Aaron Clauset (a recent CS Dept. alumnus now at the Santa Fe Institute), Prof. Cris Moore, and Mark Newman (Univ. of Michigan) published "Hierarchical structure and the prediction of missing links in networks" (subscription required) in Nature. The paper in the prestigious journal offers a general technique to divide network vertices into groups and sub-groups, and argues that "...hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena." The Nature article was also featured on Slashdot.
Related links: Aaron Clauset; Cris Moore; Nature article; Slashdot Article
Senior Lecturer for the CS Dept. Andree Jacobson won the UNM 2007-2008 Outstanding Adjunct Teacher/Lecturer of the Year Award this May. The award is the highest teaching honor among adjunct faculty/lecturers and recognizes valuable contributions as a classroom instructor. Andree is one of only three recipients at UNM this year. The awards ceremony took place on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008.
Congratulations, Andree!
Related links: Andree Jacobson; UNM Today Article
Dennis Paiz-Ramirez is no stranger to awards and honors, having been valedictorian at Rio Grande high school here in Albuquerque, and earning the Outstanding Junior student for the CS Dept. at this year's SOE Awards Banquet. Now he has an additional honor to add: he will be one of the School of Engineering Convocation speakers at this year's convocation, which takes place Saturday, May 17th, at 1pm. This marks the fourth time a computer science student has been selected to be a speaker in a row--the others were Rory McGuire, Monique Morin and Aaron Clauset. Dennis will receive his Bachelor's degree, and plans to become a graduate student at Stanford.
Congratulations, Dennis!
Related links: Dennis Paiz-Ramirez; School of Engineering Convocation
Congratulations to UNM PhD students Navin Rustagi and Amitabh Trehan whose paper, "The Forgiving Tree: A Self-Healing Distributed Data Structure" was accepted at the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC 2008) conference. PODC is the preeminent conference in distributed computing, with an acceptance rate around 15%. This paper, which was joint work with Thomas Hayes and Jared Saia, describes algorithms to ensure that a network keeps a small diameter, even if an adversary continually deletes nodes in the network.
Congratulations also to former UNM student, Maxwell Young (now at U. Waterloo) whose paper "Sleeping on the Job: Energy-Efficient Broadcast for Radio Networks" was also accepted at this conference. This paper, which was joint work with Jared Saia, Cynthia Phillips (from Sandia Labs), and Valerie King, describes algorithms to enable robust and energy efficient broadcast in a radio network.
Related links: PODC 2008; "The Forgiving Tree: A Self-Healing Distributed Data Structure"; "Sleeping on the Job: Energy-Efficient Broadcast for Radio Networks"; Jared Saia; Navin Rustagi; Amitabh Trehan; Thomas Hayes; Cynthia Phillips
The CS Department's Nate Swanson received the UNM Innovations in Informatics Award at the Biocomputing @ UNM Conference on March 28, 2008. Nate, a PhD Research Assistant in the department, won for his work on the invention of dynamic gamma knife radiosurgery.
Gamma knife radiosurgery procedures are often used to treat brain tumors,and this new technique greatly speeds the delivery of this life-saving technique. Nate's advisor is Prof. Shuang Luan: the work was funded in part by the NSF.
Congratulations, Nate!
Related links: Shuang Luan; NSF; Biocomputing @ UNM
Josh Karlin, a PhD student in the CS Dept, has a website hosted here at the CS Dept. called the Internet Alert Registry (IAR) which monitors Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) updates for suspicious routes. BGP is the routing protocol used to discover routes between the Internet's various networks.
The IAR was recently highlighted when an ISP in Pakistan, attempting to implement a government-ordered censoring of YouTube, inadvertently broadcast information that prevented users worldwide from accessing the wildly popular home of viral videos.
The incident, which lasted around 2 hours on February 24, 2008, was mentioned in InformationWeek as well as CNET, and the IAR was mentioned as a site helping to highlight the problem by listing dozens of potentially suspicious changes to BGP per day. A paper with co-authors Jennifer Rexford and Dept. Chair Stephanie Forrest, offers a way to greatly mitigate the security issues with BGP using an approach called Pretty Good BGP.
Related links: Josh Karlin; InformationWeek article; CNET article; Renesys blog entry; IAR site; Jennifer Rexford; Stephanie Forrest; Pretty Good BGP
This upcoming School of Engineering Convocation (taking place 10:00 am, Saturday, December 15th at Popejoy Hall) will feature a strong presence from the Computer Science Department. Graduate student Monique Morin will be a speaker at the Convocation, and undergraduate student Laura Glendenning will receive the George F. Breece Award, which is awarded to the undergraduate in the School of Engineering with the highest GPA.
At the convocation, Monique will receive her PhD. Her dissertation deals with the development of new algorithms and tools for the reconstruction and characterization of phylogenetic networks. Monique, whose adviser is Prof. Bernard Moret, previously won an undergraduate Associated Western Universities Honorary Fellowship to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Laura will receive her Bachelor's degree at the convocation. Laura is no stranger to awards—she was also recipient of the Computer Science Departments's 2006 Outstanding Junior award and the Outstanding Senior award in 2007. Not content to wait for her graduate career to work on research, has worked on machine learning with Prof. Terran Lane in the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program.
Congratulations to both!
Related Links: Prof Lane; Convocation Information; REU; Prof. Moret
PhD student ThanhVu Nguyen won the NASA New Mexico Space Grant Fellowship for Spring and Fall 2008. ThanhVu's previous work with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles motivated him to apply for the fellowship. The fellowship will allow him to study computer security, specifically detecting abnormalities in desktop environments. ThanhVu has also researched evolutionary computing, more specifically genetic algorithm and programming, as well as agent-based optimizations. ThanhVu received an M.S. and B.S. degrees from Pennsylvania State, and is a first-year PhD student in the department. Department Chair Stephanie Forrest is his advisor.
Congratulations, ThanhVu!
Related links: ThanhVu Nguyen ; Space Grant Fellowship; Stephanie Forres
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