In the news

Distinguished Professor Arnold Rosenberg was the keynote speaker at the 12th International Conference on High Computing (HiPC'05) in Goa, India. During thier visit, he and his wife Susan got a chance to pet an elephant.

Faculty News

“Analyzing Myopic Approaches for Multi-Agent Communication,” by graduate student Raphen Becker, Professor Victor Lesser, and Professor Shlomo Zilberstein, received the Best Paper Award from the 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM Intelligent Agent Technologies Conference held in Compiègne, France.

Graduate student Xiaotao Liu, Associate Professor Prashant Shenoy, and Assistant Professor Mark Corner won the Best Paper Award at the ACM Multimedia 2005 Conference in Singapore for their paper “SEVA: Sensor-Enhanced Video Annotation.” At the same conference, the paper “SensEye: A Multi-tier Camera Sensor Network” authored by graduate student Puru Kulkarni, Assistant Professor Deepak Ganesan, and Shenoy was a Best Student Paper Award finalist.

Sami Rollins, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Mount Holyoke College, joined the Department as an Adjunct Assistant Professor.

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras selected Professor Krithi Ramamritham for a 2006 Distinguished Alumni Award. He is the head of the School of Information Technology at IIT Bombay and an adjunct professor in our Department.

Professor Shlomo Zilberstein joined the Editorial Board of Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

Associate Professor Brian Levine became an Associate Editor of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.

Associate Professor Eliot Moss is the Program Chair for the 2006 International Symposium on Memory Management, to be held in Ottawa in June.

Associate Professor Prashant Shenoy will serve as Program Chair for the World Wide Web 2007 conference.

Assistant Professor Oliver Brock received a nomination for the campus-wide Outstanding Academic Advisor of the Year (OAAY) Award. Winners will be announced in May.

Along with co-authors Lilla Zollei, Eric Grimson, and William Wells, Assistant Professor Erik Learned-Miller received a Best Paper Award for their paper “Efficient Population Registration of 3D Data” at the Workshop on Computer Vision for Biomedical Image Applications: Current Techniques and Future Trends. The workshop was held at the 2005 International Conference of Computer Vision, in Beijing, China.

Associate Professor Andrew McCallum gave an invited talk at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2005) Workshop on “Bayesian Methods for Natural Language Processing.” He also gave an invited Broad Area Colloquium talk at Stanford University Computer Science department entitled “Information Extraction, Social Network Analysis and Joint Inference.”

Assistant Professor Emery Berger recently released a program called DieHard that automatically makes programs less buggy and more secure from a hacker attack. More at www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/diehard/.

Visitor News

Victor Emanuel UC Cetina, a Ph.D. student at Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, is a Visiting Scholar working with Professor Andrew Barto.

Research News

Gideon Mann joined the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory as a Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate this fall.

Daniel Bernstein (Ph.D. ’05) is a Senior Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Resource-Bounded Reasoning Research Group.

Dr. Norman Sondheimer joined the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research (LASER) as a Research Scientist.

The Center for Computer-Based Instructional Technology (CCBIT) has a new name and a new location. Now called the Center for Educational Software Development (CESD), the group reports to John Dubach, the campus’ Chief Information Officer, and is located in the Lederle lowrise. CCBIT/CESD staff who have moved to Lederle include David Hart, Matthew Mattingly, Cindy Stein, and Stephen Battisti. Rachel Lavery will work half-time for CESD.

Student News

The first annual undergraduate award recipients for 2005 are Mark Gruman (AI), Matthew Brandwein (Security), Subhash Patel (Theory), Andrew Tolopko (Networking), Bradley Hawkes (Software), and James Cipar (Systems). Each of the honorees graduated in 2005 with a B.S. in Computer Science.

Graduate student Benessa Defend received an NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) grant to spend this summer at Kyushu University in Japan working on RFID security.

CIIR graduate student Mark Smucker and his wife Anne welcomed the arrival of their son Leo Mark on December 20.

PRISMS graduate student Tom Heydt-Benjamin and his wife Ava are the proud parents of their daughter Ivy Frost, born on December 30.

Staff News

Working with the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory, Adam Saunders was promoted to Software Engineer I.