SCS Weekly Updates

Week of SEPTEMBER 2, 1997

NEW AWARDS...Congratulations to Jonathan Shewchuk and Xudong Zhao, co-winners of the first Computer Science Department Doctoral Dissertation Award. As noted by Jeannette Wing, the award is designed to "recognize and encourage superior research and writing by our doctoral candidates." The department will hold an annual award ceremony each spring, and the awardee will be invited to speak as part of the spring SCS Distinguished Lecture Series." The award also includes a $1,000 cash prize. This year, Jonathan will deliver his distinguished lecture on February 12, 1998 and Xudong will give a talk and host a discussion as part of the Emigration Course. Both dissertations have also been nominated for the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Bravo on jobs very well done!

ROBOCUP COMES HOME!..."Five teams of clicking, whirring soccer machines from the U.S., Spain, France, Australia and Japan went at each other on the first day of World RobotCup 97", noted the August 25 AP article. Held August 25-28 in conjunction with the 15th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '97), the competition in Nagoya, Japan, drew accolades for the CMU team, which won First Place honors and trophy in the small robot league. The team, consisting of Manuela Veloso, Peter Stone, Kwun Han, Sorin Achim and their mini-players, #1-#2-#3-#4-#5 and #6, amazed the crowds with their stellar performance. Referred to as our "spunky little dune buggies which whirred circles around their opponents" by one writer, our radio-controlled robots were 7.5 cm cubes on wheels, built from scratch with erector sets and similar types of apparatus. The field of play, a ping-pong table-sized field laid flat on the floor -- surrounded by a wall to prevent robo-players and ball from leaving the area -- was designed to showcase the robots' abilities to behave intelligently as a team. The soccer robots integrate many technologies, including multi-agent collaboration, strategy acquisition, real-time reasoning, sensor-fusion, annd design of autonomous agents...to mention but a few. The team returns at the end of the week and will provide all the exciting details. Congratulations!

IN DEFENSE...
**CAROLYN PENSTEIN ROSE addresses "Robust Interactive Dialogue Interpretation" at her LTI defense (Program in Language and Information Technologies) on Thursday, September 4 at 3:30 pm in Cyert 279 (LTI Blue Room). Her dissertation committee includes: Lori Levin (Advisor), Barbara Di Eugenio, Jaimes Carbonell, Alon Lavie, Johanna Moore (University of Pittsburgh), and Sandra Carberry (Unversity of Delaware).

MARY SHAW WORKING ON INNOVATION...The Center for Innovation in Learning (CIL), adhering to its mission to improve undergraduate education at CMU, has awarded Mary Shaw a CIL Faculty Fellowship for the 97/98 academic year. She will be "applying her research on developing software from components to the problem of combining diverse educational materials into coherent course support systems." CIL faculty fellowships are awarded to CMU faculty who are interested in working on a significant project relevant to undergraduate education. Recipients spend a part of the academic year working at the CIL.

ROBO-PICNIC DRAWS NEAR...The 3rd Annual Robotics Picnic, for all folks affiliated with the RI and their families, is scheduled for Saturday, September 6 at the Upper St. Clair Municipal Park. The festivities begin at 1:00 pm, followed by dinner at 4:00 pm and a 6:30 pm Bonfire. In between, revelers will partake of softball, volleyball, pingpong, pool and more. The day will also include the "exciting final rounds of the annual RI croquet tournament" and the "Battle for the Golden Wicket"! Travel directions can be found at: www.ri.cmu.edu/picnic/

CSD LOGIN BALL...also known as the Computer Science Department IC Reception for all CS folks, will take place Sunday, September 7 from 7:00-11:00 pm at The Frick Art & Historical Center in Point Breeze, including The Frick Art Museum, Clayton (the historic Henry Clay Frick Home), and Car and Carriage Museum. You will relax to live music and dine well at the buffet dinner.

SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE...Richard Karp, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, and Adjunct Professor of Molecular Biotechnology, University of Washington, explores "Combinatorial Optimization as a Tool for Molecular Biology" at this year's first SCS Distinguished Lecture, in Wean 7500 at 4:00 pm on Thursday, September 11. Distinguished donuts will preceed the program at 3:45 pm. Future speakers in the series will include Anita Jones (October 16), Butler Lampson (November 13), Andreas Bechtolsheim (March 12) and Alan Kay (April 23). See the SCS Calendar or contact copetas@cs for details.

ABOUT YOUR THUMB...Mellon Bank implemented a new check cashing procedure on August 25. A fingerprint will be required from anyone cashing a check who does "not" maintain an account with their bank. PNC has been doing this for several months and it is anticipated other banks may follow PNC and Mellon's lead. All staff and students should anticipate how this will affect their normal routines.

SCS HELP CENTER OPENS...Having a a computer-related problem? You can now call the new SCS Help Center at x8-4231, or drop by Wean 3612, notes Clauss Strauch. The Center is open 9:00-5:00 weekdays and during these hours, "SCS Facilities staff on duty will be able to answer questions and provide direct help for many problems." SCS Operations can still be reached at x8-2607, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Problem reports or questions can still be directed to help@cs.

PLEASE MAKE A NOTE OF IT...The SCS V.34 huntgroup numbers 683-0111 and 621-3528 have been replaced with one new number: 268-9300. If you used either of these huntgroups, please begin using 268-9300. Recent postings to cmu.cs.scs and cmu.cs.facilities provide more detailed information. Stay tuned for information on a new number for the 621-3546 huntgroup!

NOT QUITE MANDATORY, BUT STRONGLY ENCOURAGED...The first in a series of SCS Senior Programs, the "Not Quite Mandatory, but Strongly Encouraged" seminar, "Taking Charge of Your Career" will be offered Thursday, September 4 and repeated on Wednesday, September 10, at 4:30 pm in Wean 4625. Discussions will focus on career services, resume preparation, calendar alerts for recruiting, and how to prepare for your future....Sponsored by the Career Center and SCS, this is an excellent opportunity for seniors to take stock of their lives :-)

RANDOM NUMBERS...or are they? Steven Rudich has received a high (4.93) rating on his FCE during the spring term...a big, semi-rquired course. Considering "he does not grade easily" notes Jim Morris, this is even more of an accomplishment. How did you do? The Spring FCEs are availble.

START PRACTICING YOUR "CHEESES"...The Annual SCS Group Photograph is coming up on Thursday, September 11 at 12:00 noon (sharp). No excuses! All members of SCS should assemble on the 5th floor Wean Hall patio and you will be guided into one magnificent, collective mass suitable for photographing. Be prepared to say "cheese", "geez", "funding approved" :-) or whatever gets you to smile.

ON THE NEWS...CNN broadcast a feature story on Nomad--the autonomous lunar rover built by researchers in Robotics--and its successful trek through the Atacama Desert on its Science Program on Saturday and Sunday, August 30-31. The program will be repeated Wednesday, September 3 at 7:00 am (for all you early birds). It's a great segment!

DEMETER KEEPS ON CUTTING...Demeter, robotics' autonomous harvester, achieved its 100 acre performance milestone in El Centro, CA in August. The goal was realized when it cut 15 acres autonomously one day and over 90 acres the following day. The site was a 100 acre alfalfa field ready for its last cut -- in farm talk, this means its 3-4 year cycle of alfalfa planting was complete and after this cutting, it would be rotated to a new crop. As noted by Kerien Fitzpatrick, "A side effect of an old field like this is that the surface is quite rough." Demeter's longest continuous run was over 14 hours (interrupted only by a fueling pause) and operated at 3.5 mph on the "land" cuts (between the irrigation borders) and at 3.0 mph on the border cuts. Numerous farmers and interested bystanders stopped by during the day/night/day ...to watch the job and were"stunned by the accuracy and quality of the cutting." Many people noticed that the cab of the harvester was driverless and stopped to see what was happening! "The entire operation was so smooth that boredom was the most significant obstacle - we were functioning as guards at the ends of the field where Demeter would perform spin turns," adds Kerien. "Given another field and more energy for us, Demeter would have been able to continue cutting....here is the situation of an autonomous machine, performing a real-life task in a true production setting - exceeding the typical manually-operated performance and quality."

EXEGESIS...is coming to SCS on Friday, September 12 at 4:00 pm at the Alumni Room in the University Center. You won't want to miss it! What is it you ask? What does it all mean? Watch for details....:-)

IN PRINT...Phoebe Senger's article, "Fabrikation der Subjekte: Verdinglichung, Schizophrenie, und Kuenstliche Intelligenz" (aka "Fabricated Subjects: Reification, Schizophrenia, and Artificial Intelligence") appears in a new publication, "Netzkritik: Materialien zur Internet-Debatte." (aka "Net Criticism: Material for the Internet Debate"). The book consists of a series of articles by technology-critics and internet-activitists, including detailed analysis of new media and what should or should not be done about them.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT:
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 **SPECIAL LECTURE: Chris Hansen, "Freedom of Speech on the Internet", 5:30 pm, McConomy Auditorium, University Center.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5
**LTI SEMINAR: Sandra Carberry, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, University of Delaware, "Recognizing Intentions and Generating Responses In Collaborative Task-Oriented Dialogue" at 11:00 am, Cyert 279 (LTI Blue Room).

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8
**PROGRAMMING SYSTEMS/POP SEMINAR...Paolo Traverso, "A Provably Correct Embedded Verifier for the Certification of Safety Critical Software", 9:30 am, Wean 8220.

Week of AUGUST 11, 1997

LITTON FELLOWSHIPS AWARDED...The 1997-99 Litton Fellowships for faculty development have been awarded to Robotics Institute faculty Andrew Moore (Assistant Professor) and Steven Roth (Senior Research Scientist). Each will receive $10,000 annually for two years for their research and educational program development. Bravo!

FAREWELL RECEPTION FOR KATSU...Takeo Kanade invites the SCS community to a farewell reception for Katsu Ikeuchi on Thursday, August 14, 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm in the Smith Hall Common Area (235 Smith Hall). As he notes, "Katsu, a Principal Research Scientist of CS and Robotics, is a world-class vision scientist, and has made significant contributions to both Robotics and CSD, in research and education, during his 11 1/2 years of service." As we all know, he is also a great guy. Katsu is heading off to the University of Tokyo, where he will serve as a Full Professor of Engineering. Our collective best wishes go with him!

IN DEFENSE...
**SANTOSH VEMPALA offers "Geometric Tools for Algorithms" at this CS thesis oral on Tuesday, August 12 at 2:00 pm in Wean 5409. Serving on his committee are: Avrim Blum (Chair), Alan Frieze, Ravi Kannan, and Laszlo Lovasz (Yale University).
**ANDREW JOHNSON unclutters our views on "Spin-Images: A Representation for 3D Surface Matching" at his robotics defense on Wednesday, August 13 at 2:30 pm in Wean 4623. His committee includes: Martial Hebert (Chair), Katsushi Ikeuchi, Paul Heckbert, and Richard Szeliski (Microsoft Research).

ON THE NEWS...
**The Autonomous Driving Team, including Chuck Thorpe, Dean Pomerleau and Todd Jochem, appeared on "CBS This Morning" on August 7 and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on August 8. Our "fleet", consisting of two Houston Metro Transit Authority buses, Navlab 5, a self-steering minivan, and two Pontiac Bonnevilles, cruised on Interstate 15's high occupancy vehicle lane, during last week's National Automated Highway System Consortium's Demo '97.
**The Alice project, a 3D interactive graphics programming environment, was profiled briefly on CNN this past week, as part of their coverage of SIGGRAPH 97. Alice's mission is to make it easy for novice programmers to develop 3D environments and to explore the new medium of interactive 3D graphics effectively and painlessly. More details are available at: http://cnn.com/TECH/9708/07/siggraph/index.html or from Randy Pausch.

FACILITIES UPDATE...
**NEW NETNEWS SERVERS...On Thursday, August 14, new netnews servers (the current "beta" servers) will be released as the default news servers, notes Clauss Strauch. "These servers should be faster and more reliable than the current news servers. Because article numbers are not consistent between the old and new servers, people might notice articles that they have previously read showing up as unread, and some groups may appear to have no new articles. A quick fix for groups with no articles is to unsubscribe and then re-subscribe to the newsgroup." Contact SCS Facilities at help@cs or x8-2607 with questions.

HERTZ GRADUATE FELLOWSHIPS...The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation have announced the availability of 1998-99 Graduate Fellowships in the Applied Physical Sciences, in the amount of $20,000 over a 9-month school year (plus cost-of-education allowance), for up to five years. High previous scholastic performance is expected of all applicants, but "outstanding achievement in scientific or technological areas will also be noted" (seniors and first year grads may apply). US citizenship or permanent residency is required. Applications are available from Tom Keating, Office of Scholarships and Fellowships, 328 Warner Hall (x2075) or from the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation, Box 5032, Livermore, CA 94551-5032. Check http://www.hertzfndn.org for a listing of eligible schools and other criteria. Applications are due October 24.

THE HUM OF IMMIGRATION IS IN THE AIR...Robotics, HCII and MSE students will flock to campus beginning Monday, August 18, lured by the call of Immigration Courses! Check with Marce Zaragoza (RI) or Phyllis Lewis (MSE/HCII) for a schedule of events. CS students are also starting to arrive, in anticipation of their IC programming starting August 25. A complete schedule is available at www.cs.cmu.edu/~leaf/IC/IC.html. LTI students will join the masses for the first day of classes on August 25.

THE I-9 FORM AND YOU...All "new" hires are required by law to fill out an I-9 Form, also known as the Employment Eligibility Verification Form, within 72 hours of the beginning of their employment (including students receiving stipends). Please note, this is not an option! You must visit the Payroll Office, in person, at 407 South Craig Street to fill out the form. If you have any questions, please see Karen Olack in the CS business office or talk with your division's employment manager.

MYSTERY NEWS...EXEGESIS is coming soon. Watch for details!

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
TUESDAY, AUGUST 12
**CALD TUTORIAL/SEMINAR: Larry Wasserman, Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon, "Tutorial on Statistical Estimation", 12:00 noon, Wean 4623.

Week of AUGUST 4, 1997

NEW HONORS...Congratulations to the CMU Autonomous Helicopter Project team, who won the International Aerial Robotics Competition held at Disney's EPCOT center in Orlando, Florida on July 14. The team, consisting of Omead Amidi (Project Leader), Takeo Kanade, Mark Delouis, Ryan Miller, Bernard Mettler and Randy Warner, was awarded first prize for the workmanship and safety portion of the competition as well as the competition task itself. The latter requires autonomous flight to locate a number of hazardous waste drums in a field, recognition of their content based on each drum's label, and retrieval of a sample--an orange metalic disk--from one of the drums. Second place standing was awarded to MIT, and third place to the University of Central Florida. "CMU's helicopter autonomously took off, scanned the competition arena and correctly located every drum and identified its content," noted Amidi. He added, "The helicopter also located the orange disk, but unfortunately failed to pick it up, which, has been always successful in Pittsburgh". Orange disk or not, a great job!

AWARDS...Stephen Smith received the ARPI "Guns and Butter Award" at the 1997 Annual Technical Workshop of the DARPA/Rome Laboratory Planning Initiative, for achievements in basic research and a solid record of technology transition to DARPA customers.

AND DISTINCTIONS...Congratulations to Todd Jochem and all of Team Navlab! From a field (or should we say highway) of 25 automated vehicles at the Automated Highway System demonstration, the bus that Todd "narrates" was selected to be the automated ride for the Secretary of Transportation. Chuck Thorpe notes that "The ride went flawlessly, and Secretary Slater expressed how impressed he was." Team Navlab in San Diego includes: Todd Jochem, Dean "Ralph" Pomerleau, Tad Dockstader, John Kozar, Dave Duggins, Bala Kumar, Michelle Bayouth, Chuck Thorpe, Sue McNeil (Civil and EPP), Tunde Balvanyos (Civil and EPP), and Dirk Langer.

SCS INVITED TALKS...Jack Mostow recently gave an invited talk on "Artificial Intelligence and Education" at the Ninth Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI97) in Providence, Rhode Island. Jack will serve as Program Co-chair of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI98) next year in Madison, Wisconsin.

WATCH FOR US AT SIGGRAPH...CMU/SCS will be making a strong showing at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference on computer graphics in Los Angeles next week, August 4-8. Paul Heckbert, David Baraff, Andy Witkin, and Randy Pausch will lead tutorials, and six papers co-authored by Michael Garland, Paul Heckbert, Jovan Popovic, Randy Pausch, and by recent SCSers Yoichi Sato, Mark Wheeler, Katsushi Ikeuchi, and Heung-Yeung (Harry) Shum. A complete program can be found at http://www.siggraph.org/s97/.

SCS SHOWBIZ UPDATE...Lisa Kicielinski is appearing (and singing) in the production of the "Sound of Music" through August 9 at the Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) South Theatre. Shows are Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8:00 pm. Call 469-6220 for reservations.

ATACAMA DESERT DESERTED FOR NOW...Thursday, July 31 was the final day of remote operations for Nomad team in Chile and the end of the Atacama Desert Trek! As noted by the team, "Nomad drove over 215 kilometers (at update) byf remote or autonomous control, demonstrated several new technologies for planetary exploration, and involved an enthusiastic public directly in robotic operations for space." A touching and added bonus followed a press conference in Chile, where the team "was greeted by dozens of anxious visitors: parents, teachers, and lots of children from the nearby town of Calama. Mark Maimone noted, "The kids were very excited, watching Nomad drive in circles, watching its chassis expand and contract, jumping around it, running away whenever they heard the pop of a rock under its wheels. Eventually we stopped it and they got to see and touch it up close. Many photos were taken, and many autographs were demanded [and] Many children had also prepared questions to ask us; how big is Nomad, why is it in the Atacama, how does it compare with the robot on Mars? It was quite a workout...but a pleasant one." It appears Nomad is not just a major technological feat, but a good will ambassador as well! As Mark summarized..."Each day has been filled with incredible vistas, high technology, logistical problems, language difficulties, and every day a new appreciation of life in the desert. The Atacama is a beautiful place; a `dry, lifeless desert' with rainbows, bushes, butterflies, and seemingly limitless Moon- and Mars-like terrain. We are grateful for our time here, and look forward to an opportunity to return; maybe with a little more free time." Congratulations to the Atacama team: Deepak Bapna, Steven Dow (Univ of Iowa), Alex Foessel, Carlos Guestrin, Mark Maimone, Michael Parris, Liam Pedersen, April Rathe (Univ of Iowa), Sergio Rios Lara (Ejercito de Chile), Eric Rollins, Ben Shamah, Mark Sibenac, Juan Solis (Ejercito de Chile), Jim Teza, Hans Thomas (Nasa Ames Research Center), and Red Whittaker.

