News Archive

Best wishes from the Rutgers Laboratory for Computer Science Research.

Rutgers Focus did a feature story on Prof. Andy Nealen and Osmos' "game of the year" designation.

Kevin Waters, CAVE regular and Rutgers CS major, has won the November Photo contest by naming the developers of eight famous computers from their photos. For his efforts he got a $25 Gift Card to Barnes & Noble. More photo contests will be held in 2011.

Rutgers' student newspaper wrote up a project involving Prof. Michael Littman and a group of students. The project is making household appliances programmable as a way of encouraging people to program and also to make devices easier to interact with.

Apple Computer announced to the press their choices for the best apps for 2010. The winner in the "iPad Game of the Year" category was Osmos, co-developed by Prof. Andy Nealen of Rutgers CS.

Prof. S. Muthukrishnan ("Muthu") of the CS faculty was just named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. His citation reads "For contributions to efficient algorithms for string matching, data streams, and internet ad auctions". He now shares this extremely prestigious designation with Prof. Eric Allender, who was inducted in 2006.

Prof. Naaman of our graduate faculty received a prestigious NSF CAREER grant to study social networking via Twitter and Facebook-style messages. The project is called "Novel Approaches for Reasoning about Local Communities from Social Awareness Streams Data".

Prof. Tina Eliasi-Rad's work uses machine-learning techniques on graphical data to identify security vulnerabilities.

Rutgers CS Chair Michael Littman's work focuses on both human learning and machine learning.

Rutgers CS Professor Eric Allender answers some questions about the study of computational complexity.

The Computer Science Department cosponsored the premier screening of "Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of WWII". The film shares the story of a group of female mathematicians who did secret research for the US Army during the war, a handful of whom went on to serve as the programmers of ENIAC, the first electronic computer.

Prof. Abhishek Bhattacharjee (not pictured) and Prof. Tina Eliassi-Rad of the CS department are listed among the new professors who joined Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences in the Fall.

Igor Kaplunov, CAVE regular and Rutgers CS major, has won the October Photo contest by naming the developers of eight different programming languages from their photos---Ritchie to Gosling to von Rossum. For his efforts he got a $25 Gift Card to Barnes & Noble.

The Rutgers Computer Science Department has announced that a faculty search is underway, focusing on theoretical and applied cryptography. More details are available at www.cs.rutgers.edu/employment. Applications should be received by November 15, 2010, for full consideration.

Justin Ross, Rutgers Junior and CAVE denizen, won the first CAVE photo contest by naming all twelve Computer Scientists whose photos were hanging up on the walls in the CAVE lab. For his efforts he got a $25 Gift Card to Barnes & Noble.

The Rutgers CS Department, in cooperation with the School of Engineering, hosted the NY Area Programming Contest for the Association of Computing Machinery.

Prof. Eric Allender of the Rutgers CS department has been approved by the ACM Publications Board as Editor in Chief of the promising young journal ACM Transactions on Computation Theory.

Prof. Tina Eliassi-Rad, who joined the CS department this Fall, amassed a few very nice recognitions right before arriving. She received the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Global Security Directorate Gold Award for work on detection of cyber attacks and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Outstanding Mentor Award.

Lecturer Kristian Stout, who taught CS-170 at Rutgers until recently, was credited as being a student's most influential professor in a recent editorial in the Daily Targum.

Computer science student Junzhou Huang, working with Prof. Dimitris Metaxas at CBIM, took home the Young Scientist Award from the recent MICCAI 2010 conference (The 13th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention) for his paper on efficient MRI processing.

Prof. Endre Szemeredi received an honorary degree this summer for contributions to mathematics. (Video edited down from official event video.)

The Center for Computational Biomedical Imaging and Modeling held an open house, complete with visitors from throughout the university and nearby industry, talks by university leaders, and demos from CBIM scientists. CBIM is celebrating its 8th highly successful year at Rutgers.

