Personal Mention
Maralee Harrell, teaching professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Philosophy, has been selected as the winner of the 2018 Prize for Excellence in Philosophy Teaching. The recipient is selected by the American Philosophical Association (APA), the American Association of Philosophy Teachers and the Teaching Philosophy Association. The award recognizes a philosophy teacher who has had a profound impact on the student learning of philosophy in undergraduate and/or pre-college settings. Selected from 39 nominations across the U.S., Harrell will receive $1,000 and a commemorative plaque at the APA’s Eastern Division Meeting in January. Harrell won Carnegie Mellon’s Teaching Innovation Award in 2016 for her development and implementation of argument diagramming as a central tool in teaching Introduction to Philosophy. Find out more.
Three School of Computer Science faculty members — Venkatesan Guruswami, Mor Harchol-Balter and Eric Xing — have been elevated to fellows in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest technical professional organization. Fellow status is a distinction reserved for select members who have demonstrated extraordinary accomplishments in an IEEE field of interest.
Guruswami, a professor in the Computer Science Department (CSD), was cited "for contributions to list error-correction and algorithmic coding theory." His research spans a number of topics in theoretical computer science, including the theory of error-correcting codes, probabilistically checkable proofs, computational complexity theory and algebraic algorithms. He joined the CMU faculty in 2009.
Harchol-Balter, a professor in CSD since 1999, was cited "for contributions to performance analysis and design of computer systems." Her work on designing new resource-allocation policies includes load-balancing policies, power-management policies and scheduling policies for distributed systems. She is heavily involved in the SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE research community and is the author of a popular textbook, "Performance Analysis and Design of Computer Systems."
Xing, a professor in the Machine Learning Department since 2004, was cited "for contributions to machine learning algorithms and systems." His research interests lie in machine learning, computational biology and statistical methodology. He and his collaborators have developed a framework called Petuum for distributed machine learning with massive data, big models and a wide spectrum of algorithms. Petuum is now established as a company, of which Xing is founder, CEO and chief scientist.
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Jessica Hodgins, professor of robotics and computer science, as one of 56 new ACM Fellows for their significant contributions to computer science. Hodgins, who leads the Facebook AI Research Lab in Pittsburgh in addition to her faculty duties, was cited by the ACM for her contributions to character animation, human simulation and humanoid robotics. Her research focuses on computer graphics, animation and robotics with an emphasis on generating and analyzing human motion. Formerly vice president for research at Disney Research, she last year was elected president of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH). Hodgins is a recipient of numerous awards, including SIGGRAPH’s Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics. She received her Ph.D. in computer science at CMU in 1989. ACM will formally recognize its 2018 fellows at its annual awards banquet, June 15, 2019, in San Francisco.
Carolina Zarate, an elite hacker and aspiring security professional, has received a fellowship from the Executive Women's Forum on Information Security, Risk Management and Privacy and CMU's Information Networking Institute. Sponsored by Alta Associates since 2007, the fellowship supports a graduate student from a historically underrepresented population. Zarate earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science at Carnegie Mellon in 2018 and, through the INI’s integrated master’s degree program, completed her master’s degree in one year rather than two. She is a member of CMU’s internationally acclaimed competitive hacking team, the Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP), and helped PPP win its fourth title at the DefCon security conference in 2017, a feat achieved by no other team in the contest’s 22-year history. “If you can identify security vulnerabilities that are exploitable, and tell the company how you did it — that means you’re hacking for good reason: to protect people," she said. Find out more.
Obituary: Lindsay J. Morgenthaler
Alumna Lindsay J. Morgenthaler, a former trustee and chairman of the Andrew Carnegie Society whose fundraising efforts have helped raise more than $1 billion for Carnegie Mellon, died on Dec. 3 in Palo Alto, California. She was 96.
Born in Pittsburgh, Morgenthaler earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Carnegie Mellon in 1945. After moving to Cleveland, she began a career of educational and civic leadership that spanned four decades. She was president of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival and led it to national prominence, launching the careers of many actors including Tom Hanks and John Lithgow. She served for decades as vice chairman of the Cleveland Ballet and of the Playhouse Square Foundation. She was a trustee of the Cleveland Foundation, Leadership Cleveland, WVIZ-TV Public Television, Cleveland Museum of Art, and numerous other charitable and philanthropic causes.
Together with her husband David, she funded a professorship of entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon, a founding sponsorship of the Entrepreneurship Center at MIT, and fellowship programs at the Cleveland Clinic and Stanford University. She received CMU's Alumni Service Award in 1978, the Alumni Distinguished Service Award in 1986 and the Andrew Carnegie Philanthropic Award in 1993.
President Ronald Reagan appointed her to the President’s Advisory Committee on the Arts for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Later, President George H.W. Bush appointed her to the Bicentennial Commission in preparation for the nation’s Bicentennial in 1996.
“Lindsay Morgenthaler lived a life in service to her family and her many causes. She was altruistic and used her wealth to support people and causes in education, entrepreneurship and the arts. She did not seek leadership but was consistently chosen,” said her son, Gary Morgenthaler, partner at Morgenthaler Ventures. “For 40 years, leaders from the ‘Greatest Generation’ welcomed her into boardrooms as one of their own. She was a woman ahead of her time.”