CALENDAR ALERT...
**FRESHMEN ORIENTATION is scheduled for the week of August 18.
**The FIRST DAY of Fall classes is Monday, August 25.
**LABOR DAY will be observed on Monday, September 1. All university offices will be closed. Classes resume on Tuesday, September 2.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
TUESDAY, AUGUST 5
**CALD TUTORIAL/SEMINAR SERIES: Mark Derthick, "An Interactive Visualization Environment for Data Exploration", 12:00 noon, Wean 5409 (special location).

Week of JULY 28, 1997

$100,000 FREDKIN PRIZE / ALLEN NEWELL MEDAL AWARDED AT AAAI 97...The $100K Fredkin Prize for Computer Chess, created in 1980 to honor the first program to beat a reigning world chess champion, will be awarded at the annual meeting of the American Association for Artifical Intelligence (AAAI) to the inventors of Deep Blue -- Feng Hsu, Murray Campbell, and A. Joseph Hoane, Jr, -- on Tuesday, August 29 in Providence, Rhode Island. The prize, established at CMU 17 years ago by Professor Edward Fredkin, was designed to encourage research in computer chess. A prize of $5,000 was awarded to the first chess program to attain a Master's rating in 1983, and a $10,000 prize to the system that achieve Grandmaster status in 1988. Hsu, Campbell and Hoane will split this final, and well-earned $100,000 award. They will, along with 5 other research teams responsible for groundbreaking technological contributions to the development of computer chess, also receive an Allen Newell Medal for Research Excellence. These teams include: Richard Greenblatt/MacHack 1967); David Slate and Larry Atkin (CHESS 4.7/1970-78); Ken Thompson and Joe Condon (Belle/1983); Hans Berliner, Carl Ebeling, Murray Campbell and Gordon Goetsch (Hitech/1988); and, Thomas Anantharaman, Murray Campbell, Feng Hsu, Andreas Nowatzyk, and Michael Browne (Deep Thought/1988). GRAs noted by Raj Reddy, "It's wonderful to have this opportunity to honor these pioneers. They engineered chess programs that outclassed all other systems of their time." Some pretty remarkable people and decades!

NEW HONORS...Congratulations to Santosh Vempala, who received the 1997 Machtey Prize. Awarded annually at the IEEE Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science, the honor recognizes the best student-authored paper. Santosh's work focused on "A random sampling based algorithm for learning the intersection of half-spaces". The award carries a cash prize and will be formally presented in October (19-22).

IN DEFENSE...
**JOSE BRUSTOLONI showed the "Effects of Data Passing Semantics and Operating System Structure on I/O Performance" at his CS thesis defense on Monday, July 28. His committee included: Peter Steenkiste (Chair), David Johnson, Satya, and Willy Zwaenepoel (Rice University).
**RICHARD VOYLES works "Toward Gesture-Based Programming: Agent-Based Haptic Skill Acquisition and Interpretation" at his robotics defense on Tuesday, July 29 at 2:30 pm in Wean 4623. His committee includes: Pradeep Khosla (Chair), Gary Fedder, Katsushi Ikeuchi, and Ken Salisbury (MIT).
**WESLEY H. HUANG attempts "Impulsive Manipulation" at his robotics oral on Thursday, July 31, at 10:30 am in Wean 5409. His committee includes: Matthew Mason (Chair), Eric Krotkov, Yangsheng Xu, and Jeff Trinkle (Texas A&M).

PROPOSALS...PETER BERKELMAN integrated "Tool-Based Haptic Interaction with Dynamic Physical Simulations using Lorentz Magnetic Levitation" at his robotics thesis proposal on Monday, July 28. His committee included: Ralph Hollis (Chair), David Baraff, Pradeep Khosla, Robert Howe (Harvard).

AUTOMATED HIGHWAYS CONVERGE IN AUGUST...at the National Automated Highway System Consortium's Demo '97: Where the Research Meets the Road and features five vehicles automated by Chuck Thorpe, Dean Pomerleau and Todd Jochem. The program, which runs from August 7-10 in San Diego, includes live presentations of automated highway system (AHS) technologies and includes discussions on ITS technologies, traffic management software, collision avoidance systems, alternative-fueled vehicals and other transportation innovations.

FACILITIES UPDATE...VAX Retirement continues! If you use accounts on any of the following machines, please take heed of these dates:
**B.GP, F.GP, G.GP, H.GP.....Retired on August 6
**J.GP, K.GP.................Retired on August 13
**GNOME, GANDALF.............Retired on August 20
**THEORY.....................Retired on August 27
Please contact help@cs assistance in moving your account.

NOMAD RESEARCHES 200 KILOMETERS!...Nomad had successfully driven through 200 kilometers of the Atacama Desert by remote or autonomous control as of Friday, July 25, and continued its trek over the weekend. This is true trail blazing, "as "no other planetary exploration robot has been driven so far so quickly" notes Mark Maimone. A toast to our research team for a unique and exciting accomplishment!

SCS INVITED TALKS...Jeannette Wing was an invited speaker at the Second Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems (FMOODS) Conference in Canterbury, England, where she discussed "Subtyping for Distributed Object Stores."

CAN IT BE AUGUST ALREADY?...
**The Fall '97 Campus Career Fair is scheduled for Wednesday, August 27 from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm in Rangos Hall, University Center. This is an ideal opportunity to introduce students to the range of jobs available on campus. Details will follow shortly from your respective SCS part-time employment coordinators.
**IMMIGRATION 97..."that" time is approaching again. The HCII, MSE, Robotics and LTI ICs are scheduled for August 18-22, 1997. The CS Immigration begins August 25.

IN THE NEWS... **"Automated Highway Hums without a Hitch" appears in the July 23 USA Today and notes the Houston Transit Authority's work with Robotics on automated buses. This and the following articles are available from scstoday@cs.
**"Was wurde Ur-Ur-Opa dazu sagen?" appears in the Computer News section of the July 97 FOCUS: Das Moderne Nachrichtenmagazin from Germany. Featured is the virtual Albert Einstein developed by the Center for Entertainment Technology. Good time to brush up on your German :-)
**"Roving Other Worlds by Remote: a remote-controlled wheeled robot, now traversing Child's Atacama Desert, is a precursor of the unmanned rovers that will someday explore the rugged surfaces of the Moon and Mars" appeared in the July issue of Mechnical Engineering and explores the capabilities of Nomad.
**"The best is yet to come" notes Hans Moravec in "Heavy Metal: Will Robots Rock Your World" featured in the July issue of Contact. "Moravec predicts that within 40 years, robots will blast off into space by themselves!...they will build other robots and start evolving on their own." A fun read.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
TUESDAY, JULY 29
**CALD Tutorial/Seminar: Jacek Mandziuk, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, "Incremental Class Learning Approach and its Application to Handwritten Digit Recognition", 12:00 noon, Wean 4623.
**INFORMAL SEMINAR: Frak Pfenning, "Natural Deduction for Intuitionistic Non-Commutative Linear Logic", 1:00 pm, Wean 5409.
**SPECIAL SUMMER AI SEMINAR: Dr. Seishi Okamoto, NetMedia Laboratory, Japan, "Topics on Theoretical Analysis of Learning Algorithms", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

FRIDAY, AUGUST 1 (yes, already!)
**LTI SEMINAR: Dr. Hideki Mima, ATR, "Improving Performance of Transfer-Driven Machine Translation with Extra-Linguistic Information from Context, Situation and Environment"

Week of JUNE 30, 1997

IN MEMORIUM...It is with great sadness that we report on the death of Philip and Jan Karlton in a tragic automobile accident near Milan, Italy on June 20, 1997. A memorial service has been scheduled on Tueday, July 8 at 1:00 pm at the Unitarian Chuch of Palo Alto (505 East Charleston Road), followed by a reception at the Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant in Palo Alto, (640 Emerson Street). Phil was a grand part of the SCS gang of years gone by, and received his MS in CS. He was most recently a member of the research team at Netscape. Jan, his beloved wife of 28 years, was an accomplished artist and a frequent exhibitor in the Santa Clara Valley. Their friends are many and their lasting impressions can be reviewed at http://karlton.hamilton.com Take a moment...

NEW HONORS...Philip Clarkson, now a graduate student at Cambridge University (UK), has been awarded the ELSNET-ELRA Olympics student prize "for the best student paper with focus on language resources at Eurospeech'97 for his paper with Roni Rosenfeld, "Statistical Language Modeling Using the CMU-Cambridge Toolkit." The paper received notes "of excellence in the criteria items of originality, quality, presentation and high relevance." Philip, who worked on this research while in Roni's lab last summer, will be formally recognized at Eurospeech '97.

AP TEACHERS ARE COMING...to SCS from July 6-11, as they participate in the Summer Institute for Computer Science Advanced Placement Teachers (SICSAPT=6APT). A second program will be offered July 21-26. The six day program, notes Allan Fisher, provides AP computer science teachers with "two critical sets of skills: how to use and teach the C++ language, which will be introduced in the 1999 Computer Science Advanced Placement exam; and how to establish and maintain gender equity in the classroom and computer lab, in order to attract and retain dfremale students in computing courses." The faculty for the course includes Allan Fisher, Jane Margolis, Jo Sanders (Univ. of Washington), and Mark Stehlik.

SCS INVITED TALKS...Ed Clarke delivered the Keynote address on "Model Checking" at the "Eighth Israeli Conference on Computer Systems and Software Engineering" in Herzliya on June 18. He also presented two lectures at "The Intel DSTC Symposium on Formal Verification of VLSI Designs" in Haifa on June 26. The talks were entitled, "Model Checking: Past, Present, and Future" and "Dealing with Complexity in Temporal Logic Model Checking".

WIRED...The current issue of Wired has an extensive article reviewing the Financial Cryptography 97 conference held in Anguilla. Focussing on issues related to encryption and digital cash, the host for this meeting was none other than our own Vince Cate, who is profiled in the article and makes note of his graduate career in CS/SCS. See more of him and review the conference at www.offshore.com.ai/vince/ or http://www.offshore.com.ai/fc97/, respectively.

PRINTER UPDATE...A new HP DesignJet 755CM printer named Mannochmore, donated by Garth Gibson and the PDL, is now located in the Wean 3rd Floor operators station. It prints with the same quality as the HP DeskJet 1600CM, the model of the Crayon/Palette/Sunbow and Prism printers, but can produce a document up to 3 feet wide x 9 feet long (we're talking big!). To use this printer, contact SCS Facilities at x2607. The operator will enable the printer and load the correct media (transparenies, paper...) you request. Mac users will need to load a special printer description file onto their system.

HAPPY 4TH OF "DAY-OFF" JULY!

Special Edition: JUNE 26, 1997

IN MEMORIUM...It is with great sadness that we must report on the death of Philip and Jan Karlton in a tragic automobile accident near Milan, Italy on June 20, 1997. A memorial service has been scheduled on Tuesday, July 8 at 1:00 pm at the Unitarian Church of Palo Alto, 505 East Charleston Road, followed by a reception at the Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurant in Palo Alto, 640 Emerson Street. A special site, ,http://karlton.hamilton.com, has been established to help their many friends understand and deal with this great loss.

WEEK OF JUNE 23, 1997

IN DEFENSE...Dimitrios Apostolopoulos moves toward "Analytical Configuration of Wheeled Robotics Locomotion" at his thesis defense on Thursday, June 26 at 10:00 am in the FRC 100. His committee includes: Red Whittaker (Chair), John Bares, Eric Krotkov (RI/DARPA), and Kenneth Waldron (Ohio State University).

SCS SUMMER SCHOOL...begins today. Jim Tomayko reports that the number of students has doubled since last year. Students can be tracked down in all the Wean classrooms or via ens@cs.

THE MOTHER OF ALL WHITE BOARDS...can now be found on the 8th floor of Wean Hall, in the hallway directly to the right (when exiting) of the elevator. See it for yourself :-)

FACILITIES UPDATE...
**BACKUP SERVICE for PC machines running Windows 95, NT 3.51, and NT 4.0 is now available using Retrospect Remote, a flexible backup program that has been used successfully for the past year to back up SCS Macintoshes. "It allows for incremental backups and restores can be performed directly to your hard drive. Since it looks for and backs up computers whenever it finds them on the network, facilities can easily back up both desktop and laptop machines." Installation of Remote software usually takes ~15 minutes for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 machines, and ~30 minutes for NT 3.51 machines. If your Mac isn't being backed up, Remote can typically be installed in ~10 minutes. Send mail to help@cs.cmu.edu to request service.
**A.GP RETIREMENT DAY IS JULY 2...Please send mail to help@cs or call SCS facilities at x2067 if you need assistance in moving off the A.GP by that date.
**B.GP and F.GP RETIREMENT IS SCHEDULED FOR JULY 23...Check cmu.cs.scs for all particulars.
**ULTRIX TRAINING...To assist you in your transition from Mach to Ultrix, facilities will be offering a Mach to Ultrix training session on Thursday, June 26, from 10-11 in Wean Hall 4623. All are welcome. A major topic on the agenda is the basic changes that will occur by the change in operating systems. If you have any questions, send mail to help+licenses@cs.

IN THE NEWS...
**"Taking Computing to Task", appearing in the July issue of Scientific American, features VuMan in word and image. As noted, "researchers presented at least 83 novel interfaces at the CHI '97 conference. Only three new interfaces - an interactive blueprint program, the combination of a keyboard joystick with a mouse for two-handed input, and a "wearable" computer -- sped work significantly. That last device [VuMan] is worth noting, for it exemplifies what some argue is the direction most likely to lead to strong productivity growth."
**"A Chile Reception for CMU's Robot" appeared in the June 19 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Nomad, our four-wheeled, electrically powered "dune buggy" began its 125-mile trek across Chile's Atacama Desert on June 18. "That's 40 days of wandering in the wilderness that Carnegie Mellon and NASA believe will find out how well a robot like Nomad can explore other worlds." But also, this trip has "less to do with what a robot can do than with what aspects of exploration people can experience through them", as the robot will be teleoperated via satellite from the Carnegie Science Center and from NASA's Ames Laboratory near Mountainview, CA. Throughout the trek, visitors can see a 10-minute program about the journey and will be able to drive the robot using a computer terminal at the front of an auditorium", making it possible "for anyone to come here to share the adventure", notes Red Whittaker. The complete article is available from scstoday@cs.
**The July issue of National Geographic features Robotics! Noted are the NavLab, Dante and more. Simple copies won't do these pictures justice, so try to get ahold of the real thing.

IMMIGRATION RESEARCH SYMPOSIUM...The Fifth Annual Immigration Course Research Symposium, scheduled for September, will be coordinated by John Lafferty this year. He's formulating the plans and details will be forthcoming. But for now, a collective thanks to Reid Simmons for his efforts in establishing and polishing this fine program over the past years.

KA-BOOM! IT'S A HOLIDAY!...The 4th of July will be officially observed by the university on Friday, July 4. All business offices will be closed. Classes and normal office hours resume Monday, July 7.

SEEING DOUBLE?...SCS-Today has updated its distribution, meaning a few readers may temporarily receive duplicate editions. If this should be your case, please send mail to scstoday@cs and the problem will be cleared up.

WEEK OF JUNE 16, 1997

HONORS...
**HIDEYUKI TOKUDA has been appointed Executive Vice President of Keio University, where he has been serving as professor and head of the computer science program.
**Word Level Model Checking was listed as a Research Highlight in the 1996 Annual Report of the Semiconductor Research Coorporation. This verification procedure was developed by Xudong Zhao and Ed Clarke, and was the subject of Zhao's thesis.

LISTEN TO THIS!..."The pilot test of Project LISTEN's Tutor at Fort Pitt Elementary School surpassed our wildest hopes" notes Jack Mostow. According to pre- and post-tests administered by school reading specialists, six third graders who started almost three years below grade level advanced their reading skills an average of 2.3 years in under eight months. Contact Jack for all the details.

NO AIR = NO MACHINES...On Thursday, June 19, FMS will shut down the air-conditioning in Wean Hall from 2:00 am-6:00 am for maintenance. The computers in the 3rd floor machine room will be affected. In anticipation of "airlessness" and as a cautionary measure, many machines will be shut down on Wednesday night at midnight. Normal services will be interrupted until all systems can be restored to full operation on Thursday morning. The anticipated "up time" is 9:00 am. So please plan your schedule accordingly. See the SCS bboard for all particulars regarding network/machine access.

WHEN ARE THE HOLIDAYS?...The SCS Calendar of Events includes a listing of official holidays for 97-98, along with the university's academic calendar. Check www.cs.cmu.edu and click on Calendar of Events at the bottom of the page. Submissions for the calendar are welcomed daily at copetas@cs.

FACILITIES UPDATE...Visual Basic 5.0 and Visual C++ 5.0 are now available on Monolith. If you would like access to these packages, please send mail to help+licenses@cs.cmu.edu.

