RED RECEIVES SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD..."Red's Rovers Take the Field: A Crusader in sometime hostile territory, Red Whittaker drives his robots to new lands and wins Design News' Special Achievement Award." As noted in the seven page article featured in the March 2 issue of Design News, "Whittaker, founder and director of the FRC, was father to Nomad and dozens of other robots over the past decade. In fact, he practically invented field robotics. He coined the term." As Red has demonstrated repeatedly over the years, "[he] has an agenda: He wants to create robots that are agents of mankind to represent civilization in the most hotile places. In pursuit of this agenda, he travels to the far corners of the Earth to field-test his designs. He is prepared to go much farther, or at least send an automated ambassador." Fine words of praise in honor of our most esteemed colleague and friend. You won't want to miss a word of this well-deserved article. Congratulations Red on another well-scaled professional milestone! More details can be found at our SCS news site.

ASBESTOS REMOVAL ROBOT TAKES THE PRIZE...BOA (a.k.a. "Big on Asbestos"), an asbestos insulation eating robot conceived by Hagen Schempf and developed by a team including -- Clint Apland, John Bares, Scott Boehmke, Todd Camill, Brian Chemel, William Crowley, Nathan Everett, Edward Mutschler, Anthony Oscar Nolla, Colin Piepgra, Eric Rollins, William Schnorr -- took Second Place in the National Design Competition sponsored by "Design News." Selected from a field of over 100 entries, BOA was cited "as one of the most innovative new product designs developed in the US in 1997." The team's work is featured in in the magazine's March issue in "Mobile pipe crawler removes asbestos safely, economically" A robot designed to inch its way along the outside of pipes makes mincemeat out of hazardous waste and works for no pay", and will be displayed at the March 16-19 National Design Engineering Show and Conference in Chicago. The $2M project, sponsored by the DoE's Federal Energy Technology Center, is part of a robotics technology development program aimed at facilitating the decontamination and clean-up of the DoE's nuclear weapons sites and other polluted areas. As noted by Hagen, "up to now, asbestos abatement has been done by humans. It's slow, costly and dangerous...DoE was looking for a better, safer, faster and cheaper way to do it." Nice job!

NEW AWARDS...Manuela Veloso has received a DARPA award in the Agents-Based Systems initiative to research "Teams of Autonomous, Cooperative, and Adaptive Agents." The goal of the project is to enable teams of multiple agents to interleave deliberative and reactive planning during execution, and to be able to learn while acting in adversarial environments.

DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI LECTURE...Andreas Bechtolsheim, Vice President of Engineering, Gigabit Switching Group, Cisco Systems, examines "High Performance Networking" at the SCS/ECE Distinguished Alumni Lecture (Gaschnig/Oakley Memorial Lecture) on Thursday, March 12 at 4:00 pm in Wean 7500. Distinguished donuts at 3:45 pm outside the lecture hall.

PROPOSALS...
**MURALIE KRISHNA developed "An Approach to Optimal Motion Generation for Hydraulic Robots" at his Robotics thesis proposal on Monday, March 9. His committee included: John Bares (Chair), Andrew Moore, Rob Rutenbar, and Steve Lunzman (Caterpillar, Inc.).
**ROBERT O'CALLAHAN offers "Scalable Program Analysis and Understanding Based on Type Inference" at his CS thesis proposal on Monday, March 16 at 2:00 pm, Wean 4623. His committee includes: Daniel Jackson (CMU/MIT) (Co-Chair), Jeannette Wing (Co-Chair), Frank Pfenning, and Craig Chamgers (University of Washington).

IN DEFENSE...Michael Nechyba applies "Learning and Validation of Human Control Strategies" at his robotics thesis oral on Friday, March 13 at 8:30 am in FRC 100. His wide-eyed committee includes: Yangsheng Xu (Chair), Andrew Moore, Dean Pomerleau, and Shumeet Baluja (Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center).

SCS INVITED TALKS...Talk about mobile! Satya recently delivered 2 distinguished lectures, including "Mobile Computing: Challenges and Opportunities" on February 27 at UCLA and "Mobile Information Access" on March 2 at the University of Virginia.

NEW ON THE SCS WEB SITE...SCS Administrative Services can now be accessed via the SCS Insiders Page at www.cs.cmu.edu/scs/insiders.html or directly at www.cs.cmu.edu/~admin. And what awaits you? A plethoria of information on Who to See For What, Personnel Services, Policies and Procedures and Building Maintenance is now only a click away. Access is limited to individuals with .cmu.edu computer accounts. Suggestions and comments are welcomed by the webmaster@cs.

CS/CNBC FACULTY CANDIDATE...Michael Lewicki, The Salk Institute, addresses "Learning Efficient Representations of Natural Patterns" at his presentation on Thursday, March 12 at 10:00 am in Wean 4623. Dave Touretzky is faculty host.

