Personal Mention

David Mawhinney (left) has been named executive director of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship and Lenore Blum (right) and Jonathan Cagan have been named faculty co-directors. “Dave, Lenore and Jon already have had a profound impact on the entrepreneurial culture at CMU. I am confident in their ability to take these efforts even further,” said Provost Farnam Jahanian in announcing the moves in an email to faculty and staff. Mawhinney was co-leader of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) and executive director of the Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship at the Tepper School of Business. He also is an entrepreneur in his own right, co-founding four startups. Blum, founder of Project Olympus, which helps to foster faculty and student startups, was co-director of the CIE and has helped many faculty and students with their entrepreneurial efforts. Cagan is co-director of CMU’s Integrated Innovation Institute, an initiative that unites design, engineering and business, and trains students to become elite innovators.  Read the full announcement.

Computer Science Professor Stephen Brookes and Peter W. O’Hearn, engineering manager at Facebook and professor of computer science at University College London, will receive the 2016 Gödel Prize for their invention of Concurrent Separation Logic (CSL), a major advance in the design and analysis of programs that can take advantage of multicore and multiprocessor systems. “It is a fitting tribute to their fundamental scholarly work, which has had a tremendous impact on academic research in the theory of programming languages and is now beginning to have impact in industry,” said Frank Pfenning, head of the Computer Science Department. The Gödel Prize recognizes major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of computer science and is presented annually by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory and the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. The prize will be presented at the 43rd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, July 12-15 in Rome. Find out more. 

Vyas Sekar, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has received a Faculty Early Career Development Award (CAREER) from the National Science Foundation, one of its most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research and education. Sekar, a faculty member in CyLab, said he will use the award to help his research team “lead the development of a principled model-based testing framework and open-source tool for identifying if, and how, [cybersecurity] policies are violated." Find out more.

Amy Ogan, assistant professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, has earned a Jacobs Foundation Early Career Research Fellowship to support her work on international education technology. Ogan will use the fellowship to continue her strong research collaborations and field work in Latin America and the Philippines, where she investigates how personalized learning technologies developed in the United States can be deployed in different cultural settings — and how those cultural settings influence the success or use of the technologies. Find out more. 

Computer Science Professor Tuomas Sandholm has received an honorary doctor’s degree in economics from the University of Zurich. The honor was presented by the university's Faculty of Economics in recognition of his work at the intersection of computer science and game theory, in particular on electronic market design. Prior to its commencement ceremony, the university sponsored a symposium in Sandholm's honor, titled "Electronic Market Design.” Sandholm, founder and director of the Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory, has developed algorithms for optimized electronic auctions and has fielded them in his own firms, totaling billions of dollars in volume. He also has been a leader in computer poker. Find out more. 

Associate Professor of English Richard Purcell (left) co-edited “21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture” with Richard Randall (right), the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor of Music Theory in the College of Fine Arts. The anthology is the culmination of Listening Spaces, a project under CMU’s Center for the Arts in Society’s (CAS) Media Initiative. Purcell and Randall collected essays from 11 cultural studies scholars, musicians, music preservationists and philosophers on subjects ranging from music industry labor and privacy issues to the ways we interact with music in our cars and workplaces. “We were looking for a mix of contributors that represented a range of expertise and disciplinary backgrounds to give readers a very broad sense of the impact music has on many fields of study,” Purcell said. Both Purcell and Randall contributed essays to the anthology, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan. Learn about the digital music revolution.

Lisa Tetrault, associate professor of history, is among 78 new speakers appointed to the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lectureship Program for 2016-2017. These scholars join more than 400 other OAH Distinguished Lecturers who speak to audiences nationwide each year at museums, libraries, universities, community centers, churches and synagogues. Founded in 1907, the OAH is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to American history scholarship. With more than 7,800 members from the U.S. and abroad, OAH promotes excellence in the scholarship, teaching and presentation of American history, encouraging wide discussion of historical questions and equitable treatment of history practitioners. Learn more about the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program.