Rutgers CS student Junzhou Huang was selected as an "Emerging Leader in Multimedia" by IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center for his work on "Structured Sparsity and Its Applications". This award is given to only 10 Ph.D. students nationwide.

For the second consecutive year in the two years the event was held, Rutgers student Ian Jennings Jablonowski won the HackNY programming competition. Jablonowski, who studies with Prof. Mor Naaman of the Rutgers CS graduate faculty, created a smart alarm clock that fills you in on what you missed while you were sleeping. This year, another team from Rutgers CS placed, coming in third behind a team from Brown. Joey Dong, Vaibhav Verma, Sameen Jalal created a "TextRoulette" application that connects people looking to chat.

Some of the notable alumni from the Rutgers CS PhD program are listed on a new page. We are proud of our former students and continually impressed with their accomplishments and impact.

Prof. Amelie Marian received a grant this month from the National Science Foundation to study online search for medical information on patient blogs and other user-generated information. The project title is "Gaining Knowledge from Other Patients: Structuring and Searching the content of Health-Related Web Posts" and is joint with Noemie Elhadad from Columbia BioInformatics. The project will look at the reliability of health information and also provide an intelligent search engine for patient posts to medical sites.

Prof. Wade Trappe and Prof. Marco Gruteser (WINLAB and the CS graduate faculty) appeared on CNN last week for their part in work studying the security risks of spoofing a flat-tire sensor on a car. The basic idea is that some cars have sensors in their tires that report air pressure to the car's main computer via a wireless link. That wireless link is insecure and researchers showed that they can transmit a message that spoofs a car into believing its tires are flat---a possible safety and security risk.

Prof. Mor Naaman of SC&I and our graduate faculty received two new grants to study social media. The first is a 3-year NSF grant on "Detection and Presentation of Community and Global Event Content from Social Media Sources" (with Luis Gravano at Columbia) and the second is a gift from Nokia's US University Collaboration for "Understanding and Transforming Event Sharing Experiences".

The department is serving as the host for the Greater New York Region ACM Regional Collegiate Programming Contest. It will be held Sunday, October 24, 2010 on Busch Campus. In addition to hosting teams from all over the Northeast, we plan to field two Rutgers CS teams as well.

The Computer Science Graduate Student Society (CSGSS) of the Rutgers CS department hosted the annual convocation for the CS graduate students this past week. Bill Katsak, CSGSS President, announced that the graduate students selected Prof. Badri Nath for the 2009-2010 CSGSS Award for Excellence in Teaching. Prof. Nath received a plaque and a hearty round of applause from the students and his colleagues.

The Department's new work space for computer science students is now up and running. The CAVE (Collaborative Academic Versatile Environment) is located in Hill 252. The room supports learning and project collaboration by offering movable furniture, a reconfigurable bungee conference room table and rolling whiteboards. The room includes a 60" LCD HDTV, Wireless Internet, an 88" interactive SMART board, a PS3 for gaming and ten iLab LINUX PCs. It will serve as the new headquarters for our undergraduate student organizations.

Prof. Raychaudhuri of Winlab and the CS graduate faculty is leading a research team that just received a $7.5M grant from the NSF. Their project is called "MobilityFirst" and it reimagines the Internet to optimize it for primarily communication between mobile devices. Among the team members are Prof. Marco Gruteser (Winlan/ECE and CS graduate faculty), Prof. Wade Trappe (Winlab/ECE and CS graduate faculty), and Prof. Rich Martin (CS).

Prof. Ricardo Bianchini, Prof. Thu Nguyen, and Kien Le of Rutgers CS received the best paper award at the 1st International Green Computing Conference last week along with some collaborators from Princeton. Their paper, "Capping the Brown Energy Consumption of Internet Services at Low Cost", provides an optimization approach that allows groups of data centers to reduce their dependence on "brown" (carbon-generated) energy, keeping costs low while respecting service-level agreements.

