News and Events from and for the Division of Science, Brandeis University
The Computer Science Dept blog passed on the report from the New Scientist that Harald Halfgott ’98 (Math/Co Sci), now working at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, has proved the odd (weak) Goldbach conjecture, which states that every odd number above 5 is the sum of three primes. For the paper “Major Arcs for Goldbach’s Problem”, see http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.2897
see also: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/2013/05/15/goldbach-variations/
According to BrandeisNOW, Xiru Zhang, PhD ’91, has made a lead gift to help establish the David Waltz Fellowship at Brandeis in hopes of broadening the participation of women and minorities in the field of artificial intelligence. The gift is to honor Waltz, who died in March 2012, as a nurturing mentor, an inspiring colleague, a giving co-worker and a longtime friend. Waltz and Zhang worked together for six years Zhang pursued his doctorate in computer science (the first awarded in computer science from Brandeis, simultaneously interacting as professor-student at Brandeis and as senior scientist-research scientist at Cambridge-based Thinking Machines.
“No one had a greater influence on my academic and science research career than David Waltz,” says Zhang, “He was my mentor, and he was also my friend.”
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Olga Papaemmanouil has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a highly selective grant that the National Science Foundation awards to junior faculty members who are likely to become academic leaders of the future.
The research project funded by Olga’s CAREER grant (“Towards Extensible Performance Management for Cloud Data Services“) aims to a) develop declarative mechanisms that allow application developers to express custom performance criteria for data processing tasks and b) exploit the properties of these mechanisms to design extensible resource, workload and Service-Level-Agreement (SLA) management services for cloud databases.
The project also includes the design and development of XCloud, an extensible cloud-based platform that will unify these services into a usable cloud utility. The XCloud platform is expected to have a significant research and educational impact as it will act as a test-bed for new performance models and diverse performance management techniques for cloud databases facilitating research and innovation in the emerging domain.
The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.
Olga received her B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, and completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Brown University in 2008. She joined the Computer Science Department at Brandeis in January 2009.
Other Brandeis science faculty receiving CAREER grants since 2010 include Christine Thomas (Chemistry), Aparna Baskaran, Matthew Headrick, and Zvonimir Dogic (all Physics).
The Brandeis Alumni Association is hosting the first-ever Computer Science (COSI) High Tech Alumni Leadership Conference. An exciting day has been planned with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, technical directors, lead engineers, and academics who will discuss the latest advances, trends and innovations. Adam Cheyer ’88, co-founder of Siri Inc. and director of engineering at Apple, will open the program and receive the inaugural Brandeis Computer Science Entrepreneur of the Year award. For a full list of speakers, see http://alumni.brandeis.edu/web/special_programs/cosi_brandeis/cosi_speaker.html
COSI High Tech Alumni Leadership Conference
Friday, November 2, 2012
Sachar International Center, Wasserman Cinematheque
8:30 a.m.- 5:30 p.m.
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Artificial Intelligence luminaries from across the nation gathered at Brandeis on Sunday Sept 23 to honor David Waltz, who was a professor at Brandeis from 1984-1993 and who passed away in March from cancer. Organized by Prof. Jordan Pollack with sponsorship from Brandeis, AAAI, and Ab Initio Software, the day long event featured keynotes and panels from 6 different phases of Waltz’s career reflecting on his work and his leadership. A complete schedule follows the break and video, when available, is on the Computer Science website.
With the advent of web applications and mobile devices, students in Computer Science are becoming more and more entrepreneurial during their stay at university. A stream or new and intriguing applications built by students has been emerging from Brandeis.
Studifi ® is a collaboration platform for students, developed by Thomas Lextrait, graduate student at Brandeis. It is hosted in the cloud and offers free service. Students can use Studifi to find, manage and collaborate(*) on projects, while instructors can use it to manage student teams within their classes. The platform allows students to find teammates within their classes as well as look for projects at other universities across the globe.
Studifi generates revenue by allowing landlords to post local apartments and companies to post jobs. These are matched with students to create targeted yet relevant advertisement, adding value to the platform.
(*) Brandeis students should consult course instructors before collaborating on projects, and should be cognizant of the rules laid out in section 4 of the Rights and Responsibilities handbook.
The JBS Computer Science Product Showcase will take place on Thursday 8/2/2012 in the main Auditorium of the Mandel Center from 2:00-4:00
Tim Hickey and Pito Salas will present a short overview of this year’s Justice Brandeis Semester in Web Applications and Social Networks, and then each of four student groups will present the product they created this summer. There are four products that involve a database-backed web application and possibly a mobile component as well. The products are listed below, with a little suggestion of their purpose:
- Spy Game: a new genre of Augmented Reality phone games
- WikiWitness: an archive for first person reports of historical events
- Volunteerhours.org: LinkedIn for volunteers
- Where’s My Lane: civic hacking for Boston bike commuters
The JBS program covered not only the technical aspects of how to create a database backed website that could efficiently handle hundreds of millions of records, but also covered the practice of computer science and software entrepreneurship. The students will give 10-15 minute presentations with 5-10 minutes of discussion.
Followup: story at BrandeisNOW
From the Computer Science Department blog:
James Pustejovsky and his student Amber Stubbs have a new book “Natural Language Annotation for Machine Learning” out from O’Reilly Books and Media: “Systems exist for analyzing existing corpora, but making a new corpus can be extremely complex. To help you build a foundation for your own machine learning goals, this easy-to-use guide includes case studies that demonstrate four different annotation tasks in detail. You’ll also learn how to use a lightweight software package for annotating texts and adjudicating the annotations.”
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