CSE News for 2000

ABC World News with Peter Jennings (many airings on local stations throughout U.S. and Canada), April 15, 2000. RHex

SCIENCE, "Better Than Nature Made It," Gary Taubes, 288(5463):80-3, April 7, 2000. RHex (attached) (as a companion piece to) Biologists and Engineers Create a New Generation of Robots That Imitate Life, Gary Taubes, Science, April 7, 2000;

Robo sapiens: Evolution of a New Species (Material World Books) by Peter Menzel, Faith D'Aluisio , Hardcover - 240 pages (August 11, 2000) MIT Press; ISBN: 0262133822

Biobots. Can man mimic organic life-forms with machinery? By Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio DISCOVER Vol. 21 No. 9 (September 2000)

I'd like to congratulate many of our faculty for their recent success in the NSF/ITR awards. Within CSE alone we had the following awards:

More than $500K category:

1) E-COMMERCE TO RECEIVE $2.7 MILLION NSF AWARD TO SUPPORT PhD PROGRAM. The University of Michigan has been awarded a five-year $2.7 million NSF grant to support a cross-disciplinary doctoral program in the social and technological aspects of E-commerce. Co-developed with an inter-disciplinary group from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, School of Information, and the Business School, the award STIET (Socio-Technical Infrastructure for Electronic Transactions) will provide NSF funding for fellowships during the first two years of graduate study involving 65 doctoral students from these inter-disciplinary units. In addition, the grant will support STIET core courses, electives and a weekly research seminar. The UM units will work with industry partners including IBM and Microsoft in implementing the program. The primary investigator for STIET is Professor Jeff MacKie-Mason from the School of Information. Co-investigators for the program are Professor Michael Wellman from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Professor Michael D. Gordon from Business Administration.

2) ITR: Exploiting Style as Retrieval and Classification Mechanism PI: William Birmingham Institution: University of Michigan Ann Arbor Est. Award Amt: $1,778,255 Duration: 36mos. State: MI

3) ITR: Learning-Centered Design Methodology: Meeting the Nation's Need for Computational Tools for K-12 Science Education (Engineering Scaffolded Work Environments) PI: Elliot Soloway Institution: University of Michigan Ann Arbor Est. Award Amt: $2,999,998 Duration: 36mos. State: MI

4) ITR: Personal Robotic Assistants for the Elderly Major Contributor: Martha Pollack Institution: University of Pittsburgh Duration: 48 months

Less than $500K category:

1) 0082851 ITR: A Mobile Component Framework for Building Adaptive Distributed Applications PI: Atul Prakash Institution: University of Michigan Est. Award Amt: $451,204 Duration: 36mos. State: MI

2) 0082876 ITR: Adaptive Information Processing through Precomputation PI: Marios Papaefthymiou Institution: University of Michigan Est. Award Amt: $494,958 Duration: 36mos. State: MI

3) 0082884 ITR: Information Fusion Across Multiple Text Sources: A Common Theory PI: Dragomir Radev Institution: University of Michigan Est. Award Amt: $363,180 Duration: 36mos. State: MI

Matt Postiff was awarded a Rackham Fellowship. The Rackham Graduate School awards a limited amount of these fellowships to outstanding students who plan to complete the dissertation in the year in which they hold the fellowship or complete the doctorate within six years of beginning their program. (advisor is Professor Trevor Mudge)

David Greene has been awarded an Intel Fellowship for the Fall academic year. (advisor is Professor Trevor Mudge)

Professor Elliot Soloway's research appeared in the August 24, 2000 issue of Wired News, in an article entitled, Taking the Mystery out of Science.

Professor Mike Wellman was mentioned in New York Times: Thursday, August 17, 2000, in: WHAT'S NEXT; Online Auctions of the Future, It'll Be Bot vs. Bot vs. Bot By ANNE EISENBERG. "They are called shopbots, buybots, pricebots or just plain bots -- the ''bot'' is short for robot. The name is playful, but the reality is all business because shopbots are meant to roam the Web all by themselves one day, efficiently buying and selling ...

Professor Elliot Soloway's research appeared in the August 10, 2000 issue of the New York Times in an article, "Choosing Quick Hits Over the Card Catalog"

Professor Ed Davidson was awarded the Eckert-Mauchly Award, 2000, by ACM & IEEE Computer Society, "For his seminal contributions to the design, implementation, and performance evaluation of high performance pipelines and multiprocessor systems."

Professor Michael Wellman also made front page of the Detroit News on 2/25/00 in an article entitled, Web shopping about to get easier. The article featured smart programs developed at U-M.

Professor Elliot Soloway appears in Converge.Mag at in an article appropriately titled, Perpetual Energy Source.

John Reumann received Best Student Paper Award from the 2000 USENIX Technical Conference in June 2000 for a paper entitled "Virtual Services: A new abstraction for server consolidation." (advisor is Professor Kang Shin)

Professor Farnam Jahanian was awarded the 2000 Amoco Faculty Teaching Award. "...for his exceptional contributions to undergraduate teaching at the University of Michigan."

Professor David Chesney was the 2000 winner of the Arch T. Colwell Award for significant contributions to Mobility Engineering for his paper "Generalized Equations for Sprag One-way Clutch Analysis and Design".

New faculty member, Professor Igor Markov, won the 2000 Outstanding Ph.D. Student Award in June, 2000 from UCLA in Computer Science.

Professor John Laird received the College of Engineering 2000 Research Excellence Award.

Professor Kang Shin received the College of Engineering 2000 Service Excellence Award.

Professor Quentin Stout's NPACI project appears in ONLINE MAGAZINE's May 2000 issue. The article discusses work with social sciences on developing a parallel program to do multiple imputation. It also appeared at the June 2000 issue of the University Record.