News Archive

Prof. Ricardo Bianchini was one of 49 researchers worldwide added to the Association for Computing Machinery's list of Distinguished Scientists for 2011. The designation was in recognition of his significant impact on the computing field.

Prof. Rich Martin commented on NPR on the recent decision of the National Transportation Safety Board to recommend banning cell phone use by drivers.

Prof. Rebecca Wright was honored by Rutgers Athletics for her distinguished service. She received an honorary football and had her picture projected up on the Jumbotron.

Godel-prize winning theorist Daniel A. Spielman was our Distinguished Lecture speaker for December. He talked about "Algorithms, Graph Theory, and the Solution of Laplacian Linear Equations".

Internet Pioneer David Farber was our Distinguished Lecture speaker for November. He talked about "The Technical and Political Evolution of the Internet".

Rutgers CS Professor Dimitris Metaxas answers some questions about Computational Biomedical Imaging and Modeling and the CBIM Center.

Rutgers CS Professor Mario Szegedy answers some questions about the study of quantum computing and computational complexity.

Mark Guzdial of Georgia Tech was our first Distinguished Lecturer of the 2011-2012 year. He spoke on "Technology for Teaching the Majority about Computer Science".

Rutgers is hosting a workshop on Green High Performance Computing, Monday October 17. Rutgers CS Prof. Ricardo Bianchini is one of the organizers.

This past summer brought a handful of outstanding undergraduates to campus to participate in the Perceptual Science REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates). Students carried out original research in topics ranging from strategic decision making to shape understanding. Prof. Matthew Stone, in conjunction with collaborators from the Cognitive Science Center, runs the program.

Sen. Al Franken and Sen. Christopher A. Coons co-authored a letter to OnStar concerning their decision to record and possibly sell location information about former customers. Their letter cites the work of Prof. Marco Gruteser of CS's graduate faculty and his student Baik Hoh. In response, OnStar contacted the senators to let them know they reversed their decision.

Thanks to the efforts of Prof. Bahman Kalantari, the International Symposium on Voronoi Diagrams in Science and Engineering will be held in the US for the first time. The meeting will take place here at Rutgers this coming June 27-29 2012 with support from NSF, DIMACS, and the CS department.

An interactive demo on programming and robotics for the Rutgers University Alumni Association.

A team led by Prof. Marco Gruteser and Prof. Rich Martin received the best paper award at Mobicom 2011 this week. The paper "Detecting Driver Phone Use Leveraging Car Speakers" shows how a cell phone can tell with high accuracy if it is being used in a car's driver seat (and therefore might want to, say, defer text messages) or in the passenger's seat by listening to special sounds from the car's speakers.

Prof. Kristin Dana of our graduate faculty has organized the first Rutgers-wide robotics workshop, to be held September 30th 9am-4pm.

Prof. Paul B. Kantor is the principal investigator of an award from the National Science Foundationtitled "Adaptive Methods for Scalable Dissemination and Retrieval of Scientific Information".

NSF just made public that they are supporting a project spearheaded by Prof. Liviu Iftode and Prof. Badri Nath. They've proposed a "Green City intelligent transport architecture" to close the loop between sensing traffic conditions and making intelligent traffic management decisions to reduce pollution, improve congestion, and minimize delays. The story has been picked up by "Rutgers Today".

Jorge Cham, creator of the popular web comic "Piled Higher and Deeper", is coming to Rutgers October 13th (6pm @ the Busch Campus Center) to answer questions and screen the new live action movie of his strip.

The Wall St. Journal wrote about the growing trend in hackathons and the positive impact they've had on innovation. Abe Stanway, a Rutgers CS undergrad working in Prof. Mor Naaman's lab, is cited for his work on the "Honey Badger" app at "photo hack day".

Montage of images created using Prof. Bahman Kalantari's polynomiography concept.

The CS department is mourning the loss of graduate student and teacher Sergio de Biasi. A memorial gathering will be held September 6th @ 7:30pm at the Graduate Student Lounge (CAC).

Prof. Fred Roberts, director of DIMACS, formally announced this week that he will be stepping down effective September 1. He named Prof. Rebecca Wright as the new director. Rebecca was hired into Computer Science in 2007 with the goal of her becoming DIMACS director. Fred will remain as a Professor at Rutgers and will continue to be involved with various DIMACS activities. He served as director for almost 16 years.

Jonathan Maltz, an Aresty Undergraduate Researcher, describes his Spring 2011 project.

The Computer Science graduates join the other Mathematical and Physical Sciences students for Commencement 2011.

The Rutgers CS Department had an educational poster rendered by artist Nicole Alesi. We will be mailing copies out to top computer science departments across the country.

Prof. Rebecca Wright was an invited panelist at "It's your call: What Kind of Internet Do You Want?", an INET / Internet Society conference in New York City. The panel concerned "New Privacy Models".

CS grad student Chris Mansley co-authored a best paper award winner with colleages from IBM at this year's International Conference on Autonomic Computing. The title of their paper is "Toward Data Center Self-Diagnosis Using a Mobile Robot".

Prof. Tina Eliassi-Rad presents Network Science at TEDxRutgers Spring 2011.

Prof. Bahman Kalantari presented his work on Polynomigraphy to high school students in Montgomery County recently. The visit was written up in the Princeton Packet newpaper, giving an excellent sense of the connection Bahman has forged with kids and the unique blend of mathematics and aesthetics that Polynomiography represents.

