After identifying 23,300 genes made from 814 million letters of DNA code taken from Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, the California purple urchin, an international science team has found that humans share 7,077 genes with urchins. Results from the sequencing project are published in a special six-article section of Science.

Sorin Istrail, professor of computer science and director of the University’s Center for Computational Molecular Biology, served as a member of the sea urchin sequencing team. A former research director at Celera Genomics, the private company that sequenced the human genome, Istrail was one of eight scientists in the urchin ...

Professor Maurice Herlihy was awarded a $75,000 Microsoft gift for research in Software Transactional Memory. Herlihy will use the gift to continue development of SXM, a C# software transactional memory package he developed while on sabbatical at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Transactional memory is an alternative computational model in which threads synchronize by optimistic transactions, which promise to alleviate many of the problems associated with locking. SXM currently supports atomic object factories that allow users their own run-time synchronization mechanisms. Herlihy plans to revisit this design to make it more accessible (users will define new factories in C# instead of ...

Undergraduate students Daniel Leventhal and Leo Meyerovich have received Honorable Mention awards from the Computing Research Association (CRA). CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Awards program recognizes undergraduate students who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. The award committee looks for demonstrated excellence of computing research ability and also considers the student’s academic record and service to the community. The awards, supported by Microsoft Research and Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), are presented at one of the major computing research conferences sponsored by CRA, ACM, the IEEE Computer Society, SIAM, AAAI, or USENIX. For every year since ...