Vol. 2, Number 4, 2006
Significant Bits
Dear Friends of WPI Computer Science:
Welcome to another issue of Significant Bits. The past academic year was an exciting one for CS. As you’ll see, one of the biggest news items in this issue is the undergraduate program in Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD). It started last August and produced its first graduate in May. (No, he didn’t take a zillion courses this year-he took some IMGD courses when they were offered as an experiment last year and then double-majored this year.)
We’re fortunate to have had Rob Lindeman join us as our newest faculty member and a member of the IMGD team. Read his profile in this issue, and be sure to check out the link to his video.
As you may know, CS departments around the country have been experiencing a drop in majors for several years. The IMGD program has helped our department level off the number of students we teach. The dot-com bust is over (you may quote me on that). I’m now hearing from employers who say their biggest problem is getting enough talented people-this holds for companies from start-ups to Microsoft.
The CS Department had a great year-here are a few highlights:
- Faculty and students earned a number of "Best Paper" awards, led by Professor Mark Claypool, whose work was recognized not once, but twice.
- We graduated several PhDs this year (a record number for our department), which contributed to a WPI record 28 overall. These students were supported as TAs and RAs, and we’ve had great success getting research funds for them.
- We were awarded a record amount of research funds, almost double last year’s total.
- A couple of grants in particular deserve mention: Professor Heffernan’s prestigious NSF CAREER Award for work on learning, and the Department’s Graduate Assistantships in Areas of National Need (GAANN) award for learning and security.
In the spring, WPI held its first Graduate Research Achievement Day (GRAD), at which grad students showed off posters highlighting their research. Guess which department had the most posters? CS, with 27! Congratulations to John Hayward for his 1st-place poster: "Mining Oncology Data: Knowledge Discovery in Clinical Performance of Cancer Patients," and to his advisor, Professor Carolina Ruiz. Congratulations, too, to Fan Wu for his 2nd-place poster: "Wavelet-Based Multiresolution for Mobile Graphics," and to his advisor, Professor Emmanuel Agu.
There are so many more accomplishments, but I don’t have space to list them all. Here are just a few: Professor Kathi Fisler won WPI’s Romeo Moruzzi Young Faculty Award; Professors Mark Claypool and Bob Kinicki won a WPI Teaching Technology Fellowship, joining Professor Karen Lemone, who received a fellowship in 2004; and Women in Computer Science (WICS) got off the ground and established its own lounge in Fuller Labs.
Many alumni, family, and friends stopped by the CS Open House during Homecoming, Saturday, October 7. For those of you who weren’t able attend, you’re welcome to visit us anytime. And, please, do stay in touch!
Michael A. Gennert, Department Head
Recent Activities
New CS Web Site
In September 2005, WPI's Webmaster reported that the CS Department site, now located on the main server, had launched successfully. The site address is unchanged (http://www.cs.wpi.edu/), although some very local pages are still stored at CS. All the html was rewritten and standard sidebar navigation was added. The site was restructured slightly in order to add the "About WPI" content, now standard throughout the university site.
Various color and design combinations were tested with prospective students at the Mass. Academy (the science and math high school affiliated with WPI), and the results indicated that the students liked the clean white look, coupled with more and better photography. We'll add more photography to the site in the future.
Accreditation
We are happy to report that in August 2005 the ABET Computing Accreditation Commission once again accredited our computer science undergraduate degree program- this time until September 2009.
Kudos
In April 2004, Kathi Fisler was awarded WPI's Romeo Moruzzi Young Faculty Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to undergraduate education. Honored for her "brilliant and creative" teaching, Fisler was the driving force behind the new introductory CS curriculum, introduced in 2004. The award is presented in memory of Professor Romeo Moruzzi, a founder of the WPI plan (full details at www.wpi.edu/Campus/Faculty/Awards/Young/).
Several promotions have occurred since the last newsletter: Daniel Dougherty, Robert Kinicki, and Matthew Ward were promoted to full professor; Mark Claypool, Kathi Fisler, Robert Heineman, Carolina Ruiz, and Craig Wills were promoted to associate professor. Fisler was also awarded tenure, in February 2006.