IN THE NEWS..."Carnegie Mellon: Aiming for Immortality: It's technology will preserve an entire life on one tiny hard drive" is a featured article in the June 23 edition of Business Week. The issue highlights "The Digital Frontier: The Best Ideas from the Hottest Research Labs" and is the magazine's Information Technology Annual Report. It's a fascinating look (and read) at the labs whose research is considered "tops" 9Carnegie Mellon CS ranks second) and their current efforts. As noted, "in a hardful of the world's outstanding computer labs, the shape of tomorrow is as plain to see as it was 20 years ago. What those labs are doing now will set the agenda for computing over the next 15 to 20 years." As Raj notes in an interview, "We've always been a little rebellious....It comes from Simon and Newell...They stuck their necks out in the 1950s to insist that the real importance of computers would not be conventional number crunching.' The 20-page article and ratings are available from scstoday@cs.

SCS SUMMER SCHOOL...starts Monday June 23 and continues through June 27. For more details on the schedule, contact ens@cs.

CORRECTIONS AND OMISSIONS...Andrew's Leap begins Monday, June 23! 28 high school students will converge for 6-weeks of advanced training in computer science and mathematics. Watch for our youngest scientists! Contact daz@cs for a complete schedule.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
TUESDAY, JUNE 17
**SPECIAL AI SEMINAR: Sebastian Thrun, "The Robotic Tourguide Project", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

WEEK OF JUNE 9, 1997

NEW FACES...Alex Bielewicz has joined SCS as support to Jim Tomayko, Bob Kraut, and Phyllis Lewis, working with the MSE and HCI education programs. She comes to us most recently by way of Calgon Carbon Corporation and has a refreshing (yes, it is the Queen's English) accent. Alex is located in Wean Hall 4621.

THE CRITICS RAVE...A new work of interactive computer music and animation, created by Roger Dannenberg (composer, trumpet) and Scott Draves (animation), has been receiving a lot attention at numerous performances, including a premier at the Connecticut College Symposium for Art and Technology in February, Horizon Days at Indiana University in March, IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in May, and an international music festival in Guanajuato, Mexico on June 5. Watch out Grammies!

HIPNAV HAS A BREAK-THROUGH...Hipnav (hip navigation system), the first computer-assisted surgical navigation tool to improve the success rate of total hip replacement surgery, is the result of a unique collaboration between the Center for Medical Robotics and Computer-Assisted Surgery (MRCAS) and Shadyside Hospital's Center for Orthopaedic Research (COR) and will be demonstrated to orthopaedic surgeons at the First American Program on Computer-Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery on June 12-14 at Shadyside Hospital. Used recently in a limited clinical trial, the system employs infrared sensors and a 3-D computerized image system to improve accuracy and reliability when implanting a replacement for the acetabulum (translation, the socket in the pelvis that holds the ball joint of the femur or upper leg bone). As noted by Dr. Anthony DiGioia, Director of COR, "approximately 150,000 total hip replacements are performed each year in the U.S. alone. One to 6% of them fail because of poor alignment of the components during surgery, which may cause the joint to dislocate or wear abnormally." He adds, "we are excited because HipNav holds the potential to improve patients' clinical outcomes and also provide for a very precise intraoperative measurement tool...the potential of these new navigational technologies is to reduce complications, make procedures more precise and eventually less evasive. These improvements should result in faster recoveries and less need for repeat surgery." The $2.5M project is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation.

SCS INVITED TALKS...Roy Maxion is giving an invited talk entitled, "Anomaly Detection in Process Control and System Security" at the Annual Meeting of the Classification Society of North America on Friday, June 13 (brave guy!) in Washington, DC.

ANDREW'S LEAP RETURNS...July 23! Twenty-eight high school students will participate in this summer's Andrew's Leap, directed by Steven Rudich. He will be assisted by Matthew Mason and Bruce Maggs. Sponsored by the Vira I. Heinz Foundation and the Scaife Family Foundation, this SCS program offers an accelerated course of study for computer/mathematically gifted high school students. Topics are drawn from game theory, cryptography, decision theory, algorithms and robotics are incorporated into this 6-week program that includes classes and project work through August 1. For additional information contact Dorothy Zabrowski at daz@cs.

BOOK VENDORS SAY FALL IS NIGH...Fall term isn't as far away as you think, especially if you need books for your classes in August. Be sure to touch base with your department/division book order contact (Maria Fischer/CS UG, Jennifer Roderick (CS/PhD), Alex Bielewicz (MSE/HCI MS), Jennifer Potter (LTI MS/PhD, and Marce Zaragoza (Robotics PhD) in the next few weeks. Avoid late fees and headaches and assure timely arrival of your books by acting now :-)

WEEK OF JUNE 2, 1997

DANA'S IN SCHOCK...Our warmest congratulations to Dana Scott, who has been awarded the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The prize, established in 1993, is awarded every two years and includes a cash prize. Dana will be honored at a formal presentation on October 23 in Stockholm. As noted by the Academy, Dan has well-deservedly received this honor "for his conceptually oriented logical works, especially the creation of domain theory, which has made it possible to extend Tarski's semantical paradigm to programming languages as well as to construct models of Curry's combinatory logic and Church's calculus of lambda conversion." The Scott domains, "consitutute the mathematical basis of the branch of computer science which is now generally referred to as 'semantics of programming languages'" and have been "pivotal in establishing 'logic and computer science' as a new branch of logic." In addition, the Academy points out that Dana's "works are marked throughout by their conceptual clarity and formal elegance," qualities he displays in all his activities and involvements with his SCS colleagues, students and friends. A round of schockingly loud applause for Dana!

NEW HONORS...
**JIM OSBORN has been elected to a seat on the Executive Committee of the Robotics and Remote Systems Division of the American Nuclear Society. His term will run from July 1997 to June 2000.
**NEIL HEFFERNAN has been awarded the 1997 David Marr Prize by the Cognitive Science Society for the best cognitive science paper by a student. "The Composition Effect in Symbolizing: The Role of Symbol Production vs Text Comprehension", co-authored with Ken Koedinger, was submitted to the Congitive Science Conference. The prize, awarded by the program committee, includes a certificate and cash prize.
**MANU KUMAR was among this year's recipient's of GSIA's Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship Awards, being among the "Enterprise Awards with Distinction" recipients.
**Sanjiv Singh reports that his undergraduate advisee, MICHAEL MONTEMERLO, received First Prize for Undergraduate Research (across all of CIT), for his presentation, "Fast Image Segmentation of Vegetative Cuttings for Greenhouse Automation" at this year's Meeting of the Minds program. Michael received a cash prize of $500, provided by Caterpillar Corporation.

NEW AWARDS...TAKEO KANADE has received the 1997 JARA Award for the paper "A Video-rate Stereo Machine and its New Applications", co-authored with Tanaka, Oda, Kano and Yoshida, and presented at the 27th International Symposium on Robotics in Milan, October 1996. The award includes a $2000 cash award and a medal for each of the authors.

AND NEW INTEL FELLOW...COREY KOSAK has received an Intel Graduate Fellowship Award for 1997!

WELCOME ABOARD...Jim Morris reports that Todd Mowry of the University of Toronto, will be joining CSD on July 1 as an Associate Professor.

IN MEMORIAL...Thom Peters, a long time friend, colleague and associate and a founding member of the Information Technology Center, passed away last week. A memorial service in his honor was held this past weekend. For his many friends, cards and letters of sympathy may be addressed to: Mrs. Joan Peters, 122 Gladstone Road Pittsburgh, PA 15217-1100. As recalled by his associates, "Thom was a very special and talented person whose contributions to computer science have been numerous and significant. He will be sorely missed."

COMING SOON TO PITTSBURGH...
**ISARC: The 14th International Symposium on Automation and Robotics in Construction, is scheduled for June 8-11 at the William Westin Hotel. Organized by The International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction and the Robotics Institute, the program has been overseen by Red Whittaker (Conference Chair) and Jim Osborn (Co-Chair). Complete details are available at /www.ri.cs.cmu.edu/isarc/
**COAS/USA '97: The First Annual North American Program on Computer Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery" is scheduled for June 12-14 at Shadyside Hospital in Pittsburgh. Sponsored by the latter's Center for Orthopaedic Research and CMU's Center for Medical Robotics and Computer Assisted Surgery. Check /ortho.cor.ssh.edu/caos.html for particulars.

FACILITIES UPDATES...
**A.GP RETIREMENT: On Wednesday, July 2, the first of the gp vax machines is scheduled to make a gentle departure. A.GP.CS.CMU.EDU will be retired as part of the phasing out of obsolete platforms. All VAXen will be retired by September 3. Current A.GP users will be moved to a newer, Vendor OS mail server. If you are an A.GP user, please contact help@cs for assistance in making this move.
**MAC PRINTING CHANGES: On Thursday, June 5, *many* of the Macintosh printers will be moved from the CS1 and CS2 zones to the CS zone. If you have trouble finding a particular printer that day, check the CS zone in your Macintosh chooser, to see if the machine has earned a new home there. Details can be reviewed on the cmu.cs.scs and cmu.cs.mac.announce newsgroups.

DIGITAL INK TAKES HOME THE GOLD...Digital Ink, conceived, developed and designed by senior industrial designers Chris Kasabach and John Stivoric, industrial design consultant Francine Gemperle and design faculty member Chris Pacione in the EDRC Design Studio, has been listed among the Best International Designs of 1997! Of the approximately 1000 global entries, only 29 designs won the Gold Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA) for innovative industrial design. The EDRC took home the Gold in the Consumer Product Concept category. IDEA Awards honor the year's best product, multimedia, exhibit and packaging designs and are co-sponsored by Business Week Magazine and the Industrial Designer's Society of America (IDSA). Digital Ink is featured in the June 2 issue of Business Week, will appear on businessweek.com and www.idsa.org in coming weeks and the design team will be honored on June 28 at the IDSA National Conference at the National Press Club in Washington DC. Dan Siewiorek notes, "Digital Ink, one of 5 product concepts designed for Intel by EDRC's design studio, is a sophisticated pen that recognizes and stores handwriting and drawing of it's user, enabling the user to simply jot the word send or e-mail followed by a fax number or e-mail address. The documents are wirelessly sent via cellular network to fax machines, desktop computers or even other digital pens." He adds, "Digital Ink reinvents the computer desktop by turningany writing surface--from napkins to paper--into low-tech and socially comfortable computer interfaces."

LATITUDE -22, LONGITUDE -69...or thereabouts is where Nomad, an archetype planetary explorer, will be found in the coming weeks. The team took off for Chile this weekend in preparation for the beginning of the trek across the Atacama Desert on June 18. Watch for details.

YOUR PERSONAL RHINO TOURGUIDE...www.cs.uni-bonn.de/~rhino/tourguide/ was your pathway to interactive tours at the Deutsches Museum Zweigstelle in Bonn on May 29-June 1. Rhino, integrating the latest AI technology, navigation, speech output and probabilistic reasoning (and ultimately, vision-based gesture recognition), was accessible to the public over the weekend and was there for you "if you could not make it in person to the exhibits" says Sebastian Thrun, "you could send the robot around through the web, where it retrieved live images from the museum." The site is still up. Click to see what went on!

WEEK OF MAY 12, 1997

NEWELL AWARD FOR UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH...Congratulations to senior Hongsuda Tangmunarunkit, the 1997 recipient of the Allen Newell Aware for Undergraduate Research Excellence. Hongsuda's senior thesis topic was "Network-Aware Distributed Computing" and her advisor was Peter Steenkiste. She will be recognized for this wonderful achievement during Commencement 97.

AWARDS...Peter Stone has been awarded a NASA Graduate Student Researchers Program Fellowship. Bravo!

AND HONORS...Doug Baker has received an Honorable Mention for this year's Carnegie Mellon Graduate Student Teaching Award, and is honored among the two winners and five honorable mentions within the University. Doug has been a TA for 15-211 for two years and as noted by Guy Blelloch, "has done an excellent job teaching his sections, designing innovative homeworks, and helping students one-on-one. This year, Doug initiated the first honors section for 15-211 and taught it on his own." Great job!

IN DEFENSE... **MANISH PANDEY offers "Formal Verification of Memory Arrays", at his CS thesis defense on Thursday, May 13 at 9:00 am in Wean 4623. His committee includes: Randal Bryant (Chair), Allan Fisher, Rob Rutenbar, and Richard Raimi (Motorola).
**JAMES STICHNOTH is "Generating Code for High-Level Operations Through Code Composition" at his CS oral on Monday, May 19 at 1:30 pm in Wean 4615A. Serving on his committee are: Thomas Gross (Chair), Steven Lucco, David O'Hallaron, Jaspal Subhlok, and Joel Saltz (University of Maryland).

PROPOSALS...
**MEI CHUAH...looks at "A Framework for Analyzing and Automating the Design of Interactive Visualizations", at her CS thesis proposal on Wednesday, May 14 at 4:00 pm in Wean 5409. On her committee are: Steve Roth (Chair), Jim Morris, Scott Fahlman, Dan Olsen, and Jock Mackinlay (Xerox PARC).
**STEPHEN CHEN finds "The Commonality-Based Crossover Framework: A New Model for Genetic Algorithms" at his robotics thesis proposal on Friday, May 16 at 4:00 pm in Wean 4601. His committee includes: Stephen Smith (Chair), Andrew Moore, Art Hsu (GSIA), and Darrell Whitley (Colorado State University).
**GARTH ZEGLIN jumps into "Planning and Control for a Bow Leg Hopping Robot" at his Robotics thesis proposal on Friday, May 16 at 1:00 pm at Wean 4601. His committee includes: Matthew Mason (Chair), Ben Brown, Ralph Hollis, Illah Nourbakhsh, and Mark Raibert (Boston Dynamics, Inc).

IBM'S DEEP BLUE A WINNER...IBM's Deep Blue computer chess machine defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov over the weekend in New York, making the developers eligible to share the $100,000 Fredkin Prize for Computer Chess. Established at CMU 17 years ago by MIT Computer Science Professor Edward Fredkin, the prize was designed to "encourage continued research progress in computer chess." As a three-tiered prize, the first award of $5,000 was awarded to 2 scientists from Bell Laboratories who, in 1981, developed the first chess machine to achieve master status. The intermediate prize, $10,000, went to the first chess machine to reach international master status, and was awarded in 1988 to 5 CMU graduate students who built Deep Thought, the precursor to Deep Blue, at the university.

NOMAD IS GEARING UP...The Nomad project, consisting of over a half dozen researchers and graduate students from robotics and engineering are finalizing their plans for the trip to Chile's Atacama Desert on June 1. As noted, "this is a rare opportunity for an unprecedented 120-mile trek into the most extraterrestrial landscape on earth." Project Manager, Eric Rollins explains that the robot can act autonomously or be teleoperated, and during a part of its travels, will be teleoperated by visitors to the Carnegie Science Center and NASA's Ames Research Center. Images and data from Nomad will be available on the net in real time. Get ready....

YOU'LL GET A KICK OUT OF THIS...The Computer-Science based Intramural soccer team continued it's dominance this year, winning the major division championship of BOTH the outdoor and indoor soccer competitions. Known as "Real Mellon", the indoor team included the following SCS-ers: Kostya Domashnev, Jovan Popovic, Zoran Popovic, Douglas Rohde, Peter Stone, Astro Teller, Andrew Wilmott, and Hui Zhang.

CAP & GOWN PICK-UPS...are going on this week at the Peter/Wright/McKenna Rooms in the University Center, 2nd Floor. Don't wait until the last minute. If you get your gowns now, you can be wrinkle-free by Sunday :-)

COMING SUNDAY TO A CAMPUS NEAR YOU: COMMENCEMENT 1997!... On Sunday, May 18, Carnegie Mellon with celebrate it's 100th Commencement. 10:30 am - 12:00 pm: SCS Commencement Brunch, Rangos Ballroom, UC 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Carnegie Mellon Commencement Ceremony, The Main Tent 3:30 pm - 4:30+ pm: SCS Diploma Ceremony, Rangos Ballroom, UC SCS sends it collective and proudest congratulations to our graduating students. A kaboom x 21 salute !

REGALIA STANDARDS REFRESHER COURSE...
**The cap is worn straight with the shallower part in front.
**Undergraduate degree candidates should wear the tassel on the RIGHT side and move it to the LEFT AFTER the degree has been conferred.
**Graduate degree candidates should wear the tassel on the left.
**Faculty should wear the tassel on the left.
**Male candidates/faculty should remove their caps during the National Anthem.
**Choice of garments under the gown is your business :-)

CS BLACK FRIDAY...is on for Thursday/Friday, May 15/16. On the schedule are: Thursday--AI (10:00 am); CS and Theory (1:00 pm); Programming Systems (3:00 pm) and Friday--General Meeting (10:00 am). The meetings will be held in Wean 4623 both days. Check with sharon.burks@cs for details.

ROBOTICS BLACK FRIDAY...or actually, Black Monday, will be held Monday, May 19 at 9:00 am in Wean 4623. Contact marce zaragoza for all particulars.

CS FACULTY RETREAT...May 21-23! Check with Jim Morris for details.

PARAMETRIC TECHNOLOGY VISIT POSTPONED...The May 15 visit by Parametric has been postponed and will be rescheduled for a later date. Watch for particulars.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
WEDNESDAY, MAY 14
**HCI SEMINAR: Jean-Pierre Jacquot, CRIN University Henri Poincare, France, "Early Specification of User-Interfaces: Toward a Formal Approach", 3:30 pm, Wean 3412.

WEEK OF MAY 5, 1997

SAINT PAUL PERFORMS ANOTHER MIRACLE...On Monday morning, April 28, at 1:30 am (yes, the wee hours of the morning), the power supply to the network backbone was "fried" by a power outage. Paul "The Saint" Parker was summoned from his bed into work and had everything working perfectly by the time users started arriving for work. No one would have ever known that it had happened, and we suspect many still don't realize what transpired. It was a marvel what he accomplished. The facilities staff once again, in their quiet way, saved us from a potential disaster. Our collective thanks to Paul and the other members of facilities for another miracle!

