Summer 2002

ALUMNI In the News

-- MARK STICKEL (CS '77) is the recipient of the prestigious 2002 Herbrand Award, given each year for career contributions to automated reasoning. The award will be presented at the 18th International Conference on Automated Deduction to be held in Copenhagen in July 2002.The Herbrand award is considered the most important prize in theorem-proving or automated deduction. The list of previous winners of the award is a who's who of the field: Larry Wos (1992), Woody Bledsoe (1994), Alan Robinson (1996), Wu Wen-Tsun (1997), Gerard Huet (1998), Boyer and Moore (1999), William McCune (2000), and Donald Loveland (2001).

--ASTRO TELLER (CS '98), CEO of BodyMedia in Pittsburgh, has received the 2002 Industrial Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) gold award for the company's wearable body monitor. The IDEA awards, sponsored by the Industrial Design Society of America (IDSA) and Business Week magazine, are recognized as "the premier awards worldwide" for new product design. The 41 IDEA Gold winners will be recognized at a ceremony Saturday, July 20 during the 2002 IDSA National Conference & Design Gallery in Monterey, Calif. The BusinessWeek IDEA report, containing a complete list of all the Gold winners and in-depth analysis of many of the designs, arrived on newsstands June 28. In addition, IDSA's quarterly magazine, Innovation, will publish in-depth case studies on the Gold winners in its Yearbook this fall. To learn more about BodyMedia visit http://www.bodymedia.com.

--JAY SIPELSTEIN (CS 2002) won the POT-LIMIT OMAHA "HOLD'EM" event held on April 28 at the 33rd Annual "World Series of Poker" (WSOP), the largest poker tournament in the world. Commencing April 20 at Binion's in Las Vegas, the 37-event tournament concluded May 20-24 with a 5-day championship. The tournament, started by Benny Binion in 1970, included seven of the world's most noted poker players. The event has evolved into a competition with hundreds of players and total prize money last year of $18M. Jay's #11 event victory was "especially notable in that this was his first WSOP event, in his first pot-limit tournament, and [he] showed NO FEAR in an as impressive a performance as we've had so far this year," noted the event commentators.

-- JOHN W. HEFFNER (CS 2002), was awarded the 2002 Allen Newell Award For Excellence In Undergraduate Research, for his senior thesis, "High Bandwidth TCP Queuing." The thesis develops methods to reduce TCP queue size in relation to the bandwidth of TCP connections to improve throughput and optimize memory usage efficiency. John received a $1,000 cash award and was formally recognized at this year's SCS commencement program. He currently works for the Network Research Group at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center where he held a student internship for three years. Future plans include attending graduate school.