Teaching Technology Fellows
Over the past two years, three CS faculty members have been awarded Teaching Technology Fellowships. The goals of the fellowship program are to improve student learning through the use of technology, increase communication and collaboration among users of IT, build awareness of instructional technologies and their evaluation, and recognize and reward excellence in teaching with technology.
The fellows spend the first year discussing learning strategies, sharing teaching experiences, testing course materials, and developing their respective projects. In the second year, they implement and evaluate their projects, then present their results to the WPI community.
2004-2006 Teaching Technology Fellow:
Karen A. Lemone
Course: Foundations of Computer Science
Project: Create a series of animations to explain difficult mathematical proofs to increase the understanding of these concepts by distance learners.
2005-2007 Teaching Technology Fellows:
Robert Kinicki and Mark Claypool
Course: Computer Networks
Project: Develop a technology-based interface for a laboratory environment that enables students to measure and monitor wireless communications.
For further information: www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/Programs/TTF/.
Newest CS Faculty Member
Rob Lindeman joined the department as an assistant professor in the fall of 2005. Before that, he was an assistant professor in the CS Department at George Washington University. He did his doctoral work in the same department, earning the doctor of science in 1999; his thesis topic dealt with developing and evaluating user interaction techniques for use in immersive virtual environments. He also holds a BA (cum laude) in computer science from Brandeis University and an MS in systems management from the University of Southern California.
"It's exciting to be part of the CS Department," says Rob. "The environment here is squarely focused on quality education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The faculty are genuinely engaged in supporting this mission, and I aim to do the same."
Fields covered by Rob's work include computer graphics, human-computer interaction, and gaming. He started the department's Human Interaction in Virtual Environments (HIVE) lab in order to continue to explore next-generation user interface opportunities for virtual reality and gaming.
"I hope the HIVE will become a hotbed of advanced interaction research," he says, "continuously buzzing with activity (sorry!)."
In addtion, he teaches courses in the IMGD major, and looks forward to working closely with students on projects that push beyond more traditional interface options, such as general purpose game controllers, keyboards, and mice, to provide a more realistic user experience.
Note: Rob was recently interviewed by Discovery Channel Canada for a piece about a virtual feedback vest (TactaVest) that he developed. It was shown on May 26, 2006, on the Daily Planet program. Additional details about the TactaVest can be found at www.cs.wpi.edu/~gogo/hive/.
Recent CS PhDs
Janet Burge, "Software Engineering Using Design RATionale (SEURAT)." Advisor: Dave Brown. Now at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio.
Li Chen, "Semantic Caching for XML Queries." Advisor: Elke A. Rundensteiner;. Now at San Diego Supercomputer Center.
Songting Chen, "Efficient Incremental View Maintenance for Data Warehousing." Advisor: Elke A. Rundensteiner. Now at NEC Research Lab, USA.
Jae Won Chung, "Congestion Control for Streaming Media." Advisor: Mark L. Claypool. Now at Airvana.
Maged F. El-Sayed, "Incremental Maintenance of Materialized XQuery Views," Advisor: Elke A. Rundensteiner. Now at Arab Academy for Science and Technology, Egypt.
Bin Liu, "Scalable Integration View Computation and Maintenance with Parallel, Adaptive and Grouping Techniques." Advisor: Elke A. Rundensteiner. Now at Investoday Corp., Shenzhen, China.
Hao Shang, "Exploiting Flow Relationships to Improve the Performance of Distributed Applications." Advisor: Craig E. Wills.
Hong Su, "Automaton Meets Algebra: A Hybrid Paradigm for Efficiently Processing XQuery over XML Stream." Advisor: Elke A. Rundensteiner. Now at Oracle Corp., USA.
Huahui Wu, "ARMOR: Adjusting Repair and Media Scaling with Operations Research for Streaming Video." Co- Advisors: Mark L. Claypool, Robert Kinicki.
Jing Yang, "A General Framework for Multi-Resolution Visualization." Advisor: Matt Ward. Now at University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
Iain Mackinnon Boyle (Manufacturing Engineering), "CAFixD: A Case-Based Reasoning Method for Fixture Design." Advisors: Yiming Rong (Mfg), David Brown (CS).
Editorial Appointments
Professor David Brown has been appointed for a second term as the editor in chief of the Cambridge University Press journal AIEDAM: Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing. He is also a member of the International Editorial Board of the new Journal of Designing in China.