SCS AWARDS CEREMONY IS HERE!...All SCS faculty, staff and students are invited to the 1997 School of Computer Science Staff Recognition Awards Ceremony on Tuesday afternoon, May 6 at 3:00 pm in the Connan Room, University Center. A reception will follow. Come honor the recipient(s) of the SCS Staff Recognition Award (SCSi) and the Service Recognition Awards...it promises to be a great time. Don't miss this one!

NEW FACES...Jennifer Roderick has joined CS (permanently!) as Executive Assistant to Jim Morris and Sharon Burks.

PROPOSALS...
**ANDREA RICHA takes "On Distributed Network Resource Allocation" at her ACO thesis proposal on Wednesday, May 7 at 2:00 pm in Wean 4623. Her committee includes: Bruce Maggs (Chair), Alan Frieze, Ramamoorthi Ravi (GSIA), and Greg Plaxton (University of Texas at Austin).
**GEOFFREY GORDON attempts "Approximate Dynamic Programming" at his CS proposal on Thursday, May 8 at 12:00 pm in Wean 4615A. On his committee are: Tom Mitchell (Chair), Andrew Moore, Ravi Kannan, and Satinder Singh (University of Colorado).
**COREY KOSAK tests out "High-Quality Resource Allocation for Application- Oriented Network Service" at this CS thesis proposal on Monday, May 12 at 1:30 pm in Wean 5409. His committee includes: Allan Fisher (Chair), Thomas Gross, Peter Steenkiste, and external member, TBA :-)
**WILL MARRERO investigates "Model Checking for Security Protocols" at his CS proposal on Monday, May 12 at 3:30 pm in Wean 5409. Serving on his committee are: Edmund Clarke (Chair), Doug Tygar, Jeannette Wing, and Martin Abadi (DEC SRC).

MS PRESENTATION...Gregory Aist offers "A General Architecture for a Real-Time Discourse Agent and a Case Study in Oral Reading Tutoring" at his Computational Linguistics master's presentation on Wednesday, May 7 at 10:00 am in the LTI Blue Room (Cyert 279). A demo will follow in Cyert 213. His committee includes Jack Mostow (Advisor), Alex Rudnicky, and Nancy Green.

CS/RI FACULTY CANDIDATE...Ioannis A. Kakadiaris, GRASP Lab, CIS Department, University of Pennsylvania, offers "Motion-Based Segmentation, Shape and Motion Estimation of Multi-Part Objects" on Thursday, May 8 at 10:00 am in Wean Hall 4601. His faculty host is Martial Hebert.

ANNUAL SPRING PICNIC...DecFive says don't think, just be there on Wednesday, May 7 from 1:00 to 8:00 pm at the Veterans Memorial in Schenley Park to celebrate the rites of spring with festive glee and loads of edibles!

CALD SYMPOSIUM...The Center for Automated Learning and Discovery will host its first symposium on Monday, May 12. The center, "designed to pursue basic science in machine learning, including data mining, statistical methodology, and knowledge discovery, is driven by applications to problems of societal importance." For details, contact Tom Mitchell (mitchell+@cs).

AUTOMATED UNDERGROUND MINING PROGRAM...On May 1, Carnegie Mellon and Joy Mining, Inc. signed a contract to develop the technologies for automating underground mining operations. Joy Mining and NASA will jointly fund a 3-year effort to automate the navigation, cutting, and roof support functions of a continuous mining machine used for coal mining. "Coal mining is a dangerous job. Roof collapse, coal dust explosions, and equipment accidents result in injury and death," notes Tony Stentz, Principal Investigator for the project. "The machines are operated suboptimally to allow humans to work in proximity to them. By moving the people out of harm's way to remote monitoring stations, both safety and productivity can be improved." The developed technologies will be validated on a 40-ton continuous miner, sited at the NREC in Lawrenceville. John Bares is Co-PI on this project.

CREATING POWERFUL WEB APPLICATIONS...is the topic of the "Microsoft at the Movies" program scheduled for May 5 and May 6 (8:00 am to 6:00 pm) in the Peter/McKenna Rooms, University Center. "Discover how easily you can extend the functionality of the Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems, Microsoft Office, FrontPage 97 Web authoring and management tool, Visual InterDev Web development tool and Microsoft Internet Explorer to build effective intranet and Internet solutions....and more. A complete agenda for Tuesday is on cmu.cs.scs or the cboard.

FACILITIES UPDATE...Matlab 5.0 for Unix is here! If you would like to subscribe to this release, add the following line to your /usr/local/depot/depot.pref.local file: collection.release 5.0 matlab. For more info on this release visit: /www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/help/www/Collections/depot.html#Alternative

CALLING ALL PRO-E PEOPLE...Dave Petine, from Parametric Technology, maker of Pro-Engineer, will be on campus Thursday, May 15 to meet with current users of the Pro-E software, and any potential users. There will be a group meeting at 1:30 in Wean 4625, followed by individual meetings in the afternoon. If you are interested in attending, send mail to help+licenses@cs.cmu.edu. More details will be posted shortly.

ROBOTIC SOCCER IS HAPPENING!...Manuela Veloso reports that preparations for the RoboCup competition, scheduled for the International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-97, in Japan, are really coming along. CMU will participate in two competitions at RoboCup: the simulator league and the small size robot league. The team is called CMU United! "Peter Stone, who's thesis proposal 'Layered Learning in Multiagent Systems', is using the simulator robotic soccer as a substrate for his research." notes Manuela. "Peter has been a main (and pioneer!) developer of intelligent learning agents for the players in the simulator. She adds "We are also studying issues of collaborative planning and learning in this multiagent realistic adversarial real-time scenario." The Robotics Soccer Lab, located in Doherty 2300A, is where you can find real soccer robots being built. Be forewarned, "they do not have legs, arms or heads and they do not kick the ball :-)" They are small radio controlled, wheeled robots (smaller than 15cm3) that push a golf ball. The field is a ping-pong table with walls to prevent the robots and the ball from going off the field. A team is composed of up to 5 robots. For more details, check /www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/kitano/RoboCup/RoboCup.html or www.cs.cmu.edu/~pstone.

MEETING OF THE MINDS...The Undergraduate Research Review, is scheduled for Wednesday, May 7 from 1:00-5:00 pm in the University Center. SCS undergradates (listed with their advisor, time, location) making presentations are listed below. Complete abstracts and details can be found via the SCS Calendar or at /www.cmu.edu/adm/uri/urs.html.

*Michael Herf, "Soft Shadow Textures" (Paul Heckbert), 1:00/Dowd.
*Nicholas Vallidis, "Design and Implementation of a Hexapod Robotics System", (Manuela Veloso), 1:40 pm/Wright.
*David Watson, "Musical Style Recognition Using Machine Learning Techniques" (Roger Dannenberg), 1:40 pm/Dowd.
*Choon Yang Quek, "Classification of World Wide Web Documents" (Tom Mitchell), 2:00 pm/Dowd.
*Hongsuda Tangmunarunkit, "Middleware Between Application and Network" (Peter Steenkiste), 2:00 pm/Peter.
*Anton Staaf "Evolving Gaits for Caterpillar Style Robots", (Tom Mitchell). 2:20 pm/Dowd.
*Patrawadee Prasangsit "Data Analaysis and Prediction Using GMDH Algorithm" (Andrew Moore), 2:40 pm/Peter.
*Andrew Ng, "Preventing `Overfitting' of Cross Validation Data" (Andrew Moore) 3:00 pm/Wright.
*Yu-Chung Ng, "A Nitpick Specification of IPv6" (Jeannette Wing), 3:00 pm/McKenna.
*Benjamin Hsu, "A Flow Based Approach to Graph Partitioning" (Gary Miller), 3:20 pm/Peter.
*Wai Yin Liu, "Protection for Key Repository from Attackers" (Doug Tygar), 3:20 pm/McKenna.
*Murali Haran, "Recognizing Haptic Gestures for Interactions for Virtual Environments" (Karun Shimoga), 3:40 pm/McKenna.
*Brian Carothers, "Language Independent Representations of Programming Problems", (Albert Corbett), 3:00-5:00 pm/Connan Auditorium

POSTER SESSIONS:
2:00-4:00 pm, Hoch Commons
*Steven Anichini and Andrew Yoder, "Realtime Audio for Gaming" (Ragunathan Rajkumar)
*Benjamin Folk-Williams, "Random Walks on Graphcs" (Merrick Furst)
*DeWitt Latimer, "Utilizing HTML in Application Programs" (David O'Hallaron)
*Tammo Spalink, "Remote Execution for Network Attached Storage" (Garth Gibson)
*Raymond Tse, "A Control and Monitoring Tool for Mobile IP" (David Johnson)
*John Warwick, "Linear Quadratic Regulators: Comparisons with Reinforcement Learning" (Andrew Moore)
2:30-4:30 pm, Rangos Ballroom
*Jason Fung, "Standalone, Light-weight Distributed Objects Naming Service Through Domain Name System" (David O'Hallaron)

2:00 pm, Rangos Ballroom
*John Chang, "Natural Programming" (Brad Myers)
*Leejay Wu, "Fast Heuristics for Finding Related Data Attributes" (Andrew Moore)

A closing reception and awards ceremony follows at 5:00 pm.

COMMENCEMENT 97...2 weeks and counting. May 17 and 18 are a heartbeat away! Caps and gowns will be available for pickup May 14-18 at the McKenna/Peter/Wright Room in the University Center. Watch the bboards for particulars on times.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT... FRIDAY, MAY 9
**LTI SEMINAR: David Allbritton, University of Pittsburgh "Is Prosody a Reliable Source of Information for Resolving Syntactic Ambiguity?" at 11:00 am, the LTI Blue Room (Cyert 279).

WEEK OF APRIL 28, 1997

CARNEGIE GROUP CHAIR...Our congratulations to Mahadev Satyanarayanan (Satya), the recipient of an endowed chair from Carnegie Group, Inc (CGI). The firm, specializing in AI, was founded by Jaime Carbonell, Mark Fox, John McDermott, and Raj Reddy. As noted by Jim Morris, "the funds for the chair will come from CMU's sale of its CGI stock as well as personal contributions from the founders." Satya (PhD CS '83), one of the designers of the Andrew file system at the ITC, led the effort to analyze the system's performance. Morris adds, "He published an important paper showing its significant performance advantages over other contemporary systems." Satya later joined CSD, "where he initiated the Coda project which extended the Andrew system to use multicast protocols and support detached operation...He now oversees the Odyssey project, which is aimed directly at mobile computing, a field he helped found and leads." In addition to his many contributions to our educational programs within SCS, his numerous best paper awards with his co-authors, and his unique student/ advisor relationships which have resulted in excellent theses, Satya has taught us what it is to be a great guy.

NEW HONORS...Congratulations to Adam Berger, recipient of a 1997/98 IBM Cooperative Fellowship Award.

AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS...CS seniors Glenn Durfee and Andrew Ng have been selected as 1997 Andrew Carnegie Scholars. Also receiving academic honors this year is is Adam Klivans, who has been honored as an Andrew Carnegie Presidential Scholar. A hearty round of applause!

IN DEFENSE...
**JONATHAN SHEWCHUK reviews "Delaunay Refinement Mesh Generation" at his CS thesis oral on Tuesday, April 30 at 2:00 pm in Wean 4623. His committee includes: Gary Miller (Co-chair), David O'Hallaron (Co-Chair), Thomas Gross, Omar Ghattas (CMU/CivE), and Jim Ruppert (Arris Pharmaceutical).
**DAVID REDISH goes "Beyond the Cognitive Map: A Computational Neuroscience Theory of Navigation in the Rodent" at his CS defense on Friday, May 2 at 3:30 pm in Wean 5409. His committee members include: David Touretzky (Chair), James McClelland, David Plaut (CMU/Psych), and Bruce McNaughton (University of Arizona).

PROPOSALS...
**KAN DENG offers "Memory-Based Time Series Recognition" at his Robotics thesis proposal on Tuesday, April 29 at 12:30 pm in Wean 4623. His committee members are: Andrew Moore (Chair), Dean Pomerleau, Scott Fahlman, and Christopher Atkeson (Georgia Tech). **MEI CHEN examines "Knowledge-Guided Deformable Matching for Pathology Detection" at her Robotics proposal on Thursday, May 1 at 10:00 am in Wean 4623. Her committee includes: Takeo Kanade (Chair), Dean Pomerleau (Co-chair), Andy Witkin, William Rothfus (Allegheny University of the Health Sciences), and W. Eric L. Grimson (MIT).

SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE...Amir Pnueli, Professor of Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science and 1996 Turing Award winner, explores "Translation Validation" at a special SCS Distinguished Lecture on Thursday, May 1 at 4:00 pm in Wean 7500. Refreshments will be available at 3:45 pm, outside the lecture hall.

SPECIAL HCI SEMINAR...George G. Robertson, Senior Researcher and Manager of the User Interface Research group at Microsoft Research, investigates "Navigation in Information Spaces" on Friday, May 2 at 12:00 pm in Wean 5409.

CANDIDATE CRITIQUE II...Jeannette Wing will host the second Critique session on Wednesday, April 30, from 12 noon - 1:30 p.m. in Wean 5409. Pizza lunch will be served. Graduate students wishing to attend should rsvp to charlieg@cs ...to guarantee enough pizza :-)

SCS AWARDS CEREMONY...All SCS faculty, staff and students are invited to the 1997 School of Computer Science Staff Recognition Awards Ceremony on Tuesday, May 6 at 3:00 pm in the Connan Room, University Center. A reception will follow. Among this year's honorees will be the recipient(s) of the SCS Staff Recognition Award (SCSi), to be announced at the ceremony. Nominees are Chris Clune (CSD), Anita Connelly (RI), Heather Moody (LTI), and Marce Zaragoza (RI). The following staff members will also be honored with Service Recognition Awards:

**20 Years:

Michael Accetta, CSD; Sharon Burks, CSD
**15 Years:
Jeff Baird, CSD; Mike Blackwell, Robotics; Tad Kikuchi, CSD;
Peter Lieu, CSD; Jim Skees, CSD
**10 Years:
Martha Clarke, CSD; Ellen Douglas, CSD; Maria Fischer, CSD;
Kerien Fitzpatrick, RI;
Donna Gates, CMT/LTI; Jean Harpley, CSD; Kelly Mullins, CSD; Wenfan Shi, RI
**5 Years:
Delaine Cushey, CSD; John Dolan, RI; Jesse Easudes, RI;
Paul Gleichauf, CSD; Ricky Houghton, CSD; Dottie Marsh, RI;
Tim Meadows, RI; Michael Polis, CSD; Bernhard Suhm, CSD

Please join us!

JEDERMANN REVISITED..."Jedermann", the computer installation by CS graduate student Astro Teller and designer Chris Pacione will be on display at the Hewlett Gallery (CFA) from May 5-24, with a reception on Thursday, May 8 from 5:00-7:00 pm. "Jedermann", noteds Astro, "fuses computation and aesthetics to create poetic, dynamic, digital portraits. By recording facial characteristics and taking personal information from its visitors, Jedermann composes dynamic, evolving portraits that explore our reaction to human faces and the ways our culture assigns characteristic traits to them. The animated collective visages act as psychological mirrors, reflecting the beauty, variety and stereotypes of the human face." Spectate or participate in the show at www.cs.cmu.edu/ ~astro/JEDERMANN.html. A digital facsimile will be accessible from May 5 thru December, and can be "experienced" on the internet at www.cs.cmu.edu/astro/ JEDERMANN.html. Gallery hours: Monday thru Friday, 11:30 am to 5:00 pm; Saturdays and Sundays, 11:30 am to 4:00 pm.

ANNUAL DECFIVE PICNIC...Wednesday, May 7!

MEETING OF THE MINDS...the Carnegie Mellon Undergraduate Research Symposium, a university-wide program, is scheduled for Wednesday, May 7 from 1:00-5:00 pm throughout the University Center. The Symposium provides an opportunity for students campus-wide to share their research projects with the CMU community through oral, poster and artistic presentations. A concluding awards ceremony and reception honoring all participants will follow at 5:00 pm in the Weigand Gymnasium, University Center. A schedule of events (including abstracts and times/locations for SCS seniors) can be found at www.cmu.edu/adm/uri.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20
**HCI SEMINAR: David H. Jameson, IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, "Sonnet, A Visual Language For Rapid Prototyping", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

THURSDAY, MAY 1
**SPECIAL ECE/RI SEMINAR: Kaigham J. Gabriel, Director, Electronics Technology Office, DARPA, "Microelectromechanical Systems", 4:00 pm, Scaife Hall Auditorium.

FRIDAY, MAY 2
**THEORY SEMINAR: Valerie King, University of Victoria, "Dynamic Graph Algorithms: An Overview of Recent Work", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.
**LTI SEMINAR: Manfred Stede, Technical University Berlin, "Discourse Relations and Connectives in Language Generation"", 11:00 am, LTI Blue Room.
**ROBOTICS SEMINAR: Ralph S. Mosher, "Experiences and Lessons in Building Robots", 3:15 pm, Adamson Wing, Baker Hall.

