October 15, 2009
Vol. 20, No. 15
In this issue:
Featured Events
- Thursday, Oct. 15: H1N1 Vaccine Clinic. 9 a.m.-4 p.m., Rangos 1, University Center (UC). Student Health Services is providing the nasal spray vaccine, called LAIV (Live Attenuated Influenza Vaccine). It is recommended only for healthy persons between the ages of 2 and 49. Read more at http://www.cmu.edu/alert/.
- Friday, Oct. 16: "Continental Reception." 6-8 p.m., Miller Gallery. An opening reception for the new gallery exhibition "Experimental Geography." For more: http://millergallery.cfa.cmu.edu:16080
- Monday, Oct. 19: University Lecture Series. 5:30 p.m., Porter Hall 100, Gregg Hall. Adjunct professor Lilly Abreu will present a lecture and demonstration on "The Many Faces of Brazilian Jazz." For more: http://www.cmu.edu/uls/october/abreu.html
- Monday, Oct. 19: Giler Humanities and International Relations and Politics Program Lecture Series. 7 p.m., Rashid Auditorium, Gates Center. Andrew Sullivan, a conservative author and political commentator, will speak on "American Politics: A View from Home and Abroad." For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/October/oct14_sullivan.shtml
- Tuesday, Oct. 20: Information Session: Transition to Biweekly Pay for Non-Exempt Employees. 9 a.m.-noon, Rangos 1, UC. The session is targeted to non-exempt employees who are currently paid on a monthly basis and will be moving to the biweekly payroll in January 2010, and to employees currently paid biweekly. To register: https://hr-apps.as.cmu.edu/hrlearn/HRLearn2
- Tuesday, Oct. 20: Information Security Office (ISO) class on Identity Theft. 10-11 a.m., McKenna Room, UC. Wiam Younes, training and awareness coordinator, will offer tips on how to protect yourself from identity theft at home and work. She also will outline the ISO process for responding to data breach incidents on campus. To register: https://hr-apps.as.cmu.edu/hrlearn/HRLearn2
- Tuesday, Oct. 20: University Lecture Series. 4:30 p.m., Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall 103. Eva Maria Höller-Cladders, adjunct professor of organizational behavior, will discuss "Understanding Europe and the EU: Basics, Essentials, Trends." For more: http://www.cmu.edu/uls/october/holler-cladders.html
- Wednesday, Oct. 21: Media Roundtable. Noon-1 p.m., Singleton Room, Roberts Hall of Engineering. The panel, moderated by Civil & Environmental Engineering Professor David A. Dzombak, will discuss "The Changing Nature of News, Daunting Digital Deadlines." For more: http://www.cit.cmu.edu/about_cit/events/2009/10_21_media_roundtable.html
- Wednesday, Oct. 21: University Lecture Series. Noon, Hamburg Hall 1000. Admiral Gary Roughead will discuss "America's Global Navy: In the Middle East and Beyond." For more: http://www.cmu.edu/uls/october/roughead.html
- Oct. 21-24: School of Music opera, "Dialogues of the Carmelites." Performances run nightly at 8 p.m. in the Purnell Center's Philip Chosky Theater. General admission is $15, $12 for senior citizens and $10 for students with valid ID. For tickets, call the School of Drama Box Office at 412-268-2407 or purchase online at http://music.cmu.edu. For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/October/oct8_frenchopera.shtml
- Thursday, Oct. 22: ISO class on Security 101. 2-3:15 p.m., Connan Room, UC. Wiam Younes, training and awareness coordinator, will discuss the end-users role in cybersecurity, how to protect data and how to secure assets from cyber threats. To register: https://hr-apps.as.cmu.edu/hrlearn/HRLearn2
- Thursday, Oct. 22: Department of History Lecture. 4:30 p.m., Dowd Room, UC. Lori Ginzberg of Penn State University will lecture on "Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life." A reception and book signing will follow.
- Tuesday, Oct. 27: Benefits Forum. Noon-1:30 p.m., Connan Room, UC. Staff Council sponsors the open dialogue on health care benefits and open enrollment for the upcoming year with Barbara Smith, associate vice president and chief human resources officer, and Lori Bell, benefits specialist. For more information about Staff Council, visit http://www.cmu.edu/staff-council.
Recent Nobel Prize Winners Have Ties to Carnegie Mellon
Two Nobel Prize winners announced within the past week,
Oliver Eaton Williamson and
Ada Yonath, have ties to Carnegie Mellon. Williamson, who shares this year's Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, earned his Ph.D. in economics at Carnegie Mellon in 1963. A well-known author in the area of transaction cost economics, Williamson is the Edgar F. Kaiser Professor Emeritus at the prestigious Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He shares the Nobel Prize with
Elinor Ostrom, the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science at Indiana University at Bloomington.
