Personal Mention
Electrical and Computing Engineering professors Pulkit Grover (left) and Soummya Kar (right) and ECE Ph.D. student Yaoqing Yang recently had a paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. The Big Data era has necessitated use of massive parallel processing, and computation speeds are limited by the slowest of the processors and the faulty ones. Titled “Computing Linear Transformations With Unreliable Components,” the paper discusses how linear computations are the building blocks of modern data analysis and machine learning algorithms. The paper shows how sophisticated error correcting codes can be combined with linear computations to form "Coded Computations" to obtain resilient linear computing in presence of slow/faulty processors. Even when all processors are error-prone, the computation is carried out reliably. These are the first results that show that coded computation with all error-prone processors outperforms classical techniques of replication, which is a landmark advance in a field that was started by mathematician and physicist John von Neumann in 1956.
Monica Harrison has been named the first head softball coach in Carnegie Mellon history. A native of Pittsburgh and graduate of Shady Side Academy, Harrison comes to Carnegie Mellon following a two-year stint as an assistant coach at Arcadia University, where she helped the Knights to back-to-back trips to the Middle Atlantic Conference Commonwealth Championship and two straight Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) Division III titles. Prior to Arcadia, Harrison spent six seasons at Stevens Institute of Technology, where she helped lead the Ducks to the ECAC championship finals in 2014 and 2015. Harrison earned her bachelor's degree in economics with a concentration in sociology and minors in legal studies and African-American studies from Bucknell University in 2007. She was a four-year letter winner and team captain who earned Patriot League all-academic honors. Earlier this year CMU added softball as an intercollegiate sport beginning in the 2019 spring season. Find out more.
Paul Eiss has received the 2017 Humanities Essay Award from the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association. He was recognized for his article, “Playing Mestizo: Festivity, Language and Theatre in Yucatán,” published in the fall 2016 edition of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies. Eiss is an associate professor of history in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.