MONDAY, MAY 5
**JOINT PHILOSOPHY/LOGIC COLLOQUIUM/PROGRAM SYSTEMS SEMINAR: Joseph Halpern, Cornell University, "From Statistics to Beliefs", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

WEEK OF APRIL 21, 1997

SCHERLIS APPOINTED DIRECTOR OF ITC...Bill Scherlis has been appointed Director of the ITC. He fills a position left vacant by Steve Cross, now Director of the SEI. The ITC's mission includes the initiation and coordination of larger scale information technology infrastructure projects, working with other units of SCS and the university to bring projects to fruition. Raj Reddy notes, "Over the next 5 years, the ITC may be expected to lead projects related to the development of the SCS gigabit testbed, next generation Internet, metropolitan area networking, and large scale information archives for access by large numbers of people. Bill brings unique experience to such a challenge." He is leading projects on Collaboration Information Management (long-term information-intensive collaborations) and on Software Evolution (systematic restructuring of software) and is a principal investigator of the HomeNet project. He has been involved in several National Research Council studies including "Computing and Communications in the Extreme: Research for Crisis Management and Other Applications", and "Ada and Beyond: Software Policies for the Department of Defense", and chaired the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group on Foreground Information Management. He will serve as program chair of the 1998 ACM Foundations of Software Engineering Symposium. At DARPA for more than 6 years, Bill departed in 1993 as senior executive responsible for coordination of software engineering research. He was a leader in the initiation of the Federal HPCC program and the DARPA NII efforts. Join us in congratulating Bill!

ALLEN NEWELL AWARD FOR RESEARCH EXCELLENCE...Satya, Peter Lee, and George Necula have received the 1997 Allan Newell Medals for Research Excellence. "Satya's award recognizes his multi-year record of producing superb research, papers, and students, related to the Coda and Odessy systems," notes Jim Morris. "Over the years he has established a standard of excellence for the reporting of measurable research results at conferences such as SOSP." Peter and George have "introduced a completely new technique for achieving security in a distributed environment: making the well-behavedness of a program quickly provable from its content alone. Most other approaches depend upon an element of trust. Their paper on Proof-carrying code won a best paper award at the last Operating Systems Design and Implementation conference and this work has supplied an example of how ideas from logic can be useful in contemporary computing problems." Incisive problems, relentless study and hard work...Allen would be proud!

MORE HONORS...Robert O'Callahan has been awarded the 1997 Microsoft Graduate Fellowship in SCS.

FACULTY CANDIDATE...Liviu Iftode, Princeton Universty, examines "Home-based Shared Virtual Memory" on Thursday, April 24 at 10:30 am in Wean 4623. His faculty host is Bruce Maggs.

PROPOSALS...Bwolen Yang tackles "Efficient BDD Construction" at his CS thesis proposal on Wednesday, April 23 at 10:00 am in Wean 4623. His committee includes: David O'Hallaron (Chair), Randy Bryant, Thomas Gross, and Katherine Yelick (University of California at Berkeley).

MASTERS PRESENTATIONS AT CMU/LTI...
**KLAUS ZECHNER gets into "Building Chunk Level Representations For Spontaneous Speech in Unrestricted Domains: The CHUNKY System and Its Application to Reranking NBest Lists of a Speech Recognizer" on Thursday, April 24 at 5:00 pm, LTI Red Room. His committee includes: Alex Waibel, Alon Lavie and Nancy Green. A demo of his system is scheduled for Thursday, May 1 at 5:00 pm in the Interact Lab, Wean 4616.
**GREGORY AIST, computational linguistics master's presentation, "A General Architecture for a Real-Time Discourse Agent and a Case Study in Oral Reading Tutoring", and systems demo are scheduled for Friday, April 25 at 10:00 am in the LTI Blue Room (Cyert 279), and 1:00 pm in the LISTEN LAB (Cyert 213), respectively. His committee includes: Jack Mostow (advisor), Nancy Green, and Alex Rudnicky.
**MARIA TERESA TABOADA, offers "Discourse Information for Disambiguation: The Phoenix Approach in JANUS" on Friday, April 25 at 4:30 pm, LTI Red Room. **ROSEMARY ELLEN JONES, looks at "Web Search Disambiguation (tentative title)" on Thursday, May 1 at 10:00 am in Wean 3412.

IS THAT RATIONAL?...The Department of Philosophy, in celebration of the awarding of the Herbert A. Simon Chair in Philosophy to Teddy Seidenfeld, will host the "Is That Rational?" Symposium on Saturday, April 26. Open to the entire campus community, the event is scheduled for 1:00-4:30 pm in the Adamson Wing, Baker Hall. Chaired by Herbert Simon, the participants include Isaac Levi (Columbia University), Joseph Kandane and Teddy Seidenfeld (CMU). A reception will also be held from 3:00-3:30 in honor of Seidenfeld. A complete list of topics is available on the SCS Events Calendar.

MICROSOFT MINI DEVELOPER DAYS...Tim Belvin, Vice President, Infotech Solutions, will present "The Microsoft Visual Studio and Developer Tools" at this" mini" developer symposium on Saturday, April 26. The program begins at 9:30 am in the McConomy Auditorium, University Center, with a video presentation of keynote addresses by Bill Gates, Bob Muglia, and Paul Gross on the directions they expect the new technologies to take in the coming years. Tim Belvin will follow at 11:00 am. Refreshments will be served. For more details, see the website: http://www.ms.lore.net/cmu/ under "Events" or contact Matt at mashoe+@cmu.edu.

BLACK FRIDAY ALERT...CS Black Friday meetings will be held Thursday and Friday, May 15-16. The schedule includes: May 15 (8:30 am/Computer Systems, 10:00 am/AI, 1:30 pm/Theory and 3:00 pm/Programming Systems); May 16 (10:00 am/General Meeting).

ART NEWS..."Jedermann", a computer installation by CS graduate student Astro Teller and designer Chris Pacione will be on display at the Hewlett Gallery (CFA) from May 5-24. A digital facsimile of the show will be accessible from May 5 through December, and can be "experienced" on the internet at www.cs.cmu.edu/astro/JEDERMANN.html.

SCS UNDERGRADUATE PICNIC...Friday, April 25! All undergraduates be there. No excuses accepted :-)

BRING YOUR DAUGHTERS TO WORK...On Thursday, April 24, CMU celebrates "Five Years of Work Towards A Lifetime of Confidence", the theme for this year's "Take Our Daughters to Work Day." Among the schedule activities are a luncheon, site visites and presentations across campus. Contact mlpl@andrew.cmu.edu or call x8/2642 for more details.

SPEAKING OF SPRING...Spring has sprung, and DecFive's Spring Picnic can't be far off. In fact, it isn't. Everybody is invited to celebrate on Wednesday, May 7 from 1:00-8:00 pm, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Schenley Park. Watch for details.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22
**HCI SEMINAR: Jeff Peirce, HCII Graduate Student, "Image Plane Interaction Techniques for Immersive Environments", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409. (this is an informal, practice talk).

FRIDAY, APRIL 25
**POP SEMINAR: Jason Hickey, Cornell University, "Formal Module Systems for Relating Programming and Mathemtics", 3:30 pm, Wean 8220.
**ROBOTICS SEMINAR: "Icebreaker - A Lunar South Pole Exploring Robot" is presented by representatives from the Mobile Robot Design Class, 3:15 pm, the Adamson Wing.
**THEORY SEMINAR: Ronitt Rubinfeld, Cornell University, "Understanding Noisy Data: The Case of Polynomials", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.

Special Edition: APRIL 15, 1997

JARED L. COHON, YALE DEAN, NAMED CARNEGIE MELLON PRESIDENT...Dr. Jared L. Cohon, Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, was elected on April 15 as the eighth President of Carnegie Mellon University. Cohon, 49, succeeds Dr. Robert Mehrabian, who will retire on July 1 after seven years as Carnegie Mellon President. Cohon was elected at a meeting of the university's Board of Trustees.

There is no better way our search for the eighth president of Carnegie Mellon could have succeeded than in bringing Jared Cohon to our university," said Thomas A. McConomy, chairman of the university's Board of Trustees. "His proven abilities as a scholar, teacher and administrator make him a superb choice. But his personal qualities are what truly distinguish him.

We expect much of him, but I have every confidence that he will fulfill our expectations. I look forward to having Dr. Cohon take the lead in guiding Carnegie Mellon into its second century."

Cohon's career includes professional and management experience in education, industry and government. In more than 25 years at private research universities, he has held faculty and administrative positions at all levels and has been involved in a broad range of issues and activities.

He joined Yale in 1992 as dean and professor of environmental systems analysis and mechanical engineering after 19 years at The Johns Hopkins University, where he rose through the faculty ranks to become associate dean of engineering and then vice provost for research. As vice provost at Johns Hopkins, Cohon led the university's efforts in technology transfer and high-technology business development in the Baltimore area. He was deeply involved in the development in the late 1980s of Triad Investors Corporation, a technology commercialization company with ties to Johns Hopkins. He also initiated the development of a biotechnology manufacturing center, a partnership involving the city of Baltimore, the state of Maryland, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland.

Cohon's research and teaching have centered on the development of systems analysis techniques and their application to the management of environmental problems. His scholarly and consulting work has focused on river basin planning, water quality management, the siting of energy facilities and nuclear waste management. He is the author of one book and more than 80 technical publications.

President Bill Clinton appointed Cohon in January as chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board. From 1977-78, he was a legislative assistant for energy and environment for U.S. Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. He is a member of "Who's Who in Engineering" and a member of the Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi honor societies. He earned his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the Univeristy of Pennsylvania in 1969, his master's and doctoral degrees in civil engineering in 1972 and 1973, respectively, from the Massaschusetts Institute of Technology.

Cohon and his wife, Maureen, have one child, Hallie, 26, a third-grade teacher in Baltimore. A member of the Connecticut and Maryland bars, Maureen Cohon has been an attorney for 15 years, specializing in family law and divorce medication.

WEEK OF APRIL 14, 1997

SCS DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI LECTURE...James Gosling, Vice President and Fellow at Sun Microsystems, offers his thoughts on "Doing Innovative Software in the Real World" on Thursday, April 17 at 4:00 pm in Wean 7500. Distinguished refreshments at 3:45 pm, outside the room. (Note: Room may change to Doherty 2315, a room down the hall from Wean 7500. Watch for postings! )

SCS ADVISORY BOARD CONVENES...The Educational Directions Committee of the SCS Advisory Board will gather on Monday evening and Tuesday, April 21 and 22.

SLEEPINGBAG WEEKEND...The final program for students admitted into the SCS undergraduate program is scheduled for Sunday and Monday, April 20 and 21. As always, students will experience a slice (and sleepingbag full) of campus life, to help them determine where they will begin their college career. Join us in welcoming them to campus!

IN DEFENSE...
**Dan Morrow develops "Sensorimotor Primitives for Programming Robotics Assembly Skills at his Robotics thesis defense on Thursday, April 17 at 1:00 pm in Wean 4623. On his committee are: Pradeep Khosla (Chair), Michael Erdmann, Lee Weiss, and Brenan McCarragher (Australian National University).

PROPOSALS...
**HOWARD GOBIOFF examines "Security Issues for Network Attached Storage" at his CS thesis proposal on Wednesday, April 16 at 2:00 pm in Wean 4615A. His committee includes: Garth Gibson (Co-chair), Doug Tygar (Co-Chair), Satya, Clifford Neuman (USC/ISI) and Bennet Yee (University of California at San Diego).
**CHRISTIAN LEBIERE tries out "An ACT-R Model of Cognitive Arithmetic" at his CS thesis proposal on Thursday, April 17 at 10:00 am in Wean 3412. His committee includes: John Anderson (Chair), Bonnie John, Tom Mitchell, and Bob Siegler (Psychology).
**GEORGE NECULA tests out "Compiling with Proofs" during his CS proposal on Monday, April 21 at 2:00 pm in Wean 4615A. Among his committee are: Peter Lee (Chair), Robert Harper, Frank Pfenning, and Greg Nelson (DEC SRC).

MOBOT WINNERS ANNOUNCED...Congratulations to the winners of the 1997 Mobot Finals. Arne Suppe (CS), Team Noname1, captured first prize of $1,000 in the undergraduate class, with a winning time of 3:55.5 through Gate 8. Il-Hwan Kwon ECE), Team James Kwon, followed to earn the second prize of $500, with a speed of 3:01.9 through Gate 4. Daniel Bothell, Team DJBIII, continues his winning streak to take Open Category First Prize of $250 with a pace of 1:37.5 through Gate 8. Congratulations to all this year's contestants for their enthusiastic participation and many thanks to our sponsors RedZone Robotics and Schlumberger.

DAS IST EIN RHINO...Sebastian Thrun and colleagues at the University of Bonn are exhibiting a robotic tour guide they've developed, RHINO, at the Deutsches Museum Zweigstelle in Bonn, on May 26. The robot, named while the Rhine River was flooding and Sebastian was attempting save some things from inundation (!), offers tours to museum visitors and provides Web visitors with virtual presence at the museum exhibits, all of which are dedicated to science. Visitors will be able to access the robot and request, among other things, that it take them to specific objects. Outfitted with four buttons that users can push to let the robot know what they want, Rhino responds in both English and German. Sebatian points out that he developed about half of the robot's software on Amelia and Xavier. Rhino integrates the latest AI technology, navigation, probabilistic reasoning and speech output and will, ultimately, operate on vision-based gesture recognition.

DESERT TREK...Preparations are underway for the Atacama Desert Trek, a 6-week public demonstration of Lunar Rover technology developed at the RI. Called Nomad, the robot will be shipped next month to the Atacama Desert in Chile, a regiona noted for its arid climate (less than 1cm rainfall per year), lack of vegetation and Lunar-like terrain. When visiting the Carnegie Science Center this summer (mid-June through the end of July), you'll be able to see what it is like to drive a robot thousands of miles away, using video from a special 360 degree camera. For details, check out http://www.ri.cmu.edu/atacama-trek/, a site which will grow by robotic leaps and bounds in the coming weeks.

1997 BUHL LECTURE...Dr. Edward "Rocky" Kolb of the NASA/Fermilab Astrophysics Group at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Professor at the Enrico Fermi Institute, The University of Chicago, travels "From the Primordial Soup to Pittsburgh" at the annual Buhl Lecture. Sponsored by the Department of Physics, the April 15 talk begins at 4:30 pm in the Mellon Institute 2nd Floor Auditorium. A reception will follow.

TAKE A "FAST BREAK"...SCS undergraduates are at welcomed to the Thursday, April 17, "Fast Break" (i.e., free breakfast and lots of socializing) from 8:00-10:00 am at the Skibo Coffeehouse. The food is hosted by Student Activities and Student life. Socializing is up to you :-)

ROBOTICS FACULTY MEETING...Friday, April 18, 11:30 am, Wean 4625.

ONE SMART COOKIE..."World Wide Web surfers who travel from site to site under the illusion their actions are private and anonymous don't know about "cookies", notes the article, "CMU Student 'Snoops' Out Threats to Privacy", in the April 14 Tribune-Review. "A cookie is like a passport that gets stamped as users visit various sites. This file--also known as Persistent Client State HTTP Cookies--is stored on a user's hard disk." Whether curious (or now just hungry, read on about Snoop, a program that enables users to see how much information they are revealing about themselves whenever they visit a website. Justin Boyan's effort to protect us and assure our privacy over the internet via Snoop and the Anonymizer are fascinating. Copies are available from scstoday@cs or at http://tribune-review.com/morecom.html

NOWING AIRING...The RoboCopter appeared on the April 8 NBC Dateline. Omead Amidi, featured developer, put forth a strong and exciting case for for the copter's use in search and rescue, defense, and even aerial photography for movie production companies! A solid interview with great demos.

HIPPIE NEWS...The recent winners of the "dress like a hippie for Hair" contest, sponsored by the Drama Department in conjunction with their performances of the musical "Hair", included the "Pelton-John family (a.k.a, the Gary Pelton/ Bonnie John family), who earned the family "togetherness" award and James Tomayko, who showed up "wearing the very same Army shirt, bandana and peace symbol" he wore in his 1970 campus photo. All winners received season tickets to CMU drama. If anyone would like to see a vintage 1970 Tomayko, send email to scstoday@cs, The photo, appearing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is "cool".

DATE ALERT...The SCS Undergraduate Picnic is scheduled for April 25. Watch for details.

COMMENCEMENT REMINDER...Did you order your cap and gown? Have you RSVPed to commencement@cs or your program administrator regarding the events you will attend and the people you will bring? Have you looked into getting tickets for the special family programming and lunches on May 17? If not, why are you waiting. Do it today!

WORDS FOR THOUGHT... TUESDAY, APRIL 15 (after taxes seminars :-)
**AI SEMINAR: John Koza, Stanford University, "Genetic Programming: Programming Computers by Means of Natural Selection", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16
**SPECIAL SEMINAR: Clifford Neuman, ISI/USC, "Flexible Authorization for Distributed Applications" and "A Minimal or Layered-Semantic Framework for Information Access", 10:30 am, Wean 7220.
**HCI SEMINAR: Rudy Darken, Department of Computer Science, Naval Postgraduate School, "Navigating Virtual Worlds: Wayfinding and Locomotion in Real and Not-So-Real Environments", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.
**SPECIAL SEMINAR: Richard Beigel, Yale University and Univeristy of Maryland, "Incremental Data Structures and Algorithms for Dynamic Query Interfaces", 1:30 pm, Wean 4625.

THURSDAY, APRIL 17
**SPECIAL SEMINAR: Todd Mowry, University of Toronto, "Thread-Level Data Speculation: Facilitating Automatic Parallelization for Single-Chip Multiprocessors", 10:30 am, Wean 4623. His host is Thomas Gross.

FRIDAY, APRIL 18
**LTI SEMINAR: Masato Shiraishi, Fukuoka University of Education, "On Semantic Interpretation of Japanese Compound Nouns", 11:00 am, LTI Blue Room.
**THEORY SEMINAR: R. Ravi, GSIA, "Rapid Rumor Ramification: Approximating the Minimum Broadcast Time", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.
**COMPUTER SYSTEMS/PSC SEMINAR: Kunle Olukotun, Stanford University, "The Stanford Hydra Single Chip Multiprocessor", 4:00 pm, Wean 5409.
**ROBOTICS SEMINAR: John M. Holland, President and CEO, Cybermotion, Inc, "K3A Commercial Mobile Robot", 3:15 pm, Adamson Wing.

