Carnegie Mellon University

The Piper

CMU Community News

Piper Logo
August 02, 2012

Personal Mention

Corina Pasareanu, a Carnegie Mellon senior scientist and researcher with the Robust Software Engineering group at NASA Ames Research Center, gave one of two invited keynote talks in June at the 6th International Conference on Tests and Proofs (TAP'12), part of the TOOLS Europe (50th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns), in Prague, Czech Republic. Pasareanu’s research focuses on scalable testing and verification techniques for ensuring the reliability and safety of NASA systems. Read the full story.

Senior Global Studies major Ema D. Woodward has been awarded one of 40 Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowships. The fellowships, administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for the U.S. Department of State, aim to develop a source of well-prepared men and women whose academic backgrounds fulfill the skill needs of the State Department and who are dedicated to representing America's interests abroad. Woodward, the first CMU student to receive this fellowship, will receive financial support toward tuition and other expenses during her senior year and first year of graduate school. She also will participate in two paid internships, one domestic and one overseas. Following the fellowship, she will be committed to serving three years as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer, a corps of working professionals who support U.S. foreign policy around the world. Read the full story.

Alumnus Amr Ahmed, a Yahoo! Research scientist who earned his Ph.D. in language technologies in 2011 and his master’s degree in machine learning in 2009, is the winner of the prestigious 2012 Doctoral Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM SIGKDD). His dissertation is titled "Modeling Content and Users: Structured Probabilistic Representation and Scalable Online Inference Algorithms.” Lei Li, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who earned a Ph.D. in computer science at CMU in 2011, was the runner up for the award. The ACM SIGKDD is the premier society for data mining and knowledge discovery research, and the ACM SIGKDD dissertation award is the highest distinction for a Ph.D. in the area. Amr and Lei will be honored at the KDD Conference in Beijing, China, Aug. 12-16. Read the full story.

Obituaries:

Mary Louise Milligan Rasmuson (MM’32), a pioneer for women in the armed services, died on July 30 at her home in Anchorage, Alaska. She was 101. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in education from Margaret Morrison Carnegie College, she became an assistant principal in a school district near Pittsburgh. In 1942, she was accepted into the first class of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She rose quickly through the ranks and played a significant role in promoting legislation in support of women in the armed forces. In 1957, Colonel Milligan became the fifth Commandant of the entire Women’s Army Corps (WAC). As director of the WAC, military historians credit her with major achievements including increasing the WAC’s strength, insisting on effectiveness in command, working with Congress to amend laws that deprived women of service credit and benefits, and expanding the range of military opportunities open to women. She retired in 1962 with many military honors and medals and moved to Alaska, with her husband Elmer. There she became one of the state’s leading philanthropists as a board member of the Rasmuson Foundation. Read about Rasmuson in a 2006 issue of Carnegie Mellon Today magazine. Read her obituary in the Alaska Dispatch.

Bernadette G. Callery, a former librarian at CMU's Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, died July 27 from ovarian cancer. She joined the institute staff in 1971 as the assistant librarian and became the librarian in 1977. In 1987 she accepted the position of research librarian at the now Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden, but she remained an adjunct research scholar at the Hunt Institute. Through the years she maintained strong ties with the institute, attending exhibition preview receptions, staff events and the annual Open House. For more details about Callery’s life and career, see the obituaries in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. A memorial service will be held at the institute in the fall.