Dr. Rob Abbott's dissertation "Automated Tactics Modeling:
Techniques and Applications" recently won the Tom L. Popejoy Dissertation
Prize. The award was created as a memorial to the late Tom L. Popejoy, UNM
President from 1948 to 1968. The dissertation discusses the use of intelligent
agents with realistic tactics gleaned from subject matter experts in a computer
simulation program used for training.
Rob currently works at the Cognitive and Optical Military Systems department at Sandia National Laboratories, which works to understand and facilitate interactions between humans and automated systems, especially high consequence decision-making under stress.
Way to go, Rob!
Related links: Popejoy Prize; Dissertation; Sandia National Laboratories, Cognitive Systems
CS Dept. Graduate student ThanhVu Nguyen and his advisor Prof. Stephanie Forrest (in collaboration with Univ. of Virginia Prof. Westley Weimer and graduate student Clair Le Goues) won the the IFIP TC2 Manfred Paul Award for Excellence in Software: Theory and Practice for a paper they worked on for the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).
The award is 1024 Euros and the award ceremony will take place at ICSE in May. In addition, the paper was also named one of only five ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Papers as well.
Congratulations!
Related links: ThanhVu Nguyen; Stephanie Forrest; Westley Weimer; Clair Le Goues; ICSE; Distinguished Papers page; Manfred Paul Award
The article, "UK is ideal home for electronic Big Brother", discusses which countries transmit the most Internet traffic and is a based on a paper, "Nation-State Routing: Censorship, Wiretapping, and BGP", which is a collaboration of graduate student Josh Karlin with Prof. Jennifer Rexford of Princeton and Prof. Stephanie Forrest of the CS Dept.
The UK is the second highest on the "country centrality" score (after the US) with Germany taking up the third place. It builds on Josh's work with Autonomous Systems and BGP that Josh focused on for his recent dissertation. It shows that, counterintuitively, the nations who are known to censor the Internet such as China have relatively little impact on international routing, while these top three nations could potentially have a much greater impact.
Related links: Josh Karlin; Stephanie Forrest; Jennifer Rexford; New Scientist article; Paper
Applicants for Spring 2010 should use the new graduate application server. The new server allows secure uploading of unofficial PDF transcripts, letters of recommendation, and creation of an account that allows editing of your application with the CS department. If you still need to apply for Fall 2009, you should apply using the Pre-admission Graduate Information Form.
Related links: Graduate Application Server
Edgar Leon, a PhD student
working with Barney Maccabe,
was recently accepted to the
NSF-Sponsored Academic Workshop for Underrepresented Assistant Professors, Associate Professors, and
Senior Doctoral Students. The workshop will be held April 4th and 5th, 2009 in Portland Oregon.
Congratulations, Edgar!
Related Links: Edgar Leon; Workshop Site; Barney Maccabe
Prof. Melanie Moses of the UNM CS Dept. recently had an essay (subscription needed) published in Nature discussing the Metabolic Theory of Ecology. Biologists use this theory to explain why elephants have many fewer children than mice, but also live much longer. The theory states that that both are related to the length of the circulatory network needed to provide nutrients to the cells of each animal: in fact, the longer the network, the slower the metabolism, and the fewer the offspring.
How do humans stack up on this scale? This theory shows that "...North Americans consume energy at a rate sufficient to sustain a 30,000-kilogram primate....". This takes into account the power we consume through electrical, oil, gas and other networks. The theory also explains why humans with the most resources tend to reproduce the least: each child in a developed nation takes a great deal of resources, and parents react by having fewer children.
Related links: Melanie Moses; Nature essay (subcription required)
Cleve Moler, co-creator of the MatLab software used worldwide by scientists and engineers, was recently featured in an article in the New Mexico Business Weekly. Moler served as Chair of the Computer Science department in the 1980s and later became Chief Scientist at The Mathworks™, developers of MatLab. The article also features a quote from current chair Stephanie Forrest.
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