MONDAY, APRIL 21
**SPECIAL SEMINAR: David E. Liddle, President, Interval Research Corporation, "An Overview of Interval's Mission and Research Program", 1:45 pm, Wean 4623.

WEEK OF APRIL 7, 1997

MOBOT RACE FINALS!...Come see the final competition of the 1997 Mobot Slalom Races, starting Friday, April 11 at 11:30 am, on the race course in front of Wean Hall. Contestants will fire up their vehicles for cash prizes in both undergraduate and open categories. All are welcome and encouraged to cheer on your favorite team. It looks easy, but it isn't -- come see what our community members have accomplished! [Rain date is Saturday, April 12 at 11:30 am). The races are sponsored by RedZone Robotics, Schlumberger, and SCS.

FACULTY CANDIDATE...
**GREG GANGER, MIT Lab for Computer Science, offers "System Software Support for I/O-intensive Applications" on Thursday, April 10 at 10:30 am in Wean 4623. His faculty host is Garth Gibson.

IN DEFENSE...
**ROBERT ALLEN offers "A Formal Approach to Software Architecture" at his CS thesis oral on Tuesday, April 8 at 1:00 pm in Wean 3412. His committee includes David Garlan (Chair), Daniel Jackson, Mary Shaw, and Barry Boehm (University of Southern California).
**LIN CHASE checks "Error-Responsive Feedback Mechanisms for Speech Recognizers" at her Robotics thesis defense on Friday, April 11 at 2:30 pm in Wean 4623. The members of her committee are: Raj Reddy (Chair), Roni Rosenfeld (Co-Chair), Jaime Carbonell, Alex Waibel, Wayne Ward, and Mei-Yuh Hwang (Microsoft).

SCS TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER SEMINAR...Ken Lang, Chief Technology Officer/Founder, WiseWire Corporation, explores "NewsWeeder to WiseWire: Transformation of a Research Project into Commercial Technology" on Wednesday, April 9 at 3:30 pm in Wean 5409. Light refreshments will be served.

MOBILE DISTINCTIONS...On March 24-26, David Johnson participated in a NSF sponsored workshop on "Wireless and Mobile Communications" in Warrenton, Virginia. The workshop, which was by invitation only, included 15 researchers in wireless and mobile communications and 15 researchers in wireless and mobile networking. The output of the workshop will be a report to NSF, co-authored by the workshop participants, on "Research Priorities in Wireless and Mobile Communications and Networking", and will be published by NSF in May.

SCS INVITED TALKS...Mootaz Elnozahy was an invited speaker at the second European Seminar on Advances in Distributed systems, where he talked about his experience on building applications in DCE and CORBA.

IN THE NEWS..."Looking Out, Looking In", a featured article in the March 22-28 edition of The Economist, notes that sports on television are never the same as the real experience. "The roar of the players and the smell of the crowd will not be easy to duplicate remotely. But if Takeo Kanade...has his way, televised sport may, one day, in one crucial way, be better than the real thing." Working with 'virtualised reality', a person could see a game from the referee's point of view, or even from the ball's. Read on yourself. Copies available from scstoday@cs.

ON THE NEWS...Scientific American Frontiers, hosted by Alan Alda, will air "Robots Alive", and features a special segment on Navlab (ridden by Dean Pomerleau) on PBS, at 8:00 pm on Wednesday, April 9. Also featured is the 1996 AAAI Robot Competition, with participation by Amelia (Simmons, Shyjan, Haigh, Thurn and Koenig) and Jeeves (Thrun and the Bonn team).

SPRING CARNIVAL IS NIGH...Spring has sprung and the campus is ready for Carnival! Make sure to stop by the University Center for a complete schedule of events, which begin Thursday evening, April 10!

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
TUESDAY, APRIL 8

**AI SEMINAR: Raul Valdes-Perez, "Maximally Parsimonious Discrimination: A New Variation on Multiclass Concept Learning", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9
**LTI SEMINAR; Tracey Feick and John Benzinger, The Corporate Word, "Software Localization: The Process and Tools", 11:00 am, LTI Blue Room (Cyert 279).

FRIDAY, APRIL 11
**COMPUTER SYSTEMS/PSC SEMINAR: Charles C. Goodrich, University of Maryland, "What Can MHD Simulation Tell Us About the Magnetosphere: Storms, Substorms, and Other Trauma", 4:00 pm, Mellon Institute 3rd Floor Conference Room.
**POP SEMINAR: Manuel Fahnrich and John Boyland, "Statically CHeckable Pattern Abstractions" (paper presetned by J. Boyland), 3:30 pm, Wean 8220.
**ROBOTICS SEMINAR: Neal Lesh, University of Washington, "Scalable and Adaptive Goal Recognition", 3:15 pm, Adamson Wing, Baker Hall.
**THEORY SEMINAR: Stephen Vavasis, Cornell University, "Finite Element Mesh Generation with QMG", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.

WEEK OF MARCH 31, 1997

MOBOT PRELIMINARY RACES!...The 3rd Annual Mobot Race, Preliminaries are scheduled for Wednesday, April 2 at 11:30 am on the Race Course in front of Wean Hall. Come and cheer on your favorite team, in preparation for the April 11 Finals! If you are still considering an entry, contact mobot@cs.

FACULTY CANDIDATES...
**CAMILLO J. TAYLOR, Yale University and University of California at Berkeley Post-Doc, is a joint Robotics/CS faculty candidate, looking into "Recovering 3-D Structure from Line Correspondences" on Wednesday, April 2 at 10:00 am in Wean 4623. His faculty host is Ralph Hollis.
**NIR FRIEDMAN, University of California at Berkeley, examines "Learning Structure in Probabilistic Models" on Thursday, April 3 at 10:30 am in Wean 4623. His faculty host is Avrim Blum.

SCS INVITED TALKS...
**RAJ REDDY will be the Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Utah's 11th Annual Organick Memorial Lecture. He will examine "All Authored Works On-Line, A Global Infrastructure for University Access to Information", on April 9 and "To Err is Human, Computational Limits to Human Thinking and Implications for the Design of User Interfaces", on April 10. **KATIA SYCARA gave an invited talk on "Distributed Agents for Information Gathering and Decision Support" at the "Mobile Agents: Basics, Technology and Applications Systems Symposium on March 26, 1997 in Ontario Canada. The symposium was sponsored by the Telecommunications Research Institute of Ontario and the Information Technology Research Center of Canada.

SPECIAL TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER SEMINAR...Ken Lang, President and Founder of WiseWire (aka Empirical Media), will discuss "NewsWeeder to WiseWire: Transformation of a Research Project into Commercial Technology" on Wednesday, April 9 at 3:30 pm in Wean 5409.

FACILITIES UPDATE...
**EUDORA, the supported mail system for Macintosh and PC platforms at CMU, is now available under a site license. This license enables all faculty, staff, and students to run the software on their machines and includes documentation. If you are interested in obtaining a copy, please contact help+licenses@cs for particulars.
**NOW-UP-TO-DATE is coming our way. A volume license has been signed covering both the Macintosh and PC platforms. If you are interested in running this software on your machine, please contact help+licenses@cs. If you are already using a copy and would like to receive future updates, send mail, including the serial number from your copy, and you will be included in any upgrades.

SLEEPING BAGGERS ARE COMING...on Sunday and Monday, April 6 and 7. High school students accepted into the SCS Undergraduate Program will be visiting campus (some with parents), sleeping in dorms (in sleepingbags, of course), meeting with departmental representatives, and attending information sessions and classes. This is the last opportunity they will have before deciding where to attend college next year. Watch for our prospective Class of 2001!

SHOW BIZ UPDATE...Jeannette Wing performed at the Ballet Baroque's production of Cinderella on March 21 thru 23, playing the role of the wicked stepmother (graduate students take note!). Her performance and acting were considered a remarkable success. and as Jeannette notes "I must have done a good job acting mean and nasty since I got booed and hissed at the curtain calls." :-)

TOM'S TOME COMPLETED..."Machine Learning" by Tom Mitchell is finished! Now available from McGraw-Hill as ISBN 0-07-042807-7, "this textbook provides a single source introduction to the primary approaches to machine learning. It is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as for developers and researchers in the field." Tom reports that his life, post writing, has resumed :-) From all accounts, the sacrificed months were well worth it!

IN THE NEWS..."Einstein Comes to Life on Screen" notes the March 23 Sunday London Times. The system, developed by the Center for Entertainment Technology, "has been used to create a virtual Albert Einstein that allows users to hold a conversation with the physicist...[and] uses several new technologies, including voice recognition, video databases, and advanced search engines... the systems works so quickly that users can have a natural conversation." Scott Stevens, one of the creators of the system, believes it may even be used to make computerized teachers we can talk to" and further adds, "any person who has left a large archive about themselves could be recreated." Details are in the article, available from scstoday@cs.

IN THE ROBO-NEWS..."Nomad's Land: CMU Team Preparing Robot for Trip into Chile's Atacama Desert and Beyond" is featured in the Monday, March 31 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Working round the clock to build a "wheeled robot that will make a 120-mile trek this summer across Chile's Atacama Desert... home only to borax lakes and saline deposits, where rain is a once-a-century event and fog is the main source of precipitation." The team, led by project manager Eric Rollins, begins their field testing tomorrow, in preparation for a trip beginning on June 15. "Nomad will test technology for a pair of teleoperated robots that Carnegie Mellon and LunaCrop of Arlington, Virginia hope to send to the moon by the end of the century." "...the Nomad project has brought robot building full circle." Read on yourselves. Copies are available from scstoday@cs.

CALENDAR ALERT (details in SCS Calendar of Events)...
**CS FACULTY MEETING: April 3 at 4:00 pm, Wean 4623.
**ROBOTICS FACULTY MEETING: April 18 at 11:30 am, Wean 4625.
**BUHL LECTURE: Edward W. Kolb, "From the Promordial Soup to Pittsburgh", April 15 at 4:30.
**SCS DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI LECTURE: James Gosling, Sun Microsystems, April 17, at 4:00 pm.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
MONDAY, MARCH 31
**PROGRAMMING SYSTEMS SEMINAR: Natarajan Shankar, SRI International Computer Science Laboratory, "An Overview of Automated and Interactive Verification in PVS", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

TUESDAY, APRIL 1
**AI SEMINAR: Don Swanson, University of Chicago, "A Discovery-Support System Based on Natural Language Processing of MEDLINE Records", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

FRIDAY, APRIL 4
**COMPUTER SYSTEMS/PSC SEMINAR: Todd Mowry, University of Toronto, "Thread-level Data Speculation in Tightly-Coupled Multiprocessors, 4:00 pm, Wean 5409.
**POP SEMINAR: Cedric Fournet, INRIA Rocquencourt, "A Calculus of Mobile Agents", 3:30 pm, Wean 8220.
**ROBOTICS SEMINAR: Ralph Hollis asks "Whither Microbots?" at 3:15 pm, the Adamson Wing.
**THEORY SEMINAR: Jin-Yi Cai, SUNY Buffalo, "Improving Ajtai's Connection", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.
**SPECIAL SYSTEMS DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION SEMINAR: Jim Gray, Microsoft Research, "I/O Revisited - Why and How", 10:30 am, Wean 7500.

WEEK OF MARCH 24, 1997

MORRIS AWARDED SIMON CHAIR OF HCI...It is with pleasure we announce the appointment of Jim Morris to the Simon Chair of Human-Computer Interaction, the first endowed chair in the HCII. As noted by Dan Olsen, "the creation of this chair recognizes Herbert Simon's contributions in the field of cognitive psychology and its underpinnings in the study of human computer interaction. Raj Reddy added, "This chair also recognizes Jim's seminal contributions to the Andrew System and collaborative techniques...given the hype about NetComputers and NetPCs as prototypes for the future of personal computation, it appears that the model used for the Andrew System 15 years ago, will in the end, turn out to be the right way of providing ubiquitous access to computation." Our many congratulations!

STEHLIK RECEIVES SIMON TEACHING AWARD...Mark Stehlik has been awarded the 1997 Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in Computer Science. As noted by the Award Committee, "Mark generates the kind of testimonials from that would make Mother Teresa blush....'never too busy to spend quality time with students', 'lively and humorous', 'challenging', and 'inspiring'" were among the qualities noted. But "this award recognizes not only Mark's dedication...but his skill as a lecturer, course organizer, and all-around educator. Many students describe Mark's determination to get every student to learn, no matter what effort is required. As the committee concluded, "Mark is no flash in the pan...Students who are long graduated still remember and speak fondly of Mark's affect on their lives. We are extremely proud to have a colleague such as Mark in SCS. The Simon Award is just one small sign of our appreciation for his contributions."

CS FACULTY CANDIDATE...John Kubiatowicz, MIT, offers "Three Challenges to Integrating Message Passing and Shared Memory" on Monday, March 31 at 10:30 am in Wean 4623. His faculty host is Randy Bryant.

FUNDING AWARDS...The National Science Foundation has granted a 3-year, $664,853 continuing award for Project LISTEN's work on "An Automated Reading Assistant that Listens."

MFPS 97...The 13th Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics is being held on campus March 23-26, and has been organized locally by Stephen Brooks, who has served as Co-chair along with Michael Mislove of Tulane University. The majority of the program is scheduled for the Adamson Wing in Baker Hall. Dana Scott will deliver an invited address at 11:00 am on Wednesday, March 26. Complete details can be found in the SCS Calendar of Events (www.cs.cmu.edu, check under events).

NEW DISTINCTIONS...
**Jack Mostow has been named Program Co-chair for the 1998 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
**"Translingual Information Retrieval: A Comparative Evaluation", by Jaime Carbonell, Yang Yiming, Robert Frederking, Ralf Brown, Yibing Geng and Danny Lee, their submission to the International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI) has been selected as one of the three distinguished papers.

SCS INVITED TALKS...Chuck Thorpe presented "Mobile Robots and Smart Cars" as invited speaker at the British IIEE on March 18.

IN THE NEWS..."Online education can get you there, from anywhere" notes a special report in the March 24 Education & Training Quarterly of the Pittsburgh Business Times. As noted, "last semester, only two of the 14 students taking the course "Managing Software Development" set foot on the CMU campus...the rest of those in the master's level offering were scattered across the country and beyond." Taught by Jim Tomayko, the course is part of the new offerings in the SCS Distance Learning Program he is pioneering. As emphasized, "Distance learning provides companies with the option of training their employees while minimizing disruption to work schedules..." Check out this article, available from scstoday@cs, for complete details on how it's done!

CALLING ALL ENTREPRENEURS..."Are you an entrepreneur with a scientific, engineering or computer background?" The Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship is offering "Starting a Technology-Based Venture" on Tuesday afternoons, from April 1 to May 13, at 3:30-5:00 pm, in Wean Hall. If interested in signing up, contact John DiRicco (diricco+@andrew.cmu.edu, x7758) or Jack Roseman (roseman+@andrew.cmu.edu, x3482).

WORDS FOR THOUGHT
FRIDAY, MARCH 28
LTI SEMINAR: John Lafferty, "Text Segmentation Using Exponential Models", 11:00 am, LTI Blue Room (Cyert 279).

MONDAY, MARCH 31
PROGRAMMING SYSTEMS SEMINAR: Natarajan Shankar, SRI International Computer Science Laboratory, "An Overview of Automated and Interactive Verification in PVS", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

WEEK OF MARCH 17, 1997

NEW LITTON FELLOW..."In recognition of his outstanding work in the theory of algorithms and his service to the department and university, Ravi Kannan has been named a Litton Fellow", announced Jim Morris. This fellowship, awarded by Litton Corporation, will provide an annual stipend to Ravi for pursuit of his research. "Ravi has made many significant contributions to geometrical algorithms, combinatorial optimization, randomized algorithms, approximation algorithms, and linear programming. His research program is to find efficient algorithms for fundamental, recurring mathematical problems." Along with Allan Frieze, Ravi discovered the first randomized, polynomial-time algorithm to compute the volume of a convex body in n-dimensional space, a distinction earning them the Fulkerson Prize. Congratulations!

SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURES...
**Jon Bentley, Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs, presents the 1997 Hank Wan Memorial Lecture on Thursday, March 20, examining "Algorithm Engineering: From Practice to Theory and Back." His talk begins at 4:00 pm in Wean 7500. Distinguished edibles at 3:30 pm.
**The SCS Distinguished Alumni Lecture with James Gosling, originally scheduled for April 3, has been moved to Thursday, April 17.

PROPOSALS...Akira Ushioda discusses "Word and Compound Clustering for Natural Language Processing" at his LTI thesis proposal on Wednesday, March 19 at 3:00 pm in Cyert 279 (CMT Blue Room). His committee includes: Jaime Carbonell (Chair), Robert Carpenter, John Lafferty, and Christopher Manning. Copies of his proposal are available at the LTI front desk or via /afs/cs/user/ref/public/ushioda-proposal.ps.

NEW HONORS...Raul Valdes-Perez has been elected to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Machine Learning.

CS FACULTY CANDIDATE....Luis Gravano, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, looks into, "Querying Multiple Sources Across the Internet" on Monday, March 24 at 10:30 am, Wean 4623. Please contact his faculty host, John Lafferty, to schedule an appointment.

SCS INVITED TALKS...
**Katia Sycara has been asked to give an invited talk at the 1997 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-97).

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, REV YOUR MOBOTS...The 1997 Mobot Preliminary Races are scheduled for Wednesday, April 2 at 11:30 am on the "slalom" race course in front of Wean. Contestants will showcase their MObile roBOT designs, in anticipation of the final competition on Friday, April 11. All members of the campus community are invited to attend the event and to cheer on your your favorite team.

