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CMPS welcomes back Mary Kearney, founding editor of CMPS News, who is now re-assuming the role of Editor. She can be reached at mkearney@umd.edu, 301-405-2204.

Belmont Farley, A.B., '41, Mathematics, passed away on February 28. Dr. Farley was a pioneering brain researcher and computer scientist who helped develop the first fully-transistorized computer and created the first computer simulation of a neural network. After attending Maryland Dr. Farley
went on to obtain a Ph.D. in physics from Yale in 1948. He was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and was also a professor emeritus of Temple University's Department of Computer and Information Science. Dr. Farley was a member of the New York Academy of Science, The American
Mathematical Society, The Biophysical Society and the NIH's study section on biomedical engineering, among many other professional organizations.

Howard Gobioff, BS, CS, '93 passed away on March 12 from lymphoma at age 36. A star while studying at UM, Howard went on to complete his PhD at CMU in 1999, and was soon working as a software engineer at Google with his former classmates from College Park. His expertise in large scale distributed computing took him to work long stints in Japan and most recently to Google's New York office. He never forgot his roots in College Park, and gave generously of his time and resources to maintain and improve the Computer Science Department's mission. His last visit to the alma mater, not long before his passing, was to participate in a campus workshop for graduate students, where he advised today's students on how to approach research questions in academia and industry.

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Steve Anlage, Physics, and Jonathan Katz, CS and UMIACS, have been selected as two of only twenty semi-finalists from across the country in the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship Program. Nominations were solicited from all U.S. accredited, degree-granting educational institutions and no other university placed more than one semi-finalist. Anlage's project was titled "Basic Research on Defeating Speed of Light Threats" and Katz's projected was titled "Cryptographic Primitives and Protocols for Secure Information Flow in Complex Systems."

Giovanni Forni, Mathematics, is the first winner of the Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems. Forni was recognized for his outstanding work on solutions for cohomological equations for flows on surfaces and solutions of Kontsevich-Zorich conjecture on deviation of ergodic averages. The awardee is selected by an international committee which considers nominees from around the world. The award carries a cash prize of $15,000.

Russell Dickerson, ASOC and Bob Hudson, AOSC, will receive the Regents' Award on April 11 for Collaboration and Service in recognition of work done with the Maryland Department of the environment to combat air pollution in the Mid Atlantic Region.

Ellen Williams, Physics and IPST, was appointed to the Congressional Commission on U.S. Strategic Posture.

A UMIACS team lead by Rama Chellappa, ECE and UMIACS, with Professors Yiannis Aloimonos, CS and UMIACS, Larry Davis, CS and UMIACS, Ramani Duraiswami, CS and UMIACS and David Jacobs, CS and UMIACS, won a 2008 MURI award for their proposal to develop face, gait, long-distance speech and other motion-based human recognition algorithms tailored to the maritime
domain. The grant is for $1.5 million per year for three years with potential for an additional 2 years.

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Michael A'Hearn, Astronomy, $750,687, NASA; "EPOXI"

Michael A'Hearn, Astronomy, $643,900, NASA; "Operation of the Discipline Nodes of NASA's Planetary Data System"

John Aloimonos, CS and UMIACS, $135,949, HHS/NIH: "Human Activity Language and its Applications"

John Aloimonos, CS and UMIACS, $100,000, Honda; "Surface Segmentation from Multiple Cues"

Ernesto Berbery, AOSC, $134,091, NSF, "Land-Atmosphere Contributions to the Hydro-Climate Predictability of the South American Monsoon System"

Larry Davis, CS and UMIACS, $147,419, DOI; "Even Modeling and Recognition for Visual Surveillance"

Douglas P. Hamilton, Astronomy, $109,219, NASA; "Dust Dynamics at Saturn: Spokes in the B Ring"

Douglas C. Hamilton, Physics, $110,000, John Hopkins APL; "Magnetosphere Imaging Instrument"

Jeffrey Hollingsworth, CS and UMIACS, $295,470, University of Wisconsin; "Tools for Development of High Performance Energy Applications"

Joseph JaJa, ECE, and UMIACS, $1,247,671, DOD; "LTS"

Daniel Lathrop, Physics,IPST, and IREAP, $115,333, NSF; "CSEDI Collaborative Research: Integrating Numerical and Experimental"

Zhanqing Li, ESSIC, $300,000, NASA; "East Asian Study of Tropospheric Aerosols"

