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The News (headlines with text)
Date: Monday, November 29, 1999. This past Friday, November 26th, William Chan lost his life in a car accident while travelling to Oregon to visit his fiancee. When he graduated from Cornell in 1994, Woon Chung "William" Chan was at the top of his class in Engineering and CS. He had defended his PhD dissertation at the University of Washington only a week before his accident. William was recently hired by Brown University to join their faculty of Computer Science. He had a passion for photography and some of his work is posted the web.Class of 1994 Grads Sell Company for $100 Million
Date: Wednesday, November 10, 1999. Two former CS undergraduates from Cornell have sold their company, The Theory Center, Inc., to BEA Systems for approximately $100 million in stock and cash. John Belizaire '94, MEng '95 and Julian Pelenur '94, MEng '95 started the Theory Center in 1998 and their company quickly became a leading provider of Java Beans (software components that allow companies to quickly build and extend mission-critical solutions for e-business).The Theory Center, a privately held, Boston-based software development firm, is primarily focused on creating Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) component solutions that enable companies to quickly turn their e-commerce visions into revenue-generating reality. Under the terms of the agreement, BEA will integrate The Theory Center's executive management and staff of 42 into BEA's operations. (BEA press release on the merger)
Cornell Team Wins ACM Regional Contest
Date: Monday, November 8, 1999. On Sunday, students from Cornell took both first and second place in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Greater New York Regional Programming Contest held at the US Military Academy, West Point, NY. The first place team included Hubie Chen, a first-year PhD student in CS, Gun Srijuntongsiri, '02, and Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, '03. The second place team members were Kang-Hoe Kim, a first-year PhD student, Jed Liu, '01, and Joel Chestnutt, '02. The first place team will compete in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals, to be held in Orlando, Florida in March 2000.The undergraduates on Cornell's teams are either CS majors or underclassmen who plan to major in CS. Over 2300 teams of students compete in similar regional events worldwide. Of those, a total of fifty-eight teams will advance to the World Finals. The top ten teams at the World Finals will be awarded scholarships and other prizes.
The ACM collegiate programming contest, sponsored by IBM, is in its 24th year. Cornell teams have participated since the early 1990's, and have won the Regional Contest once before, in 1998. This year's teams were coached by Adam Florence and David Kempe, both Ph.D. students in CS. The teams were sponsored by Green Hills Software, Inc., Santa Barbara, CA. This posting was submitted in part by Adam Florence, who can be reached via email at: aflorenc@cs.cornell.edu
The Jonathan E. Marx Cornell Tradition Fellowships Date: Monday, November 1, 1999. The Jonathan E. Marx Memorial Fund, from which the Jonathan E. Marx Cornell Tradition Fellowships will be awarded, was created to pay tribute to the June 1985 computer science graduate who died on July 9, 1985 in an unfortunate skiing accident. The Fund was established by Cornell and Jonathan’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Alan Marx. He will be remembered as an enthusiastic and warm member of the Cornell community who was an active member of the ACSU, a member of Sigma Pi, a tutor for the mathematics department and a grader and consultant for CS482. Up to four Jonathan E. Marx Cornell Tradition Fellowships of up to $3,500 each will be awarded for the 2000-2001 academic year. To be eligible, students must i) be a computer science major, ii) qualify for financial aid, iii) have a loan component in their financial aid package, and iv) demonstrate a commitment to work, scholarship and leadership activities.Recipients of the awards will be selected by members of the Cornell Tradition Staff, the Department of Computer Science, and the Marx family. The names of the recipients will be announced at the Computer Science graduation reception following Commencement. Applications may be picked up after December 1, 1999 from the Cornell Tradition Office, 107 Day Hall. The application deadline is March 1, 2000. The Difference Between CS 409 and 410 Date: Thursday, October 28, 1999. With CS 410 no longer being offered after Summer 2000 and some CS majors not being able to take it in its new time slot, we want to make it clear that 409 is a perfectly acceptable alternative if taken during the spring 2000 semester. "What's the difference between 409 and 410," you ask? CS409 is a course on data structures and algorithms directed at those who are in application areas. There is considerable overlap between the content of CS409 and CS410. Since CS409 was designed for non-CS majors, the examples are chosen to illustrate the use of various data structures and are primarily from application fields outside of computer science. CS409 spends less time than CS410 on certain topics, e.g., sorting and graph algorithms. However, it contains some material that does not usually appear in CS410, e.g. geometric data structures, very large data sets, and the use of randomness. If you are planning to major in CS and are not sure whether you should be taking CS 410 (or 409), you should check out: Change in the CS Core-Course Requirement. Kleinberg Wins Packard Fellowship Date: Wednesday, October 27, 1999. Professor Jon Kleinberg has been selected as a 1999 Packard Fellow. The Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering allow the nation's most promising young professors to pursue their science and engineering research