"On behalf of Carnegie Mellon University, I congratulate Oliver Williamson on this great honor," said Carnegie Mellon President
Jared Cohon. "We are always pleased to see our alumni succeed, and in this case Dr. Williamson has achieved international recognition at the highest level. His work in economic governance has been groundbreaking, and this Nobel is well deserved."
Yonath, a post-doctoral fellow at the Mellon Institute in 1969, was named one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Yonath is known for generating X-ray crystallographic images of the ribosome structure as early as the 1970s, a task the Nobel committee said was then considered "impossible." She earned a Ph.D. in X-ray crystallography at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, in 1968, followed by postdoctoral studies at Carnegie Mellon and MIT.
Williamson and Yonath are the 17th and 18th Nobel Prize winners with connections to Carnegie Mellon. For the other 16, visit
http://www.cmu.edu/corporate/pod/awards/nobel.shtml.
Platzer Named to Popular Science's Brilliant 10
Andre Platzer, assistant professor of computer science, is one of 10 young scientists chosen by the editors of Popular Science for the magazine's annual "Brilliant 10" list. Platzer, who the magazine dubbed the "Crash Test Anti-Dummy," was cited for his work on verification software for hybrid systems, such as collision avoidance systems in flight control and railway control systems. Systems like these are important in many domains, including robotic surgery devices and nano-level manufacturing equipment.
Like seatbelts, antibiotics and fire hoses, a method for detecting potentially critical errors in safety systems is an innovation so vital "that it's hard to imagine how we got along without it," according to the profile of Platzer that appears in the magazine's November issue.
Platzer is the fourth Carnegie Mellon faculty member to be named to the list, joining current professors
Carlos Guestrin (2008) and
Luis von Ahn (2006), and
Doug James, now at Cornell University.
Carnegie Mellon Named a Top 25 "Best Neighbor"
Carnegie Mellon was named a Top 25 "Best Neighbor" for its economic and social impact on Pittsburgh in a 2009 poll titled "Saviors of Our Cities: A Survey of Best College and University Civic Partnerships." The study, conducted by
Evan S. Dobelle, president of Westfield State College in Westfield, Mass., ranks higher education institutions based on the positive impact they have on their hometowns. Carnegie Mellon was ranked 19th.
The survey noted Carnegie Mellon's Leonard Gelfand Center for Service Learning and Outreach and its Strategies for Engineering Education program, which gives middle-school girls the opportunity to engage in hands-on engineering activities focused on energy. It also praised the university's Summer Academy for Mathematics and Science, an enrichment program for high school minority students; its School of Music, which "seeks to enhance music instruction in Pittsburgh Public Schools"; and its "powerful" engineering and design schools for being "instrumental in hundreds of start-up companies."
Dobelle, former president of the New England Board of Higher Education, released his first study of "town-gown" relationships in 2006. He ranks institutions based on their "demonstrated and documented long-standing cooperative efforts with community leaders to rehabilitate the cities around them, to influence community revitalization and cultural renewal, and to encourage economic expansion of the local economy, urban development and community service."
The University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California tied for the top spot in the survey.
For more on the survey, visit
http://www.wsc.ma.edu/Announcements/Top_25_Saviors.html.
Von Ahn Awarded Grant for "Promising Young Scientists"
Luis von Ahn, assistant professor of computer science, is one of 16 promising young scientists chosen by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation as a 2009 recipient of a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering. Each fellow receives an unrestricted research grant of $875,000 over five years.
Von Ahn, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon in 2005 and joined the faculty in 2006, has pioneered an area of computer science that he calls "human computation" — combining human abilities with those of computers to solve problems that would be impossible for humans or computers to solve by themselves.
The program is one of the largest nongovernmental programs designed to seek out and reward the pursuit of scientific discovery with "no strings attached" support. Previous Carnegie Mellon faculty winners of Packard Fellowships include
Dannie Durand, associate professor of biological sciences and computer science, and
Jessica Hodgins, professor of computer science and robotics.
News Briefs
- Are you aware of any community service or educational outreach activities that were conducted by faculty, staff and/or students during the 2008-09 academic year? The Gelfand Center is preparing Carnegie Mellon's submission to the Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll and needs your input. Last year more than 88,000 hours of community service ‚ through programs at Carnegie Mellon campuses or through student service trips and courses that provide service — were documented. Submit news of your organization's work in the community to Judy Hallinen at jh4p@andrew.cmu.edu by Oct. 26.