Prof. Uli Kremer talks about his work in programming languages making smart phones and undersea gliders easier to use. (From Rutgers University Faculty Research Spotlight.)

Prof. Michael Littman was interviewed on WKYW Newsradio about a recent hacker convention. (Thanks to Charles McGrew of LCSR for turning the audio recording into a video.)

Covering a Las Vegas conference on hacking, KYW Newsradio in Philadelphia called Rutgers for a little perspective. Prof. Michael Littman provided some context and stressed the importance of protecting yourself and your company from Social Engineering.

Rutgers Center for Information Assurance is co-hosting a conference---Secure Knowledge Management Workshop (SKM 2010)---that will be held at Rutgers this October. Prof. Thu Nguyen is one of the organizers and the program committee includes Profs. Marco Gruteser, Wade Trappe, and Yanyong Zhang from WINLAB and Rutgers CS graduate faculty.

Six Rutgers computer science and biomedical engineering graduate students recently participated in a prominent gathering of women in computer science, designed to combat the field's difficulties in attracting and retaining women scientists.

Prof. Michael Littman was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence at their annual meeting held this year in Atlanta.

Osmos, an independent video game co-developed by Prof. Andy Nealen, went on sale for the iPad on July 8. It's been the top selling app world-wide ever since then. This distinction is added to the many other awards and accolades the game has received.

CATBox is a course book and a software system for animating graph algorithms intended for readers at advanced undergraduate or graduate level. It provides a hands-on approach to learning about combinatorial optimization and includes computer exercises and examples that replace the usual static textbook pictures. This innovative book was written by Prof. Alexander Schliep of the Rutgers Computer Science Department and Biomaps with collaborator Winfried Hochstattler of FernUniversitat in Hagen.

Prof. Evangelia Micheli-Tzanakou of Biomedical Engineering and the Rutgers Computer Science graduate faculty will be honored with the 2010 IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Continuing Education "or vision and leadership in establishing the IEEE Biometrics Certification Program". Prof. Micheli-Tzanakou will receive the award in New Brunswick in November 2010.

Prof. Amelie Marian received a Google Research Award for her proposal, "PERSEUS: Structuring and Searching the Content of Health-Related Web Posts." The project extends her prior Google-supported work on searching and analyzing user restaurant reviews to a patient web forum domain. The project will help patients and medical professionals sort through the large amount of patient-input web information available.

The 2011 IEEE Control Systems Award this year has been awarded to Prof. Eduardo of the RU CS graduate faculty. He is cited "for fundamental contributions to nonlinear systems theory and nonlinear feedback control."

The Chronicle of Higher Education includes a great article on how computer technology is enabling new kinds of science. Our own Prof. Haym Hirsh shares his thoughts.

The Laboratory for Computer Science Research, an advanced development organization within CS, helped create the University Course Schedule Planner. This service helps Rutgers students navigate the challenging task of creating their own course schedules.

Prof. Marco Gruteser and Prof. Wade Trappe of our graduate faculty were co-authors of the best paper award at the ACM MobiSys 2010 conference. The paper provides an architecture for efficiently and accurately navigating to available parking spots.

Prof. Endre Szemeredi is being granted an honorary degree from the Department of Applied Mathematics of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at the Charles University in Prague.

The CS Department gathered to congratulate our graduates, including Novielli Award winners Anthony Cuozzo and Bradley Lord, and honors track students Anthony Cuozzo and David Boehm.

Prof. Endre Szemeredi's recent selection to the National Academy of Sciences was covered in a Rutgers Press Release this week.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the leading AI professional society, will be naming Prof. Michael Littman to their list of fellows at this summer's conference. Littman will be the 3rd current CS faculty member on this distinguished list.

There will be a conference held this summer to honor Prof. Endre Szemeredi's 70th birthday. Top speakers are invited from throughout the mathematics world.

