Year: 2005

Shaya Potter and Jason Nieh received the Best Student Paper Award at
the 19th Large Installation System Administration Conference (LISA
2005) held last week in San Diego, CA for their paper titled:
“Reducing Downtime Due to System Maintenance and Upgrades”.

Prof. Henning Schulzrinne was elected to the grade of IEEE Fellow “for contributions to the design of protocols, applications, and algorithms
for Internet multimedia.”

Ph.D. Student Matei Ciocarlie from the Columbia Robotics Lab was chosen as the second place winner in the CanestaVision 3D Vision Contest The prize includes a $5,000 cash award and an electronic perception development kit worth $7,000. Matei’s entry was a real-time “Eye-in-Hand” range sensor for robotic grasping. Matei was one of ten finalists, who were then given 6 months to develop their 3D vision application. Congratulations to Matei!

Peter Allen and Dennis Fowler M.D, Surgery have received a 2 year
$425K NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant for Insertable
Imaging and Effector Platforms for Surgery. The grant is to construct
small, mobile, multi-function platforms that can be placed inside a
body cavity to perform robotic minimal access surgery. The robot will
be based upon an existing prototype device developed at the Columbia
Robotics Lab.

The Department of Computer Science is seeking applicants for a tenure-track position at either the junior or senior level in computational biology and software systems. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in a relevant field, and have demonstrated excellence in research and the potential for leadership in the field. Senior applicants should also have demonstrated excellence in teaching and and continued strong leadership in research.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced that Columbia will host one of the three NIH Roadmap National Centers for Biomedical Computing awarded in 2005. The National Center for Multi-Scale Study of Cellular Networks, MAGNet, at Columbia will be focusing on the comprehensive mapping and analysis of molecular cellular interactions. Columbia Computer Science faculty and research staff involved include Prof. Gail Kaiser, Dr. Christina Leslie, Prof. Ken Ross, Dr. David Waltz and Prof. Yechiam Yemini.

Prof. Vishal Misra and Prof. Dan Rubenstein were recently elected to the IFIP Working Group 7.3 on Computer Performance Modeling and Analysis. The WG accepts new members every two years and includes the most recognized experts in that field.

Prof. Henning Schulzrinne, along with a team consisting of researchers from
Pennsylvania State University, University of California-Santa Barbara and Lucent Technologies, won a National Science Foundation grant titled WORKIT: A Universal Wireless Open Research KIT.

Prof. Julia Hirschberg was elected as president of the International Speech
Communication Association (ISCA).

Regina Barzilay, a CS PhD graduate, has just been selected as one of this year’s top 35 technology inventors under the age of 35 by Technology Review. She is currently an assistant professor at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, having received a PhD in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2002.

Prof. Joe Traub was named as the new chair of the Computer Science and
Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies.

Yoav Freund of Columbia University and Robert Schapire of Princeton University won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for their contribution to highly accurate prediction rules used in web search engines. The Kanellakis Award honors specific theoretical accomplishments that significantly affect the practice of computing.

A proposal from the Columbia Robotics Lab was chosen as one of ten
winners for the CanestaVision 3D sensing design competetion. Columbia
Ph.D. student Matei Ciocarlie and Research Scientist Andrew Miller
headed the proposal which focuses on developing an “Eye-in-Hand” range
sensor for robotic grasping.