May 29, 2008
Vol. 18, No. 43
In this issue:
Professors Receive Highest Faculty Honors
Edmund M. Clarke, Pradeep K. Khosla and Daniel S. Nagin have been named University Professors, the highest honor faculty can achieve at the university. Clarke is the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science, Khosla is the Philip and Marsha Dowd Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robotics, and Nagin is the Teresa and H. John Heinz III Professor of Public Policy and Statistics.
"Designation as a University Professor is a distinction that is reserved for a very small fraction of our faculty," said Carnegie Mellon President Jared L. Cohon. "Ed Clarke, Pradeep Khosla and Dan Nagin are highly deserving of this honor, each having made exceptional contributions to their fields as well as outstanding contributions and leadership to the university."
For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may22_universityprofessors.shtml
University Receives $2.64M to Digitize Qatar Heritage Materials
The University Libraries, the School of Computer Science and Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar have agreed with the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science & Community Development to do a one-year pilot digitization project that will bring an outstanding Arab heritage collection to the web. Qatar's Heritage Library contains more than 88,000 books, maps and manuscripts. "This is a treasure, a rich collection of early travelers' views of the Arab world and Islamic historical materials that will interest many students and scholars," said Dean of University Libraries Gloriana St. Clair. Along with St. Clair, the project's co-directors are Raj Reddy, the Mozah Bint Nasser University Professor at the Institute for Software Research, and Chuck Thorpe, dean of the Qatar Campus.
Working on-site in Qatar, the pilot project will digitize 5,300 select items using methods perfected in the Million Book Project and in scanning the Posner Collection of rare books. The final product will be searchable PDFs of the works, available in an Arabic or English language interface. The pilot also aims to identify potential problems and to estimate the time and cost to digitize the entire Heritage Collection.
For more information on the Posner Memorial Collection, see http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/.
For more on the Universal Digital Library, see http://www.ulib.org.
New Degree Fuses The Arts With Computer Science
The new Bachelor of Computer Science and Arts (BCSA) is an interdisciplinary program that will equip students to explore and expand the connections between computation and the arts. The BCSA program is an integrated double major, which combines a sequence of full-strength computer science courses with a rigorous concentration in studio or performing arts. Eight Carnegie Mellon students are scheduled to transfer into the program this spring, while several first-year students are poised to enter the program in the fall.
Franco Sciannameo, director of the BCSA, Bachelor of Humanities and Arts (BHA) and Bachelor of Science and Arts (BSA) programs, collaborated with faculty and administrators from the College of Fine Arts and the School of Computer Science to create the new program. "The unified Bachelor of Computer Science and Arts degree will allow a new generation of artist-technologists to create new forms of knowledge and influence culture at the highest possible level, by bridging fields in totally new ways," Sciannameo said.
For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may8_bcsadegree.shtml
Scientists Unveil New Tool To Understand Gene Evolution
Computational biologist Dannie Durand and colleagues Nan Song, Jacob Joseph and George Davis have discovered critical flaws in the standard method used to analyze gene evolution and tackled the dilemma of how to study the ancestry of multi-domain genes. In a paper published online in Public Library of Science Computational Biology May 16, they present a novel method to determine whether a pair of similar genes evolved from a common ancestor, or whether they just look similar because the same domain was inserted into both genes. Their method, called "Neighborhood Correlation," is the first to deal with this problem. These results upend current analyses and herald a new way to understand and exploit key proteins in cancer.
For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may16_multidomaingenes.shtml
News Briefs
- Justin Y. Newberg, a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering, and Robert F. Murphy, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology, have developed a software toolbox that is intended to help bioscience researchers characterize protein patterns in human tissues. This pattern recognition tool and its underlying methods are important for identifying biomarkers that could be useful for cancer diagnosis and therapy.
For more: http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may12_proteinpatterns.shtml
- The Computing Services Education and Outreach department will offer six summer training classes to assist faculty and staff members in using the services offered by the division. All classes are free, but registration is limited. For more information and to register for a class, please visit http://www.cmu.edu/computing/ed-outreach/classes.html.
Personal Mention
- Judith Schachter, professor of anthropology and history in the Department of History, and Stephen Brockmann, professor of German in the Modern Languages Department, are co-editors of "(Im)permanence: Cultures In/Out of Time," which was recently published by The Center for Arts in Society (CAS) and will be available through the Penn State University Press. The volume examines permanence and impermanence in cultural and artistic practices in the West and elsewhere, and it is a collection of presentations and papers from the first conference presented by CAS, a joint program of the College of Fine Arts and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. Other Carnegie Mellon contributors include College of Fine Arts faculty members Lowry Burgess and Franco Sciannameo, and H&SS faculty members Xiaofei Kang and Donald Sutton.
- Amal Mohammed Al-Malki, Ph.D., professor at Carnegie Mellon in Qatar, has been named to the Qatar National Competitiveness Council. The 20-member council will push for reform and transparency in the national economy and seeks to create awareness on the topic.
- Francisco Veloso, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, has received a 2008 Sloan Industry Studies Fellowship. The two-year, $45,000 grant was awarded for his research in the automotive sector. His latest research project, supported by the National Science Foundation, aims at understanding effective strategies for auto firms to be players in new alternative power train technologies, including electric, hybrid and fuel cell engines.
- President Jared L. Cohon will speak at the Great Lakes Manufacturing Forum July 9 at the Cleveland Key Center Marriott. Regional leaders will discuss innovation in manufacturing, the workforce and skills needed for manufacturing today and in the future, as well as the requirements needed to succeed in today's global economy.
- Qatar students Hatem Alismail and Rishav Bhowmick and teaching assistant Justin Carlson, a Ph.D. student in robotics, placed second in the 2008 IEEEXtreme 24-hour online programming contest. There were 130 teams from 31 countries that participated. For more: http://www.ieee.org/xtreme
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