Prof. Kulikowski recently co-authored, according to a press release, "the first article ever in a high impact medical journal on the topic of biomedical nanoinformatics". The article appeared in the journal Pediatric Research earlier this year and the new press release is from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid.

Prof. Sesh Venugopal was awarded a 2010 SAS Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education for his long-term dedication to computer science teaching.

The Computer Science Department honored graduates at our <a href="http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/cs/Events/honors2010/">end-of-year awards ceremony</a>.

The Computer Science Department shared their work with participants in <a href="http://rutgersday.rutgers.edu">Rutgers Day</a> 2010.

Prof. Endre Szemeredi has been recognized for his contributions to computer science and combinatorics by being named to the United States National Academy of Sciences. He is already a member of the Hungarian Academy and is the only Rutgers professor so honored this year.

The Computer Science department had a demo booth at Rutgers Day 2010. Visitors from all over the state came and learned about us. An addition at this year's event was the brave and giving students who spent the day showing their course projects.

Prof. Vinod Ganapathy and Prof. Liviu Iftode were asked by the NSF to participate in media webcast describing their work on possible attacks to Smart Phones.

<a href="http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~nealen/">Prof. Nealen</a> speaks on creating minimalistic video games and 3d objects via sketching.

Abhishek Bhattacharjee (currently at Princeton) has accepted our offer to join us in the Fall as a new junior faculty member. His research area is computer architecture with an emphasis on how the processors in a multicore architecture can share information to improve their performance.

Profs. Marco Gruteser and Wade Trappe, members of WINLAB and the RU CS graduate faculty, were cited for their work on sensors for available parking spots.

Steve Smaldone, a RU CS graduate student working with Prof. Liviu Iftode, received the Dean's Research Award from the Rutgers University Graduate School.

Prof. Vinod Ganapath and Prof. Liviu Iftode and students Jeffrey Bickford, Ryan O'Hare, and Arati Baliga showed that smart phones can be co-opted to perform nefarious activities (and therefore need greater security support).

Yingying Chen, a former student of Prof. Rich Martin and Prof. Wade Trappe, won an NSF CAREER award for her project "EASE: Enhancing the Security of Pervasive Wireless Networks by Exploiting Location". Yingying graduated in 2007 and is a professor at Stevens. Kudos to Yingying and to Rich and Wade by proxy.

Former RU CS Prof. Craig Nevill-Manning highlighted some of the latest research results from Google.

Prof. Vinod Ganapathy was awarded a CAREER grant from the NSF. The CAREER award is commonly viewed as a vote of confidence in a young researcher's future and we're proud to have Prof. Ganapathy on our faculty

Google announced that it will be funding a $1.5M proposal co-written by Prof. Ricardo Bianchini with 3 colleagues from other universities. They will be continuing their ground-breaking work on energy efficient computing, specifically, studying how to design large-scale data centers with smaller carbon footprints. The story was picked up by the Star Ledger, Asbury Park Press, and the Daily Targum, as well as some targeted publications like "Energy Efficient News", "DatacenterDynamics". This project is Prof. Bianchini's 5th funded grant proposal this year, for a total of $2.75M in funding.

Rutgers Against Hunger notified Mary Hoffman of the CS department for a job well done: "Thank you so very much for serving as captain of your group for the Rutgers Against Hunger Adopt-A-Family campaign. I hope that you found your experience to be as fulfilling as the families who received your donations. Please share my gratitude with all who participated in your group. ... I witnessed so many people overwhelmed with joy and tears as they received their boxes with those RAH labels on them."

Ileana Streinu, a former student of Prof. Bill Steiger's and current professor at Smith College, received The David P. Robbins Prize from the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The prize is awarded every three years for a paper that reports on novel research in algebra, combinatorics or discrete mathematics. Streinu won the prize for solving the "carpenter's rule problem," a long-standing challenge inspired by those folding measuring devices that woodworkers sometimes use. It asks whether a chain of hinged polygons can be unfolded without them bumping into each other.