We're proud to announce that Brown undergraduates Harry Li ('02) and Rachel Weinstein ('02) have received Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's 2002 Outstanding Undergraduate Awards. These awards recognize undergraduate students majoring in computer science who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. In addition to evidence of significant research contributions, CRA's awards committee also considers the student's academic record and service to the community. Rachel and Harry were among the only 44 award-winners in North America. We congratulate them most heartily for their achievement!

On 29 November 2001, at 4:00 p.m., the CS Department will host the first annual Paris Kanellakis lecture: Dr. Mihalis Yannakakis, of Avaya Laboratories, will speak on ``Progress in System Modeling and Testing.'' This lecture series honors Paris Kanellakis, a distinguished computer science theoretician who was an esteemed and beloved member of this department. His death in a December, 1995 airplane accident was a profound loss of which we are especially reminded at this time of year. We are therefore all the more delighted now to inaugurate this lecture series in his memory.

Participants in 1 Nov 2001 IPP Symposium

Last Thursday our Industrial Partners Program held its 28th IPP Symposium, organized by Prof. Shriram Krishnamurthi, on `Component Software and Technologies'. Speakers came to Brown from Northeastern, IBM, University of Utah, GTECH, IBM, and Sun Microsystems. There were unusually lively discussions to accompany the usual wonderful food (especially the sinfully opulent desserts!).

Shriram kicked off the day with an overview of component technologies and of some of the challenges facing them, summarizing some work being done at Brown along the way. The remaining speakers addressed specific topics. Mirek Kula and Bob Rogers of ...

The Fall, 2001 issue of conduit! has just hit the stands; it's available at

http://www.cs.brown.edu/publications/conduit/

as are all previous issues back to its beginning in March, 1992.

This website is, in fact, a very impressive ten-year collection of articles on technical matters leavened with lighter pieces about the doings of department members, CS undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni/ae. Do check it out -- it well repays serious browsing!

The most recent issue of Brown's George Street Journal contains a long and interesting article on CS's five ITR grants, complete with a picture of CS's own Michael Black: see

http://www.brown.edu/Administration/George_Street_Journal/vol26/26GSJ08c.html

Takeo Igarashi, a postdoc in the Graphics Group here working with John Hughes, hit the worldwide news today. The BBC News Online, no less (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1606000/1606175.stm), picked up a system he's to present at the ACM UIST (User Interface Software and Technology) conference in Orlando next month. What's more, slashdot.org (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/18/1245232&;mode=thread), which calls itself ``News for Nerds'' and is read, John Bazik says, by ``millions of geeks like me,'' just grabbed the story and featured it ...

NSF has awarded three more Information Technology Research (ITR) grants to researchers in this department.

First, Michael Black was granted $446K over three years for ``The Computer Science of Biologically Embedded Systems'', work done in conjunction with John Donoghue (Biomed-Neuroscience) and Lucien Bienenstock (Division of Applied Mathematics). Michael's abstract states, `` Biologically embedded systems that directly couple artificial computational devices with neural systems are emerging as a new area of information technology research. The physical structure and adaptability of the human brain make these biologically embedded systems quite different from computational systems typically studied in Computer Science.

``Fundamentally, biologically embedded ...

Pascal Van Hentenryck and Andy van Dam have both been awarded large grants in this second year of NSF's Information Technology Research (ITR) competition. Their proposals were among the 309 selected from a field of over 2000. NSF director Rita Colwell, in announcing the grants, said ``NSF is proud to be a leader with these bold ITR projects, Through long-term, high-risk research, we expect a wide range of positive results that will benefit the nation as a whole. Our objective is to support the development of software and IT services that will help scientists and engineers make the kind ...

A belated welcome to Ugur Cetintemel, who joined the faculty here earlier this month! He comes us from graduate work at the University of Maryland; his undergraduate degrees are from Bilkent University in Ankara. His research interests are in the areas of distributed systems and databases and mobile and ubiquitous computing. See his webpage at http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/faculty/ugur.html

The 2001 Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS 2001) was held on August 8-10, 2001 at Brown University. WADS 2001 was sponsored by the Center for Geometric Computing and by the Department of Computer Science at Brown University, with additional support from John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Participants from all over the world attended the workshop, which is a forum for researchers in the area of design, analysis, and implementation of algorithms and data structures. Plenary lectures were given by Mike Atallah (Purdue) on `Secure Multi-Party Computational Geometry,' Tom Leighton (Akamai) on `The Challenges of Delivering Content on the Internet ...