognition of his outstanding students who Yahoo! believes are doing research in very performance in academics and research. important and challenging areas. Graduate students Michael Bendersky and Michael Wick Bo An was chosen for a University Fellowship for 2009- each received a Yahoo!-sponsored Award for Accomplish- 10, one of ten graduate students chosen from the campus. ments in Search and Mining. Computer Science graduate student Marwan (Moe) Mattar was named as one of the seven 2009-10 Isenberg The first New England Undergraduate Computing Sympo- Scholars. In 1994, Mr. Eugene M. Isenberg, alumnus of sium (NEUCS), held at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Mas- the UMass Amherst School of Management, and CEO of sachusetts, brought together nearly 100 students and faculty Nabors Industries, Inc., established these prestigious awards from the region. Two UMass Amherst CS undergraduates to aid graduate students who demonstrate academic merit participated in the event. Matthew Laquidara presented and a commitment to the integration of science, engineer- “OPENPKMN: Lessons learned from an eight-year soft- ing, and management. ware project,” and John McDowell presented “Codename: Incoming graduate student Hee-Tae Jung received this Vargach – A game.” year’s Robin Popplestone Fellowship in Robotics & Artifi- Graduate students Jeff Dalton and Dubi Katz were this cial Intelligence. Jung received his M.S. at Stanford Univer- year’s winning team at the Annual CS Foosball Tournament sity and his B.S. at Yonsei University in Korea. sponsored by Yahoo!.

Signiﬁcant Bits Spring / Summer 2009 9 University of Massachusetts Amherst lum Spring / Summer 2009 AMatters A newsletter for alums of the Department of Computer Science

Franklin’s database career spans academia and industry ichael Franklin (B.S. ’83) anteed correctness and durability of build it from scratch. Secondly, the recalls a time when he would data manipulation operations. Sec- Data Independence assumptions Mfeel obliged to start his Intro- ond, through an abstraction principle underlying SQL made it easy to write duction to Database Systems course called “Data Independence”, they applications that were independent by explaining that computers had im- enable long-lived applications to run of the underlying network topology. portant uses beyond number crunch- effi ciently as the underlying data, soft- Finally, since sensor-rich applications ing. “Now, students come to class ware, and hardware evolve and as the would ultimately have to integrate experienced in using computers for applications themselves change over with other components of enterprise data management, having grown up time. Unfortunately, for years these IT infrastructure, speaking SQL was using them to handle everything from benefi ts were locked inside of com- a natural fi t since most of the back their music and video collections to plex and cumbersome systems that end systems also speak SQL. their interactions with friends. This were expensive to buy and maintain. “The main impact of HiFi and its shift is a result of the pervasive spread Franklin’s research has been focused related projects was to get people of data-intensive applications on the on liberating this technology. to think differently about how the web and mobile devices,” says Frank- An example is the HiFi project. key insights of database technology lin, Professor of Computer Science at The idea for HiFi came to Franklin could be exploited in non-traditional the University of California, Berkeley, while he was attending a meeting of environments,” says Franklin. and a Founder and CTO of Truviso, a group tasked with standardizing In 2006, Franklin took a leave Inc., a Silicon Valley developer of interfaces for RFID-enabled systems. of absence from his faculty position data analytics solutions. Group after group described the data to start Truviso, Inc., a company he In a career spanning academia and structures and API of their layer of founded with his former Ph.D. stu- industry, Dr. Franklin explores how the system. “To me, it was clear that dent Sailesh Krishnamurthy. “Since the core lessons learned from large- each group was presenting their own database research is aimed at ad- scale database systems can be applied data model and query language, but dressing real-world problems, impact across a spectrum of data-intensive each one was different,” says Frank- is ultimately measured by real utility applications including: large-scale lin. “This lack of consistency was rather than by paper count,” Says analytics, pervasive computing, leading to a complex architecture and Franklin. “The amount of data that distributed systems and information a baroque set of standards.” companies have to deal with is grow- integration. Earlier project developments in the ing faster than Moore’s Law. That Database systems provide two Berkeley Database group included a means, if you are dealing with data, somewhat miraculous features, says “streaming” SQL processor (SQL is your computers are effectively getting Franklin. First, they provide guar- the standard language for accessing slower every year,” adds Franklin. Relational Database Systems) and an “It turns out that Database sys- SQL interface to dynamic, wireless tems have a fundamental bottleneck. sensor networks. “It occurred to me Namely, that you need to fi rst store that we had already developed most the data before you can do anything of the technology needed to create with it,” says Franklin. “In a world an end-to-end distributed SQL-based where all data is on the move, tradi- system that would manage RFID and tional database systems are basically other sensor data. So the HiFi project an end-point rather than a part of was created to build the infrastruc- the datafl ow.” Truviso addresses this ture required to put such a system problem through a technique called together,” adds Franklin. Using SQL “Continuous Analytics”, and has to cross all the layers had multiple convinced a number of high-profi le benefi ts. First, the system was able traditional database users to switch to leverage years of database systems to this new way of handling their technology, rather than having to data. “Companies in high-growth

