Cornell University

Cornell Computer Science Ph.D. student Yannis Vetsikas finished third in the finals of the International Trading Agent Competition. This competition was held in conjunction with the 2001 ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce. Yannis competed over the internet in a combinatorial auction setting with a total of 28 teams from around the world, including teams from Stanford, AT&T Research, NEC Research and many other academic and industrial research labs. See http://auction2.eecs.umich.edu/ for further information.

By David Brand

John Hopcroft is stepping down June 30 after eight years as dean of the College of Engineering. On May 24, his friends and colleagues, many of whom were hired during his tenure, met to praise his accomplishments during a day-long seminar at Olin Hall.

The tributes came from Charles R. Lee '61, chief executive of Verizon, Cornell President Emeritus Frank H.T. Rhodes and from John Silcox, vice provost for physical sciences and engineering, among others. Said Lee, who also is a Cornell emeritus trustee and a presidential councillor, "Dean Hopcroft, you have left your mark. I stand here for all alumni to thank you for your many contributions."

During the tributes, much was made of the fact that the makeup of the college has changed greatly over the past eight years. The faculty has shrunk to 200 from 230, but it is much more diverse. Of the 40 new faculty hired during the Hopcroft administration, 25 percent are women and 12 percent are underrepresented minorities. "In a period where we hear constantly about the dearth of women and minorities in engineering, it is heartening that John has presented a view of the possibilities that have attracted them to Cornell," said Rhodes.

Among engineering students, Rhodes also noted, applications have soared to 5,000 a year from 3,000, while the admission rate has dropped to 28 percent from 38 percent. And as Rhodes pointed out, "If you want a measure of the success that John has brought to the educational component of the program, it is those student application and student admission figures." Said Rhodes, "Generations of students will pay tribute to John as somebody who not only made college obtainable, but introduced them to a rich career in engineering."

The symposium was opened by Silcox, the David E. Burr Professor of Engineering, School of Applied and Engineering Physics, who recalled that he was one of the three candidates for the deanship eight years ago. When Hopcroft was selected, Silcox called him with congratulations. "John's reaction was, 'you really didn't want to do it, did you?' I said, 'no, John.' So, out of the depths of my heart, John, thank you so much."

During his tribute to Hopcroft, Lee, whose company was formed last year from a merger of GTE and Bell Atlantic, noted that Hopcroft spends 20 percent of his time on fund-raising. "He has traveled all over the world. I know that he once nailed me on the golf course," he said. But fund-raising, he said, has helped put the engineering college in the forefront of technology.

"Silicon chips and fiber optics are to today's generation what steel and oil were to an older generation," Lee said. And he asked, "Where's the next big thing?" He answered by advising the audience to check out their children's bedrooms ("If your kid has a PC, I bet you will find he has 10 instant messages while he is doing his homework"); to check out Japan ("There are 12 million people on wireless internet, a very high percentage"); to check out Napster ("They had 50 million customers in two years, yet it took 10 years to get 50 million wireless customers, 20 years to get 50 million cable TV customers, and 50 years to get 50 million phone customers"); and to check out broad-band users ("they spend more time on the Internet than they do watching TV.")

He recalled meeting a young New Jersey high schooler who had on his PC, 200 songs, 15 games, many movies and all 200 episodes of "Seinfeld." "We have a very interesting world , and Verizon is very lucky to be a part of it," he said.

Lee was introduced by Clifford Pollock, whose chair, the Ilda and Charles Lee Professor of Engineering, is endowed by Lee and his wife. Pollock is the incoming director of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Other engineering faculty who gave presentations during the day included Yuri Suzuki, George Malliaras, Ulrich Wiesner, Rajit Manohar, Mark Heinrich, W. Evan Speight, Martin Burtscher, Antje Baeumner, Francisco Valero-Cuevas and Lois Pollack.

At a reception, which followed the symposium, Hopcroft was toasted by Steven Strogatz, professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, and Susannah Hobbs, founding president of the Graduate Student Association.

Four members of the Cornell and Weill Cornell Medical College faculty and administration have been elected fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

They are Antonio M. Gotto Jr., the Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City and provost of medical affairs, and from Cornell's Ithaca campus: Jonathan Culler, senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of English and comparative literature; Thomas Seeley, professor of neurobiology and behavior; and Eva Tardos, professor of computer science. 

Now in its 221st year, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences honors distinguished scientists, scholars and leaders in public affairs, business, administration and the arts. The academy boasts 3,700 fellows and 600 honorary foreign members. The four new fellows will be inducted during academy ceremonies to be held in October. 

Gotto is a world-renowned authority in the field of cardiovascular medicine. He and his associates were the first to achieve the complete synthesis of a significant plasma apoplipoprotein (apoC-I), and they also determined the complete cDNA and amino acid sequence of apo B-100, one of the largest proteins ever sequenced and a key protein in atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. 

Gotto became dean at Weill Cornell after two decades at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Among his contributions since he joined Weill Cornell are his continuing insights into the benefits of the cholesterol-lowering statin drugs for cardiac primary prevention and the potential predictive value of certain apolipoproteins that are major components of LDL and HDL, the so-called bad and good cholesterols, respectively. 

At Weill Cornell, Gotto has either implemented or brought to fruition a Strategic Research Plan, which will markedly expand the school's research effort; a new problem-based, student-centered curriculum; a new state-of-the-art education center; and an increased donor base and school endowment. In a break from precedent, he has led Cornell and the medical college into an extraordinary commitment to build and operate a whole new branch of the medical college in the Middle Eastern nation of Qatar. 

