Newsletter of the Department of Computer Science CHAIR’S MESSAGE Duke University The summer was a welcome break for all of Volume 13 / Number 2 / Fall 2009 us after a busy spring semester. As we begin the new academic year, we welcome our www.CS.DUkE.EDU new members. It gives me great pleasure to announce the arrival of our newest faculty member, Bruce Maggs. A world renowned leader in parallel and distributed systems, Bruce moved here from Carnegie Mellon University. He also works as VP of Research and Development of Akamai Technologies. We are also delighted to have new students—both graduate and undergraduate. Congratulations to our recent graduates. We THREADS wish them all the best as they start a new phase in their lives. I am always proud to share the Pankaj K. Agarwal, Chair accomplishments of the members of the Department. Xiaobai Sun was promoted to the rank of Full Professor. A highly regarded computational scientist, she is well known for blending mathematical, algorithmic, and engineering issues. Kamesh Munagala received a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. Last year he received an NSF CAREER award for his work on stochastic optimization. Alex Hartemink was named a Bass Professor for his excellence in research and teaching. Currently on a sabbatical leave, Alex is spending a year teaching at a school in Kenya. Spring 2009 graduates Alex Keybl, John Pena, and Tiffany Yam received the 2009 Department’s Alex Vasilos Memorial Award for THREADS their excellence in academic achievement and undergraduate program support. As always, we were busy hosting several events during the spring and summer. Two new students, Sophia Cui and Peng Shi, fall joined our C-SURF program, a program designed to provide undergraduates with an intensive research experience. Building on the success of the last year’s workshop, Susan Rodger once again organized a THREADS CoNtENtS: workshop on Alice, educational software that provides innovative methods for teaching computer programming. Jeff Forbes organized the RoboCup Junior Regional Competition, in which eleven middle- and 2 THREADS high-school teams participated. The faculty Department also hosted a vibrant summer THREADS internship program for undergraduates. The students conducted a wide variety of research in computational economics, 4 computational biology, networking, RESEARCH and robotics. Others assisted with the HarambeeNet and Alice workshops. All agree it was a valuable and rewarding experience. 6 Be sure to check out our website to learn the OUTREACH latest news about the Department and to be THREADS a part of our community. If you are in the RTP area, we hope you will stop by for a visit. 7 We look forward to hearing from you. students Best wishes, Pankaj K. Agarwal 12 BACK pagE THREADS WWW.CS.DUKE.EDU faculty CS Welcomes PRoFESSoR BRUCE MAGGS wItH GREAt PLEASURE, the Department websites like Apple iTunes and Microsoft 2 THREADS welcomes its newest faculty member, Windows Update. Working at Akamai as Professor Bruce Maggs. Maggs joins the VP of Research and Development sparked Duke community after fifteen years of Maggs’ interest in massive data sets, a research and teaching major focus of his research today. (Read in parallel and more about Maggs’ research projects on distributed systems page five of this issue.) “I have tremendous NEw GrantS Awarded at Carnegie Mellon respect for the Duke faculty,” says Maggs, University. who met many of his new colleagues as a Shivnath Babu After receiving visiting professor at Duke during the 2007- CAREER: Querying and Controlling his SB, SM, and PhD 2008 school year. “And the students are Bruce Maggs Systems (REU Supplement) degrees from MIT and fantastic and bright.” Sponsor: NSF working as a research scientist at the NEC Maggs is no stranger to Duke: His Vince Conitzer Research Institute in Princeton, Maggs grandfather was a law professor at the Computational Social Choice: joined Carnegie Mellon. In 1998, while on University, which proudly supports an Aggregating Preferences in Combinatorial sabbatical at MIT, he helped launch a start- endowed chair in his name. When he’s Domains (REU Supplement) up company called Akamai Technologies. not in his office, you can catch Maggs on Sponsor: NSF Today, Akamai is an international content the hockey rink or softball field, or out delivery network that handles hundreds of zipping around Chapel Hill on his trusty Alexander Hartemink billions of Web interactions every day for electric scooter. New Computational Methods for Elucidating Transcriptional Regulation During the Eukaryotic Cell Cycle Sponsor: DARPA XIAoBAI SUN Promoted to PROFESSOR thom LaBean (PI - Stephen Craig) CDI-Type II: Computational Discovery tHE DEPARtMENt proudly announces that architecture, tackling both hardware and of Complex