10 Alum Matters Spring / Summer 2009 Alum Connections industries are seeing data volume growth of up to10x a Tuomas Sandholm (Ph.D. ’96) was named an ACM year,” he adds. Fellow for his contributions to combinatorial auctions Franklin, who resumed his duties at Berkeley in 2008, and mechanism design. credits his entry into the database field to his undergraduate education at UMass Amherst and to a promise he made Brent Heeringa (Ph.D. ’06), Assistant Professor of to his parents to finish his studies on time, even after taking Computer Science at Williams College, was awarded time off. “I spent my Junior year studying abroad at He- a National Science Foundation grant for his work on brew University in Jerusalem,” says Franklin. “I decided to “Models and Methods for Information Organization.” leave that program early to live on a Kibbutz (a collective Andy Podgurski (Ph.D. ’89) received media attention farm – I harvested bananas mostly) and backpack around in Science Daily for his research on electronic health the region and Europe.” records. Professors Arnold Rosenberg and Lori Clarke In order to graduate on time, Franklin needed to earn co-chaired his Ph.D. thesis committee. credits during winter intersession. He started knocking on faculty doors looking for a project, and Dave Stemple Virtual Iron Software, Inc. announced that Steve Beck- offered him an independent study with the Database lab, hardt (M.S. ’74) was named as a founding member of given his prior experience in Bruce Croft’s database course. the company’s advisory board. Beckhardt is president “That experience led directly to my first job upon gradu- of Red Brook Harbor Consulting, a software consult- ation, a database development position at Wang Labora- ing and design firm. Previously, he was vice president tories, and I have been working in the database field ever of software engineering at ThingMagic, a company since,” adds Franklin. working in the area of RFID and intelligent embedded After obtaining a Masters degree, Franklin took a control systems. programmer position at MCC, working on large-scale Daniel Barrett (Ph.D. ’98) has published MediaWiki, parallel database systems. “The group I joined pioneered his seventh book, with O’Reilly Media, on program- many of the techniques that underlie modern data-parallel ming and administering the software engine that processing approaches such as Map-Reduce and Massively powers Wikipedia. Barrett is currently Director of Parallel Data Warehousing,” says Franklin, who then went the Learning & Knowledge Management group at on to complete his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin- VistaPrint (www.vistaprint.com). Madison, and from there joined academia. He is an ACM Fellow and a recipient of the NSF Career Award and the EnterpriseDB, a leading enterprise open source data- ACM SIGMOD “Test of Time” Award. At Berkeley, one base company, announced that Larry Alston (B.S. ’85) of Franklin former students was Yanlei Diao, an Assistant was named vice president of marketing and product Professor in our department. management. Previously, he was the vice president and general manager at IONA. Earlier in his career, Alston was the vice president of products at Pantero. Prior All in the Franklin family to that, he was corporate officer and executive vice president of product management and marketing at eXcelon. Mark Smucker (Ph.D. ’08) and his wife Amy are pleased to announce the birth of their daughter Vivienne, born on November 8, 2008.

ing provider of software for management and remote control and access. Prior to this position, he was with start-up company Epoch Systems before it was acquired by EMC Corporation, where he remained as Principal Software Engineer for over 15 years. Franklin family of CS alums (l. to r.): David, Sherryl, and Michael Sherryl is a software developer in the Test & Measure- t was deﬁnitely a family affair in the 1980s with three ment group of The MathWorks, makers of MATLAB IFranklin siblings in the CS Department (then COINS) at and Simulink. “My very practical training at UMass UMass Amherst. Michael Franklin (B.S. ’83), his brother Amherst allowed me to really hit the ground running David Franklin (B.S. ’87), and his sister Sherryl Franklin fresh out of college at my ﬁrst job at a large aerospace Radbil (B.S. ’82) are enjoying successful careers in com- company,” says Radbil. Her career led her through jobs puter science after graduating from the department. Two at a computer manufacturer to ATE (Automated Test more people from the next generation of Franklins also Equipment) to her current position. came to UMass Amherst. Two of Sherryl’s four children joined their mother’s Michael is a Professor of Computer Science at the Uni- alma mater. They both were accepted in the UMass Am- versity of California, Berkeley (see previous page). herst Isenberg School of Management as part of Com- David is the Product Manager and Technical Support monwealth College. Leor graduated in 2008, and Tomer Manager for Boston-based Proxy Networks, Inc., a lead- will graduate in 2009.