Zhanqing Li, AOSC and ESSIC, $300,000, NASA; "East Asian Study of Tropospheric Aerosols"

William McDonogh, Geology, $115,000, NASA; "Compositional Studies of Iron Meteorite and Pallasite"

Coleman Miller, Astronomy, $126,562, NASA; "Development of a Tree Code for Extreme Mass Ratios Inspirals"

Donald Perlis, CS and UMIACS, $213,691, DOD; "Overcoming the problem of brittleness with the metacognitive loop"

Phil Piccoli, Geology, and Phil Candela, Geology, $116,227, NSF, "Problems in ore metal partitioning: melt-vapor-brine equilibria"

Mihai Pop, CS and UMAICS, $388,832, Henry Jackson Foundation; "Assembly and Gene Finding Algorithms for Genome Sequencing"

Roald Sagdeev, Physics and IPST, $371,373, NASA; "Lunar Explorer Neutron Detector"

Steven Salzberg, CS and UMIACS, $276,750, HHS/NIH; "Bioinformatics Software for Analysis of Microbial Genomes"

Eun-Suk Seo, Physics and IPST, $363,699, NASA; "Cosmic Ray Energetics and Mass"

Eun-Suk Seo, Physics and IPST, $147,468, NASA; "Measuring particles, antiparticles and isotopes"

Peter Shawhan, Physics, $295,000, NSF; "Gravitational Wave Burst Searches and Signal Validation"

Ben Shneiderman, CS and UMIACS, $100,235, iDoxSolutions, Inc; "Evaluating Cooperation Among NCI Partners"

Ben Shneiderman, CS and UMIACS, $100,000, Washington Hospital Center; "Discovering Patterns of Events in Patient Histories"

V.S. Subrahmanian, CS and UMIACS, $100,000, SAIC; "Integrated Crisis Early Warning System"

Gregory Sullivan, Physics, $311,264, University of Wisconsin; "IceCube Neutrino Observatory Maintenance and Operation"

John Trasco, Astronomy, $840,802, NASA; "The Goddard Center for Research and Exploration"

Andrew Wilson, Astronomy, $129,284, NASA; "X-Ray Spectra of Active Galactic Nuclei"

Mark Wolfire, Astronomy, $144,793, NASA; "Photodissocation Regions: Laboratories for Astrophysics"

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Bill Arbaugh, CS and UMIACS, sold his start up company Komoku to Microsoft. Founded in 2004, Komoku has been a leader in the area of rootkit detection, doing work for ultra security- conscious customers such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. Rootkits are malicious software programs that are designed to take control of a computer's operating system at the administrator, or root level, where they can often hide from detection by standard anti-malware software.

Ben Bederson, CS and UMIACS and Allison Druin, UMIACS and CLIS, led an NSF-sponsored workshop on Children's Mobile Technologies which focused on the trends in applying mobile (phone, laptop and other) technologies for children around the world, primarily for education. The workshop attracted amazingly good and high level people from complementary and competitive places including the UN, UNICEF, the World Bank, Intel, Samsung, Motorola and academic leaders from UMD, MIT, GA Tech, University of Michigan, University of Iowa and Penn State was well as representatives from Portugal, Switzerland, England and Mexico.

Jeffrey Bub, Philosophy and IPST, has been appointed to the Program Committee of the Topical Group on Quantum Information, chaired by David DiVincenzo. The Committee is responsible for planning the 20 or so GQI sessions for the 2009 APS March Meeting and overseeing some joint GQI
invited sessions at the 2009 DAMOP Annual Meeting.

Michael Fisher, Physics and IPST, gave three Mark Kac Memorial Lectures in March at the LANL Center for Nonlinear Studies in New Mexico. His lectures on March 17 and 18 were titled "Atoms and Ions; Universality, Singularity and Particularity: On Boltzmann's Vision a Century Later." His lecture on March 19 was titled on "Charge Correlations in a Near-critical Plasma: Simulations challenge theory."

Dianne O'Leary, CS and UMIACS, was named the editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications beginning January 2009. She was also invited to be one of the four plenary speakers at the 2008 SIAM Conference on Data Mining held in Atlanta on April 25 and selected as the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer at the SIAM Annual meeting on July 7 in San Diego.

Jonathan Rosenberg, Mathematics, will be the primary speaker at the NSF/CBMS Regional Conference in the Mathematical Sciences, to take place in Fort Worth, Texas, June 1-5, on "Topology, C*-algebras, and String Duality."

