December 2007

INI student Hirokazu Sasamoto and alumnus Eiji Hayashi receieved acceptance of "Undercover: Authentication Usable in Front of Prying Eyes" as a full paper at ACM CHI 2008.

BME Ph.D. student Arielle Drummond has been selected by the Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference as its Student Leadership honoree. This honor will be conferred at the BEYA Conference in Baltimore, MD during February 13 -17, 2008.

EPP alumna Felicia Wu was awarded the prestigious Chauncey Starr Award from the Society for Risk Analysis. At 31, she is the youngest-ever recipient of the award, which is given annually to an outstanding risk analyst age 40 or under.


November 2007

ECE faculty members Gary Fedder, Alex Hills, Roy Maxion, and Jimmy Zhu were elected as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellows, while Donald Thomas became an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow and Greg Ganger and Raj Rajkumar were appointed Distinguished Engineers of the ACM. Rajkumar was also promoted to Senior Member of the IEEE.


CIT students from BME, ChemE, ECE, and MechE were awarded SURG grants for Spring 2008.


University Professor Mark Kryder has received a Public Service Medal from the President of Singapore for helping to establish the Data Storage Institute (DSI).


ECE Emeritus Professor Stanley Charap was selected for the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Data Storage Device Technology Award. His citation was "for quantative prediction of the superparamagnetic limit for magnetic recording." The award, sponsored by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies and one of the IEEE's most prestigious honors, is presented for "outstanding contributions to the advancement of information storage with emphasis on technical contributions in computer data storage device technology."


Carnegie Mellon's Society of Women Engineers (SWE) won the third place 2007 Outstanding Collegiate Section Award, Medium Section.

A paper written by ECE Associate Professor Radu Marculescu and his former graduate student Jingcao Hu has been selected for a book featuring the most influential work over the 10 years of the Design Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) conference.


The Chemical Engineering Chem-E-Car team took second place in the national Chem-E-Car competition at the AIChE national meeting in Salt Lake City.

October 2007

ICES Research Professor Asim Smailagic, Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute Dan Siewiorek, and Pitt Psychology Professor Thomas Kamarck have received press coverage on the online news sources ScienceDaily and EurekAlert for their work studying the effectiveness of the eWatch, a wrist-mounted instrument for measuring psychosocial stress exposure during the course of daily life. The eWatch is a multisensor package about the size of a large wristwatch and was developed by Professors Smailagic and Siewiorek. Professors Smailagic, Siewiorek and Kamarck have received a $426,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the first year of their four-year project, which is part of a larger NIH initiative to study environmental factors that people encounter every day that may increase their risk for certain diseases.


ECE and CS Professor Rob Rutenbar and ECE Ph.D. student Amith Singhee won the 2007 Best Paper Award at the Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE) conference.


MechE Department Head, Professor Nadine Aubry, will be honored for her election to the rank of Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) at the Association's Annual Meeting, which will take place in Boston next February. She was awarded this distinction "for distinguished contributions to the field of fluid dynamics, particularly turbulence and micro flows, and as an education leader in mechanical engineering."


ECE and CS Professor Takeo Kanade is the 2007 recipient of the Okawa Prize, which is sponsored by the Japan-based Okawa Foundation for Information and Telecommunications.


Allen Robinson, professor of MechE and EPP, is receiving $1.65 million to conduct research on new chemical processes that transform emissions in the atmosphere. The funding includes a $600,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a $750,000 grant from the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), and a $300,000 grant from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).


Edward S. Rubin, the Alumni Professor of Environmental Engineering and Science, and a professor in the departments of Engineering and Public Policy and Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, was among the scientists honored for his contribution to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which recently won the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize. Professor Rubin served as a coordinator and lead author of the IPCC’s “Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage.’’  That  report established the major role this technology could play in mitigating global climate change.


Anastasia Ailamaki, associate professor of CS and ECE, is one of 20 scientists chosen for this year's highy selective European Young Investigator (EURYI) Awards.


Professor of EPP and ECE Marja Ilic gave the keynote address at a workshop held during the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC 2007) October 7-10.


In "From Nerd to Wonk," IEEE's October 8th Spectrum featured the EPP program, its head, Granger Morgan, and alumnus Paul Parformak.