Alum Matters Spring / Summer 2009 11 Significant Bits NONPROFIT ORG. U.S. Postage Newsletter of the PAID Department of Permit No. 2 Computer Science AMHERST, MA College of Natural Sciences & Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst 140 Governors Drive University of Massachusetts Amherst Amherst, MA 01003-9264 “Significant Bits” is published twice a year by the Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst (www.cs.umass.edu). Your news, suggestions, comments, and contributions are welcome. Please mail them to the address above or send them electronically to [email protected]. Department Chair Andrew Barto Editor Jean Joyce Art Direction North Haven Design Faculty Liaisons Mark Corner, Bruce Croft, Gerome Miklau Graduate Student Filip Jagodzinski, Liaisons Borislava Simidchieva Contributors Michael Franklin, Sridhar Mahadevan, UMass Amherst News Office staff Thanks for your support

he following alumni and friends have active- Mr. Wayne W. Duso (‘85) Mr. Brian J. Morris (‘91) Dr. Zhongfei Zhang (‘96) ly supported the Department of Computer Gerardo & Adriana Esposito Roger & Dorothy Myers Mr. Jerome E. Zolit (‘79) T Mrs. Julie M. Fowler (‘88) Dr. Daniel E. Neiman (‘06) Science from September 2008 through May Mr. David A. Franklin (‘87) Corporate and Mr. Joseph R. Neslusan (‘92) Matching Gifts 2009. Such ﬁnancial support is greatly appreci- Dr. Michael J. Franklin (‘83) Dr. James T. Oates (‘97) IBM Corp. ated and helps maintain a world-class instruc- In Memory of Michael J. Frongillo Mrs. Audrey L. Orenstein (‘86) Lockheed Martin tional and research program. Contributions Ms. Linda A. Gineau Dr. Achilleas Papakostas (‘93) Microsoft Corp Lisa & Jon Glass (‘85) Dr. Ron Papka (‘99) Morgan Stanley Dean Witter from alums and friends help to fund impor- Ronald & Brenda Hamel Gerald & Doris Peterson (‘73) & Co. tant special activities that are not supported Mr. Edwin K. Hammond (‘07) Mr. Robert M. Pilachowski (‘88) Monster Worldwide through the state budget. Ms. Elicia M. Harrell (‘82) Mr. Miles A. Price III (‘00) Pixel Forensics Jean & William Hart Debra & Steven Pullen Those interested in helping the department UpToDate Mr. Michael J. Hartman (‘82) Mary & Louis Raboin (’78) Yahoo! Research should visit www.cs.umass.edu/about/donate Christopher & Heddi Holmes Melanie &. John Raitto (‘82) (‘91) Mr. Thomas M. Reilly (‘86) Popplestone Fellowship for online donations or send a check made out Mr. Steve J. Hoogheem (‘79) Prof. Kristin Morrison to UMass Amherst to: Department of Comput- Mrs. Constance B. Richmond Mr. Richard L. Housel (‘80) (‘76) Paul Utgoff Memorial Fund er Science, Attn: Jean Joyce, University of Ms. Jin Huang (‘96) Carol & Ronald Robichaud Dr. James P. Ahrens (‘89) Massachusetts Amherst, 140 Governors Drive, Mr. Charles E. Hulburt II (‘84) Dr. Daniel S. Rubenstein (‘96) Malini & Nehru Bhandaru (‘98) Mr. Rajesh K. Jha (‘90) Amherst, MA 01003-9264 Mr. Stephen J. Shmulsky Ms. Margaret Bouvier