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