with few funding restrictions and limited paperwork requirements. Every year, the Packard Foundation's Fellowship Advisory Panel, made up of distinguished scientists and engineers, invites the presidents of 50 universities to nominate two young professors each from their institutions. Nominations are carefully reviewed by the panel, which selects 24 Fellows to receive individual grants of $125,000 annually for five consecutive years. Professor Kleinberg is a former CS undergraduate major from Cornell who went on to complete his doctoral studies at M.I.T. Kleinberg is known for his work in Theory and Algorithms. COM S 314 Schedule Change for Spring 2000 Date: Friday, October 22, 1999. Beginning Spring 2000, COM S 314 and ELE E 314 will be cross-listed. The course will meet at the traditional EE time rather than the traditional CS time. Please refer to the Spring 2000 Course and Time Roster for complete scheduling details.COM S 410 Time Change for Spring 2000
Date: Friday, October 22, 1999. Because the original meeting time of COM S 410 created conflicts for a number of students, the time has been changed to TR 2:55-4:10pm. If the original time - TR 8:40-9:55 - is preferable, students may opt to take COM S 409 (Data Structures for Computational Science) instead. For Spring 2000 only, CS majors can substitute CS 409 for the CS 410 requirement.COM S 417/418 Time and Content Change for Spring 2000
Date: Friday, October 22, 1999. CS 417 and 418 will be meeting at new times in the spring. In addition, the course description is new. Please refer to the Spring 2000 Course and Time Roster and CS 417 summary page for further details. Please note that CS majors and other students wanting to take advanced graphics courses in the future are required to take CS 418 as well as CS 417.Greenhills Software Gives $1,250 to Sponsor Teams
Date: Monday, October 18, 1999. Greenhills Software of Santa Barbara, California has once again agreed to sponsor Cornell's programming teams in the Fall 1999 ACM Regional Programming Contest (see story below). Last year Greenhills sponsored a Cornell team that won the regional contest and went on to the world finals in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. In it's first ever showing in the finals, Cornell placed 18th out of 62 teams. The team members were David Kempe, a first-year doctoral student in CS, Erik Dangremond '99, a senior in CS,and Mike Smullens '00, a junior in biology. The team was coached by doctoral student Adam Florence. The Greenhills gift will be used to cover entry fees, pizza for training sessions, as well as travel and lodging for the teams.CU Programming Teams to Storm West Point
Date: Monday, October 18, 1999. Two programming teams from Cornell will travel to the US Military Academy in West Point, NY on Sunday, Nov 7th to participate in this year's regional ACM Programming Contest. 39 teams from 21 schools in portions of NY, NJ, and CT will be participating. The winner of the contest will go on to the international competition in Orlando, FL on March 18, 2000. 56 teams will be at the international finals. This year's team is once again being coached by CS doctoral student Adam Florence. The local contest web site is: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/acm. The international contest web site is: http://acm.baylor.edu.Course Changes: 211, 212, and 410
Date: Thursday, October 14, 1999. We have made some course changes that you should know about:1. The CS 211 prerequisite of CS 100 will now specify a course in Java or C++. What this means is that students attempting to get transfer credit for CS 100 will need a qualified course (must include object oriented programming) in Java or C++. The AP College Board Exam in CS is given in C++, so it will still meet our CS 100 requirement and will serve as an adequate prerequisite for CS 211.
2. We will now require all CS majors to take both CS 211 *and* CS 212 (they used to be functional equivalents). Link to this document if you want to know more about this change.
3. CS 410 "Data Structures" will not be offered after Summer 2000. It will no longer be required for CS majors (see document). A similiar course for non-CS majors will continue to be offered. Currently we are offering this course as CS 409 and it will be taught in the spring.
CS Major Wins
$3,000 IBM Research Award
Date:
Monday, October 11, 1999.
The Cornell Theory Center (CTC) today announced
that CS major Warren Andrew Menzer '00 is the winner of the second annual
IBM Undergraduates in Computational Science Award. Menzer wins this prize for his
development of a tool to visualize complex socioeconomic data. Made possible through IBM's
endowment of a partial fellowship, the award supports outstanding students of computer and
computational science at Cornell University.
Menzer received the $3,000 award for his exceptional research and as an incentive to
continue on to graduate school. Working with Professor James Pratt of the Cornell Program
on Dairy Markets and Policy, Menzer constructed a visual program used to analyze data on
dairy market behavior. According to Pratt, "Warren is able to easily and adeptly
apply his skills to bridge the gap between the social scientist and complex computer
graphics."
Menzer created a software tool, based on IBM's Visualization Data Explorer software (now
OpenDX), and customized a graphical interface for social scientists in Pratt's group using
this complex scientific visualization tool.
Nominations for the IBM Undergraduates in Computational Science Award can be submitted by
any member of the Cornell Faculty. To be considered for this award, a student must be an
undergraduate at the time the award is made and must be doing research in computational
science. Computational science can be broadly defined as the search for the solution to
scientific and engineering problems through the use of computing and related technologies.
