Computer Science News

Julie Dorsey won a fellowship to support development of innovative teaching materials for CPSC 179, Digital Photorealism.

Professor Paul Hudak received the Most Influential ICFP Paper Award for the paper Functional Reactive Animation, written jointly with Conal Elliott, and presented in 1997 at the ACM International Conference on Functional Programming. The award is presented annually by ACM to the authors of an ICFP paper that is judged to be the most influential paper in the past ten years. Hudak and Elliott were presented their award on October 2 at the annual conference, held this year in Freiburg, Germany.

Daniel Abadi won the VLDB-2007 Best Paper award, 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases September 23-27 2007, University of Vienna, Austria.

Kevin Gold and Marek Doniec won the Best Paper award at the 6th IEEE
International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL 2007) for the
paper "Learning grounded semantics with word trees: prepositions and
pronouns" coauthored with faculty member Brian Scassellati.

Lev Reyzin won the Best Student Paper Award at the 20th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2007) for the paper "Learning Large-Alphabet and Analog Circuits with Value Injection Queries" coauthored with faculty members Dana Angluin and James Aspnes, and Jiang Chen of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University.

Tom Kempner – a Yale 1975 Alumni with a B.A. in Computer Science – has agreed to establish the Thomas L. Kempner, Jr. Fellowship Fund, which will provide support to Ph.D. students in Computer Science. The fund’s initial value is about $2,200,000. Tom graduated magna cum laude from Yale. After Yale, Tom went to Harvard Business School where he obtained his M.B.A. He is the Executive Managing Member of Davidson Kempner Capital Management LLC, a New York-based hedge fund with $12 billion of assets under management. Tom’s son Nathaniel Kempner graduated from Yale in 2005 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and his son Trevor Kempner is a Theatre Studies major in the Class of 2009.

David Gelernter wrote an article that appears in Forbes 90th Anniversary issue, The Inside-Out Web, May 7, 2007.

The National Science Foundation awarded graduate research fellowships to two Computer Science students: senior Emily Pitler (Artificial Intelligence) and graduate student Lev Reyzin (Machine Learning).

Could robots help provide better diagnostic tools for children with autism? An article in Monitor on Psychology, APA online, discussing autism research being conducted by Brian Scassellati and his team.

Brian Scassellati has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Press Release.

Yale sent four teams to the Greater New York Regionals of the ACM Collegiate Programming Contest on October 29th. Full details (including both problems and standings) will be available soon at http://www.acmgnyr.org/.

Lev Reyzin won the Best Student Paper Award at the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2006) for his work with Robert Schapire on "How Boosting the Margin Can Also Boost Classifier Complexity."

Holly Rushmeier has recently been promoted to a Distinguished ACM Member, having achieved a significant impact on the computing field.

Collin Jackson, BS '04, is part of the team that won the 2006 Computerworld Horizon Award for anti-phishing tool PwdHash. Details.

John Fujii, BS '87, was presented the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award at the recent SIGGRAPH conference held in Boston. John is the seventh recipient of the award, which is presented once every two years. John is an advanced graphics software engineer for the Hewlett-Packard Workstations in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Fred Shic won Best Applied Computational Modeling Paper at the 28th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. The paper was based on collaboration with Ami Klin and Fred Volkmar at the Yale Child Study Center (Shic F, Jones W, Klin A, Scassellati B., Swimming in the Underlying Stream: Computational Models of Gaze in a Comparative Behavioral Analysis of Autism). CogSci is the primary conference venue for the Cognitive Science Society.

Vladimir Rokhlin has been named recipient of the 2006 IEEE Honorary Membership. Sponsored by the IEEE, the award honors Rokhlin for his invention of fast multipole methods (FMM), a revolutionary way for engineers and scientists to solve tough problems. Details.

Robert Dunne, who was recently named Senior Lecturer, has been voted recipient of the undergraduate PBK DeVane Medal. Each year the Alpha of Connecticut confers the DeVane Medal on members of the faculty who have distinguished themselves as teachers of undergraduates in Yale College and as scholars in their fields. Pictures and speech.

Yale sent four teams to the Greater New York Regionals of the ACM Collegiate Programming Contest, held at Nassau Community College (Garden City, NY, on Long Island) October 29th. Full details (including both problems and standings) will be available soon at http://www.acmgnyr.org/. Congratulations to all who participated.