Theodore R. Bashkow, professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer science, died December 23, 2009, at his home in Katonah, New York. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and attended Washington University, where he received his BS degree in mechanical engineering. He went on to receive his master’s and doctorate degrees at Stanford University.
He served as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force during World War II from 1943 to 1945. While in the Air Force, he served as a maintenance officer and helped to stage the Enola Gay. In the 1950s, while at Bell Labs, Professor Bashkow became well known for his development of a new method for analyzing linear electrical networks, Professor Bashkow’s A matrix. He also became involved with digital computers.
Bashkow joined the faculty of the Columbia Electrical Engineering Department in 1958 and helped transform the Electrical Engineering Department into the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. When, in 1979, this department was divided into the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments, Bashkow became one of the founding faculty members of Computer Science. He taught courses in digital logic, computer organization, and computer programming.
He did research on parallel processing. In collaboration with Herbert Sullivan, he pioneered a new approach to that subject through the development of CHoPP, Columbia Homogeneous Parallel Processor, a large-scale, homogeneous, fully distributed parallel machine. A number of Columbia graduate students and a junior faculty member, David Klappholz, were also involved at various stages.
In 1980, the Computer Science Department instituted an annual award in his honor, the Theodore R. Bashkow Award. Among his many affiliations, Bashkow was an active member of IEEE, ACM, and Sigma Xi organizations.
Ashutosh Dutta, a PhD student working with Prof. Henning Schulzrinne, received a 3rd best paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Internet Multimedia Systems Architecture and Application in Bangalore, India.
Postdoc Sean White was named one of this year’s 2009
Tech Award Laureates for his work addressing environmental issues.
Prof. Shree Nayar has developed a new camera, called Bigshot, that has been
designed to improve the way children learn about science and about one
another. The camera comes as a kit that students assemble while being exposed
to various science and engineering concepts.
Venue: 21st International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence
Talk Title: Learning from Data using Matchings and Graphs
Prof. Shree Nayar receives Carnegie Mellon University’s 2009
Alumni Achievement Award
Also appeared in ACM Tech News:
A scan of the Internet by Columbia University researchers searching for vulnerable embedded devices has found that nearly 21,000 routers, Webcams, and VoIP products are vulnerable to remote attack.
The National Cyber Defense Industry Workshop will take place on October 28-29, 2009 at the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington, DC. The workshop is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and will be limited to senior experts from the financial services industry, academia and government agencies. The workshop is one in a series organized by the National Cyber Defense Initiative Steering committee with support from several government organizations and leaders.
Prof. Kenneth Ross has been awarded an NSF grant to study how to effectively use multicore machines to perform data intensive computations typical of database systems. The project aims to provide a generic, programmer-friendly framework for performing certain kinds of concurrent operations in parallel. The system will automatically detect and respond to hotspots and other performance pitfalls.
Prof. Angelos Keromytis was invited to give a keynote talk on VoIP security at the 5th International Conference on Information Systems Security (ICISS), to be held December 16-18, 2008 in Kolkata, India.
PhD candidate David Elson was awarded the 2009 Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by Graduate Students during the PhD convocation.
Joseph F. Traub, the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science has been selected as a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). He was chosen in the initial class of Fellows.
Michele Merler, a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science, won a Yahoo Key Scientific Challenges Award, one of 20 such grants given this year by Yahoo Research.
The project “Active Networked Tags for Disaster Recovery Applications” won one of three Vodafone wireless innovation award. The project team consisted of Electrical Engineering faculty Gil Zussman, Peter Kinget, John Kymissis, and Xiaodong Wang and Computer Science Professor Dan Rubenstein.
Prof. Keromytis has been invited to give a talk at the Critical Infrastructure Protection Conference, to be held at City College New York in June 2009.
Prof. Keromytis will give a keynote address at the 2nd European Workshop on Systems Security (EuroSec), taking place in Nuremberg, Germany in March 2009.
Add to GMail