The winner of the award is selected by members of CTC's executive committee. (complete article)
Cornell Financial Solutions Center Established in NYC
Date: Wednesday, September 22, 1999. Silicon Graphics, Inc. and Cornell University today announced the opening of the first Financial Industry Solutions Center (FISC), a joint venture dedicated to helping the financial community solve their most challenging computational problems in risk management, financial engineering and business intelligence. With the participation of world-class software developers and solutions providers, FISC is a resource and partner for financial corporations worldwide offering hands-on evaluation and testing of technologies, customized solutions and onsite consultation for software optimization.NSF Awards $1.5 Million for Pingali Project on Simulation Tools
Date: Wednesday, September 8, 1999. Cornell University announced today $1.5 million funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a two-tiered facility that will help researchers working on multiscale problems in materials science and molecular biology. The goal of this project is to develop the scalable hardware and software systems needed to allow researchers to zoom in and out on a simulation of a cracking piston or a folding protein. Teams of computer scientists and visualization researchers from around the country working on this project will concentrate on enabling infrastructure technologies to ease the transition from desktop to supercomputer."We are charged with developing the simulation tools of the 21st century," said principal investigator Keshav Pingali. Pingali, a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, will oversee development of parallel software that will be used on commodity-based cluster computing systems at Cornell, the University of Delaware, and Notre Dame. This work, being performed jointly with Tony Ingraffea's Cornell Fracture Group in the Department of Civil Engineering and Ron Elber's Computational Biology Group in the Computer Science Department, has already attracted more than $5 million funding from the NSF through a CCISE grant and a KDI grant. (complete article)
Constable Named Dean of Computing and Information Science
Date: Thursday, September 2, 1999. Professor Robert Constable was selected earlier this summer to head up a new University-level administrative structure which is being called a "Faculty of Information Science". As dean of this structure, Constable will report directly to the Provost. The Department of Computer Science will form the hub of the new structure but other significant partnerships have already been forged with the Program of Computer Graphics, The Center for Applied Mathematics and the Theory Center. (for related information see Cornell Chronicle article, or previous posting about "New Age of CS Education and Research at Cornell".) Date: Wednesday, September 1, 1999. To all CS Majors who are interested in pursuing Departmental Honors: We have made a slight change to the honors requirement. Effective January 2000, we will now allow Honors courses to be used as Technical Electives. Honors courses may not be used as CS Electives, the Math Elective, or any courses in the Specialization.For more information about Honors see:
Arts - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Ugrad/Arts.html#Honors
Engr - http://www.cs.cornell.edu/Ugrad/Engineering.html#Honors
COM S 517 Added to Fall '99 Course Line-up
Date: Tuesday, August 31, 1999. For Fall '99, ARCH 476.6 (Special Topics in Computer Graphics) is cross-listed with COM S 517 (Advanced Rendering Seminar). The course is being taught by Don Greenberg and meets Tuesdays 2:30-4:25 in Rhodes 551.Cornell Robots Win World Soccer Title
Date: Thursday, August 12, 1999. A team of Cornell University students and faculty advisors became champions of world robot "soccer" last week when they beat a highly regarded German team 15-0 in the finals in Stockholm, Sweden. The event, called the Robot World Cup Initiative, familiarly known as RoboCup, pits teams of tiny but incredibly smart robots against each other. In the final, Cornell's team -- the first the university has fielded in the 3-year-old competition -- played the FU-Fighters from the Free University of Berlin in a match carried live on Swedish television and streamed live on the World Wide Web. The Big Red was competing in the "small" league, in which robots are about 6 inches in diameter and the playing field is the size of a regulation table-tennis surface.Cluster Generates 122 Billion CPS
Date: Wednesday, August 11, 1999. The Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium at Cornell recently installed a state-of-the-art, 256-processor cluster at the Cornell Theory Center. The $3 million upgrade to Cornell's super computing center contains 64 Dell PowerEdge servers, each equipped with four Intel Pentium processors running on Windows NT. According to David Lifka, Theory Center Director of Systems, this is "the largest cluster of this sort in the world, for a minimal amount of money, and just as powerful as any other super computer." Providing hardward, software and technical support were consortium partners Dell, Intel and Microsoft. (taken from an article by Missy Globerman in the August 11, 1999 Ithaca Journal. For more information see press release).New Course in Computational Biology
Date: Tuesday, July 27, 1999. COM S 221, Numerical Methods in Computational Molecular Biology, will be offered for the first time this fall. Instructors Ron Elber and Charlie VanLoan are very excited about offering this new interdisciplinary course to the science community. Registration information is listed in the on-line roster. Date: Tuesday, July 27, 1999. COM S 519, Engineering Computer Networks, will not be taught during the Fall '99 semester. Date: Tuesday, July 27, 1999. At the department's annual award ceremony in May, ten undergrads were recognized for their outstanding contributions as course consultants and undergrad TAs. These students provide an invaluable service to both the teaching staff and the students enrolled in computer science courses. The 1998-99 award winners are Michael Babish (CS 211), Brandon Bray (CS 212), Po Chen (CS 100), Paul Coleman (CS 211), Yan Estrada (CS 100), David Liben-Nowell (CS 212), Teresa Liou (CS 100), Mike Napoleone (CS 100), Kevin Neijstrom (CS 100), and Daniel Spoonhower (CS 130).