News from around the Department

Faculty News

Professor Lori Clarke, co-director of the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER), was presented with the University of Colorado at Boulder Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award in the category of Research and Invention. The award ceremony was held on April 16.

Professor Jim Kurose and Distinguished Professor Arny Rosenberg both gave Information Science and Technology Center (ISTeC) Distinguished Lectures at Colorado State University. Kurose’s talk “Networking…Successes, New Challenges, and an Expanding Waist as the Field Approaches 40” was presented in December. Rosenberg’s lecture “N+1 heads are better than N --- or are they?” was presented in January. In another notable event for Rosenberg, this year is the 40th anniversary of his first conference paper: “On n-tape finite state acceptors,” presented in the 5th IEEE Symposium on Switching Circuit Theory and Logical Design, Princeton, New Jersey in 1964. This conference evolved into the present-day IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS Symposium).

Bruce Croft, Distinguished Professor and Department Chair, gave a distinguished lecture, “Question Answering and Semi-Structured Text,” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in February.

Associate Professor Sridhar Mahadevan was appointed an associate editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).

Micah Adler, Assistant Professor, is the chair of the Sixteenth ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA 2004) to be held in Barcelona, Spain in June.

The paper “Interactive Information Extraction with Constrained Conditional Random Fields” has been selected for Honorable Mention at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Nineteenth National Conference (AAAI-04) to be held in July in San Jose, California. The paper’s co-authors are Associate Professor Andrew McCallum, CS graduate student Aron Culotta, and Trausti Kristjansson and Paul Viola, both from Microsoft Research.

Professor Jim Kurose is the technical program chair for the 2004 ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) to be held in Sicily, Italy in October.

Since September, Professor Edwina Rissland has been serving as the Program Director for the Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science (AICS) Program at the National Science Foundation. The AICS Program is part of the Data, Inference and Understanding Cluster in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, a division in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE). As a side note, Rissland’s daughter Olivia has been named a Rhodes Scholar. Each year 32 U.S. students are selected to study at Oxford for 2-3 years. Currently, a senior at Brown University, Olivia is a triple concentrator with majors in mathematics, biology and classics. At Oxford, she will pursue a D.Phil in biology. Upon her return, she will attend medical school.

Visitor News

James Sterbenz is a Visiting Research Scientist with the Computer Networks Research Group. Sterbenz is a Senior Network Scientist at BBN Technologies.

Working with the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) as Visiting Researchers, Ji Seoung Kim and Tae Il Kim are from NHN Corporation in Korea.

In a collaborative arrangement between UMass Extension Services and the Center for Computer-Based Instructional Technology (CCBIT), Kim Anderson Pond is a Visiting Research Scholar.

Yao Chen is a Visiting Research Scholar with the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER). She is an Instructor at the School of Software Engineering at Beijing University.

Research News

David Westbrook, formerly with the Experimental Knowledge Systems Laboratory, has joined the Engineering Research Center for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) as a Senior Research Fellow. Michael Zink joined CASA as a Research Scientist. Professor Jim Kurose is an Associate Director of CASA.

Michael Rosenstein (Ph.D. ’03), Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate, and Autonomous Learning Laboratory (ALL) graduate student Mohammad Ghavamzadeh are co-chairs of the AAAI-04 Workshop on Supervisory Control of Learning and Adaptive Systems, to be held at the Nineteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence in San Jose in July. For details see http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mgh/AAAI-2004/.

Student News

Current graduate student Brent Heeringa was appointed a visiting faculty position at Williams College for academic year 2003-04. Heeringa is teaching theory of computation and algorithm design courses while at Williams.

Computer Science undergraduate Kevin Grimaldi won second place in the 19th Annual Mathematics Competition run by the UMass Department of Mathematics and Statistics. CS undergraduates Vitaliy Lvin and Michael Sindelar earned honorable mention in the competition.

Graduate students Toby Dragon and Ed Walters received nominations for the 2003-2004 UMass Distinguished Teaching Award.

Current graduate student Güray Alsaç was accorded an Honorable Mention by the National Science Foundation in the competition to receive a 2004–2005 Graduate Research Fellowship.

Staff News

Laurie Connors has accepted a Grant Administrator position with the Computer Networks Research Group. Connors previously was the Department’s Graduate Programs Assistant.

Cindy Loiselle joined the Knowledge Discovery Laboratory (KDL) as its Technical Writer.