December, 2001
PDL Student recieves Honorable Mention in CRA Outstanding Undergraduate
Awards
Cory Williams, a senior in CS and Math Sciences, and a member of the PDL,
received Honorable Mention when the Computing Research Association selected
the recipients of their Outstanding Undergraduate Awards for 2002. Nominees
were from universities across North America and it is a significant honor
for Cory to have been selected for honorable mention from this group.
Cory's work focuses on Computer forensics and Intrusion detection, and the benefit achieved if system logs continued to be accurately recorded after a system compromise. Specifically, he is working on how to use these accurately recorded system logs and what should be recorded if accurate logging is expected.
November, 2001
Congratulations to CMU's ACM Programming Contest Winners
The CMU team consisting of Cory Williams, Tom Murphy and Eric
Heutchy recieved 4th place in the East Central North American Region
in the ACM programming contest this past saturday. They competed at
Ashland University, where they placed 1st (there are several sites of
competition within each region).
October, 2001
3 PDL Faculty Receive HP/Intel Itanium-Based System Grant
Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) and Intel Corporation have awarded three
Carnegie Mellon computer science faculty members $153,162 in equipment
grants from its new Itanium-based Systems Grant program. Carnegie Mellon
is one of 40 universities worldwide whose faculty was selected based
on how they would deploy the Itanium-based systems to strengthen their
research. One of the largest awards made under the HP/Intel program
goes to Anastassia Ailamaki (PI), Todd Mowry and Dave
Nagle. They will receive six one-way workstations, one two-way Workstation
and one RX4610 server valued at $153,162. "The Itanium architecture
is extremely promising for database applications -- the software that
dominates the commercial server market," said Ailamaki, an assistant
professor of computer science. "Inventing ways for database systems
to take advantage of the Itanium processor's characteristics opens an
exciting new research area that will lead in revolutionizing database
software technology to deliver superb performance on this cutting-edge
computer architecture."
(from SCS Today, Oct 2, 2001)
August, 2001
Professor Srinivasan Seshan Receives IBM Faculty Partnership Award
and NSF CAREER Award
Srinivasan Seshan has been awarded
an IBM Faculty Partnership Award (FPA) and an NSF CAREER award. A $20,000
IBM FPA was granted for his work related to networking protocols and
infrastructure for ubiquitous computing. He earned a $487,651 NSF Career
Award for his proposal, "Towards an Efficient Ubiquitous Computing
Infrastructure," in which he will attempt to design a new networking
and operating system infrastructure for the next generation of ubiquitous
computing applications. Congratulations Srini!
(from SCS Today, Aug 8, 2001)
July, 2001
2 PDL Faculty Receive IBM Faculty Partnership Award
Anastassia Ailamaki, assistant professor
in computer science, has received an IBM Faculty Partnership Award,
totaling $40,000. Also receiving the award, for a third year, is PDL
Co-Director Greg Ganger, Assistant
Professor in ECE.
The IBM Faculty Partnership Award recognizes and fosters novel, creative
work as well as strengthens the relationships between leading universities
and the IBM research and development community.
(from SCS-Today, July 10, 2001)
July, 2001
Ailamaki Receives Carnegie Mellon Berkman Faculty Development Award
and VLBD01 Best Paper
Anastassia Ailamaki has
also received a Carnegie Mellon Berkman Faculty Development
Award for $5,000. Carnegie Mellon established the award to aid junior
faculty in their professional development and provide funding for projects
that have difficulty attracting outside support. For more about the
Berkman Faculty Development Award, see http://hss.cmu.edu/facdev/.
Recently honored with the Best Paper Award in the prestigious International
Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 2001), Ailamaki researches
database management systems (DBMSs) and on their interaction with computer
architecture. Her recent work is highly interdisciplinary and explores
innovative ways to improve DBMS performance by studying the hardware
behavior of commercial database systems running on modern processors.
(from SCS-Today, July 10, 2001)
May, 2001
Craig Soules Named USENIX Scholar for Second Year
Our congratulations to Craig Soules,
a PDL graduate student working toward his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer
Engineering. He was named a "USENIX Scholar" for a second
year by the USENIXassociation. As a part of this award, USENIX is supporting
Craig's tuition and stipend.
April, 2001
Steve Schlosser Receives Intel Fellowship
We’d like to congratulate Steve
Schlosser who has been awarded an Intel fellowship. Nationally,
Intel awards thirty-five Ph.D. fellowships each year, providing a cash
award (tuition/fees/ stipend), an Intel CPU-based PC, an Intel Mentor,
and the opportunity to conduct research or an internship at Intel.
Steve’s research focuses on the design and application of MEMS-based storage. This non-volatile storage technology merges magnetic recording material and thousands of recording heads to provide storage capacity of 1-10 GB of data in an area under 1 cm2 in size with access times of less than a millisecond and streaming bandwidths of over 50 MB per second. Further, because MEMS-based storage is built using photolithographic IC processes similar to standard CMOS, MEMS-based storage has per-byte costs significantly lower than DRAM and access times an order of magnitude faster than conventional disks.
