E-News | CMPS

Elizabeth Beise (Physics) has been appointed Interim Associate Provost for Academic Planning and Programs, effective August 3, 2009. She has served the University with distinction in various positions, most recently as a member of the Strategic Planning Steering Committee and Chair of the SPSC CORE Major Initiative Committee in 2008-2009. She served from 2006 to 2009 on the campus Academic Planning Advisory Committee (APAC) and on the Middle States Review Committee for Standard 12 (General Education) in 2005-2006. Her research in experimental nuclear physics focuses on the use of electromagnetic and weak probes of the internal structure of protons, neutrons and light nuclei, and on the use of nuclear physics techniques to test fundamental symmetries of nature. She received the Maria Geoppert-Mayer Award from the American Physical Society (APS) in 1998 and became an APS Fellow in 2002.

Ron Lipsman (Mathematics) Senior Associate Dean, will step down from his current position on June 30, 2009. He will return to the Mathematics Department as Professor of Mathematics for one year, at the end of which he will formally retire from the University of Maryland after 41 years of service. Professor Lipsman was appointed Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Research and Graduate Education in CMPS by Dean Richard Herman in 1998. Dr. Lipsman served under interim Dean, John Osborn and, since 1999, under Dean Steve Halperin. He was promoted to Senior Associate Dean in 2006. In addition to the three subjects in his title, Dr. Lipsman handled issues in Facilities, IT, Libraries, International Affairs, and also shepherded many special College initiatives. Prior to arriving in the Dean's Office, Dr. Lipsman had a distinguished teaching and research career in the Mathematics Department, where his specialty was harmonic analysis and group representations. He was awarded both NATO and Fulbright Fellowships during that period.

Bonnie Dorr (Computer Science and UMIACS) will join the Dean’s Office as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Research and Graduate Education, effective July 1, 2009. Dorr has a distinguished career as an educator and scientist, serving as the primary adviser for 11 Ph.D. graduates, with 3 more in the pipeline and directing 25 sections of university honors courses while individually mentoring 10 honors research projects. As a scientist she co-founded and co-directs our highly reputed Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Laboratory and currently serves as principal scientist in the new Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, a joint UM-Hopkins project. She has been an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, is principal investigator on grants totaling $1-2 million per year, and has a very long list of publications in distinguished journals and conferences. In her role as Associate Dean, Dorr will be responsible for managing the College's faculty appointments and promotions process, providing leadership to our group of graduate program directors, assisting departments and institutes in advancing their research agendas, and serving as one of the Dean’s principal advisers. At the same time she will also maintain her own active research program.

Ron Thomann is the new Assistant Dean for External Relations for the College. Thomann, who brings a wealth of development experience to the College, began his university fundraising career in 1986 at Tufts University as Director of Development for the College of Engineering. In 1989 he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 13 years, serving initially as the Associate Director of Major Gifts for their New York City office, and then transitioning to build the development office for the Sloan School of Management as their Executive Director of Alumni and Corporate Relations. Previous to Tufts and MIT, Thomann spent eight years with the Department of State representing the intelligence community in Asia on programs pertinent to our national security and economy. For the past six years he has been raising capital for well-known alternative investment funds (Venture Capital and Hedge Funds) which brought him into close personal contact with ultra high net families, provided him the opportunity to learn how family foundations are run, and to also work with corporations and their foundations.

HONORS AND AWARDS:

The paper "Using Histograms to Better Answer Queries to Probabilistic Logic Programs" by Matthias Broecheler, Gerardo Simari (Computer Science Graduate Students) and V.S. Subrahmanian (Computer Science and UMIACS) has been named the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award at the 2009 International Conference on Logic Programming to be held in Pasadena, CA in July 2009.

Christine Finke (Arts and Humanities Student who participated in the CMPS Earth, Life and Time College Park Scholars program) has received a Fellowship from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program and will spend the 2009-2010 academic year teaching English in Germany.

Eugenia Kalnay (AOSC and IPST) has been awarded the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) Prize, the World Meteorological Organization’s most prestigious prize, for her leadership in the field of global numerical weather prediction and analysis, including data assimilation and ensemble forecasting.

Hanan Samet (Computer Science and UMIACS) has been selected as the winner of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) Research Award for 2009 in recognition of his landmark book on data structures and its outstanding impact on the theory and practice of GIScience.

Lucy McFadden (Astronomy) is a member of the Dawn Science Operations Team which received the NASA Group Achievement Award "for exceptional and successful execution of the Dawn post-launch payload characterization and calibration activities."

