CS Faculty News and Notes
Faculty in the Department of Computer Science recently have been singled out for honors and have had research proposals funded by the National Science Foundation and Google.
Professor Henryk Wozniakowski was honored recently by both the Polish Academy of Sciences and Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, Germany. Professor Wozniakowski was inducted into the Polish Academy of Sciences, a state-sponsored scientific academy founded in 1952. It has also become a major scientific advisory body through its scientific committees and currently consists of 346 Polish members, 18 of whom are mathematicians. Professor Wozniakowski was also selected to receive an honorary doctoral degree (Dr. rer. nat. hc) from Friedrich-Schiller University, which was founded in 1588. He was cited for his contribution to numerical methods, particularly the deep insights due to the new discipline of information-based complexity and the work on the "curse of dimensionality" that helps determine which high-dimension problems are solvable.
Associate Professor Angelos Keromytis has been appointed to the scientific advisory board of CERTH, the Center for Research and Technology, Hellas, by the Greek Ministry of Development. CERTH is the largest research centre in Northern Greece. Founded in 2000, CERTH is a non-profit organization that directly reports to the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Greek Ministry of Development. The center’s mission is to carry out fundamental and applied research with emphasis on development of novel products and services of industrial, economic and social importance in the fields of chemical and biochemical processes and advanced functional materials, informatics and telecommunications, land, sea and air transportation, agrobiotechnology and food engineering, environmentally friendly technologies for solid fuels and alternative energy sources, as well as biomedical informatics, biomedical engineering, biomolecular medicine and pharmacogenetics. Read about CERTH.
Assistant Professor Luca Carloni and Professor Keren Bergman of the Department of Electrical Engineering received a grant from the National Science Foundation entitled "Photonic Interconnection Networks for Chip-Multiprocessor Computing Systems.” The project proposal noted that the impact of communication on the performance of computer systems continues to grow both at the macro-level, for blade servers and clusters of computers, and at the micro-level in multi-core processors. Meanwhile the tight on-chip power dissipation constraints have forced practically all major semiconductor companies to move to multi-core or chip multiprocessor (CMP) architectures. The emergence of CMPs has in turn placed increased challenges on the communications infrastructure as the growing number of processing cores integrated on each chip exacerbates the bandwidth requirements for both intra-chip and inter-chip communication.
This research project aims to harness the recent extraordinary advances in nanoscale silicon photonic technologies for developing optical interconnection networks that address the critical bandwidth and power challenges of future CMP-based system. The insertion of photonic interconnection networks essentially changes the power scaling rules: once a photonic path is established, the data are transmitted end-to-end without the need for repeating, regeneration or buffering. This means that the energy for generating and receiving the data is only expended once per communication transaction anywhere across the computing system. The PIs will investigate the complete cohesive design of an on-chip optical interconnection network that employs nanoscale CMOS photonic devices and enables seamless off-chip communications to other CMP computing nodes and to external memory. System-wide optical interconnection network architectures will be specifically studied in the context of stream processing models of computation.
Associate Professor Luis Gravano, together with his graduate student Hila Becker, have received a research gift from Google to improve local event search. The project focuses on two problems associated with local event search—how to identify events of all sizes, including small, not-so-prominent events not necessarily covered in mainstream sources, and how to determine the "geographical scope" of events beyond their explicit location. The project will use the wealth and variety of sources that are available over the Web to identify and characterize events, in turn to produce expressive, high-quality local event search results.