MOBOT CLINIC...On Wednesday, April 1, a "Mobot Clinic" is scheduled for all Race participants from 12:00 noon to 2:00 pm on the race course in front of Wean Hall. This 2-hour clinic will enable contestants to run the course under actual race conditions, while having members of the Mobot Steering Committee on hand for technical, logistical and development advice. Come by and test out your vehicle. If you have been procrastinating, use this clinic as the kick that gets your vehicle started :-) Remember, the Mobot Finals are scheduled for Friday, April 17 during Spring Carnival Weekend. All members of the CMU community are welcome to participate or enter a vehicle. Watch for details on the scs bboards, send mail to mobot@cs, or visit www.cs.cmu.edu/~mobot.

SCS STARS OF THE FUTURE...Gilbert & Sullivan's "Patience", performed by the Pittsburgh Savoyards, is "a hilarious musical comedy about true love, selfless sacrifice, and bad poetry." This newest production features our very own Jack "Project Listen" Mostow as the Duke, Mike Duggan and David Svoboda as Dragoon Guards, and Jack's true-life daughter Melody as a (small) Rapturous Maiden. For details, see http://www.pitt.edu/~sawst8/savoy/index.html or call 734-8476. Performances are scheduled for March 13-15, 20-22, or 27-29 (8:00 pm Friday, 8:00 pm Saturday or 2:00 pm Sunday). You can also contact the cast members for discounted tickets good at any show.

TAX FORMS!...Many of you are waiting to receive your 1042-S tax form (non-resident/alien) from the university. They will be mailed to your home address (i.e., the one CMU currently has on file in the payroll system) by March 13. You should receive them in the mail the week of March 16.

OF SPECIAL NOTE...Kudos to the grad students in CMU's reconfigurable computing group. Srihari Cadambi (ECE) presented details of their efforts during a recent presentation at FPGA98, where "...already convinced of the value of adaptively reconfigurable FPGAs for computing, university researchers are now beginning to focus effort on the best way to reconfigure the devices." Seth Goldstein notes the work is cited in EE Times (on the web at http://techweb.cmp.com/eet/news/98/995news/attention.html).

WATCH THE NEWS...or at least catch "Robots Rising" on Sunday evening, March 15 at 9:00 pm on the Discovery Channel. Work of the Robotics Institute will be specifically noted!

IN THE INTERGALACTIC NEWS...Ian Davis, recent robograd ('96) now at Activision, is featured in "Intergalactica: CMU robotics graduate takes his education to a new level" appearing in the March 8 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. As a senior programmer for Activision, "he develops space-battle strategy games like `Dark Reign', whose slogan is `New Armies, New Campaigns, New Devastation: The Reign Continues.'" The transition from robotics student engaged in the development of navigational and safety systems for a military helicopter to game developer was, per Ian, a logical and expansive move. The article offers a quick summary of Ian's recent talk at the Robotics Seminar and helps you assess his hows and whys. Read for yourself. Copies are available from scstoday@cs.

IN THE CORPORATE NEWS..."You can always look it up: Islip Media is leader in digital video and digital audio indexing" was featured in the "Company in the Spotlight" section of the March 8 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Founded in 1996, Islip is licensing the technology from the Informedia Project, which enables the creation of a "digital library of images and sounds...[where] users can search videotape or audiotape in much the same way they search text now; they can also use it to catalog and index old tapes." The article highlights the company's goals and directions. Copies are available from scstoday@cs.

GET READY FOR A BREAK...Spring Recess is scheduled for March 23-27. The campus will be abandoned as students scour the world in search of academic diversions :-) Normal class schedules resume Monday, March 30.

WORDS FOR THOUGHT...
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11
**POP TALK: Lal George, Bell Laboratories, "M L R I S C: A Framework for Retargetable and Optimizing Compiler Back Ends", 3:30 pm, Wean 8220.
**PITTSBURGH JAVA USERS GROUP: 6:30 pm, Wean 5409.

THURSDAY, APRIL 12
**SPECIAL SEMINAR: Michael Thielscher, Dresden University of Technology, "The International Masters Programme in Computational Logic", 3:00 pm, Wean 4623.

FRIDAY, MARCH 13
**ROBOTICS SEMINAR: Daniela Rus, Department of Computer Science, Dartmouth College (now on sabbatical at CMU), "Self-reconfiguring Robotics", 3:30 pm, Adamson Wing (refreshments at 3:15 pm).
**THEORY SEMINAR: Kamal Jain, Georgia Institute of Technology, "A Factor 2 Approximation Algorithm for the Generalized Steiner Network Problem", 3:30 pm, Wean 7220.

MONDAY, MARCH 16
**SPECIAL SEMINAR: Mike Reiter, AT&T Research Labs, "Toward Survivable Systems", 10:00 am, Wean 4623.
**PROGRAMMING SYSTEMS SEMINAR; Doron Peled, Bell Laboratories, "Automatic Verification of Message Sequence Charts", 3:30 pm, Wean 5409.

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