Nucleic-acid-based Duke University has promoted Xiaobai Sun software needs and constraints. Among Architectures for Nanoengineering to the rank of full Professor. A member of other achievements, the system has been Sponsor: North Carolina State University the scientific computing faculty at Duke, used to automate and speed hardware Sun specializes in numerical analysis development and to thom LaBean with a focus on the differences and accelerate signal and Bioenabled Electronics: Bridging relationships between continuous and image processing. the Top-down and Bottom-up discrete models for computation. Additionally, Sun Fabrication Approaches “Xiaobai is highly regarded for the depth and her students Sponsor: Office of Naval Research as well as breadth of her work, and she is maintain active well known for blending mathematical, on-campus kamesh Munagala Xiaobai Sun Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship algorithmic, and engineering issues,” collaborations, one Sponsor: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation says Department Chair Pankaj Agarwal. with ECE professor David Brady, leader “I am thrilled to see her getting this well- of the Duke Imaging and Spectroscopy kamesh Munagala deserved recognition.” Program, on optical imaging and spectral CAREER: Light-weight Near-Optimal Sun is currently Principal Investigator reconstruction, and another with g. Allan Stochastic Control Policies for on a $2.6 million grant from DARPA, the Johnson, Professor of Radiology and Information Acquisition and Exploitation U.S. Defense Department Agency. The Physics, on MRI image processing. (REU Supplement) grant currently funds the FANTOM project, When congratulated on the honor Sponsor: NSF Framework For Accelerating Numerical of being promoted, Sun was eager to Jun Yang Transforms On Microchips, developed recognize her peers. “In this department, III-COR: Wide-Area Publish/Subscribe: by Sun and Professor Nikos Pitsianis in the other faculty members are very Unifying Data Processing and conjunction with researchers at Arizona inspirational,” she says. Department Dissemination (REU Supplement) State and Pennsylvania State University. leadership brings out the best in each Sponsor: NSF The project works to better application faculty member, she adds, and it is a performance in size, speed, and weight testament to the Department that it is Xiaowei Yang along the computational spectrum from able to actively recruit additional strong NETS-FIND: An Internet Architecture for continuous models to digital computer faculty to the ranks. User-Controlled Routes Sponsor: NSF Xiaowei Yang CT-ER: A DoS-Resistant Internet Architecture Sponsor: NSF faculty THREADS 3 ALEXANDER HARtEMINk NAMED Bass Fellow JoINING A SELECt GRoUP of Duke faculty, “A brilliant scholar, Alex has earned the Alexander Hartemink has been named a admiration and respect of everyone,” says distinguished Bass Professor for excellence Department Chair Pankaj Agarwal. “This in research and teaching. His new title prestigious professorship is the perfect way will be Alexander F. Hehmeyer Associate of recognizing his extraordinary teaching Professor of Computer Science. and research accomplishments.” “I am incredibly honored and grateful In addition to distinction in research, the to have been nominated and selected,” Bass Professorship recognizes excellence says Hartemink, who joined the faculty in in undergraduate teaching. Each year, 2001 after completing his PhD in electrical Hartemink teaches an undergraduate class engineering and computer science at the in computational genomics that attracts Massachusetts Institute of Technology. a wide variety of students, including A member of Duke’s Institute for genome computer science, biology, engineering, Alexander Hartemink and Provost Peter Lange at the awards ceremony Sciences and Policy, Hartemink uses math, and chemistry majors. Additionally, novel computational methods to study undergraduates often work in Hartemink’s term and attend annual dinners at which transcriptional regulation, a complex cellular research group, attending lab meetings they interact with other Fellows from around process in which proteins originally encoded alongside Master’s and PhD students. campus. “They are a great group of people,” by the genome return to the nucleus and turn “giving undergraduates opportunities to says Hartemink, who attended his first on and off the transcription of other genes. do research can be invaluable for their dinner this April. “I’m looking forward to He has recently published in Nature, Genome intellectual development,” he says. deeper interactions with my colleagues over Research, and PLoS Computational Biology. Bass Fellows are chosen for a five-year the next few years.” kAMESH MUNAGALA WINS Sloan Fellowship tHE