Gotto received his B.A., magna cum laude, in biochemistry in 1957 from Vanderbilt University; his D.Phil. in biochemistry in 1961 from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and his M.D. in 1965 from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He did his residency training at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. 

He has served as national president of the American Heart Association, as a member of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Advisory Council and on the National Diabetes Advisory Board, among many other associations. He has received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Bologna and Abilene Christian University and honorary professorships from the University of Buenos Aires and Francisco Marroquin University (Guatemala). He was awarded the prestigious Order of the Lion from the Republic of Finland. 

His original scholarly articles number close to 400. He also is co-author, with Dr. Michael DeBakey, of The Living Heart and The New Living Heart Diet, and author of The Living Heart Cookbook. 

Culler, a literary theorist, earned a bachelor of arts degree in history and literature at Harvard in 1966; a B.Phil. in comparative literature (1968); and, a D.Phil. in modem languages (1972), both at the University of Oxford. He taught at the University of Cambridge, Oxford and Yale before coming to Cornell in 1977. In 1982 he was awarded an endowed chair as the Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He served as the director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell from 1984 to 1993 and as the chair of the Department of Comparative Literature (1993-96) and of the Department of English (1996-99). 

Culler also is the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship and subsequently of the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association of America and of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He currently is president of the American Comparative Literature Association and is the author of several seminal texts in his field, including On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1982), Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institutions (1992) and Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (1997). His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. 

A member of the Cornell faculty since 1986, Seeley teaches courses in animal communication, behavior, biology of social insects and major transitions in evolution. Seeley earned an A.B. in chemistry (1974) at Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. in biology (1978) at Harvard University. He was in the Society of Fellows at Harvard, 1978-80, and taught at Yale University, 1980-86, before joining the neurobiology and behavior faculty at Cornell as an assistant professor. 

Other honors to Seeley include a 2001 Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, regarded as the most prestigious scientific prize given by Germany to foreign scholars. The award will take Seeley to the University of Wrtzburg, where he will conduct studies of communication among bees via substrate (honeycomb) vibrations and write a biography of the German scientist Martin Lindauer, whose observations of the social physiology of honey bees laid the foundation for Seeley's work. 

Eva Tardos studied mathematics at the Etvs University in Budapest, Hungary, and received her Ph.D. in mathematics there in 1984. After teaching at Etvs University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she joined the Cornell faculty in 1989. During her years at Cornell, she has been awarded several prestigious fellowships. From 1990 to 1995, she was a David and Lucille Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering; from 1991 to 1993, she had a Sloan Fellowship; and from 1991 to 1996, she had a Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation. In May of 1998, she was elected a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). In 1999 she received a Guggenheim fellowship, which she used for sabbatical research and study at the University of California-Berkeley in the 1999-2000 school year. 

She is editor of SIAM Journal of Computing, Combinatorica, the Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science and the Journal of Interconnection Networks. And she is area editor of Discrete Optimization for Mathematics of Operations. 

Tardos' research focuses on "combinatorial" problems, in which the goal is to find the most efficient or least expensive arrangement of complex systems. These problems are found in such activities as designing and managing communication networks or planning airline schedules. The challenge is to avoid brute force testing of every possible arrangement and quickly find the best (or nearly best) solution. 

By Bill Steele

Juris Hartmanis, the Walter R. Read Professor in Engineering and first chair of the Department of Computer Science, will retire at the close of the current academic year after more than three decades at Cornell. 

The department celebrated his career with an all-day symposium May 5, where colleagues from Cornell and elsewhere delivered technical papers on computer science, many dealing with problems whose study Hartmanis himself pioneered. The proceedings will be published later by Spencer-Verlag. 

Hartmanis first came to Cornell in the late 1950s after receiving his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1955. He left to work for General Electric Research Laboratory, but was invited back to Cornell in 1965 to serve as the first chair of the newly founded Department of Computer Science, created jointly by the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences with an initial grant of $1 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. 

In those days, Hartmanis said, "If you told someone you were in computer science they looked at you for a while and then said 'What's that?'" 

Under Hartmanis' direction, the department quickly became a leader in theoretical computer science. It always has been ranked among the top five programs in the nation. 

"The way he shaped [the department] has remained in place to this day, which is astonishing," said Robert Constable, university dean of computing and information, who joined the new department shortly after it was formed. 

Among the core values Hartmanis instilled was "a feeling of great collegiality," Constable said. "Everybody's door is always open, there is a sense of open democratic discussion and we try to solve all problems by consensus." 

In the meantime, Hartmanis made major contributions to research in the field. He received the prestigious Turing award for a paper co-written with GE colleague Richard Sterns that pioneered an area of computer science called computational complexity theory, which has to do with the fact that some computer problems are "non-deterministic," meaning the solution may take more computing resources than anyone has available. Usually these are problems where the computer must try many possible combinations of elements to find the fastest or least expensive arrangement. "You guess and then test the solution, but there are too many guesses," Hartmanis explained. So far, no one has produced a mathematical proof that the hard problems can't somehow be simplified, and until that happens, one of the holy grails of computer science is to find workable shortcuts. 

Hartmanis is also a recipient of the Computing Research Association Distinguished Service Award for 2000. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. And he serves as editor or adviser to several computer science journals. 

"When I look back and look at where Cornell stands today in its computer science effort, I'm just very, very pleased and proud of what we've achieved," Hartmanis said. 

"I feel I had a very rich and rewarding career as a scientist and educator, and at age 72, pushing 73, I think it's time to step sideways," he said. "I'm looking forward to doing what I really love to do, thinking, research, keeping up with new and exciting ideas and watching the department grow and prosper -- and I'm looking forward to the free parking that apparently one gets."