Mr. David Jones Ms. Louise M. Sironi (‘65) Dr. Carla E. Brodley (‘94) Please state that your gift is restricted to Mr. Samir K. Kar (‘77) Mr. Konstantin S. Skovorodin Adele Weitz & Jamie Callan Computer Science. Mr. Tareef Kawaf (‘94) (‘05) (‘93) Ms. Mary E. Kearney Mr. Daniel W. Slowik (‘00) Mr. Paul A. Chukiu (‘07) Mr. John F. Adler (’85) Patricia & Andrew Candres, Jr. Mr. Jeffrey L. Krichmar (‘84) Mr. Peter J. Stewart Margaret & John Connell (‘87) Patricia & John T. Amirault (‘82) Dr. Aaron G. Cass (‘05) Mr. Hanumantha R. Kodavalla Mr. Prabakar Sundarrajan (‘83) Mr. Jack G. Conrad (‘94) Marlene & Thomas Aquadro Mr. Dansong Chen (‘02) (‘88) Amy & Keith Swan (‘90) Mr. Matthew Cornell (‘91) Dr. Krishnamoorthy Arvind (‘91) Mr. Yidong Chen (‘92) Mr. E. Micah Kornﬁeld (‘02) Mr. Jianbin Tan (‘05) Mr. Christopher M. D’Amour Dr. Kevin D. Ashley (‘88) Dr. Panayiotis K. Chrysanthis Mr. Ha W. Kung (‘94) Mr. Robert P. Thomas (‘84) (‘03) (‘91) Mr. Mariappan Asokan (‘86) Mr. Bruce B. Lacey (‘85) Mr. Brian W. Vatcher (‘79 Heather & Allen Demers Mr. Stephen D. Clare (‘01) Dr. Daniel J. Barrett (‘98) Mr. Lawrence M. Lanzilli, Jr. (‘01) Mrs. Renee B. Venne Mr. Craig L. Fournier (‘91) Mr. Richard S. Colon (‘79) Mr. John V. Bellissimo Mr. David J. Lee (‘81) Tsong-Shyan & Mr. Dennis P. Gove (‘06) Mr. Rafael J. Colorado (‘81) Debra Bernstein & Mr. Jones S. Leung (‘04) Min-Jen Wang (‘84) Mr. Mark L. Gruman (‘05) Christopher Morely (‘82) Ms. Jennifer M. Cotter (‘03) Dr. Steven P. Levitan (‘84) Ms. Anne Marie Ward Dr. Donald H. House (‘84) Mr. William A. Birchenough (‘94) Mrs. Maureen A. Counihan Anne & Bernard Lorge Mrs. Nancy W. Wasiuk (‘79) Prof. James F. Kurose Stephen Bosworth & Dr. Robert H. Crites (‘96) Mr. Gregory J. Lorge (‘06) Prof. Charles C. Weems, Jr. (‘84) Prof. Nelson Lacey Roberta Hamer Mr. Christopher M. Curtin (‘90) Dr. Zhihong Lu (‘94) Dr. Charles J. Welty (‘79) Mr. Kristoffer W. Lange (‘99) Mr. George E. Bowker (‘83) Dr. Mohammad Dadashzadeh Mrs. Woen-Ru L. Ma (‘81) Kimberly Edgar & Dr. Steven J. Bradtke (‘85) Hilary and Richard Levin (‘87) Mr. Nicholas M. Maniskas (‘06) Stephen Werntz (‘86) Dr. James T. Oates (‘97) Mr. Stuart J. Brisson (‘97) Mr. Christopher M. D’Amour Mr. Saul R. Marcus (‘77) Mr. Michael R. White (‘95) (‘03) Dr. Toni M. Rath (‘01) Dr. Carla E. Brodley (‘94) Douglas McCallum & Mr. Peter F. Willey (‘80) Ms. Cynthia L. Brown (‘95) Dr. Jody J. Daniels (‘97) Mr. Andrew D. Tirella (‘01) Diana Neff (‘75) Mr. Christopher J. Widak (‘08) Mr. Harteg S. Wariyar (‘07) George & Kim Bryant Ms. Donna E. Deeley (‘70) Karen & Andrew Merlino Jr. (‘86) Mr. James R. Williams (‘83) Mrs. Carol Buote (‘84) Mr. Kristoper L. Denio (‘00) Conrad & Barbara Wogrin Mr. Mark A. Merlino (‘89) Ms. Elizabeth Wood (‘85) Ms. Jeanne Yocum Dr. Brendon D. Cahoon (‘02) Sherrie & Charles Denison (‘03) Brian & Susan Moriarty (‘75) Mr. Yan Xiao (‘00) Adele Weitz & Jamie Callan (‘93) Mr. John K. Devadoss (‘94)

12 Signiﬁcant Bits Spring / Summer 2009