Dean Khosla has been elected to the board of directors at BitArmor, a leader in data control software that helps corporate executives protect and manage sensitive data throughout their organizations.


Larry Pileggi, Tanoto Professor of ECE, received the 2007 Richard Newton GSRC Industrial Impact Award, which acknowledges work from the DARPA/MARCO Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC)


ECE faculty members Shawn Blanton and Philip Koopman were named senior members of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). They are two of only 57 recipients worldwide to achieve senior member status in 2007.

September 2007

ECE Department Head T.E. (Ed) Schlesinger has been invited to serve on the International Advisory Panel of Singapore's Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) Graduate Academy. The A*STAR Graduate Academy was set up in 2003 to nurture and develop Singapore's R&D human capital through various scholarships, fellowships, awards and collaborative Ph.D. programs at both Singaporean and international universities.


Several Carnegie Mellon engineering faculty members have been chosen to organize the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Network (DSN). The conference takes place next June in Anchorage, Alaska. DSN is the premier academic conference on computer dependability. The following faculty members are among have been chosen to be a part of the conference team:

• Philip Koopman, Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
• Dan Siewiorek, the Buhl University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute
• Chuck Weinstock, Senior Member of Technical Staff in the Performance Critical Systems Initiative, Software Engineering Institute
• Babak Falsafi, Professor, ECE
• James Hoe, Associate Professor, ECE
• Tudor Dumitras, ECE doctoral student
• Priya Narasimhan, Associate Professor, ECE
• Mike Reiter, Adjunct ECE and Computer Science Professor
• Jeff Hansen, Research Scientist, Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES)
• Rajeev Gandhi, Systems Engineer, Information Networking Institute (INI)

Dean Khosla has been named to a high-level commission for advising the State Treasuring Department.


Wojciech Maly received the Aristotle Award for Outstanding Teaching.

FORE Systems Professor of CS and Professor of ECE, Edmund Clarke, received the most citations for software engineering and programming languages authors according to Microsoft Libra, a new ranking service. Clarke also ranked tenth in the computer science overall category; his research interests are hardware and software verification, automatic theorem proving, and symbolic computation. Libra Academic Search is a free computer science bibliography search engine.

August 2007

Several faculty members have been chosen to organize the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Network (DSN) next June in Anchorage, Alaska. DSN is the premier academic conference on computer dependability. Philip Koopman, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), has been named general chair. Dan Siewiorek, the Buhl University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, will be the honorary general chair.

Other faculty serving in leadership positions include: Chuck Weinstock, senior member of the technical staff in the Performance Critical Systems initiative at the Software Engineering Institute; ECE Professor Babak Falsafi; Associate Professor of ECE James Hoe; ECE doctoral student Tudor Dumitras; Associate Professor of ECE Priya Narasimhan; Adjunct ECE and Computer Science Professor Mike Reiter; jeff Hansen, research scientist in the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES); and Rajeev Gandhi, systems engineer in the Information Networking Institute.

Is America Falling Behind? A panel of experts look at America's response to the global economy.

July 2007

Three Carnegie Mellon professors recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify on subject matter ranging from national safety communications to the World Bank. Jon Peha, associate director of the Center for Wireless and Broadband Networking and professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy, participated in a July 23 panel discussion, during which he urged the federal government to use an upcoming opening of broadcasting space to develop a national safety communications network. In his testimony, Peha implored the government to take the lead on creating a national system that relies on powerful broadband technology, potentially improving responses to local and national emergencies.

Electrical and Computer Engineering's Graduate Student Organization has elected new officers for the upcoming year. They are:

• Srinivas Chellappa, President
• Kyle Anderson, Vice President and Fall Picnic Chair
• Adam Pennington, Treasurer
• Nicole Saulnier, Secretary

Dean Khosla is featured in BusinessWeek, responding to the issue of globalization.

Eleven Carnegie Mellon professors, including three from the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, attended Microsoft Research's 8th annual Faculty Summit July 16-17 at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash. The event, which draws about 350 academics from 175 institutions worldwide, is an opportunity for professors to meet with Microsoft researchers and product group engineers for in-depth discussions of computing problems and trends. ECE attendees included Bruce Krogh, Jose Moura and Dawn Song. Luis von Ahn, a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow, also participated.

