Professor Eli Upfal and Michael Mitzenmacher, professor of computer science at Harvard, have been awarded a $100,000 Yahoo! Research Alliance gift for their research in “Algorithms and Modeling for Large-Scale Web Applications.”

The funding will assist in the development of a theoretically well-founded framework for the design and analysis of algorithms for large-scale Web-related applications including: efficient sampling and analysis for content matching; and modeling and analyzing the dynamic structure of Internet-based social networks and communication within these networks.

Associate Professor Shriram Krishnamurthi and his team of developers have created a new programming language for developing Web applications. Known as Flapjax, the technology was released under the BSD open-source license this week. Designed as an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) offshoot, Flapjax runs on traditional Web browsers and requires no plug-ins or additional downloads.

Krishnamurthi hopes that Flapjax's key attributes will appeal to developers: It is event-driven and reactive; its template system reduces unnecessary code; it enables sharing of data and provides a persistent store that automatically updates all clients sharing data; it implements access control to channel ...

"Excursions in Algorithmics: A Late Festschrift for Franco P. Preparata" aka FrancoFest, is a two-day workshop to honor and celebrate the career of Franco P. Preparata on the occasion of his 70th birthday (which was in December 2005). The event will be held October 27-28, 2006 on the Brown campus. Please visit FrancoFest for details.

All the members of the Brown computer science community are invited to attend the technical presentations (CIT 368) on each of the two days and the reception at 5:30pm on October 27 (CIT, third-floor atrium). An open-door policy will be in effect ...

Philip Klein has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The funding will support Klein's research on algorithms for solving optimization problems on planar graphs - graphs that can be drawn on the plane with no crossings. Such graphs are necessary in image processing and road map logistics.

Possible uses for planar graphs research are illustrated by the following scenario - imagine a truck driver who must develop the shortest possible route to supply vending machines at numerous locations. This scenario is a version of the infamous Traveling Salesman Problem; and finding the shortest route that visits ...