Ben Shneiderman, CS and UMIACS, licensed his treemap software to HiveGroup and brought $108,000 to the University of Maryland from the agreement and also sold Spotfire and a photo annotation patent bringing over $170,000 to the University. This comes on the heels of a special journal edition of the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction honoring Shneiderman on
his 60th birthday.

Eric Slud, Mathematics, is hosting a 2-day Workshop on Bayesian Statistics under the auspices of the Statistics Consortium, with co-sponsorship from the American Statistical Association and the Institute for Mathematical Statistics. The Workshop will feature a number of eminent Bayesian
statisticians in two days of technical sessions to be held at the Mathematics Department. The workshop beings at 9:30 on April 30.

US News and World Report newest graduate school rankings place Maryland's

• Computer Science at number 13
• Artificial Intelligence 9
• Systems 12
• Programming Language 17
• Mathematics 21
• Applied Mathematics 12
• Physics 13
• Atomic/Molecular/Optical 5
• Condensed Matter number 13
• Elementary Particles/Field/String Theory13
• Nuclear Physics 10
• Plasma Physics 2
• Quantum Physics 9
• Geochemistry was ranked number 10.

An international conference was held March 15-18 here at the University of Maryland in honor of Mathematics Professor Michael Brin's 60th birthday. The conference drew over 100 participants representing over 50 schools and 10 countries. The first Michael Brin Prize in Dynamical Systems was also announced at the conference. The conference was part of the 34th meeting of the Maryland-Penn State Dynamics Workshop, one of the longest running dynamics meetings in the world.

The Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, and the Mathematics Department are hosting an international conference on "Hyperbolic Problems: Theory, Numerics and Applications" at the University of Maryland, June 9-13, 2008, led by a world renowned list of plenary and invited speakers. The objective is to bring together researchers, practitioners and students with interest in all aspects of hyperbolic differential equations and related time-dependent models.

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Richard Ash, Geology, was quoted in the New Scientist on March 12 speaking about two rocks found together in Antarctica. These rocks are chunks of a dwarf planet that was smashed apart early in the solar system's history. Ash is leading one of the studies on these rocks.

Elizabeth Beise, Physics, was quoted in Inside Higher Ed on March 11 in an article about public flagships looking at revamping their curriculum.

Charles Clark, IPST and JQI, was mentioned in an article on Phys.org on March 11 that highlighted the developed a new optical method that can detect individual neutrons and record them over a range of intensities at least a hundred times greater than existing detectors. The new detector comes out
of the University of Maryland/NIST Joint Quantum Institute. The story was also picked up by the United Press on March 13.

Larry Davis, CS and UMIACS, was quoted in the MIT Technology Review on March 7 in an article about a Web service called Make3D that lets users turn a single two-dimensional image of an outdoor scene into an immersive 3-D model.

Sankar Das Sarma, Physics, was quoted in Scientific American on March 21 in an article discussing findings of new research on a test run of the most sensitive spin-bath yet, a type of artificial molecule embedded in a small film of synthetic diamond at room temperature. A spin-bath is the sound of
quantum clarity--a clutch of subatomic particles interacting cleanly enough to reveal quantum fluctuations spreading like ripples on a still pond.

James Day, Geology, was quoted in National Geographic on March 12 as he joins other researches at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference to puzzle over a pair of meteorites. The chemical and mineral compositions of the rocks are similar to brachinites and another type of meteorite called
chondrites, but the pair doesn't match either category exactly.

Michael Fuhrer, Physics and IREAP, was quoted on physorg.com on March 22 discussing his research showing that in graphene the intrinsic limit to the mobility is higher than any other known material at room temperature. Graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of graphite, is a new material which combines aspects of semiconductors and metals. Their results indicate that graphene holds great promise for replacing conventional semiconductor materials such as silicon in applications ranging from high-speed computer chips to biochemical sensors. The story was also published in the EE Times of France, the CBC News of Canada, Daily Tech, VNUNet and the Christian Science Monitor on March 25.

Thomas Holz, Geology, author of Dinosaurs: The Most Complete, Up-to-Date, Encyclopedia for Dinosaur Lovers of All Age presented his book and discussed the exciting world of paleontology at a special program on March 15 at the Bethesda Library. The event was featured in the Gazzette Newspaper on March 28.