CONTRACTS/GRANTS:

David Doermann (UMIACS), BBNT Solutions, $100,000, "Multilingual Automatic Document Classification Analysis and Translation (MADCAT)."

Dennis Drew (Physics), Maryland Procurement Office, $116,000, "Nano-electronics."

Mark Freidlin (Mathematics), NSF, $523,421, "RECOVERY: FRG-Research Collaborative Stochastics and Dynamics: Asymptotic Problems."

Victor Galitskiy (Physics), NSF, $400,000, "RECOVERY: CAREER-Fluctuation Phenomena Near Quantum Phase transitions."

Michael Laskowski (Mathematics), NSF, $308,050, "RECOVERY: Structure Theorems in Model Theory."

Howard Milchberg (Physics, IPST, IREAP), NSF, $264,419, "Quantum-Coherent Molecular Ensembles in Plasma."

Gennady Milikh (Astronomy), NSF, $173,507, "Recovery: Collaborative Research—Physics Based Modeling of Blue Jets."

Mihai Pop (Computer Science and UMIACS), Henry M. Jackson Foundation, $239,471, "Assembly and Gene Finding Algorithms for Genome Sequencing."

John Rodgers (IREAP), Sandia National Laboratories, $100,000, "A Deterministic Approach to Modeling HPM Effects in Electronic Circuits and Systems."

Eun-Suk Seo (Physics and IPST), Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility, $151,180, "Modifying CREAM for SIP Interface."

Harry Tamvakis (Mathematics), NSF, $150,000, "Schubert Calculus and Algebraic Combinatorics."

PATENTS:

Daniel DeMenthon (UMIACS). Patent entitled "Device Using a Camera and Light Polarization for the Remote Displacement of a Cursor on a Display."

Bruce Jacob (UMIACS and ECE) with David Tawei Wang (ECE). Patent entitled "System and Method for Performing Multi-Rank Command Scheduling in DDR SDRAM Memory Systems."

WHAT'S NEW:

Ian Appelbaum (Physics) was an invited speaker at the Spin-Up 2009, hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, at Longyearbyean, Norway on May 31-June 4.

Michael Brown (Geology) was the convener of the session "Crust Coming of Age: From Accretion to Craton" at the Goldschmid 2009 meeting, June 21-29, Davos, Switzerland. Brown will also be a keynote speaker at the "Granulites, Partial Melting and Rheology of Orogenic Lower Crust" conference, Prague, Czech Republic, July 9-15 with a topic of "High-grade Crustal Metamorphism Records Secular Change in Mantle temperature and Geodynamics."

Paul Julienne (Physics, NIST and JQI) was an invited speaker at the "Cold Atoms and Molecules: Collisions, Field-effects and Applications" workshop held June 23-26, Kyoto University, Yukawa Institute of Theoretical Physics.

Jan Sengers (IPST) is a member of an international team that has prepared a new internal standard formulation for the viscosity of water and steam that has been adopted by the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS). The new formulation is documented in an article by M.L. Huber, R.A. Perkins, A. Laesecke, D.G. Friend, J.V. Sengers, E. Vogel, R. Mares, and K. Miyagawa, J. Phys. Chem. Ref. Data, Vol. 38, 101-125 (2009) and has already been incorporated in the new edition of the "ASME International Steam Tables for Industrial Use" published in 2009 by the American Society for Mechanical Engineers.

Ning Zeng (AOSC) has been appointed an Editor of "Atmospheric and Oceanic Science Letters" and also to the Editorial Board of "Sustainability."

IN THE NEWS:

The Human Computer Interaction Lab’s annual symposium was the topic of an article in The Washington Post, June 1. Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science and UMIACS) and Allison Druin (UMIACS and CLIS) were quoted in the article. David Wang (Computer Science Graduate Student) and his research were also mentioned.

Thomas Holtz (Geology) was quoted in Science News, June 17, in an article on some theropods having birdlike hand-bone arrangements.

Daniel Kirk-Davidoff (AOSC) was quoted in The Christian Science Monitor, June 24, in an article on wind farms and their potential unintended consequence of altering weather patterns downwind.

Dan Lathrop (Physics, Geology, IREAP and IPST) was featured on Inside Planet Earth (Discovery Channel), aired between June 10 and June 25. Already featured extensively by NPR and Slashdot, Lathrop tells Discovery, "We've been seven years in construction of this experiment, built to try to match as many parameters as possible with the earth's core."

Christopher Monroe (Physics) was quoted in ScienceNews, June 3, in an article on the recently published paper (Jost, et al., Nature) demonstrating deterministic entanglement of separated mechanical oscillators, consisting of the vibrational states of two pairs of atomic ions held in different locations.

