Laura K. Dillon - Outstanding Achievement in Education
Laura Dillon is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University (MSU), where she served as Department Chair from 2003-2007.
Her research interests center on specification and analysis of concurrent software systems, formal methods in software engineering, and programming languages.
Before joining MSU in 1997, she was on the Computer Science faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara for thirteen years. Prof. Dillon has served on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and Communications of the ACM. She has also served on numerous conference organizing and program committees, funding panels, and advisory committees. She was a Program Co-Chair of the 2011 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, a member of the Organizing Committee and Programming Committee of the 2012 International Conference on Software Engineering, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Oakland University (Auburn Hills, MI) School of Engineering and Computer Science. She was Secretary/Treasurer and is currently Vice Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group in Software Engineering. Dr. Dillon was the General Chair of the inaugural Michigan Celebration of Women in Computing. She received the 2008 CRA-W Distinguished Professor Award, the CIC Fellow Academic Leadership Program Award for 2005-2006, and the 2012 MSU College of Engineering Withrow Outstanding Service Award. She is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and has been an ACM Distinguished Lecturer since 1993.
Prof. Dillon received a B.A. and an M.S. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1974 and 1976, respectively, and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981 and 1984, respectively.
Wayne W. Duso - Outstanding Achievement in Management
Wayne W. Duso is the General Manager, AWS New Cloud Initiatives at Amazon.com. He is heading a team developing next generation cloud services as well as opening Amazon.com's AWS (Amazon Web Services) Boston development center.
Prior to his current position, Mr. Duso has held a variety of executive roles in product development, product management and technical business development spanning enterprise storage, storage and network resource management, rich media, and data networking. Mr. Duso has been highly successful in bringing innovative engineering products to market. He has deep experience in building global multi-disciplinary teams and leading them in meeting delivery and investment targets. He held many executive positions during his eighteen-year career at EMC Corporation. These included being Senior Director in Midrange Storage Strategy, Storage Virtualization, Product Engineering, and Product Management within the Unified Storage Group; Senior Director of Business Development in the IP Storage Group; Senior Director of Quality Engineering in the Storage Management Software Group; and Director of Engineering in both the Media Solutions Group and the Storage Appliance Services and Applications Groups.
Prior to joining EMC, Mr. Duso was a Principal Software Engineer within Digital Equipment Corporation's Networks and Communications Group. While at Digital, he was a principal contributor to a number of highly successful product and advanced development efforts in the areas of data and mobile communications.
Mr. Duso holds over a dozen patents in the areas of client server protocols, highly available computer systems, MPEG processing and file systems for continuous media serving. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1985, an M.S. in Systems Engineering from Boston University in 1991, and he has attended executive education programs at MIT and Babson College.
Arthur I. Karshmer - Outstanding Contributions to Society
Arthur I. Karshmer is a Professor and Department Chair in the School of Management's Department of Analytics and Technology at the University of San Francisco, which he joined in 2006.
Professor Karshmer's research interests are in the system-architecture interface, metropolitan area networking, and computer interfaces for people with disabilities. Some of his research achievements include MAVIS: Mathematics Accessible to Visually Impaired Students; translating MathML into braille; an audio browser for navigating mathematical equations; a comprehensive system for translating braille-based mathematical documents into LaTeX; the development of a tool to enhance communication between blind and sighted mathematicians; and using sound and sound spaces to adapt graphical interfaces for use by the visually impaired.
He joined the Computer Science Department at New Mexico State University in 1978 as Professor of Computer Science and Academic Department Head. In 2000, he moved to the University of South Florida as Professor and Founding Chair of the Information Technology Department. From 2000-2001, he was Program Director for the National Science Foundation's Program for Persons with Disabilities.
Dr. Karshmer has published well over 100 technical papers, and he edited several books on subjects relating to how to help people with disabilities access computational facilities. He has been a member of the editorial board for Universal Access in the Information Society. He was awarded a Lady Davis Fellowship for study in Israel, a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (German Academic Exchange Service) award to carry on research in Germany, and three Fullbright Fellowships for study in Europe.
Prof. Karshmer received a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University in 1964 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1974 and 1978, respectively.
Rakesh (Teddy) Kumar - Outstanding Achievement in Technology Development
Rakesh (Teddy) Kumar is Director of the Vision Technologies Center at SRI International.
He directs projects in computer vision, augmented reality, robotics, video surveillance, 3D modeling, and medical image analysis. Dr. Kumar pioneered 3D vision in the form of high accuracy localization of mobile cameras. He has led the development of world-class technologies with applications in augmented reality, geolocalization, and precision 3D.