Ted Jacobson, Physics, was quoted in Scientific America on March 7 commenting on a new report that describes a way of mimicking the event horizon of a black hole-- the boundary beyond which light and matter are forever lost--using nothing more than light pulses transmitted along an optical fiber. Researchers are trying to create an object that is similar to the event horizon and study the quantum physics of the black hole in a real laboratory setting. Jacobson says the set up sounds feasible but notes that if the pulses can be tweaked to liberate Hawking radiation at all, the particles may still be drowned out by other effects at the horizon.

Hassan Jawahery, Physics, was quoted in Science Magazine on March 21 in an article about a new subatomic particle report published in Nature. Jawhery is performing similar experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park, California.

Daniel Kirk-Davidoff, AOSC, was quoted in the Maryland Daily Record on March 11 in an article that showed nearly 90 percent of Marylanders backed the state's desire to add more solar and wind power to its renewable fuels portfolio. Kirk-Davidoff is a big supporter of wind power and says he finds
wind farms "beautiful."

Alan Migdall, Physics, was quoted on scienceblog.com on March 17 in an article discussing his work on comparing the travel times of two photons with sub-femtosecond precision that may provide an answer to a long-standing puzzle over how fast light crosses narrow gaps that do not permit the
passage of conventional electromagnetic waves. The story was also picked up by Redorbit.com on March 17.

Bob Park, Physics, was quoted in Florida Today on March 12 speaking about who really controls the International Space Station and the science done in orbit. Park says the debate is meaningless since there's little science planned in orbit that couldn't be done on Earth.

James Purtilo, CS and UMIACS, was a guest on NPR's All Things Considered on March 20. Purtilo discussed the declining enrollment in computer science seen across the country and at Maryland over the last 10 years.

Steve Salzberg, CS and UMIACS, was quoted in Science Magazine on March 21 in an article about reforms to GenBank's files that would allow users access to the database to make changes, but managers are against this policy change.

Ben Shneiderman, CS and UMIACS, was published in Science Magazine on March 7. The overwhelming presence of the world wide web, cell phones and WiFi collaboration has offered many new opportunities for business, education and other ventures. Shneiderman's article says that it is time for researches in science to take collaboration to the next phase and reap the potential
intellectual and societal payoffs. The story was also covered by the Indo-Asian News Service, Phys.org, and weirdscience.com on March 7.

V.S. Subrahmanian, CS and UMIACS, was a guest on CTV Canada on February 29 speaking about his research and development of Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents (SOMA). SOMA generates likely behaviors patterns of terror outfits based on previous data and collaboration with computer and political science experts. This new portal can give an accurate forecast of new potential steps terrorists are taking. SOMA was also featured in an article in the Press Trust of India on March 2.

Jessica Sunshine, Astronomy, was quoted in NASA's Universe Today on March 21. A team of Maryland scientists recently identified three previously unknown asteroids that appear to be among the oldest objects in our solar system and have remained relatively unchanged since they formed. Sunshine's comments were also published in Science Magazine and Asian News International on March 21 and space.com on March 24.

Elizabeth Warner, Astronomy, authored an article that was featured in the March edition of Southwest Airline's Spirit Magazine. The article, Family Telescopes, advertised the University's astronomy observatory and its availability to the public.

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Alan Harbitter, M.S., CS, '82, was interviewed by Executive Biz on March 25. Harbitter is the CTO of Nortel Government Solutions but before that he started his own company PEC Solutions which merged with Nortel in 2005.

Matthew Paoletti, Physics graduate student, advisor Daniel Lathrop, Physics, IPST and IREAP, won the 2008 APS Group for Statistical and Nonlinear Physics Student Speaker award at this year's March Meeting in New Orleans, LA. The prize was given for his work on the velocity statistics of quantum turbulence and the effects of reconnection.

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PLEASE SUBMIT ITEMS TO: Mary Kearney (mkearney@umd.edu)

COLLEGE OF COMPUTER, MATHEMATICAL AND PHYSICAL SCIENCES

Astronomy Department - Dr. Stuart Vogel, Chair
Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Department - Dr. James Carton, Chair
Computer Science Department - Dr. Larry Davis, Chair
Geology Department - Dr. Michael Brown, Chair
Mathematics Department - Dr. James Yorke, Chair
Physics Department - Dr. Drew Baden, Chair
CSCAMM - Dr. Eitan Tadmor, Director
ESSIC - Dr. Antonio Busalacchi, Director
IPST - Dr. Rajarshi Roy, Director
IREAP - Dr. Dan Lathrop, Director
UMIACS - Dr. V.S. Subrahmanian, Director

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