Professor Craig Wills, an associate editor of the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
Professor Elke Rundensteiner, an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
Professor David Finkel, an editorial advisory board member for Campus-Wide Information Systems
Sabbaticals
Micha Hofri, visiting Project ALGO, INRIA, in Rocquencourt, France (2005-06)
Carolina Ruiz, visiting local sites (2005-06)
Craig Wills, visiting faculty member at Network Management Technology Group, Cisco Systems, Boxborough, Mass. (2004-05)
David Brown, visiting the Engineering Design and Methodology Institute at the Technical University Berlin, Germany, and the Engineering Design Center, Cambridge University, UK (2004-05)
Recent Grants
June 2006 Craig Wills (with Michael Rabinovich of Case-Western Reserve), "CSRPDOS: Virtual Machines Meet Application Clusters: A Highly Responsive Global Utility Computing Platform for Internet Applications." Sponsor: NSF. $238,380 over three years.
May 2006 Elke Rundensteiner, Murali Mani, George Heineman, "High Performance Infrastructure for Data-Intensive Stream Processing Techniques" (equipment award). Sponsor: NSF. $100,000
April 2006 Matthew Ward, Emmanuel Agu, Neil Heffernan, George Heineman, "Fellowships in Computer Science to Support the Learning Sciences and Security (GAANN)." Sponsor: U.S. Department of Education. $804,940 over three years.
September 2005 Matthew Ward, Elke Rundensteiner, "Quality-Aware Visual Exploration Tools." Sponsor: NSF. $360,000 over 3 years.
April 2005 Neil Heffernan, "CAREER award: Learning about Learning." Sponsor: NSF. $613,075 over five years.
April 2005 Elke Rundensteiner, Murali Mani, "Automaton Meets Algebra: Towards an XML-Centric Stream Query System." Sponsor: NSF. $360,000 over three years.
April 2005 Gabor Sarkozy, "Extremal Problems in Graph Theory." Sponsor: NSF. $62,160 over three years.
February 2005 Matthew Ward, "Clutter Measurement and Reduction for Enhanced Information Visualization." Sponsor: Air Force Research Lab. $75,865.
July 2004 Kathi Fisler, "Collaborative Research: Compositional Verification of Software Product Lines as Open Systems," Sponsor: NSF. $134,000 over two years.
January 2004 Neil Heffernan, Grant to test a computer instructional math program that will help Worcester middle school students prepare for the MCAS math exams. Sponsor: U.S. Department of Education. $1.4 million over four years.
Awards for Publications
January 2006 Mark Claypool, Kajal Claypool, Feissal Dama, "The Effects of Frame Rate and Resolution on Users Playing First Person Shooter Games," Best Paper Award at the ACM/SPIE Multimedia Computing and Networking (MMCN) Conference, San Jose, Calif.
October 2005 Mark Claypool, "On the 802.11 Turbulence of Nintendo DS and Sony PSP Hand-held Network Games," Best Paper Award, Fourth ACM Network and System Support for Games (NetGames), Hawthorne, N.Y.
September 2005 Karen Lemone, "Analyzing Cultural Influences on E-Learning Transactional Issues," Outstanding Paper Award, E-Learn 2005 (only 10 of 800 submissions received the award)
September 2004 Leena Razzaq (CS graduate student advised by Neil Heffernan), Best Poster Award, Intelligent Tutoring Systems Conference, Brazil.
September 2004 Iain M. Boyle, Kevin Rong, David C. Brown, "CAFixD: A Casebased Reasoning Fixture Design Method: Framework and Indexing Mechanisms," Best Paper Award, Computers In Engineering Conference: ASME Design Technical Conferences, Salt Lake City
Did You Know...
- During the last 12 months, CS researchers have received over $1.7 million in funding-the third highest department total at WPI.
- Professor Stanley Selkow recently celebrated his 25th year at WPI. Stanley has been teaching theory, algorithms, and basketball to two generations of WPI students. Over his tenure at WPI, he has played approximately 2,500 hours of basketball. He has now added to his repertoire by becoming a department soccer star, along with Emmanuel Agu, Bob Kinicki, and Rob Lindeman.
