The Department: Then and now

by Rick Adrion

(photo by Ben Barnhart, UMass Magazine)

“Welcome back, your dreams were your ticket out. Welcome back, to that same old place that you laughed about. Well, the names have all changed since you hung around, but those dreams have remained and they've turned around …” Welcome Back Kotter theme song.

For the last four years, I have spent much of my time at the National Science Foundation. I served part-time for the first few months and the last year, and I returned each week for one day plus the weekend while I was full time. Still, it seems like a homecoming from a long absence.

Of course I followed the news about UMass in the Washington Post, and tried to catch up with colleagues when I had a chance. There was substantial coverage of our System President, William Bulger, and some coverage of the budget cuts that higher education has suffered in Massachusetts (as has occurred in most states and for many public and private institutions). What I discovered on my return was that for the Amherst campus and for the Computer Science Department, in particular, the truth has been quite a contrast.

We have a new Chancellor, John Lombardi, who came to the campus in 2001 from the University of Florida where he had served as president for 10 years. We have a new Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, Leon Osterweil, who is a member of the Computer Science Department. We have a new chair, Bruce Croft, who is continuing the excellent leadership of our previous chair, Jim Kurose.

I had very active and prominent colleagues before I left (19 fellows of the ACM, IEEE, AAAI and/or AAAS; 12 colleagues who had won outstanding teaching awards; 3 who hold the University’s highest rank, Distinguished University Professor; the faculty hold 50 journal editor and editorial board positions; etc.), but now the department has grown, adding six assistant professors (with a seventh to join in January) and three associate professors in the last few years. We now have 37 faculty members active in research and teaching. We expect to add several more new faculty members for AY 2004-5. In the last five years, enrollments have increased dramatically with a 68% increase in graduate students and a 79% increase in undergraduate majors. Administrative and technical staff support has grown from 78 to 93, with over a 40% increase in technical staff support. Our research funding continues to increase, reaching $12.4M in FY2001. Our success in the NSF CAREER program, the NSF ITR program and our key role in the recently announced $40M NSF Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) will cause our research revenues to continue to grow.

At the campus level the cuts were severe, however, under Chancellor Lombardi’s leadership, we emerged leaner but stronger. Chancellor Lombardi is a person with substantial charisma, but more importantly he completely understands the qualities that make a university great and he knows how to set priorities. In his words “through this incredibly difficult and painful process, I have been heartened by the strength and effectiveness of the people of UMass Amherst [who] have found the creativity and commitment to carry us through this period with the minimum damage to our core academic strength.” What he has done is run an open process to deal with our budget struggles and made the hard decisions. All of the indicators are up: increased research funding, increased revenues from distance education and intellectual property, and substantial increases in gifts and donations. We are embarking on the largest building program in some years, aggressive faculty and staff recruiting to replace those lost to early retirement programs, and the first growth in student enrollments since the 1960s.

The biggest adjustment for me is the change in the faculty. Prashant Shenoy (Ph.D. 1998 from Texas-Austin, interests in multimedia systems, operating systems, computer networks and distributed systems) joined in 1998 just as I was leaving (as officially did James Allan and Raghavan Manmatha, but both had been in the department earlier). Among the new additions to the faculty are: Micah Adler (joined in 1999 from Toronto, Ph.D. 1966 from Berkeley, interests in algorithms, communication networks, parallel and distributed systems, and theoretical computer science); Emery Berger (joined in 2002, Ph.D. 2002 from Texas-Austin, interest in operating systems, memory management, programming languages and compilers, and application of theory to systems work for robustness); Oliver Brock (joined in 2002 from Stanford where he received his Ph.D. in 1999 having spent some time at Rice, interests in robotics, mobile dexterous manipulation, motion planning, computer vision and structural biology); Mark Corner (joined in 2003, Ph.D. 2003 from Michigan, interests in mobile and pervasive computing, security, file systems, and distributed systems); and Brian Levine (joined in 1999, Ph.D. 1999 from Santa Cruz, interests in computer networks, network security and group communication). David Kulp (Ph.D. 2003 Santa Cruz) will join us in January 2004 from Affymetrix where he heads the bioinformatics program. The three new associate professors include: Sridhar Mahadevan (joined in 2001 from Michigan State where he was associate professor of computer science, Ph.D. 1990 from Rutgers, interests in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, machine learning, reinforcement learning, robot learning, and sequential decision-making); Andrew McCallum (joined in 2002 from WhizBang Labs where he was director of R&D, Ph.D. 1995 from Rochester, interests in information extraction, text data mining, statistical natural language processing, and machine learning) and Hava Siegelmann (joined in 2001 from the Technion where she was head of the information systems department, Ph.D. 1993 from Rutgers, interests in biological and physical computation, neural computation, adaptive information systems, machine learning and knowledge discovery, theory of analog and adaptive systems, and bioinformatics).

We have experienced some losses to faculty departures and retirements, but many of these remain active collaborators or participants in the department. I was sad that Kathryn McKinley, one of my last hires as department chair, had left for Texas, but I was pleased to discover at the first faculty meeting that another of my last hires, Ramesh Sitaraman, has been lured back from Akamai (The other two of my last hires in 1994 are Shlomo Zilberstein, and our new dean, Lee Osterweil). Kathryn and Krithivasan Ramamritham both left for family reasons, but Kathryn continues her close collaboration with Chip Weems and Eliot Moss on the DaCapo Project and Krithi remains an adjunct professor in the department and directs Ph.D. students. I have to be happy for research faculty members, Jamie Callan, Susan Landau and Barb Lerner, who left for CMU, Sun Microsystems and Williams College respectively. Jamie still works with the CIIR group and Barb participates in the LASER laboratory. Susan lives in Amherst and we see her often. I do feel older with several colleagues taking early or regular retirement: Bob Graham, Robin Popplestone, Dave Stemple, and just this Fall, Ed Riseman, have joined the ranks of faculty emeriti. Bob is still teaching. Ed is still directing the Vision Lab. Robin and Dave spend much of their time in the British Isles, but Dave still has his home in nearby Hatfield.

So the names have all changed … but [the] dreams have remained and they've turned around … It’s great to be back. UMass is as an exciting place to be now as it has been in my 17 + years in (and out) of Amherst.