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October 18, 2012

Personal Mention

Three new software leaders — Bob Iannucci,  Cécile Péraire and Jia Zhang — have joined the teaching and research community at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley (CMUSV). 

  • Iannucci is the new director of the CyLab Mobility Research Center. Prior to joining CMUSV, he served as CTO of Nokia and was head of the Nokia Research Center (NRC). Read more about Iannucci.
  • Péraire, an assistant teaching professor, has more than 15 years of software engineering experience working in both industry and academia. Following a postdoctoral research fellowship at SRI International and Hewlett Packard, she worked at Rational and IBM where she played different roles covering the many facets of software development. Read more about Péraire.
  • Zhang is an associate research professor in software engineering. Her recent research interests center on services computing, with a focus on collaborative scientific workflows, service oriented architecture, and semantic service discovery. Read more about Zhang.

Alex Waibel, professor in the Language Technologies Institute, will address the European Parliament in a special session on "New Technologies and Education for Multilingualism" in Brussels, Belgium, on Friday morning. His talk regarding the feasibility of Automatic Simultaneous Translation will be translated automatically into Spanish using a system developed in his lab. The talk will be webcast live at 3:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

Anind Dey, associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, spoke about dwellSense, his project to develop in-home sensors that can detect the onset of dementia or physical decline in adults who live alone, at the Wired Health Conference, "Living by Numbers," this past Tuesday, Oct. 16 in New York City.

Piano faculty member Sergey Schepkin was a featured guest on the Emmanuel Music recital series in Boston.  He performed trios and sonatas of Beethoven and garnered a glowing review in the Boston Musical Intelligencer. Schepkin was praised for his "remarkable delicacy ... he lent an imaginative range of colors and shadings to Beethoven's piano writing." Read the full review.

Suguru Ishizaki, associate professor of English, was recently awarded the Rudolph J. Joenk Award at the IEEE Professional Communication Society Conference. The award recognizes the best paper published in the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication during the previous year. Ishizaki also gave a keynote presentation at the conference on his development of assessments for measuring student learning in information design. CMU’s Department of English will host IEEE PCS in 2014.

Tridas Mukhopadhyay, the Deloitte Consulting Professor of e-Business at the Tepper School of Business, has been elected as the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Information Systems Society (ISS) distinguished fellow for 2012. The award was announced during the Conference of Information Systems and Technology in Phoenix. A prestigious honor in the field of information systems, the ISS Distinguished Fellow Award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding intellectual contributions to the discipline. The award recognizes the multi-dimensional nature of intellectual contributions including published works that have made a significant impact on theory, research and practice. It also recognizes intellectual leadership in the discipline as reflected in editorial appointments and intellectual stewardship of the field as reflected in the mentoring of doctoral students and young researchers.

Cellphones are a matter of life and death for Amy Wesolowski, a Ph.D. student in CMU’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy and the lead author of a study suggesting new strategies for tracking malaria epidemics that kill 665,000 a year. The study, recently published in the journal Science, used millions of cellphone records to document the impact human movement has on malaria disease patterns in the densely populated nation of Kenya. The study suggests the best plan for attacking the disease in Kenya would be to concentrate on the western edge around Lake Victoria because many of its residents carry the infection with them when they visit surrounding regions with a much lower disease rate. Read the full story

English doctoral candidates David Haeselin and Sheila Liming created the video “Tributaries” to chart the development of the Department of English’s Literary and Cultural Studies (LCS) Program. The film premiered at the LCS 25th anniversary celebration last month. It features English faculty members Jon Klancher, Peggy Knapp, Richard Purcell, David Shumway, Kristina Straub and Jeffrey Williams as well as Paul Smith from George Mason University and Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and former associate professor of English at CMU. To watch the film, visit http://youtu.be/vlhDGatz-yc.