Seven people from this department received PhD degrees at last month's graduation ceremonies. They are:

Michael Benjamin, `Interval Programming: A Multi-Objective Optimization Model for Motion Planning in Autonomous Vehicles' (advisor: Leslie Kaelbling). Mike is now a post-doctoral associate in the Department of Ocean Engineering at MIT.

Stina Bridgeman, `Techniques and Tools for Graph Drawing' (advisor: Roberto Tamassia). Stina is now an Assistant Professor at Colgate University.

Steven Dollins, `Modeling for the Plausible Emulation of Large Worlds' (advisor: John Hughes). Steve is now a software engineer at There, Inc. in Menlo Park.

Luis E. Ortiz, `Selecting Approximately Optimal Actions in ...

We're delighted to announce that, with Tom Dean stepping down, Eli Upfal has agreed to take over as Chair of this department effective July 1, 2002. Eli joined the department in 1997 from the Weizmann Institute and IBM Almaden Research Center.

As Chair since 1997, Tom's contributions to the department have been incalculable, and we are more grateful than we can say for his extremely hard work, not only as chair but also as Brown's acting CIO for six months. He will be on leave this coming academic year; we all hope he'll use part of ...