June, 2001
Computer Magazine Features Research on Active Disks for Large-Scale
Data Processing:
In the June edition of Computer Magazine (Vol. 34, No 6), Erik
Riedel, ECE alumnus, Christos Faloutsos, professor, Garth A. Gibson,
associate professor, and David Nagle, senior research computer scientist,
report on their research on an active disk storage device that can accelerate
an existing database system and eliminate the need for the PC processor.
From the online abstract: "With active disks, application-specific functions
access the excess computation power in drives. Active disks combine
the requisite processing power of general-purpose disk-drive microprocessors
with the special-purpose functionality of end-user programmability.
The authors' experiment showed that active disks can accelerate an existing
database system by moving data-intensive processing to the disks, thereby
reducing the server CPU's processing load."
(from SCS-Today, June 5, 2001)
May, 2001
Premier Database Research Conference ACM SIGMOD 2001 Recognizes CS
Ph.D. Student's Work
Shimin Chen's paper "Improving
Index Performance through Prefetching," co-authored by Phillip B. Gibbons,
and Todd C. Mowry was selected as a runner-up for the Best Paper Award
for 2001 at the ACM SIGMOD 2001 conference. The premier conference for
database research and practice, ACM SIGMOD 2001 conference organizers
received 290 paper submissions, but chose only 44 papers to be included
in the proceedings. "The task for selection of best paper was extremely
difficult," explained the ACM SIGMOD selection committee. "We ended
up with three papers (out of 44) that were clearly the top ones, all
deserving the best paper award. At the end, the decision was a very
hard one to make; [Chen's] paper was finally ranked as one of the two
runner-ups." Chen is a second year CS Ph.D.; his advisor is Todd
Mowry, associate professor of computer science. A copy of "Improving
Index Performance through Prefetching" is linked from Chen's web page.
(from SCS-Today, June 5, 2001)
March, 2001
Mor Harchol-Balter Receives Anna McCandless Chair
Mor Harchol-Balter, assistant professor
of computer science, has been awarded the Anna McCandless Chair, a three-year
term career development professorship that provides funding for travel
and sabbaticals, including partial costs of academic-year teaching and
research and programs. Jim Morris, dean of the School of Computer Science,
said, "Mor arrived here, hit the ground running and has already launched
an exciting program of research and education in computer system performance."
A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Harchol-Balter received her doctorate in 1996. Manuel Blum, professor of computer science and Turing Award winner, was the committee chair of her thesis entitled "Network Analysis Without Expoentiality Assumptions." Currently, her research interests include performance analysis and computer systems design, particularly distributed systems. Her research applications include Web servers, distributed Web servers, distributed supercomputing servers, networks of workstations, and communication networks. Harchol-Balter teaches performance analysis and computer networks and also advises three Ph.D. students. A prolific researcher, she is the author of numerous papers published in various journals and conference proceedings.
The Anna McCandless Chair is sponsored by the estate of Anna Loomis
McCandless. McCandless, a native of Pittsburgh, was a 1919 graduate
of Margaret Morrison Carnegie College. She worked for a private investor
and then Fidelity Trust Co. after graduating from Carnegie Tech and
was the first female member of the Board of Trustees in 1967. She was
the longest serving female trustee, serving on the board for 29 years.
In 1963, McCandless received Carnegie Mellon's Alumni Service Award.
(from SCS-Today, March 27, 2001)
March, 2001
Garth Goodson Receives IBM Research Fellowship
Congratulations to Garth Goodson on his award of a Research Fellowship from IBM. The fellowship, which
is eligible for renewal, covers Garth's tuition for the year and includes
a stipend of $15,000. Garth plans to spend some time at IBM Almaden
with the storage research group there this summer.
Garth is a Ph.D. student in ECE and has recently been working on Self-Securing Storage Systems (S4 for short). Self-securing storage prevents intruders from undetectably tampering with or permanently deleting stored data by internally auditing all requests and keeping all versions of all data for a window of time, regardless of commands received from potentially-compromised host operating systems. Within this window, this valuable information exists for intrusion diagnosis and recovery. Garth is also currently a teaching assistant for 18-546: Introduction to Storage Systems.
Feb 22, 2001
3 Professors Receive Research Grants from Dept. of Defense
The U.S. Department of Defense has awarded grants to Edmund Clarke,
the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science, Greg Ganger, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, and Jeannette Wing, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs
in the School of Computer Science, for their national defense research
efforts. The grants were three of 20 awards totaling $9.3 million. The
average award is $875,000 per year for three years. Clarke's project
for the U.S. Navy is entitled "Static Analysis to Enhance the Power
of Model Checking for Concurrent Software." Ganger's project for the
Air Force is called "Enabling
Dynamic Security Management of Networked Systems via Device-Embedded
Security." Wing's work for the Army is entitled "Verification Tools
for Embedded Systems."
from CMU 8 1/2 x 11 News, Feb 22, 2001
More PDL news here.