- If you Google the names of the WPI CS faculty, you will get over 750,000 results back: even if you restrict common names to include initials. This is over 30,000 hits per faculty member! When you change the search to Google Scholars, the results whittle down to 2,755. Makes you wonder... what do all the other links point to?
- The CS department awarded seven PhDs in 2005-06. That’s more than any other department at WPI. Professor David Brown was also an advisor for a PhD in Manufacturing Engineering- make that 7.5 PhDs.
- 38 MQPs, involving 77 students, were presented to the CS faculty in April (13 were externally sponsored).
- Last year the CS Department went through over 30,000 gallons of bottled water, 924 pots of coffee, 360 cups of cocoa, and 624 cups of tea. We are a well-fuelled department!
Let Us Hear From You
We want to hear from CS alumni. We'll try to include selected information in every newsletter. Contact us via e-mail or real mail. Please let us know of any changes to your address as soon as possible, so that we can keep you informed about the department.
Here's some of the news...
Owen Murphy '81 is professor and chair of the Department of Information Science at the College of Information Science and Systems Engineering, University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
Stephanos Bacon '88 is vice president for product development at IONA Technologies Inc. He joined IONA as vice president, product development, in 2005. Before that, he served as vice president, engineering, for Avaki Corporation.
Naresh Bala '89 was an AI student, with Lee Becker as his advisor. After working in this country for a long time, he ran a company in India and is now a management consultant running courses in Bangalore; his hypothesis is that due to the IT boom there are many more new, young managers who need good advice about how to do the job well. He speaks highly of WPI CS, and sends his regards to those who may remember him. He's still in touch with Kamran Jazayeri, another active student from those days.
Al Grasso '93 is MITRE executive vice president and director of the Department of Defense Command Control Communications and Intelligence Federally Funded Research and Development Center (www.mitre.org/about/officers/grasso.html).
Bob Mason '94 is vice president, technology, at Brightcove in Cambridge, Mass., an on-demand Internet TV service. He has just been appointed to the WPI CS Department Advisory Board.
Peter Bastien '96 died in March 2005 while hiking in Big Bend National Park. Some of you may remember Peter, who earned his MS in CS from WPI in 1996.
Carla (Caputo) Modderno '96 recently passed away after suffering from leukemia. Carla worked at EMC and is remembered by all as a great student and one of the nicest people you could ever meet. Ironically, Carla completed her MQP with Lee Becker, who died in 2004 after a 14-month battle with leukemia.
Matt Young '00 is at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash., where he has been promoted to a manager. He is married and has a six-month-old. Matt says great things about his WPI education ("The whole project-based education pays off in spades," he notes) and would like to hire more of our grads.
Brad Snow CS/EE '01 is also at Microsoft, where he has been since the fall of 2005, and was recently seen on campus recruiting for his employer.
Paul Leemans '01 joined Philips in January 2006 after nearly seven years at KPMG. He is a project manager, Internet, within corporate IT in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
Esteban Burbano de Lara '02 reports that he misses WPI and wants everyone to know he started his own business intelligence company in Ecuador, where he has partnered with IBM and Business Objects. The company has been going for close to three years, and is growing. Esteban expects to expand to the Colombian market and, with luck, to the region in general.
IMGD
In the fall of 2005, the proposal by a group of faculty from Computer Science and Humanities and Arts for a new major, Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD), was approved (see www.wpi.edu/+imgd). Students focus on the development of interactive media and computer games- both the technical (programming) aspects and the artistic (art, music, story).
As of February 2006, IMGD had 59 majors; however, since the program is so new, there have been only two graduates: one artistic, one technical. At the beginning of A-Term, there were 36 confirmed majors, and a projected steady state of 200 in two or three years.
At left is the cover shot for the Summer 2004 issue of Transformations. The accompanying story is at www.wpi.edu/News/Transformations/2004Summer/gameplan.html.
Professor Mark Claypool's book, Networking and Online Games: Understanding and Engineering Multiplayer Internet Games, was published recently (Wiley, June 2006); co-authors are Grenville Armitage and Philip Branch. The book argues that the computer game industry is clearly growing in the direction of multiplayer, online games; that understanding the demands of games on IP networks is essential for ISP engineers to develop appropriate services; and that knowledge of the underlying network's capabilities is vital for game developers.
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Last modified: February 01, 2012 15:18:17