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February 2002 SCS Graduate Programs:
An In-depth Review STATISTICS We have eight master's programs
and six doctoral programs
The newest "kid" on the block is the Ph.D. in KDD program, which has for the past two-and-one-half years run as a master's program out of the Center for Automated Learning and Discovery. This new Ph.D. program was approved by the School in December 2001, and is accepting applications for fall 2002. The Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO) and the Pure and Applied Logic (PAL) programs are specializations of the Ph.D. in Computer Science program; the Neural Basis of Cognition (NBC) program is a specialization of both the Ph.D. in Computer Science and the Ph.D. in Robotics programs. A student in one of these specializations must satisfy all the requirements of the home Ph.D. program, plus complete additional course or lab work. Finally, we offer a joint Ph.D. in Robotics and the M.D. program with the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. For fall 2001 admissions, we received 1053 applications to our doctoral programs, admitted 145 (14% selectivity), and 77 accepted our offers (53% yield). We received 493 applications to our master's programs, admitted 227 (46% selectivity), and 146 accepted our offers (64% yield). In fall 2001, we enrolled 288 doctoral students and 211 master's students, for a total enrollment of 499 new and returning graduate students. Of the doctoral students, 82% are male; 18%, female; 47% domestic, 53% foreign. Of the master's students, 77% are male, 23% female; 55% domestic and 45% foreign. Notably, 57% of our Ph.D. applications were from overseas; 30% from China alone (i.e., more than half of our foreign Ph.D. applicants were from China). Across all graduate programs we received applications from students representing 157 different undergraduate institutions and 37 different countries. In May 2001, we granted 37 doctoral degrees and 107 master's degrees for academic year 2000-2001. ACCOMPLISHMENTS Research
Highlights The Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) Project, led by Professor Manuel Blum in collaboration with Udi Manber of Yahoo!, engages the minds of Computer Science Ph.D. students Luis von Ahn and John Langford. The goal is to run a program that can recognize, through a brief interaction over the web, whether a user is a human or not. Their insight is to use complex patterns that only humans can understand. For example, one CAPTCHA test relies on the ability of humans to recognize highly distorted words. Other Computer Science Ph.D. student contributors include Nick Hopper, Bartosz Przydetek, Chuck Rosenberg, and Ke Yang. See http://www.captcha.net for more information and to test yourself. The Phoenix Project (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~phoenix), led by Professor Seth Goldstein, is exploring the use of nanotechnology for building very large reconfigurable devices. Goldstein and Computer Science Ph.D. student Mihai Dan-Budiu propose a new architecture, nanoFabric, based on chemically assembled electronic nanotechnology. Combined with work by Computer Science Ph.D. student Dan Rosewater that eliminates the need for transistors, nanoFabric eliminates the need for precise alignment and placement of wires, and provides for defect tolerance. In conjunction with CMOS support circuitry it can create a reconfigurable fabric with more than 1010 gate equivalents/cm2. This fall, first-year Computer Science Ph.D. student Mahim Mishra and LTI Ph.D. student Yan Rong joined the project, which also includes ECE graduate student Suraj Sudhir and undergraduate Michael Donohue. Carnegie Mellon's Robosoccer teams (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~robosoccer), led by Professor Manuela Veloso, continue to score big. The soccer simulation team placed first in the RoboCup 2001 coach competition, held in Seattle in August. The coach and soccer-playing simulation team included Computer Science Ph.D. students Paul Carpenter and Pat Riley. The legged robot team CMPack'01 took second place in the Sony Legged Robot League at RoboCup. The team included Computer Science Ph.D. students James Bruce, Scott Lenser and Will Uther, and junior Martin Hock. Under the supervision of Veloso and Dr. Tucker Balch, Robotics Ph.D. students Ravi Balasubramanian, Rosemary Emery, Steven Stancliff, and Ashley Stroupe, and Robotics MS student Kevin Sikorski contributed to the middle-real robot team, which went 2-3 (win-loss) in the first round. The Carnegie Mellon teams were the only American teams to take any place in the competition. In fall 2001, Robotics Ph.D. student Alex Foessel-Bunting successfully defended his thesis on the interpretation of radar data. He took the occupancy grid method pioneered by Dr. Hans Moravec, and adapted it to radar images. The combination of data from disparate vantage points mitigates the ambiguities introduced by the sidelobes, attenuates the noise, and emphasizes the evidence of objects in a scene. Foessel-Bunting has been a key contributor to the Field Robotics Center since he first arrived at Carnegie Mellon, including his involvement in the treks to the Atacama desert in Chile (his home) and Antarctica. Horatio Doc Beardsley is an animatronic character that interacts with people by responding to questions, discussing a topic, singing songs, and even burping, hiccupping, sneezing or snoring. ETC master's student Timothy Eck first envisioned an animatronic character, such as Doc Beardsley, that would be able to converse with a guest. His collaboration with Robotics Institute research engineer Todd Camill led to the founding of the Interactive Animatronics Initiative. ETC co-directors Don Marinelli and Randy Pausch then organized a team of eight other ETC students to help with Doc's production. See www.etc.cmu.edu for other ETC creations. The Universal Speech Interface (USI) project (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~usi/), led by Professor Roni Rosenfeld includes LTI Ph.D. students Stefanie Shriver, Arthur Toth, and Jerry Zhu; LTI master's student Thomas Harris and CALD master's student James Sanders; and