Chris T. Hendrickson, the Duquesne Light Professor of Engineering, will be named an honorary member of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) at the 137th Annual Civil Engineering Conference, Nov. 3 in Orlando, Fla. He will be honored for his distinguished service and leadership during more than four decades as an educator, administrator and researcher. A Rhodes scholar in 1973, Hendrickson has penned five books, hundreds of papers and was managing editor of the Journal of Transportation Engineering. Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/July/july16_hendrickson.shtml/

ECE students John Reinke and Nicholas O'Donoughue are recipients of the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, which will cover their tuition and stipends over three years. Alumnus Daniel Weller (E' 2006) also qualified for the honor and will use his fellowship at MIT, where he is a graduate student in electrical engineering.

ECE faculty members Ken Mai and C. Fred Higgs III are winners of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Early CAREER Award. Each grant provides about $400,000 in funding for a period of five years.

Carnegie Mellon's teams of soccer-playing robots took home a gold and bronze medal at RoboCup 2007 in Atlanta. The CMDragons are world champions in the small-sized robot league for the second consecutive year after besting a dozen competitors. The CMDash AIBO team took third place in the legged league, which included a field of 24. The CMDragons were led by James Bruce, Stefan Zickler and Michael Licitra. The AIBO CMDash team members were Juan Fasola., Michael Phillips, Gregory Delmar and Somchaya Liemhetcharat.

"Pittsburgh Steel," a team that includes faculty and students from Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh, took first place in the RoboCupRescue Simulation League, beating out nine other teams from Europe and the Americas. Robotics Institute Research Professor Katia Sycara, Systems Scientist Paul Scerri and first-year Ph.D. student Prasanna Velagapudi were Carnegie Mellon's representatives on the team.

In addition to the legged, small-sized and robot rescue competitions, Electrical Engineering and Robotics Professor Gary Fedder and his students Fernando Alfaro and Chiung Lo, and Mechanical Engineering Professor Metin Sitti and his students Steven Floyd and Chytra Pawashe participated in RoboCup's Nanogram Demonstration League. This new league hopes to use the competition to show the potential for building tiny devices that can be used in manufacturing, biotechnology and other industries.

H. Scott Matthews, associate professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy, has received the prestigious Laudise Award for outstanding research in industrial ecology from the International Society of Industrial Ecology in Toronto. Further information: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/June/june29_matthews.shtml/

Associate Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) professors Radu and Diana Marculescu's paper on "Voltage-Frequency Island Partitioning for GALS-based Networks-on-Chip" was nominated for a Best Paper Award at the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference, June 4 - 8 in San Diego. The research was co-authored with ECE graduate students Umit Ogras and Puru Choudhary.

ECE graduate student Sebastian Herbert has been awarded a two-year Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship. He is studying variability-adaptive power modeling and optimization in chip multiprocessors. His advisor is Associate ECE Professor Diana Marculescu.

ECE faculty member Ken Mai won a National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award. The grant provides about $400,000 in funding for a period of five years.

June 2007

The Center for Behavioral Decision Research has unveiled its new "Data Truck," a 36-foot mobile social science lab that will allow the university to conduct research involving groups of people, such as senior citizens, who cannot readily come to campus. Funded in part by the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, the truck's trailer includes a waiting area and eight workstations, where research participants can answer surveys, work on computers or test new products and technologies. The truck will be a major asset for Carnegie Mellon's Quality of Life Technologies Initiative, which aims to help seniors and people with disabilities lead more independent lives.

The Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research hosted three national journalists this week in its third annual environmental media fellowship program. The journalists were Bette Hileman, senior editor of Chemical @ Engineering News; Kara Sissell, senior editor of Chemical Week; and John Sullivan, editor of Environmental News. The trio spent four days on campus meeting faculty and getting a behind-the-scenes look at the some of the university's environmental research.

The College of Engineering hosted USA Today reporter Jon Swartz earlier this week in a pilot fellowship program designed for media to meet and discuss cybersecurity and information technology issues with leading experts at the university.

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department Head T.E. (Ed) Schlesinger and ECE Professor Vijayakumar Bhagavatula presented invited talks last month at the Optical Data Storage Topical Meeting in Portland, Ore. Schlesinger spoke on "Application-Driven Optical Storage," while Bhagavatula's talk was on "Channels Strategies for Handling Low Signal-to-Noise Ratios in Holographic Data Storage Systems." ECE alumnus Tim Rausch (Ph.D., 2003) was a program committee co-chair.

