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June 20, 2013

Personal Mention

Alessandro Acquisti presented at the four-day TEDGlobal 2013 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The conference explores international ideas, issues and creativity. His talk, "The battle between public and private," discussed how blurry the boundary between the two have become in recent years and suggested that privacy tradeoffs are coming as a result of the analysis of big data. Read more about his talk.

Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, a Ph.D. student in the Language Technologies Institute advised by William Cohen and Jamie Callan, was recently awarded the 2013 Google U.S./Canada Ph.D. Fellowship in Information Extraction. The fellowship was one of just 15 Ph.D. fellowships that Google awarded in the U.S. and Canada. Mishra's research develops new methods of extracting information from text to create and populate taxonomies and knowledge bases. The fellowship begins in August. Google Ph.D. Fellowships cover tuition, fees and a stipend for two years of academic study and research.

Jimmy Zhu, the ABB Professor of Engineering and director of the Data Storage Systems Center in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named co-director of the Joint Institute of Engineering, a research institute established by CMU and Sun Yat-sen University of China. CMU and SYSU have formed the institute to expand and strengthen engineering education and research in Guangdong Province, China. Zhu has published more than 300 refereed journal papers and six book chapters, has given more than 80 invited papers at various major international conferences and holds 16 U.S. patents. A fellow of IEEE, he has received many awards including the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1993, the R&D Magazine Top 100 Invention Award in 1996 and the IEEE Magnetic Society Achievement Award in 2011. Zhu received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China (1982), and a master’s degree (1983) and Ph.D. (1989), both in physics, from University of California, San Diego.

Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Engineering and Public Policy Professor Marija Ilic, Texas A&M University Professor and ECE alumnus Le Xie, and Qixing Liu, an ECE Ph.D. candidate, have co-edited a new Springer book titled "Engineering IT-Enabled Sustainable Electricity Services: The Tale of Two Low-Cost Green Azores Islands," now available through amazon.com. This book is perhaps the first-of-its-kind model-based illustration of changes in current operations and planning practices necessary to enable robust integration of renewable resources without increasing long-term electricity service cost. This reference could be used as a text for introducing smart grid concepts for a given system. The methods are generalizable and not dependent on the specifics of the systems studied.

Edda Fields-Black, associate professor of history, will speak at the Heinz History Center at 11 a.m., Saturday, June 29, for "Gun Shoot at Bay Point: The Civil War, Port Royal Experiment & The Making of the Gullah/Geechee." Fields-Black will discuss how the Port Royal Experiment answered the "Negro Question," proving freed Blacks would work, go to school, and fight for their freedom and for the Union. She will also discuss how, during the Civil War period, Blacks in the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands became harbingers for four million people who were still enslaved and became what we refer to today as the "Gullah/Geechee." For more information, visit http://www.heinzhistorycenter.org/events.aspx?EventID=310.

Rémi A. (Adam) van Compernolle, assistant professor of second language acquisition and French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Modern Languages, co-edited a special issue of the journal Language Teaching Research on Sociocultural Theory and L2 Pedagogy. To read the issue, which is available through CMU's subscription, visit http://ltr.sagepub.com/content/current.

Obituary:

Alumnus M. Lucius Walker Jr.  (E’58, ’66), a member of the Carnegie Mellon Board of Trustees from 1980 to 1982, died Thursday, June 6, in Annapolis, Md.  He was 76.  After earning his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from CMU, Walker joined the faculty at Howard University in 1963 as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. He earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at CMU in 1966 and was promoted to full professor at Howard in 1970. He was named department head at Howard in 1972, the same year he co-founded the Engineering Coalition of Schools for Excellence in Education and Leadership and the organization Advancing Minorities' Interest in Engineering. In 1978 Walker was appointed Howard’s dean of engineering and served as dean for more than 20 years before retiring in 2002.

Throughout his career, Walker also worked for General Electric, Exxon, Ford Motor Company and Harry Diamond Laboratories. He published many scientific research articles covering topics such as transportation systems analysis, fluid mechanics and bioengineering.

He is survived by his son, Mark Walker; his daughter, Monique Walker; and six grandchildren. A celebration of his life will be held at 9:30 a.m., Saturday, June 22 at the Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel at Howard University. Read more about Walker at http://www.thehistorymakers.com/makers/educationmakers.