Dr. Kumar joined the David Sarnoff Research Laboratory, now a part of SRI International, in 1993. In 1995, he worked on the development of methods to insert patterns into dynamic scenes. This research led to the "insertion of advertisements" shown on television during Major League Baseball games. He also developed 3D volumetric registration techniques to align breast magnetic resonance images (MRIs) that led to a system for breast cancer detection used in over 100 U.S. hospitals. Dr. Kumar invented Video Flashlights, a system for 3D contextual visualization of real-time video camera feeds that enables security personnel to effectively monitor hundreds of video inputs efficiently and accurately. He also played a lead role in developing the technology behind VideoBrush, one of the first commercial consumer-grade mosaicking software products. Dr. Kumar has served as a principal founder for multiple companies.
Dr. Kumar received the Sarnoff President's Award and Sarnoff Technical Achievement Awards for his work. His Video Mosaic technology was selected by R&D Magazine as one of the top 100 new technologies of 1998.
He received a B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in 1983, an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from SUNY, Buffalo in 1985, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1992.
Jennifer Neville - Outstanding Achievement by a Young Alum
Jennifer Neville is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Purdue University.
Prof. Neville's research focuses on machine learning and data mining, particularly the development and analysis of algorithms for relational domains, including social networks, citation analysis, and fraud detection.
Dr. Neville received a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2012. She is also part of a multiinstitution team that received an award to create an NSF Science and Technology Center on the "Emerging Frontiers of Science and Information." In 2008, IEEE Intelligent Systems magazine selected Dr. Neville as one of "AI's 10 to Watch," identifying her as one of the ten most promising young researchers working in the field of artificial intelligence.
She received the Purdue College of Science Team Award in 2012, the Purdue Seed for Success Award in 2011 and 2012, and the Purdue College of Science Interdisciplinary Research Award in 2009 and 2010. In 2007, she was selected as a member of the highly selective DARPA Computer Science Study Group (CSSG). While at UMass Amherst, she received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, an AT&T Labs Graduate Fellowship, and a DARPA IPTO Cognitive Systems Conference Young Investigator Award. Prof. Neville was Program Committee Co-Chair for the 4th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Location-Based Social Networks and the 9th Workshop on Mining and Learning with Graphs, and is an Associate Chair for the 27th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Prof. Neville received a B.S. (summa cum laude), an M.S., and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2000, 2004, and 2006, respectively.
Aaron St. John - Outstanding Achievement in Entrepreneurship
Aaron St. John is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of HitPoint Studios.
Based in Western Massachusetts, HitPoint Studios is the largest independent game development studio in Massachusetts. Founded in 2008, HitPoint is a growing company with over 40 employees. Regularly featured in top-ten lists across major gaming portals, HitPoint has in only four years produced over 130 games for over 50 million players on the iOS, Android, Facebook, and PC platforms. In August 2012, HitPoint's hidden object game Seaside Hideaway was first on the week's list of emerging Facebook games, with a 33% increase in active users. St. John's company has worked with ad agencies, game publishers, and independent producers to develop games for brands including TRESemme, Chrysler, Littlest Pet Shop, Clue, Battleship, Yahtzee, Connect Four, Scrabble, Alfa Romeo, and UNO.
Prior to co-founding HitPoint, Mr. St. John was the owner of Golden Goose Games. He later merged his company with Paul Hake Productions to form HitPoint Studios. Mr. St. John started his career in the game industry at the age of 19 as Game Designer for Monolith Productions, leading a team of over thirty on the design and production of Sanity: Aiken's Artifact, a multimillion dollar title based on his original design.
Mr. St. John is a member of the Advisory Board of the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute (MassDiGI), a statewide center that promotes academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development within the digital and video game ecosystem across Massachusetts.
Mr. St. John received a B.S. in both Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2003 and an M.S. in Computer Science (as a Bay State Fellow) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2005.
Richard S. Sutton - Outstanding Achievement in Research
Richard S. Sutton is Professor and iCORE Chair in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta.
Prof. Sutton pioneered the field of reinforcement learning, an approach to artificial and natural intelligence that emphasizes learning and planning from sample experience. Dr. Sutton played a crucial role in the development of important algorithms in the field, especially the very influential Temporal Difference algorithms. His research interests center on the learning problems facing a decision-maker interacting with its environment, which he sees as central to artificial intelligence. He has also conducted research in animal learning psychology, in neural networks, and generally in systems that continually improve their representations and models of the world.
Dr. Sutton is the author of the original seminal paper on temporal-difference learning. His textbook, Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, co-authored with Andrew Barto, has over 15,000 citations.
Before joining the University of Alberta in 2003 where he currently leads the Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he worked for nine years at GTE Laboratories as Principal Investigator on their connectionist machine learning project, for three years as a Research Scientist at UMass Amherst Computer Science, and for four years at AT&T Laboratories in Florham Park. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He received the International Neural Network Society President's Award in 2003 and the Warner Award in 1994, GTE's highest award for technical achievement contributing to business success.
Prof. Sutton received a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1978 and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1980 and 1984, respectively.