Rob Rutenbar, the Stephen Jatras Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Circuit and Systems Industrial Pioneer Award for his groundbreaking contributions in the development of electronic design automation tools for synthesis of analog-mixed integrated circuits for the semiconductor industry. Analog circuits are critical in applications ranging from high definition televisions to cell phones.

David Dzombak, the Walter J. Blenko Sr. Professor of Environmental Engineering, has been appointed the new faculty director of the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research (SEER). He succeeds founding SEER Director Chris Hendrickson, the Duquesne Light Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and former head of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. Dzombak will work with SEER Executive Director Deb Lange.

The Civil and Environmental Engineering Department presented the following student awards at its diploma ceremony Sunday, May 20.

• American Society of Civil Engineers Outstanding Civil Engineering Student Award: Linda Kaplan;
• The H. A. Thomas Sr. Distinguished Service Award: Corinne Scown;
• The H. A. Thomas Sr. Scholarship Award: Nicholas Greco and William Kotterman
• The James P. Romualdi Civil and Environmental Engineering Award: Anand Boscha and Joseph Nam
• The Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award: Semiha Kiziltas and Navid Saleh
• The Paul P. Christano Distinguished Service Award: Saurabh Puri and Heather Wakeley
• The Mao Yisheng Outstanding Dissertation Award: Ran Liu.

CIT Announces Winners of Student Undergraduate Reseach Symposium, Meeting of the Minds, 2007

• 1st: Justin Feig, Mechanical Engineering Advisors: Shelley Anna, Yoed Rabin "A Lab-on-a-Chip Device for Controlling the Cellular Environment"
• 2nd: William Jenkinson, Electrical and Computer Engineering Advisor: Jose Moura "A Trajectory Physics Based Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance Imaging Fiber Tracking Model"
• 3rd: James Rogers, Materials Science and Engineering Advisor: Michael Bockstaller "Synthesis of FeCo Nanorods to act as Heat Sources for Thermoablative Cancer Therapy"

Carnegie Mellon University’s M. Granger Morgan has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. See Press Resease.

Carnegie Mellon University’s Burcu Akinci has been selected to receive the prestigious 2007 Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). See Press Release.

Robert (Bob) Murphy, professor of BME and Biology, was elected a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers. Other CIT faculty who are fellows include: Jim Antaki, Mike Domach and Todd Przybycien.

Carnegie Mellon's Society of Women Engineers (SWE) received the 2006 Outstanding Collegiate Activities Certificate at the SWE National Conference in Kansas City for their re-establishment of Engineering Week activities at the university. Hilda Diamond, Associate Biomedical Engineering Department Head, is the group's advisor.

In recognition of his lifelong commitment to the iron and steel industry, and for his exceptional contributions to the fundamental knowledge of iron and steelmaking and to the development of new steelmaking technologies, U.S. Steel University Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Richard J. Fruehan, has been selected by the Board of Directors of the Association for Iron and Steel Technology (AIST) as an honorary member of the American Institute of Mining, Metalurgical and Petroleum Engineers (AIME). AIME honorary membership is one of the highest honors that the institute can bestow on an individual.


Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Cliff Davidson has been selected to receive the 2006 Outstanding Contribution to Environmental Engineering and Science Education Award from the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP). The award recognizes the development and application of innovative teaching methods and Davidson's impact on the environmental engineering and science field. Davidson will receive the award at the AEESP awards ceremony Oct. 23 in Dallas.

Philip R. LeDuc, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is one of 79 of the nation's brightest young engineers selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's 12th annual Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, Sept. 21 - 23 at the Ford Research Innovation Center in Dearborn, Mich. The event brings together engineers between the ages of 30 and 45 who are performing cutting-edge research and technical work.