SCS SHOW-BIZ...Stephanie Riso is co-founding a new theatre company called the Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre (PICT). The have gotten underway with their first production, a restoration comedy by Irish playwright George Farquhar, "The Constant Couple", which will run from May 29-June 15 at the Antonian Theatre, Carlow College. And if this isn't enough, Stephanie will be singing with the Pittsburgh Opera Chorus in the April production of Don Carlo, and then the Summer Season with the Pittsburgh CLO. We are assured Stephanie does eat and sleep in any remaining spare time :-)

STUDENTS ARE OUTTA HERE...next week, March 24-28, for spring break. Normal class schedules will resume Monday, March 31. While they are gone, our students will engage in nothing but rigorous study, extensive academic introspection, and massive career planning. Yea, sure :-) Have a great week!

CS FACULTY MEETING...Next meeting is April 3 (change from the original March 20 date).

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
TUESDAY, MARCH 18
**AI SEMINAR: Greg Cooper, University of Pittsburgh Medical School, "Causal Bayesian Networks", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.
**ROBERT LEPPER DISTINGUISHED LECTURE in CREATIVE INQUIRY: Robert Wilson, "Work: 1967 to the Present", 7:00 pm, McConomy Auditorium, University Center. Sponsored by the Department of Art and open to all.

THURSDAY, MARCH 20
**POP SEMINAR: Eugenio Moggi,"Typed Intermediate Languages for Shape-Analysis", 1:30 pm, Wean 5409.

FRIDAY, MARCH 21
**THEORY SEMINAR: Cliff Stein, Dartmouth College, "Designing Schedules that Minimize Average Completion Time", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.
**SPECIAL MODEL CHECKING TALK: Doron Peled, Bell Laboratories, "Partial Order Reduction methods for Model-Checking", 2:00 pm, Wean 4623.

MONDAY, MARCH 24
LTI SEMINAR: Eva Hajicova, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University, "Some Aspects of Discourse Structure", 12:00 pm, LTI Blue Room (note special time).

WEEK OF MARCH 10, 1997

NEW GRANTS...Mootaz Elnozahy, Mark Segal (Bellcore), Avi Ruben (AT&T) and R. Sekar (University of Iowa) have ben awarded a 3-year, $3.75M contract from DARPA to support their work on secure active networks.

NEW HONORS...
**Bonnie John has been appointed to a three-year on the National Research Council's Committee on Human Factors. The Committee, organized as a standing committee by the NRC in 1980 for the Army, Navy and AirForce, has evolved to include non-military human factors problems as well. The purposes of the committee are "to provide new perspectives on theoretical and methodological issues concerning the relationship of individuals and organizations to technology and the environment; to identify critical issues in the design, test, evaluation, and use of new human-centered technologies; and to advise sponsors on the research needed to expand the scientific and technical bases for designing technology to support the needs of its users." Congratulations!

**Katia Sycara has been selected as General Chair of the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents'98), to be held in Minneapolis, MN, in May 1998. The First Autonomous Agents conference, held in February in Los Angeles, was a "phenomenal success", attracting close to 500 attendees from academia, industry and government. Watch for details.

THE BEST...Yoichi Sata received the best paper award at the "International Conference on Shape Modelling and Applications '97", held in Aizu, Japan, March 1997, for the paper, "3D Shape and Reflectance Morphing". The paper was written in collaboration with Imari Sato, and Katsu Ikeuchi.

CS FACULTY CANDIDATE...Joan Feigenbaum, AT&T Laboratories, leans "Towards a Formal Understanding of Trust Management", in Wean 4623 at 1:30 pm.

SUMMER INSTITUTE FOR CS AP TEACHERS....SCS is hosting a Summer Institute for Computer Science Advanced Placement Teachers on July 6-11 and July 21-26 (2 sessions). Sponsored by CMU, the National Science Foundation and the Intel Foundation, the program will offer teachers an opportunity to learn critical new skills in using/teaching the C++ language (in preparation for the 1999 Computer Science Advanced Placement Exams), while exploring new tools to establish and maintain gender equity in classrooms and computer labs. Contact Allan Fisher or Terri Stankus for details.

MUG SHOTS....The last day to have your photograph (color, B&W, digital) taken by Mary Jo Dowling, for use in publications, catalogues and web pages, is Tuesday, March 11. She will be stationed in Smith Hall, 2nd Floor Seminar Area, from 10:00 am to 12:30 pm and 12:30 pm to 4:00 pm.

SCS INVITED TALKS...
**Mary Shaw delivered a Distinguished Lecture entitled "Architectures for Software Systems" at York University, Toronto, on March 7.

IN THE NEWS..."While You Wait, Why Not Make A List, Get Voice Mail, File A Nail?" notes an article in the March 11 Wall Street Journal. "Most poeple accept boot time - those lost moments when a computer cranks up - as a fact of life. But Raj Reddy sees it as $25 billion going down the tubes." Inspired reading. Copies are available from scstoday@cs.

ON THE NEWS...Bob Thibadeau discussed high definition television during a well-done interview on KDKA TV, aired on the March 10 evening news.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
TUESDAY, MARCH 11
**SPECIAL SEMINAR: Bob Simcoe, DEC, Network Products Group, "Fundamentals of Flow Control, Congestion Management, and Buffer Management", 4:30 pm, Wean 4601. Bob is also interested in talking with students regarding career opportunities.

MONDAY, MARCH 17
**PROGRAMMING SYSTEMS SEMINAR/TRAVELLING SALESMAN: Jim Horning, Intertrust Technologies Corporation, 3:30 pm, Wean 5409. Jim is also interested in talking with students about career opportunities while on campus.

WEEK OF MARCH 3, 1997

ACM MEETS EINSTEIN THIS WEEK...Raj Reddy demonstrates a new, "interactive synthetic video interview technology" involving a 3D, face-to-face Q&A session with Albert Einstein during his speech at ACM's 50th Anniversary Celebration, held March 3-5, in San Jose. Entitled "Teleportation, Time Travel and Immortality," Raj's talk will be broadcast simultaneously from the San Jose Convention Center at 9:15 am (Pacific time) on Wednesday, March 5, over the www at http://www.acm.org/acm97. The technology -- synthetic interviews -- was developed by Scott Stevens and Donald Marinelli (Drama), co-directors of the new Entertainment Technology Center in SCS, They have been demonstrating the technology for conference attendees at the March 1-4 exposition running in conjunction with the conference. Visitors interact with Einstein, reincarnated for cyberspace by actor Jerry Mayer, by speaking or typing into a computer. Scott notes that thru the use of a special 3D projector, "Einstein floats in front of viewers with no need for glasses, as is the case with standard virtual reality technologies." The technique integrates important, new technologies developed at CMU, including the Sphinx speech recognition system, the Lycos search engine, digital video information retrieval, and character simulation for intelligent multimedia. The CMU booth is a joint venture of CMU, Grand Illusion Studios (a university spinoff), 3D display experts Dimensional Media Associates (NY) and WRS Film and Video Laboratory (Pittsburgh).

PROPOSALS...Yirng-An Chen investigates "Hierarchical Verification of Arithmetic Circuits" at his CS thesis proposal on Friday, March 7 at 3:00 pm in Wean 5409. His committee includes: Randy Bryant (Chair), Edmund Clarke, Rob Rutenbar, and Xudong Zhao (Intel).

ACM PROGRAMMING CONTEST...This past weekend, CMU participated in the finals of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, held in conjunction with the ACM Conference in San Jose. The team of Carl Burch (Grad), Rob Earhart (Senior), and Dan Rosenberry (Sophomore) correctly solved 4 of the 8 problems, tying with 12 other schools for 16th place out of 50 competing teams. The winning team, from Harvey Mudd College, correctly solved 6 problems. "This is the third time in the past 4 years that CMU has been represented in the final round", notes team advisor Mark Stehlik. Congratulations to our team!

DATES TO WATCH FOR...
**Jon Bentley, Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs, delivers the 1997 Hank Wan Memorial Lecture on Thursday, March 20. He will look at "Algorithm Engineering: From Program to Proofs and Back."
**James Gosling, Sun Microsystems, discusses "Doing Innovative Software in the Real World" at the SCS Distinguished Alumni Lecture on Thursday, April 3. Watch for details!

CAREER SEMINAR...Bill Mitchell, Former Vice Chairman, Texas Instruments, offers advice on career development, Wednesday, March 6 at 7:00 pm, in the McConomy Auditorium, University Center. As a current member of TI's board of directors and chairman of the American Electronics Association, he will share 35 years of experience, outlining the skills and experiences high technology companies look for in college graduates, providing critical advice in obtaining a position in today's market, and advising students on how to advance in their chosen profession. All members of the community are invited.

IN THE NEWS...
**Katia Sycara and Anandeep Pannu were featured in the February 12 issue of Computerworld. "Sycara has developed a financial investment managment system that uses distributed agents...[The agents] collaborate to gather information from a variety of sources, monitor prices and critique and recommend stocks." When asked why should someone trust the program's recommendations?, Katia responded, "Why should you trust your broker?" :-) Interesting reading.
**"The February 23 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette asks, "Would Moon Colonists Have Ice to Put in Their Drinks?" This questions might be answered as Robotics explores the possibility of launch a "wheeled robot, land it on the moon and search for three months through craters shrouded by permanent darkness." The prospects for Lunar Ice mission, using a solar-powered "explorer" are remarkable. As noted by Red Whittaker, "Nobody's going to know if ice is there until someone goes there and looks for it." The complete article is available from scstoday@cs.

MORE NEWS..."Is There a Robot in the House?", appearing in The Magazine (United Kingdom) notes "computer technology may have enabled man to land on the moon, but where asks the author, is the robot of our dreams--the cheerful helpmate who'll mop the floor, wash up and dust for us?" Among those answering this question, is Reid Simmons. Xavier, it is noted, has "uncomplainingly taken orders from thousands of people and worked tirelessly to fulfil the tasks required of him", this despite his "extremely bad knock-knock jokes" :-) Lunar rovers, delivery robots, manipulator arms, and more make this fine reading. Copies are available from scstoday@cs.

CARPET UPDATE...Wean Hall has taken on a new character. Be sure to check out the new carpeting! The most recent improvements are on the 4th floor.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT:
TUESDAY, MARCH 4
**AI SEMINAR: Paul Cohen, University of Massachusetts, "Acquiring Conceptual Structure Through Activity", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 5
**LTI SEMINAR: Isabelle Moulinier, University of Paris VI, "Text Categorization: An Experimental Study on Feature Selection and Learning Biases", 3:00 pm, LTI Blue Room (Cyert 279).

FRIDAY, MARCH 7
**LTI SEMINAR: Susann LuperFoy, MITRE, "Discourse Processing for Spoken Dialogue Systems", 11:00 am, LTI Blue Room (CyH 279).
**CS/PSC SEMINAR: Thomas Sterling, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, High Performance Computing Systems Group, "Petaflops", 4:00 pm, Mellon Institute, 3rd Floor Conference Room.
**ROBOTICS SEMINAR: Jack Mostow, "A Reading Tutor that Listens", 3:15 pm, Adamson Wing, Baker Hall.

MONDAY, MARCH 10 **CULTURAL EXCHANGE SEMINAR: Guy Blelloch, "Pebbles, Programming and Parallelism", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

WEEK OF FEBRUARY 17, 1997

KANADE ELECTED TO NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING...Congratulations to Takeo Kanade, who has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the fields of computer vision and robotics. Election to the Academy is among the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer, and honors those who have demonstrated "unusual accomplishment in the pioneering of new and develping fields of technology, and who have made "important contributions to engineering theory and practice." Please join us in applauding Takeo on this newest honor and in thanking our lucky stars that he is part of our community...

PRESIDENTIAL HONORS...Raj Reddy has been named to the President's Committee on High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet. This 20-member advisory committee will "provide guidance and advice on all areas of high performance computing, communications and information technologies", bringing together a range of expertise and interests from the business and university communities. The committee will "provide guidance to the administration's efforts to accelerate development and adoption of information technologies that will be vital for American prosperity in the 21st century."

SCS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES...Bud Mishra, Professor of Computer Science, at Courant Institute, New York University, will discuss "Alchemy of Genomics: Optical Mapping" at the Gaschnig/Oakley Memorial Lecture on Thursday, February 20 at 4:00 pm in Wean 7500. Refreshments will begin at 3:30 pm.

PROPOSALS...Daniel Tunkelang finds "A New Approach for the Dial-A-Ride Problem" at his ACO thesis proposal on Monday, February 24 at 1:00 pm in Wean 4615A. His committee includes: Daniel Sleator (Chair), Avrim Blum, Bruce Maggs, and Michael Trick (GSIA).

CAN COMPUTERS COMMUNICATE LIKE PEOPLE DO?...Jaime Carbonell thinks so and so do some others. A set of 15 awards in a new $10 million program led by the National Science Foundation -- Speech, Text, Image and Multimedia Advanced Technology Effort -- known as STIMULATE, will fund "university researchers investigating human communication and seeking to improve our interaction with computers." "This program goes well beyond the era of graphical interfaces with our computers," said Gary Strong, NSF program manager. "Perhaps some day we can interact with our computers like we interact with each other, even having `intelligent' computer assistants." Among the supported projects is Jaime's work on Generalized Example-based Machine Translation. "With example-based machine translation, computers search pre-translated texts for the closest match to each new sentence being translated." The project's goal "is to develop generalizations that will increase the accuracy of translations and reduce the size of the necessary data base."

"CLIPS"...a publication of University Relations, highlighting CMU's "Year In Review", is now available. The newspaper-style document is a compendium of local and national stories/press clips about Carnegie Mellon appearing in 1996. If you would like a copy, please contact Anne Watzman at aw16@andrew.cmu.edu.

SCSi NOMINATIONS...Nominations for the SCS Staff Recognition Award (the "SCSi" - pronounced "scuzzy") are due March 1. If you would like to nominate someone (support or technical) who performs "above and beyond the call of duty, and would like to see that person receive not only recognition by the entire school, but a nice chunk of ca$h as well", this is the time to send in your nomination packet. Eligibility criteria and guidelines are available at: www.cs.cmu.edu/scs/staffaward. All members of the SCS community -- staff, faculty, grad/undergrad students -- may submit a nomination packet. Please address all packets to the "SCS Staff Recognition Award" and deposit them in the mailrooms in either Wean, Smith or Cyert Halls (LTI). The award ceremony will take place Tuesday, May 6 at 3:00 pm, Connan Room, University Center.

SCS HOSTED CONFERENCES...Eric Nyberg notes that the LTI/CMU was selected as the site for the Second International Workshop on Controlled Language Applications. Details can be found on the preliminary web site: www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/CLAW98/

FACILITIES UPDATES:
**As you may have noticed, many of the HP 300XL color printers have been upgraded to HP 1600CM machines. There are slight differences between the models, which SCS Facilities has documented on the "printing" page in their web site (www.cs.cmu.edu...click on SCS Facilities).
**Remember! Please notify help@cs if you would like your Macintosh to be backed up. Backups on these machines are not automatic, as it is not always possible to know when machines appear in the environment. If you are unsure about your backup status, let help@cs help you :-)
**Facilities has been experimenting with PC backup techniques. They would like to increase the number of machines on their test systems and need a a few volunteers to participate in this program. Facilities would also like to gauge your expections with regard to PC backups in general, i.e., what do people expect of PC backups, knowing the number of machines in your labs, and what volume of data per machine? Please send your comments to havey@cs.
ON THE NEWS...The local NBC affiliate, Channel 11, posed the question as to whether people can develop addictions to the internet and can it affect behavior (I think we know the answer on this one :-) on the February 18 evening and February 19 morning news. Among the campus interviewees was Jim Morris! Fun!

WORDS FOR THOUGHT:
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21
**ROBOTICS SEMINAR: Michael Erdmann, "Frictional Mechanics of Nonprehensible Manipulation", 3:15-5:00 pm, Adamson Wing.
**THEORY SEMINAR: Andrew Goldberg, NEC Research Institute, "Beautiful and Fast: New Minimum Cut Algorithms", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 24
**CULTURAL EXCHANGE: Robert Harper, "The Practive of Type Theory: Compiling Modules in the TIL/ML Compiler", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

WEEK OF FEBRUARY 10, 1997

NEW! INSTITUTE OF COMPLEX ENGINEERED SYSTEMS...Pradeep Khosla has been appointed the first director of the new Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES) in CIT, an initiatve that will build upon the infrastructure created by the EDRC. "Our goal...is to leverage and build upon the college of engineering's strengths in various technologies and its strong interdisciplinary research culture and position it for the 21st century", notes CIT Dean John Anderson, Khosla's broad technical background, leadership and vision for interdisciplinary research will allow the institute to grow in several areas of strategic interest...". The center's initial focus will be on embedded and reliable information systems, design and manufacturing, and tissue engineering, the latter an effort to be pursued in collaboration with Robotics. Dan Siewiorek, current director of the EDRC, will also serve as Associate Director of ICES.

UPDATED FACES...We are pleased to announce that AnnMarie Zanger is joining the CS Business Office as Senior Administrative Associate, Proposals and Business Administration. AnnMarie comes to us from SCS's Andrew Consortium where she served as Assistant Director and looks forward to beginning her new duties in mid-February.

NEW FACES...Charlie Goldstein has joined the CS support staff and will be assisting Jeannette Wing, David Garlan, David Touretzky and Joe Bates.

SPRING DISTINGUISHED LECTURE SERIES...The spring series begins on Thursday, February 20 with The Gaschnig/Oakley Memorial Lecture, featuring Bud Mishra, Professor of Computer Science at Courant Institute, New York University, who will examine "Alchemy of Genomics: Optical Mapping." The talk begins at 4:00 pm in Wean 7500 (preceded by refreshments at 3:45 pm).

