Personal Mention
Robert E. Kass, the Maurice Falk Professor of Statistics and Computational Neuroscience, has been selected to give the 2017 R.A. Fisher Lecture at the Joint Statistical Meetings, July 29 - Aug. 3 in Baltimore. The lecture recognizes the highly significant impact of statistical methods on scientific investigations and was established by the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) in 1963 to honor the contributions of Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher and the work of a present-day statistician. Kass has appointments in the Dietrich College’s Statistics Department and School of Computer Science’s Machine Learning Department and is the interim director of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. He is the second CMU statistician to receive this honor; the late Stephen Fienberg gave the R.A. Fisher lecture in 2015.
Provost Farnam Jahanian called for continuing investments in cybersecurity to meet the evolving challenges in securing cyberspace. He delivered his remarks during a keynote speech at the National Science Foundation's Secure and Trustworthy CyberSpace (SaTC) Principal Investigators' Meeting. The biennial forum of the SaTC research community, held Jan. 9-11 in Arlington, Va., included top experts in academia, government and industry. Alessandro Acquisti, professor of information technology and public policy at CMU's H. Heinz III College and Cylab, and director of the Privacy Economics Experiments (Peex) lab, gave the meeting's final keynote address Jan. 11. Acquisti's talk focused on the relationships between privacy, economics, and behavioral economics in a time when people disclose so much of their personal lives and data over the internet. Read more
Former School of Computer Science faculty member Hans Berliner, a world champion correspondence chess player who built the first game-playing computer ever to defeat a human champion at any game, died Jan. 13 in Riviera Beach, Fla. He was 87. Berliner, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon in 1975 and served as a senior research scientist until his retirement in 1998, was at the center of computer chess research for two decades. He led the development of Hitech, the first chess computer to achieve the rank of senior master and, in 1988, the first to beat a grandmaster. Berliner was born in Berlin in 1927 and emigrated with his family in 1937 to Washington, D.C. Read more