Professor Sridhar Seetharaman has been awarded the POSCO Faculty Development Professorship in Materials Science and Engineering effective July 1, 2006. Seetharaman received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1998 and then spent a year as a research associate at Imperial College in London. He first came to CMU as a visiting scholar in 1999 and was appointed as an assistant professor in 2000. In 2005, he was appointed as Associate Director of the Center for Iron and Steel Making Research here at Carnegie Mellon. His work has already received extensive recognition. The Iron and Steel Society has recognized him with the Young Leader Award in 2000 and the Charles H. Herty Best Paper Award in 2002. In 2002 he also received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Prize from the von Humboldt Foundation and the Marcus A. Grossmann Young Author Award from ASM International. In 2004 he received the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and the Philbrook award from the MSE department.

Dr. Robert Heard received FeMET's 2006 Initiatives Design Grant,  which is aimed at attracting top talent to the North American steel industry.

Electrical and Computer Engineering professors Jimmy Zhu and T.E. (Ed) Schlesinger presented invited keynote talks at the Asia-Pacific Data Storage Conference in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Aug. 28 - 30. Zhu, director of the Data Storage Systems Center, will give the opening presentation on "Thermal and Current Driven Noise in Magnetoresistive Sensors." Schlesinger, head of ECE, will present on "Challenges in Optical Recording Technology." The conference will cover a broad range of topics in magnetic and optical information storage.

Science Spectrum magazine's 2006 Emerald Honors award winners, presented to the top minorities in science, include ECE Professor Shawn Blanton for Educational Leadership and ECE alumnus Abhijit Mahalanobis (Ph.D. 1987), who was named "Scientist of the Year." The recipients will be featured in Science Spectrum and presented with their awards at the Minorities in Research Science Conference in Baltimore this September.

Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES) and Center for Sensed Critical Infrastructure Research (CenSCIR) co-directors Jim Garrett and Jose M.F. Moura welcome Matthew Sanfilippo as the newly created Executive Director of CenSCIR. Sanfilippo, who began the position in July, brings "an extraordinary mixture of knowledge and experience in engineering of infrastructure systems, deployment of computer technologies in engineering applications, venture capital experience, start-up business-model development and organizational leadership," says Garrett. For further information, read announcement.

Robert P. Kail, senior associate dean of Carnegie Mellon in Qatar, has retired after more than 37 years of service with the university. At Carnegie Mellon, Kail played a critical role in formulating and implementing strategic plans for the College of Engineering and was responsible for the undergraduate engineering academic program and students. In Qatar, he oversaw admissions and student affairs and was one of the key staff involved in developing the Qatar campus initiative. "Bob could always be counted on to provide thoughtful insight that reflected perfectly the ethos of Carnegie Mellon," said Chuck Thorpe, dean of Carnegie Mellon Qatar. "His empathy for others, his ability to listen, his good nature and sense of humor will be sorely missed."

ECE graduate student Ahren Studer won a best student paper award at the international conference on Applied Cryptography and Network Security in Singapore,in June 2006. His paper, "Adaptive Detection of Local Scanners," was also his master's thesis, completed under the direction of his faculty advisor, Chenxi Wang.

The Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES) has awarded the 2006 Dowd-ICES Fellowships to Chao-Min Cheng and Sinan Filiz of Mechanical Engineering, Paul Glass of Biomedical Engineering and JitKang Lim of Chemical Engineering.

James Bain, associate director of the Data Storage Systems Center (DSSC), received one of three best poster awards at the MagnetoOptic Recording International Symposium (MORIS) in Tomiura, Japan. His poster, "Side-Track Erasure and Wide Magnetic Pole HAMR Write Heads," was based on his invited talk.

Associate Professor of ECE Diana Marculescu has been elected vice chair for Special Interest Group (SIG) Development on the executive committee of the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) SIG Governing Board.

Daniel Siewiorek, Buhl University Professor of ECE and Computer Science, earned the 2006 Outstanding Contribution Award from ACM SIGMOBILE for pioneering contributions to wearable and context-aware computing. ACM SIGMOBILE is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing. Siewiorek received the award at the MobiSys 2006 conference in Uppsala, Sweden, during which he gave the keynote speech.

MechE Professor Jonathan Cagan, chief technologist and co-founder of DesignAdvance, and Peter Boatwright, associate professor of marketing at the Tepper School of Business, delivered speeches at the Pittsburgh Technology Council's "Innovation Day" on June 6. Cagan gave the keynote address. Cagan and Boatwright coauthored the book "The Design of Things to Come-How Ordinary People Create Extraordinary Products."