THE ZEN OF MOBOTICS...Illah Nourbakhsh, Assistant Professor of Robotics, will reflect on "The Zen of Mobotics" at the Mobot Open House on Wednesday, February 12 at 6:00 pm in Wean 5409. The 3rd Annual Mobot Slalom Race is "rapidly" approaching (Preliminaries: April 2; Finals: April 11) and the Open House is a great opportunity to learn more about the race, prizes, rules, resources and efforts... behind this project. Members of the Mobot Committee will be available for questions. The race, sponsored by SCS, RedZone Robotics, and Schlumberger, is open to all members of the CMU (including alumni). Refreshments will be served.

SCS INVITED TALKS...
**ED CLARKE conducted a "Tutorial on Model Checking" at the Asian Pacific Design Automation Conference in Chiba, Japan on January 28.
**BRUCE MAGGS just returned from a trip where he delivered the opening keynote lecture on "Multibutterflies: The Most Powerful Multistage Interconnection Networks Known" at the Australasian Theory Symposium on February 3 in Sidney, Australia. As a "warm-up", he presented the same talk at the India Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, on January 30.

HOT OFF THE PRESS...The MAPS Lab is represented by two chapters in "Digital Photogrammetry: An Addendum to the Manual of Photogrammetry," just published by the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. The chapter on "Automatic Cartographic Feature Extraction Using Photogrammetric Principles" was written by Dave McKeown, Chris McGlone, Steven Cochran, Yuan Hsieh, Michel Roux, and Jeff Shufelt, while "Sensor Modeling in Image Registration" was written by Chris McGlone.

IN THE TINY NEWS..."Small, Smart and Adaptable", an article appearing in the January 1997 New Scientist, reports that "staffed by squads of fist-sized robots, tomorrow's high-precision assembly lines will be put together at a few hours' notice on a desk-sized factory floor. Featured is Ralph Hollis and his investigations into fist-sized robots. Great reading.

IN THE MOBILE NEWS..."Knock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots", where "applications range from exploring Mars to handling muffins" is a featured article in Graduating Engineering, December 1996. Of special note are comments by Reid Simmons (including a photo of Xavier) and Ralph Hollis. Copies of both articles are available from scstoday@cs.

IN THE DANISH NEWS..."Selvstyrende helikopter skal pa farlig mission", notes (the editor thinks!) our work on autonomous helicopters at CMU, and was featured in Illustreret Videnskab, a Danish scientific publication. Copies are available, but only if you request them in danish :-)

NEW LINGUISTICS READING GROUP...if interested, contact chogan@cs.cmu.edu.

NEW "CURRENT TOPICS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION" DISCUSSION GROUP...if interested, contact cdamon@cs.cmu.edu.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT:
WEDNESDAY, 12 FEBRUARY
**HCI SEMINAR: Richard Scheines, CMU Department of Philosophy, "Evaluating Computer Environments for Teaching Proof Construction", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13
**JOINT HISTORY/COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT SEMINAR: Michael Mahoney, Princeton University, "Software and the Assembly Line", 3:30 pm, Wean 4623.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14
**LTI SEMINAR: Rich Thomason, University of Pittsburgh, "A Framework for Interrelating Interpretation and Generation", 11:00 am, LTI Blue Room (Cyert 279).
**THEORY SEMINAR: Michael Saks, "Building Optimcal Dispersers: How to Run Randomized Algorithms When Your Random Source is Faulty", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.
**SPECIAL HEART SEMINAR: Dr. Cupid S. Arrow, "Valentine's Day and You: Hope it is Happy", all day.

WEEK OF FEBRUARY 3, 1997

NEW FACES...
**SETH COPEN GOLDSTEIN has joined CS as an Assistant Professor, coming by way of the Univ. of California at Berkeley, where he worked on issues relating to high performance parallel systems. His thesis focused on "Lazy Threads: Compiler and Runtime Structures for Fine-Grained Parallel Programming." Seth's interests include reconfigurable computing and fine-grained parallelism. He is joined by his wife, Deborah, and a 21-month old daughter, Ella and notes that one of his extracurricular goals is to start a wine tasting club at CMU. He welcomes visitors to his Wean 7122 office.
**DEBBIE CLEMENT has joined the LIT as Administrative Coordinator. She is now providing permanent support staff to Alex Waibel and LTI. Her main responsibility will be to assist the group with speech translation-related project activities that are under Alex's supervision in CS, HCII & LTI. Debbie can be found in Wean 4611.

SCS/DEC COLLABORATE TO DEVELOP HPID...Researchers at DEC and SCS are collaborating in the creation of a new, high-performance infrastructure for desktop computing and communication (HPID) that includes advanced video capabilities. The SCS environment, involving approximately 750 computer users, will serve as one of the largest industry-standard ATM testbeds for the latest computing concepts, and will foster ideas for next-generation information and communication services. Based on DEC's high-performance ATM networking technology and Alpha workstations, the system will involve approx. 500 state-of-the-art computers and servers interconnected through a very high bandwidth, low-latency network. As noted by Howard Wactlar, "This network will be 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than what we're delivering to the desktop in SCS today. It will help us achieve the dream of gigabit bandwidth to the desktop...and will enable ubiquitous man-machine communication throughout our environment." Wactlar also notes, "we'll look at applications relating to ubiquitous teleconferencing on demand, electronic hallways and highly interactive collaboration involving groups of people and visual information resources where gestures and images convey more than words can ever say." Dr. Samuel Fuller, Vive President and Chief Scientist at DEC, adds that "With the exponential technological advancements we see for the next several years in both networks and desktop computing, it is certain that the environment we are creating with Carnegie Mellon will be available to the computing world at large by the year 2000." This joint project, as well-noted by Bill Scherlis, "will let us live in the future."

MOBOT OPEN HOUSE...The 3rd Annual Mobot Slalom Race is coming up in April: Preliminaries on April 2, 11:30 am, and Finals on April 11, 11:30 am. Visit the Mobot Open House on Wednesday, February 12 at 6:00 pm, Wean 5409, to learn more about the race, rules, resources prizes, and efforts behind this project. Illah Nourbakhsh, Assistant Professor of Robotics, will discuss "The Zen of Mobotics" and members of the Mobot Committee will be available for a Q&A session. Don't forget, the race is open to all undergraduates and members of the CMU community (including alumni). See /www.cs.cmu.edu/~mobot/ for details.

SCS INVITED TALKS...Jeannette Wing delivered a distinguished lecture at the University of Pennsylvania entitled, "Formal Methods: Past, Present, and Future" on January 28, 1997.

FEDIX ALERT...The Federal Information Exchange has announced a new, free, email service targeting research education funding opportunities within your area(s) of interest. Faculty can register to receive auto-e-mail listings of sponsored research opportunities by agency or topic. Among the agencies sponsoring FEDIX are DOE, NASA, ONR, DOT, NIH, EPA, the Air Force, DISA, and others. To register for the service, check out FEDIX at http://www.fie.com/ and select the keywords that identify your area(s) of interest. You will start receiving updates immediately.

WEARABLE COMPUTERS COME OF AGE...Daniel Siewiorek is serving as General Chair of the "First International Symposium on Wearable Computers" (ISWC), to be held October 13-14,1997, in Cambridge, MA. The conference, held in cooperation (pending) with IEEE and ACM, is designed to bring together researchers, product vendors, research sponsors, and others to share information and advances in wearable computing. Among the topics to be explored applications (affective computing, augmented reality, computer-supported collaborative work, computer supported cooperative living, ubiquitous computing, personal imaging, consumer/industrial/medical/military applications), ergonomics, hardware (head-mounted display technologies, batteries, power management, industrial design techniquies, manufacturing/packaging issues), human interface issues, networks/wireless networks, and much more. Dan notes that initial submissions are due April 4.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5
**HCI SEMINAR: Scott Hudson, Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center, College of Computing, Georgia Tech, "An Extensible UI Toolkit Architecture for Getting From the Desktop to the Next Top", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7
**POP SEMINAR: Mark Hayden, Computer Science Department, Cornell University, "Group Communication with Functional Languages", 3:30 pm, Wean 8220.
**THEORY SEMINAR: Gabor Tardos, Institute for Advanced Studies, "Is Linear Hashing Good?", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.

WEEK OF JANUARY 27, 1997

IN HONOR...Members of the SCS community are welcomed to a reception honoring Willam "Red" Whittaker on his appointment as Fredkin Research Professor on Tuesday, January 28 from 4:30-6:30 pm in the Connan Room, University Center (note new time). Recalling Takeo's thoughts, "Red has made extraordinary contributions in taking robots off factory floors and making them work in natural and hazardous environments. He is a top robotics researcher with a bold and deep vision into the future of robotics, and has the energy to make his vision happen." We all agree! Please join us in recognizing the many accomplishments of our friend.

IN DEFENSE... **RAHUL SUKTHANKAR drove head-on into "Situation Awareness for Tactical Driving", during his robotics defense on Monday, January 27. His committee included: Chuck Thorpe (Co-Chair), Dean Pomerleau (Co-Chair), Haris Koutsopoulos (CE/CMU), and Joe Kearney (University of Iowa).
**NINA ZUMEl tackles "A Nonprehensile Method for Reliable Parts Orienting" at her robotics oral on Friday, January 31 at 1:30 pm in Wean 4623. Her committee features: Michael Erdmann (Chair), Matt Mason, David Baraff, and Randy Brost (Eastman Kodak).

PROPOSALS... **PETER STONE uncovers "Layered Learning in Multiagent Systems" at his CS thesis proposal on Wednesday, January 29 at 3:00 pm, Wean 5409. His committee includes Manuela Veloso (Chair), Andrew Moore, Herbert Simon, and Victor Lesser (University of Massachusetts).
**STEPHEN WEEKS offers a "Compilation of Higher-Order Languages via Control-Flow Analysis" at his CS proposal on Wednesday, January 29 at 1:30 pm in Wean 4615A. His committee includes: Stephen Brookes (Chair), Robert Harper, Peter Lee, and Suresh Jagannathan (NEC Research Institute).
**PREM JANARDHAN explores "Space-Time Representations for Characterizing Non-rigid Deformations with Applications to Developmental Biology" at his CS proposal on Friday, January 31 at 1:30 pm in Wean 5409. His committee consists of: Katsushi Ikeuchi (Co-Chair), Martial Hebert (Co-Chair), Dean Pomerleau, Jonathan Minden (Biology), and Fred Lanni (STC).

MOBILE COMPUTING AND NETWORKING...David Johnson will serve as Program Chair of the Third ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. As noted in the offical brochure, "This conference, the third of an annual series, serves as the premier international forum addressing networks, systems, algorithms, and applications that support the symbiosis of mobile computers and wireless networks." The conference, scheduled for September 26-30, 1997 in Budapest, Hungary, is detailed at http://www.monarch.cs.cmu.edu/~mobicom97/ . Dave notes that paper submissions are due April 21.

SCS INVITED TALKS...Dan Olsen was an invited speaker at the University of Minnesota's Department of Computer Science Colloquium, Institute of Technology, on November 25, where he reviewed "User Interface Software Architectures: To Infinity and Beyond."

SLEEPING BAGGERS...arrive on campus February 2-3, and will spend two days on campus (and one night in a sleeping bag), meeting with undergraduates, visiting classes, and attending information sessions related to curriculum, admissions and funding at CMU. These prospective undergrads are in the final stages of deciding which university to attend. Future programs are scheduled in April.

MUSICAL INTERLUDES...Richard Stern plays harpsichord continuo at the Monday, January 27 performance of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" by Roy Sonne and the Ionian Chamber players, accompanying 8 members of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. The other scheduled work, Schumann's "Quintet for Piano and Strings", Op. 44, features Patricia Prattis Jennings, also of the PSO. The free concert begins at 8:00 pm in Rodef Shalom's Levy Hall. A reception follows.

NEXT CS FACULTY MEETING...Thursday, January 30 at 4:00 pm, Wean 4623.

COOL ROBOT OF THE WEEK...Pradeep Khosla and Chris Paredis' Reconfigurable Modular Manipulator System web site was selected as "The Cool Robot Of The Week" for January 13-20, 1997 (by NASA Telerobotics Div.). The honor is "bestowed upon those robotics-related web sites which portray highly innovative solutions to robotics problems, describe unique approaches to implementing robotics system, or present exciting interfaces for the dissemination of robotics-related information or promoting roboticstechnology." Pradeep and Chris "earn no money, support, or tangible benefits" for all their work on the site, but the recognition is real and their efforts are appreciated. Check out the "Cool" site at http://ranier.hq.nasa.gov/telerobotics_page/coolrobots.html.

IN THE NEWS..."Robots trained to think like rats -- honest", featured the work of Dave Touretzky and his team, who are "trying to analyze rodent behaviro and improve robot programming by training a robot, like Amelia... to act like a rat." The article appeared in the December 23 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT:
TUESDAY, JANUARY 28
**SPECIAL SEMINAR: Dan Duchamp, AT&T Labs-Research, "A Dynamic Data Filtering Architecture for Mobility Acorss Heterogeneous Networks", 12:00 pm, Wean 5409.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29
**LTI SEMINAR SERIES: Barbara di Eugenio, University of Pittsburgh, "Discourse and Contextual Knowledge in Natural Language Processing", 3:30 pm, LTI Blue Room (Cyert 279).

FRIDAY, JANUARY 31
**THEORY SEMINAR: Armin Haken, DIMACS, "Can the Known Obstacles to Non-Monotone Circuit Lower Bounds be Overcome?, 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.
**ROBOTICS SEMINAR: Randy Brost, Eastman Kodak, "Automatic Design of 3-D Fixtures and Assembly Pallets", 3:30 pm, Adamson Wing.

WEEK OF JANUARY 20, 1997

ANGEL JORDAN RECEIVES JOSEPH F. KEITHLEY PROFESSORSHIP...Congratulations to Angel Jordan, University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robotics, on his appointment to the Joseph F. Keithley Professorship. As noted by President Mehrabian, "as a distinguished citizen of the university, outstanding research and educator, [he] is a most deserving recipient of this honor." In addition to his many research accomplishments, Angel has also worn the hats of Provost, Dean of CIT, Whitaker Professor of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering during his career at CMU. His current research interests include advanced video systems, robotics, the management of technology and the structure of computer industries, interests he combines with teaching courses in both CIT and GSIA. The professorship has been endowed by Joseph Keithly, founder of Keithley Instruments of Cleveland, an ardent supporter of engineering education. Our best wishes!

IN DEFENSE...
**DIRK LANGER introduces "An Integrated MMW Radar System for Outdoor Navigation" at his robotics thesis oral on Friday, January 24, 9:30 am in Wean 4623. His committee includes: Martial Hebert (Co-Chair), Chuck Thorpe (Co-Chair), Richard Stern (ECE) and Roman Kuc (Yale University).
**YOICHI SATO looks at "3D Reflectance ANalysis from Color Image Sequence for Computer Graphics" at this robotics defense on Friday, January 24 at 2:00 pm in Wean 4623. The committee includes: Katsushi Ikeuchi (Chair), Martial Hebert, Steve Shafer (Microsoft), and Shree Nayar (Columbia).

ANOTHER VICTORY!...You'll get a kick out of this! Last week, a CMU-based indoor soccer team won the Monroeville Cup. "The level of competition is pretty high...as almost all teams from the Greater Pittsburgh area participate", noted Kostya Domashnev, PhD student in GSIA/RI and proud member of the team. The CMU team was lead by CS PhD students Peter Stone and Astro Teller. Another participant from a SCS-related subdivision was John Stivoric, PhD student at EDRC.

ALUMNI UPDATE...
**Joseph M. Newcomer (CS'75) will be autographing copies of his new book, "Win32 Programming" at Border's Books on Tuesday, 21 January (North Hills/ Northway Mall), 7:30 pm; Wednesday, 22 January (Monroeville), 7:30 pm; and Thursday, 23 January (South Hills/Route 19 near South Hills Village), 7:30 pm. Each session includes a discussion of the "new Win32 interface, the Windows phenomenon, and what it means to be a Windows programmer." "Win32 Programming" is based on the original Win16 book by Brent Rector, but "goes well beyond any other book in the area." As noted, "It provides in-depth coverage of the GUI programming, dynamic link libraries, memory allocation, and synchronization. The 1500-page book from Addison Wesley Developer's Press includes a CD-ROM with over 150,000 lines of C and C++ source code...Stop in and introduce yourself.
**JON C. STRAUSS (Systems and Communication Sciences, 65) has been elected President of Harvey Mudd College.

IN THE NEWS...
**"Engineers in the Operating Room", a feature in the Jan 19 Tribune-Review, examines how the Center for Medical Robotics and Computer-Assisted Surgery, a joint research effort between Robotics and Shadyside Hospital, "is trying to revolutionize the operating room by marrying the scalpel to the computer." As noted by David Simon, "one of the strengths of this lab is we're bringing engineers and physicians in close contact with each other to the point where we've learned each other's vocabularies." Headed jointly by Takeo Kanade and Anthony DiGioia at Shadyside Hospital (who also heads their Center for Orthopedic Research), the center's central project is a $2.5 million effort called HipNav. Read on yourself...
**"Researchers polishing up X-ray specs", highlights the three-dimensional computer simulations and virtual reality techniques", that will enable neurosurgeons to "look at a patient's head on the operating table and see a tumor inside." This image overlay system is also briefly described in the same Tribune-Review. Copies available from scstoday@cs.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22
**HCI SEMINAR: Chris Thyberg (CSW), Daniel Rehak (CEE), and Phil Miller, "CMU On-Line", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 24
**THEORY SEMINAR: Joe Mitchell, SUNY, Stony Brook, "A Simple Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme for Geometric k-MSE, TSP, and Related Problems", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.
**MECHNICAL ENGINEERING/ROBOTICS SEMINAR: Joel Burdick, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Caltech, "The Mechanics and Control of Biomimetic Location", 2:45 pm (refreshments), 3:15 (talk), Scaife 322/Scaife 125.
**POP SEMINAR: Dave MacQueen, "A New IMplementation of Higher-Order Modules", 3:30 pm, Wean 8220.