News Archive Fall 2002

Just The Headlines

The News (headlines with text)

Schneider to Head Cybersecurity Institute  Date: Monday, December 23, 2002. Professor Fred Schneider has been named the chief scientist at the Griffiss Institute for Information Assurance. The Institute was started in September with the aim of ensuring the security of information systems. It will be a joint endeavor between private-sector companies, local economic development groups and colleges, universities and research institutions. Additionally, Computing and Information Science (CIS) dean, Robert Constable, has been named to the institute's board of directors. For more information please read the Cornell Chronicle article at http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/02/12.5.02/Schneider-cybersecurity.html

Cornell researchers help develop National Educational Resource.  Date: Monday, December 03, 2002. Cornell University researchers are responsible for the digital framework of the new National Science Digital Library (NSDL). The project, funded by the National Science Foundation and worked on by top researches and educators across the country, could revolutionize the way students and educators research math and science. The Library is to be used by educators and students from Kindergarten to Graduate school. The NSDL is located at www.nsdl.org. For more detailed description of the program please refer to the Ithaca Journal article on the subject.

Omar Khan '03 Wins Top Research Award Date: Monday, December 2, 2003. Cornell is once again home to a winner of the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award. Omar Khan '03, a senior computer science major, was named as the top male research student in the nation among a field of the best undergraduate researchers around the country. Runners up for this prestigious award included outstanding students from a large field of well-known research schools. 

In 2002, Cornell computer science major Allegra Angus '02 won the top CRA Award for undergraduate women in the field. 

Khan worked with Professor's Bart Selman and John Hopcroft on research involving the clustering of temporal networks. He has also been involved with Virtual Worlds research at the Cornell Theory Center and has held summer research positions at McGill University and Xerox PARC. Kahn was a 2002 Winner of the Frank and Rosa Rhodes Award at Cornell which recognizes academic excellence and leadership. He is ranked number one in this year's class nearly 700 graduating engineers.

For more information about this award, please visit:

http://www.cra.org/Activities/awards/undergrad/home.html

Joe Halpern has been made a Fellow of the ACM Date: Monday, December 2, 2002 "For fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures." The ACM Fellows Program was established by Council in 1993 to recognize and honor outstanding ACM members for their achievements in computer science and information technology and for their significant contributions to the mission of the ACM. The ACM Fellows serve as distinguished colleagues to whom the ACM and its members look for guidance and leadership as the world of information technology evolves.

Cornell Team wins ACM Regional Contest Date: Wednesday, November 13, 2002. Two teams of Cornell students competed in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Greater New York Programming Contest. 52 teams competed in the contest held November 3, 2002 at Columbia University. The first place team, consisting of Cornell CS majors' Lars Backstrom ('04), Bill Barksdale ('05), and Michael Connor ('04), will advance to the finals this spring in Beverly Hills, California. Each first place winner will receive a $3,000 scholarship and a digital camera thanks to the contest's sponsors, IBM and Barclay’s Capital Management.  In sixth place was Cornell's team consisting of Ang Pet Chean (CS '05), Ara Hayrapetyan  (CS Ph.D.), and Jacob Hoffman-Andrews (CS '03).  The teams were coached by Hubie Chen, David Kempe, and Martin Pal and sponsored by Greenhills Software.  For more information about the contest, visit: www.acmgnyr.org/

NBA 601 starts open enrolment for non-MBA students Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2002.  NBA 601, Electronic Commerce, has been opened up to non-MBA students during preregistration for the first time this year. In past years non-MBA students have had to wait until January to register for NBA 601. Graduate students, seniors and juniors are welcome.

Yannis Vetsikas Wins First Place in the T.A.C. Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2002.  Yannis Vetsikas, a Cornell Ph.D. student working on multi-agent systems under Professor Bart Selman, won the Trading Agent Competition with his agent ‘whitebear.’  The TAC was held as part of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference this past August.  Programs competed by bidding in over 25 simultaneous electronic auctions; this platform was used to study e-commerce systems.  Vetsikas beat out teams from 18 other labs and schools, including AT&T Labs and Brown University.  For more details about the competition, see: http://www.sics.se/tac/ and http://www.sics.se/tac/tac02results.php

Selman named AAAS Fellow Date: Monday, October 28, 2002.  Associate Professor of Computer Science, Bart Selman, has recently been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributions to advances in knowledge, representation, planning, and reasoning in artificial intelligence.  AAAS Fellows are selected by their peers in recognition of outstanding efforts to advance science and its applications.  The recipient of a NSF Career Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Professor Selman worked as a principal scientist at AT&T Bell Labs before joining the Cornell CS faculty in 1997.  For more on AAAS Fellows in Cornell and beyond, see: http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Oct02/AAAS.fellows.deb.html and http://www.aaas.org/about/aaas_fellows/