Several members of the CS department participated in the Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium on April 29. Prof. Rich Martin and Doug Motto advised Jonathan Maltz, William Brozas, Jonathan Chiu and Jeremy Schiff, who worked on course algorithms and measuring human workflows. Prof. Bahman Kalantari advised Zheqian Tong who presented his work on "Polynomiography and Least Squares". Graduate student Rekha Bachwani participated as a judge for the event.

CS graduate Amy Zhang was honored by Rutgers with her own advertising billboard, outside the New Brunswick train station. It reads: Game-Set-Match: Rutgers students are among the brightest in the world. Meet one of this year's highest achievers, scholar-athlete Amy Zhang, winner of a prestigious 2011 Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

The paper "4D Cardiac Reconstruction Using High Resolution CT Images" by Mingchen Gao, Junzhou Huang, Shaoting Zhang, Zhen Qian, Szilard Voros, Prof. Dimitri Metaxas, and Leon Axel was selected as best paper at the 2011 Functional Imaging and Modeling of the Heart Conference (held in New York City last month).

The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative (WCAI) research center awarded Prof. Tina Eliassi-Rad (with Shawndra Hill, Keith Henderson, and Chris Volinksy) one of ten grants for Modeling Mobile Customer Behavior.

The 85 recipients of BS and BA degrees in Computer Science were honored at the 2011 Commencement. This year marked the first that CS held its convocation jointly with the other Mathematical and Physical Sciences departments and the event was grand success.

The CS Department gives demos to the community at Rutgers Day 2011.

Prof. Michael Littman was honored at an awards ceremony on May 4th. He was one of 3 professors, University wide, to receive The Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching. His citation read: IN RECOGNITION of his outstanding contributions to the intellectual development of his students, his inspirational and engaging lectures that convey his passion of learning, and his gift for finding creative ways to help students gain a clear understanding of even the most complex course materials.

Amy Zhang, senior Rutgers CS major and women's varsity tennis captain, has been named as a recipient of the Gates Scholarship to study advanced computer science in Cambridge, England. Amy will also be receiving the department's Novielli prize at graduation.

TEDx Rutgers, a local version of the popular TED talk series, was held on Friday April 8th. Prof. Tina Eliassi-Rad and Prof. Andy Nealen were among the ten featured speakers and several CS grad students were closely involved in organizing the event.

CS graduate student Sergio de Biasi spoke on EBRU TV about the challenges and advantages of studying away from your home country. (See video.)

Rutgers hosts intense programming competition.

The First Hack RU Competition was held on campus March 26th-27th and attracted student teams from throughout the Northeast.

The 2011 Open House featured a keynote by Gerald Tesauro (IBM) about his work on the Jeopardy! challenge, several faculty presentations, and a panel with the theme of "Whose Data Is It Anyway?".

Prof. Andy Nealen was featured in a video now appearing on time.com talking about the new wave of independent video game designers and future artistic possibilities.

A department project has been added to the list of those receiving support from the National Science Foundation. Prof. Dimitris Metaxas and the CBIM faculty members will be funded for "Phase I: I/UCRC: Center for Dynamic Data Analytics (CDDA)", a continuation of their successful collaborations with industry.

Prof. Matthew Stone was awarded a grant for "REU Site: Perceptual Science and Technology" to support undergraduates doing research with faculty over the summer.

Driving or flying while sleepy is the root cause of many accidents. Vision-based technology to monitor eyelid blinks is being developed by Prof. Dimitris Metaxas's group with the goal of automatically determining when someone is too tired to be at the wheel and to warning them. The work was cited this week in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Prof. Nealen et al. on Volumetric Modeling with Diffusion Surfaces.

Prof. Dimitri Metaxas' project "Generating Accurate, Understandable Sign Language Animations Based on Analysis of Human Signing" is being funded by the National Science Foundation.

Prof. Uli Kremer visited Maplewood Middle School and helped teach the kids about how water densities vary in the ocean. He also brought a computer controlled undersea glider and let the kids explore the ocean with the glider's flight simulator.

RU's "Women in Computer Science" (WICS) is running a fund raiser today for girls in Nigeria. Email RUcandygram@gmail.com or call 920-482-7996 for more information. 100% of the proceeds will benefit the Women's Technology Empowerment Centre's Girls Technology Camp in Nigeria.

An article in the Daily Targum discusses the research of Prof. Amelie Marian (and her Columbia collaborator) on providing new search tools to help patients find relevant information online.

An article in Rutgers Today describes the research of Prof. Amelie Marian on providing new search tools for medical forums.

The RU Computer Science department is introducing a new event for CS students called the "RU Innovating Challenge 2011", sponsored by our Industrial Affiliates Program and run by Prof. Sesh Venugopal. Teams of 3 or 4 RU CS students can create software to attack a set of creative service-invention tasks.

A demo of Turgay Senlet's robotics project out of CBIM.

Prof. Andy Nealen and colleague's game Osmos was selected by Mac World as their "Puzzle Game of the Year", calling it "undeniably enthralling".

A blogger at MIT's Technology Review interviewed Prof. Michael Littman and some of AI's heavy hitters leading up to the big human-computer matchup in Jeopardy.

ReadWriteWeb posted a brief entry on a Rutgers CS-led project on creating user-programmable appliances.

On the occassion of Prof. Endre Szemeredi's birthday, a conference was held in his honor. The proceedings of the conference are now available as a book focusing on Endre's brain called "Irregular Mind".