- Carnegie Mellon's annual United Way Campaign has begun and will run through November. Learn more about the campaign, and donate online at http://www.cmu.edu/hr/united-way.html. You will also receive a paper form in campus mail this week.
- The Office of the Associate Provost for Education is accepting nominations for the 2009-10 William S. Ryan Award. The William H. and Frances S. Ryan Award for Meritorious Teaching is given annually to a full-time faculty member at Carnegie Mellon who has demonstrated unusual devotion and effectiveness in teaching undergraduate or graduate students. Guidelines for the award can be found at http://www.cmu.edu/celebration-of-teaching. Nominations must include a letter (maximum two pages) addressed to the Ryan Committee, in care of Susan Ambrose, associate provost for education, Cyert Hall 127 by Monday, Nov. 2.
- Carnegie Mellon Today, the university's quarterly magazine, recently received an Award of Honor for feature writing at The Golden Triangle Awards banquet. The annual regional competition recognizes excellence in communications and is sponsored by the Pittsburgh chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators.
- The Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research, students from Sustainable Earth and the College of Engineering are hosting a photo contest open to the entire Carnegie Mellon community. The competition is divided into three categories: people, nature and places. Each entry must be accompanied by a 5X7 print of the photo or photos entered along with a CD of the photos submitted. Please print name, phone number and email address on the back of the hard copy photos. Entries are due by Nov. 1 to Chriss Swaney, Room 118, Scaife Hall. Winners will receive certificates and their photos will be published on the Steinbrenner Institute's Web site. All entries become property of the competition, and no entries will be returned.
Personal Mention
- Adrian Perrig was awarded a Security 7 Award from Information Security magazine for innovative cybersecurity research in academia. Perrig, technical director of Carnegie Mellon CyLab, a professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Engineering and Public Policy, and the School of Computer Science, will be recognized in the magazine's October issue. The magazine's editor, Michael S. Mimoso, said the awards recognize the achievements of security practitioners and researchers in a variety of industries, including education. Read more about Perrig, who received his master's degree and Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon, at http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/October/oct8_perrigaward.shtml.
- Carnegie Mellon has appointed Michael J. Tarr, a new professor of psychology, co-director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC). The CNBC is a joint project between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh devoted to investigating neural mechanisms and their impact on human cognitive abilities. Before joining Carnegie Mellon last month, Tarr spent 14 years at Brown University as a professor of cognitive and linguistic sciences. An expert in the neural, cognitive and computational mechanisms underlying visual perception and cognition, Tarr also held a chair in ophthalmology and visual sciences at Brown. Read more about Tarr — the son of Joel Tarr, the Carnegie Mellon Richard S. Caliguri Professor of History and Policy — at http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/October/oct9_cnbcdirector.shtml.
- Elaine A. King, professor of art history, theory and museum studies, is the guest curator of the recently opened Mattress Factory exhibition "LIKENESS: Transformations of Portrayal After Warhol." This group exhibition, which runs through March 2010, examines how technology has played an influential role in how people depict themselves. Learn more at http://www.mattress.org.
- The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS) has awarded Michael A. Trick, professor of operations research, the George E. Kimball Medal in recognition of distinguished service to the institute and to the profession of operations research and the management sciences. The award was presented this week at the INFORMS annual meeting. Trick served as President of INFORMS in 2002 and as general chairman for its 2006 national meeting in Pittsburgh.
- Kristina Straub, professor of literary and cultural studies and associate dean for academic affairs in H&SS, will present the inaugural lecture of the Eighteenth-Century Seminar at the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies on Saturday, Oct. 24, in Chicago. Straub's lecture, "Performing the London Cuckolds," is based on work she did with a Humanities Scholars seminar co-taught with Tim Dawson, a Ph.D. student in rhetoric. For more: www.newberry.org/renaissance/seminars/18thcentury.html
For more events, visit
http://my.cmu.edu/site/events.
For daily news updates, visit
http://www.cmu.edu/news/news-notes/index.shtml.
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The "8 1/2 x 11 News" is published weekly by the Internal Communications Team. To submit news of campus interest, email
Abby Ross at
abbyross@andrew.cmu.edu.
For current issues of the 8 1/2 x 11, visit
http://www.cmu.edu/news/news-notes/weekly/2009/index.shtml. For past years' issues of the 8 1/2 x 11, visit
http://www.cmu.edu/news/weekly/index.shtml.