Huttenlocher Elected to Endowed Chair Date: Thursday , October 10, 2002.   Professor Dan Huttenlocher was elected the first John P. and Rilla Neafsey Professor of Computing and Information Science and Business.  The professorship is supported by the Neafsey Endowment Fund, and encourages interdisciplinary cooperation between CIS and the Johnson Graduate School of Management.  Recipient of numerous awards, including the 1992 ACSU Faculty of the Year Award, Professor Huttenlocher is also a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and will teach a new course in spring 2003 at the Johnson School about the strategic role of information technology in business.  For more on Professor Huttenlocher’s appointment, see: http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/02/10.10.02/endowed_chairs.html

Fall 2002 ACSU Programming Contest Results  Date: Wednesday, October 2, 2002. The Fall 2002 ACSU Programming contest, held on Sunday, September 29, produced record-breaking results. Mike Conner, '04, was the first person in the history of the contest to finish all six questions; a feat he managed with an hour and forty minutes to spare. The remaining four of the top five contestants were Bill Barksdale, '05, Ang Pet Chean, 05, Saikat Guha, '03, and Lars Backstrom, '04. 22 students participated in the contest. For more information about the ACSU Programming contest, visit http://www.cs.cornell.edu/kempe/contest/

CIS Prof Ginsparg Wins 'Genius' Award  Date: Thursday, September 26, 2002.  Computing and Information Science(CIS)/Physics professor, Paul Ginsparg, has been named a 2002 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. He was awarded the five year grant for his creation of the online system for distributing scientific research results known as "arXiv.org".  The foundation's announcement noted that "Ginsparg has deliberately transformed the way physics gets done – challenging conventional standards for review and communication of research and thereby changing the speed and mode of dissemination of scientific advances."  For more information, visit: http://www.macfound.org/programs/fel/2002fellows/ginsparg_paul.htm and http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/02/9.26.02/Ginsparg.html

Rob Ryan, CU Entrepreneur of the Year, Lectures During Homecoming   Date: Thursday, September 26, 2002 . Rob Ryan ’69 was honored during Homecoming weekend as Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year for 2002, selected by University alumni, faculty, and students.  Ryan is the founder of Entrepreneur America and Ascend Communications, his start-up company that was acquired by Lucent Technologies in 1999 in one of the largest technology mergers ever.  He said, “I wanted to give something back, to America, to the fellowship of entrepreneurs, to my community and to Cornell.”  For more on Ryan and his time at Cornell, see: http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Sept02/Entrepreneur.of.the.Year.html

$60 Million Supercomputer Project   Date: Friday, August 9, 2002.  The Cornell Theory Center for advanced computing, will receive $60 million (US) dollars to develop supercomputers using technology from Dell Computer Corp., Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.  The Center's director, Thomas Coleman affirmed that the agreement to get resources from the companies will allow the Center to double the size of its supercomputing “cluster” system, which already runs on servers, chips and software made by the three, and develop more affordable supercomputing systems.  The resulting supercomputing research hopes to demonstrate to companies, government agencies, and academic institutions how to expand technical computing environments, comprised solely of economical industry components. For more information, visit: http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/02/8.15.02/CTC-hiperf.html

Bergmark wins best paper at ACM/IEEE Digital Library Conference  Date: Tuesday, August 6, 2002.  Digital Library Research Group member, Donna Bergmark, received the Vannevar Bush Award for Best Paper at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference in Digital Libraries in Portland, Oregon in July. Her paper, Collection Synthesis, describes her research on focused web crawling as a means of automatically synthesizing document collections from resources on the Web. This research continues with another paper that has been accepted at the European Digital Library Conference in Rome in September. For more information on the winning paper, see: http://mercator.comm.nsdlib.org/CollectionBuilding/bergmark-paper.pdf

Big Red Team Wins RoboCup Finals   Date: Friday, June 26, 2002. Led by faculty advisor, Professor Raffaello D'Andrea, Cornell's Big Red team won the 2002 RoboCup small-size robot soccer league championship in Fukuoka, Japan. The Big Red beat out Germany's Freie Universität (FU) Fighters 7-2 during the finals, making this Cornell's third RoboCup championship win in the past four years.  Student team members included CS Undergrads: Joel Chestnutt ('02), Varun Ganapathi ('04), Evan Kuhn ('02),William Stokes ('02), Zennard Sun ('04), and Ying Yu Tan ('04). For more about this year's competition and the Robocup project, see: http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/June02/RoboCup2002.bpf.html

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Last updated February 11, 2003. For more information email us at ugrad@cs.cornell.edu .