systems scientist Alex Rudnicky. Their goal is to produce usable, practical speech interfaces. In essence, USI attempts to do for speech what Palm's Graffiti™ has done for mobile text entry. They have developed two telephone-based applications: one for querying about showings at Pittsburgh movie theatres, and the other, about apartments for rent in Pittsburgh neighborhoods. CALD master's student Anna Goldenberg argues in her thesis "Analyzing Grocery Data for Early Detection of Epidemics and Bio-terrorism Attacks" that grocery data has two advantages: it can signal an outbreak, since people tend to seek self-treatment of symptoms before they reach a doctor or a hospital; and it is much richer and more frequent than epidemiological data. CALD master's student Zhiqiang Bi introduces in his thesis a new, skewed distribution called DGX; he shows that it appears frequently in real datasets (sales data, click-stream data, telephone service data), and that it includes the ubiquitous Zipf distribution as a special case. His work led to a joint conference paper that was runner up for the Best Paper award in KDD 2001. Five Human-Computer Interaction master's students worked in the cognition lab, led by Dr. Roger Remington, in the Human Factors Research and Technology Division at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. Under the direction of Professor Bonnie John, Marianne Berkovich, Jack Zaientz, Andy Yang, Elaine Kwong, and Anne Zahn helped develop a new research tool, called Apex. This tool is intended to facilitate cognitive psychology basic research and human factors engineering projects, e.g., the design of complicated consoles like the instrument display of a jet airplane. Fun Stuff Our students work hard, very hard, but they find time to do fun stuff too. On November 3, 2001, at the 30th anniversary Pittsburgh Filmmakers' celebration Media/Tonic (http://www.pghfilmmakers.org/tonic/), Computer Science Ph.D. student Michael Mateas presented the artificial intelligence-based artwork "Terminal Time," a system that constructs ideologically biased documentary histories in response to audience feedback. The "Terminal Time" system follows a set of rhetorical goals, then dynamically selects historical events and constructs relations between these events to tell its story. "Terminal Time" is a collaborative project between Mateas, documentary filmmaker Steffi Domike, and interactive artist Paul Vanouse. One of the two entries submitted by Carnegie Mellon's Tycon Mismatch team came in eighth out 140 teams and 269 competing programs in the Fourth International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) 2001 Programming Contest (http://cristal.inria.fr/ICFP2001/prog-contest/). Team members included Computer Science Ph.D. alumnus Perry Cheng, Ph.D. students Tom Murphy and Joe Vanderwaart, senior Charlie Smart, and staff member Dave Swasey. The contest task was to write an optimizer for an HTML-like markup language. Both of the team's submitted entries were written in the programming language Standard ML. Service Six graduate women, Sonya Allin (Ph.D., HCI), Allison Bruce (Ph.D., Robotics), Bernadine Dias (Ph.D., Robotics), Laurie Hiyakumoto (Ph.D., CS), Lisa Joyce (MS, HCI), and Grace Ritter (MS, SE), were on the organizing women@SCS committee for the "Leading the Way: Girls, Technology, and Education" forum held on April 19, 2001, open to the entire University. This event brought together more than 160 teachers, academics, students, and members of the community for a full afternoon of talks, panel discussions, and brainstorming. Topics addressed ranged from girl-friendly classroom strategies to software game development. At their own initiative SCS graduate students decided to organize a series of panel discussions on Issues in Computing Post-September 11th. The idea started from conversations among Sonya Allin (Ph.D., HCI), Anupriya Ankolekar (Ph.D., HCI), Bernadine Dias (Ph.D., Robotics), Irina Shklovski (Ph.D., HCI), and Professor Lenore Blum, all women active in women@SCS. Meanwhile, Matt Deans (Ph.D., Robotics) had been organizing a revival of the Pittsburgh Chapter of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) (www.cs.cmu.edu/~cpsr). These efforts have culminated with the election of CPSR officers in December 2001: Sonya Allin, Chair; Trey Smith (Ph.D., Robotics), Secretary; and David Tolliver (Ph.D., Robotics), Treasurer. Under the auspices of CPSR, the first panel discussion, held on November 1, addressed the topic "Computing After the World Trade Center: Surveillance and Privacy"; and the second, on December 5, "Citizen of the Republic: The National ID Card Debate." RECOGNITION Fellowships
In addition, Liu Ren (Ph.D., CS) and Ke Yang (Ph.D., CS) each received an SCS Anonymous Alumni Fellowship; Laurie Hiyakumoto (Ph.D., CS), Alla Safonova (Ph.D., CS), Robin Trew (Ph.D., CS), and Mandy Whittaker (MS, CALD) were named Carnegie Scholars. William Sellers and Carolyn Brookes, both ETC master's students, are supported by Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science Fellowships. Allison Bruce received a Clare Boothe Luce Fellowship. Twenty of our graduate students are supported by National Science Foundation Fellowships; nine, by DoD National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowships; four, by NASA Fellowships; and two, by Hertz Foundation Fellowships. Ten other students are supported by other external funding sources. SCS Awards At the February 22, 2001 SCS Town Hall Meeting, Dean Jim Morris presented SCS Citizenship Awards to outstanding members of the SCS community. Four graduate students received awards:
FUTURE Our 2001-2002 graduates will be hitting the job market this spring. To kick off the new hiring season, on December 7, 2001, Jeannette Wing gave a reprise of her popular Emigration Course talk "Tips on the Interview Process." Good luck to all! Our graduate programs are healthy, strong, and the envy of others on campus and beyond. Our students are stimulating colleagues, inspiring role models, and wonderful friends. We look forward to hearing about their successes as they enter the real world.
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