Robert Park (Physics) was quoted in the Baltimore Sun, June 15, in an article on cell phone protection devices which claim to neutralize microwave radiation.

Mihai Pop (Computer Science and UMIACS), was quoted in BioInform, June 5, in an article discussing recent developments in software for analyzing next generation sequencing data.

Steven Salzberg (Computer Science and UMIACS) was quoted in The Scientist, June edition, in an article on how to do heavy computational lifting in genomes and transcriptomes. Salzberg was also quoted in Wired Magazine, June 22, in an article on a T.Rex femur sparking a new field of biology.

Ben Shneiderman (Computer Science and UMIACS) and the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory were mentioned in VizWorld, June 10, in an article on challenging information visualization problems. Shneiderman, and the fifth edition of "Designing the User Interface" was the subject of an article in Usability News, June 12.

Ian Spielman (Physics and JQI) was quoted in Science News, June 17, in an article on a proposed quantum motor which would be made up of a carrier atom and a starter atom trapped in a ring by lasers.

ALUMNI NEWS:

Ben Akman (1985 B.S. Computer Science) is Chief Technology Officer, The Brookhaven Group, New York. Previously, he has been the CTO of Procurease LLC, manager of the Web Services Development Team of OptiMark Technologies, Inc., and a Principal Architect for Openvision Technologies (merged with Veritas). As an independent consultant, he helped develop numerous systems including futures software for Lehman Brothers, a foreign exchange trade order management system for Deutsche Bank, AG, and an energy trading system for Dow Jones Telerate. He began his career building network operating systems at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He holds an MS in computer science from the University of Southern California.

Didier A Depireux (1991 Ph.D. Physics, advisor S. James Gates), is an Assistant Professor, Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine. He also holds an adjunct appointment with the Robert Fischell BioEngineering department at the University of Maryland at College Park. After obtaining his Ph.D and 3 years of post-doctoral training in string theory and integrable systems, he moved on to the more concrete field of computational neuroscience, with a particular interest in understanding hearing and our innate ability to extract speech and music in very noisy, reverberant environments such as in a car or a busy restaurant. He joined the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, working with Shihab Shamma on measuring and modeling neural activity in the auditory midbrain and auditory cortex. In order to be even closer to the model of relevance, namely humans, he accepted a faculty position in the School of Medicine where he teaches (among other things) human gross anatomy and medical neuroscience to the medical students, and pursues his research in close collaboration with medical doctors. More recently, his interests have led him to develop an animal model of tinnitus (ringing in the ears); he is currently funded by the Department of Defense to study changes in the central nervous system associated with the induction of tinnitus. His research has been supported by grants from the NIH, the American Tinnitus Association and other foundations.

Kristopher Karnauskas (2007 Ph.D. AOSC, advisor Tony Busalacchi), currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), Columbia University, has recently accepted a tenure-track research scientist position at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) on Cape Cod, beginning in late August 2009.

John H. Knight (1990 B.S. Physical Sciences) is a director in the Restructuring and Bankruptcy Group of the law firm of Richards, Layton and Finger. His practice focuses on representing debtors, secured creditors, and other parties of interest in chapter 11 cases. Knight is also a leader of the firm's substantive non-consolidation opinion team. He has served as counsel to numerous chapter 11 debtors in varied business segments and also has an active secured lender practice, representing the prepetition or DIP lender in many large chapter 11 cases. Knight has been recognized as an outstanding bankruptcy attorney by "America's Leading Lawyers for Business" and "Delaware Super Lawyers." He received his J.D., with Honors, from the University of Maryland School of Law in 1994.

Heath (Hap) Peden (1990 B.S. Computer Science) was officially named the National Capital Area 2009 Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Man of the Year at the grand finale gala on June 14. Peden raised $93K in 10 weeks and, together with his fellow candidates, they raised $890K. The funds will help find a cure for blood cancers and improve the lives of the patients and their families.

Mark Pleszkoch (1990 Ph.D. Computer Science, advisor William Gasarch) is a member of the Technical Staff, Survivable Systems Engineering Team, CERT, Carnegie Mellon University. Pleszkoch works in the area of automation of formal methods. His current project, Function Extraction for Malicious Code (FX/MC), involves the automatic derivation of the functional behavior of disassembled assembly language code. Previously, Pleszkoch worked at IBM for twenty-one years in various capacities. As a member of IBM's Cleanroom Software Technology Center, he provided education and consultation to clients in software process, software engineering technologies, and software testing.

WE GREATLY ENCOURAGE ALL OUR READERS TO KEEP US INFORMED OF THEIR NEWS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

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