In This Issue:

NSF Early Career Awards

Grads and Frosh

Professor Morton Klein

Teaching Prizes Given

Young Alums Needed

Alumni Briefs

Homecoming 2001

School Mourns WTC Victims

FEATURE STORY

Early Career Awards to Six SEAS Faculty

Hoe I. Ling, associate professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics

Six members of the Engineering faculty, representing four departments, have received National Science Foundation Early Career Awards totaling more than $2 million. Computer scientists Jason Nieh and William Stafford Noble are investigating computers as a utility and computational biology and computers, respectively, while IEOR’s Garud Iyengar and Jay Sethuraman are concentrating on finding solutions to problems ranging from investing to routing packets on the Internet. In civil engineering, Hoe Ling is researching the use of polymer materials to reinforce soil to help soil structures withstand earthquakes, while Rastislav Levicky, a chemical engineer, is working on methods for analyzing biological samples in doctors’ offices and in the field.

“We are very proud that we have so many faculty receiving Early Career Development Awards in one year,” said Dean Zvi Galil. NSF established the awards, ranging from $250,000 to $450,000 for up to five years, to recognize the career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of this century.

Jason Nieh, assistant professor of computer science

These young researchers exemplify the new approach to interdisciplinary study of the same areas,” said Dean Galil. “We have a computer scientist and chemical engineer working on genetics while faculty members in IEOR, computer science and civil engineering work with software and hardware, each using the perspective of his own specialty.”
Two faculty members from different departments are working in areas that will impact on our newfound knowledge of the human genome. William Noble, assistant professor of computer science, is developing machine-learning techniques that can place genes into discrete functional categories to simplify the problem of inferring gene function from genomic data. “It’s like building a gene finder,” he said. “The focus is to develop software that will allow a biologist to learn about proteins. In a sense, it is building an artificial intelligence that can combine knowledge from various types of genomic data to understand the cell at the molecular level.”

Rastislav Levicky, assistant professor of chemical engineering

Rastislav Levicky, assistant professor of chemical engineering, is working on new, high performance formats to interpret and identify genetic information. Using DNA chips, with known DNA attached to a surface such as glass, a solution of unknown DNA is placed above the surface. Observations are made on how it binds with the DNA on the surface; where there is binding, there is similarity of genetic information. This information then can be used for medical diagnosis, drug development, and forensics. “My group is working on ways to make these measurements more robust so that fewer constraints exist on conditions and the kinds of samples amenable to analysis. We hope to decrease the level of sample preprocessing, so that specimens can be rapidly analyzed in the field,” he said.

Jay Sethuraman, assistant professor of industrial engineering and operations research

Garud Iyengar, assistant professor of IEOR, is working on research in three areas of optimization, one of which is robust portfolio selection. “I am developing investment strategies that protect against risks associated with imperfect knowledge of the economic indicators driving the market,” he said. In addition, his research will cover pattern recognition algorithms for medical diagnosis that systematically reduce the errors caused by outliers and will work to create robust networks of optical fibers that can quickly recover from faults.

Jason Nieh, assistant professor of computer science, is concentrating on building a wide-area public computing utility. “My research is on the underlying technology to support a subscription-based service that provides global access to your own data, the latest versions of all application software, backed-up and available from any Internet connection, 24/7,” he said.

Garud Iyengar, assistant professor of industrial engineering and operations research

This will include creating a professionally-managed scalable data center with effective remote display and resource management mechanisms to ensure fast data access from even portable handheld and appliance devices. “Like the telephone, it will be simple to use and available anywhere,” said Nieh.

IEOR assistant professor Jay Sethuraman is also concentrating on computer systems, specifically scheduling and routing on the Internet network. Since information is sent in packets, it may be transmitted in a different order and it is all collected and sorted at the point of destination. Different kinds of data—email, file transfers, video, etc. —require different qualities of service. “I’m working on how to route packets so that these guarantees are met at minimum cost. It is a traditional job shop problem that we solve by making some additional assumptions, which will give us a solution that is not optimal but is close to optimal,” he said.

Hoe I. Ling, associate professor of civil engineering, will be creating a web-based software package, Java Geotech, to aid in understanding earthquake engineering. His primary research goal is to study the use of polymers in reinforcing soil to withstand earthquakes. “In large earthquakes, it is acceleration that is important, even more important than magnitude when one is talking about design,” said Ling. He will be testing soil structures reinforced with polymers using an earthquake shaking table in Japan that can shake both horizontally and vertically. This will aid in understanding how to design polymer-reinforced soil retaining walls to withstand strong earthquake shaking. Results from the shaking table tests will be used to validate computerized design procedures using the finite element method to enable cost-effective and more reliable design of structures in the future.

These research proposals contain a significant educational component. Some will result in undergraduate and graduate courses, web-based courses, Java-based applets to allow students to experiment in real time, experimental high school science units that demonstrate science and engineering principles using everyday materials, and a new pedagogical structure for undergraduates to help them learn through research-type, objective-driven projects.

As Dean Galil said, “These awards support exceptionally promising junior faculty members who are committed to the integration of research and education, an important duality that we encourage at the School.”