Computer Science at Yale

Dan Spielman has been named one of the first Simons Investigators. This new program provides long term funding to outstanding investigators to pursue fundamental research.

Brian Scassellati and his research group are the subjects of a short film at the LA Film Festival.

Joan Feigenbaum is one of the invited speakers at the LICS 2012 plenary session being held in honor of Alan Turing on the occasion of his centenary.

"Exact Recovery of Sparsely-Used Dictionaries" by Daniel Spielman (Yale), Huan Wang (Yale) and John Wright (Columbia), has been selected as best paper in the COLT 2012 Conference.

Congratulations to 2012 Degree Recipients!

The Simon's Foundation has commissioned an article featuring the work of Dan Spielman, which can be read here.

Prof. Brian Scassellati is the lead PI on a newly awarded $10 million NSF "Expedition in Computing" grant entitled "Making Socially Assistive Robots." See announcements at NSF and Yale News.

Prof. Dan Spielman has been elected to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering in recognition of his contribution to the advancement of science. Yale News story.

Prof. Joan Feigenbaum was presented with the Academic Innovation and Leadership award at the 2012 Women of Innovation Awards sponsored by the Connecticut Technology Council at a gala dinner on March 1st.

Prof. Bryan Ford has been awarded an NSF CAREER award for his work “From Storm Clouds to EverClouds: Heading Off Long-Term Cloud Computing Risks”.

Julie Dorsey has been appointed as the new Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics, with her term beginning January 1, 2012.

Postdoctoral fellow Georgios Zervas, together with collaborators at BU and Harvard, recently discovered and resolved a threat to personal-data security on Yelp. See the full story.

The ACM Regional Collegiate Programming Contest of the Greater New York Region (ACMGNYR), perhaps the most prestigious annual contest in our area, took place Sunday October 30th 2011. Yale’s freshmen team came in 1st in the freshman/sophomore category and came in 10th place overall. Michael Hopkins ’15, Cyril Zhang ’15, and Xiao Shi ’15 each received $100 for the accomplishment. Yale’s other teams obtained 7th and 27th places out of 51 teams competing. Details.

A Yale start up called Hadapt, co-founded by computer science professors Daniel Abadi and Avi Silberschatz, along with current CEO Justin Borgman SOM ’12 and Kamil Bajda-Pawlikowski GRD ’15, has secured funds to expand. See full story.

Dan Spielman's work is featured in an article in the October 2011 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society http://www.ams.org/notices/201109/rtx110901288p.pdf.

President Richard C. Levin has announced the appointment of Computer Science chair to Holly Rushmeier. She replaces Avi Silberschatz, who served as chair for two terms. The appointment is effective July 1st.

Congratulations to Computer Science 2011 degree recipients!

Holly Rushmeier has been named a fellow of the Eurographics Association in recognition of her leadership role in the computer graphics field; her technical contributions to computer graphics through both basic and use-inspired research; her contributions to scholarly publishing through chief-editorships of leading journals and advisory boards; her direct contributions to Eurographics, most recently as co-chief editor of Computer Graphics Forum. The full citation can be found here.

Daniel Spielman has been named ACM Fellow for contributions to the design and analysis of algorithms. Also among the new Fellows is Yale Alumnus Doug Burger. See a complete list of 2010 Fellows and the news release here.

Daniel Spielman has been named one of the winners of the Best Paper Award for the annual Association for Computing Machinery
(ACM) Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), to be held in June. The paper, "Electrical Flows, Laplacian Systems, and Faster Approximation of Maximum Flow in Undirected Graphs," was written with Paul Christiano, Jonathan Kelner and Aleksander Madry of M.I.T. and with Shang-Hua Teng of U.S.C.

Mathematics visiting fellow Willard Miranker passed away at the age of 79 on Wednesday, April 27th. Prior to joining the Mathematics Department in 2010, he was an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department, joining the department in 1989.

Hongqiang Liu, a doctoral student working in Prof. Richard Yang's group, has been selected as one of 10 recipients of the Cascadia Innovation Fellowship from about 300 applicants from colleges in the U.S. and Canada. Congratulations!

Michael Nowlan has received a 2011 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. His application was selected by the DoD from over 2,900 submitted applications that were received this year. Congratulations!

Dana Angluin is one of six teachers who was awarded a Yale College teaching prize on April 25th for classroom excellence in inspiring undergraduate students. Read more.

Jenny Liu, a high school student working with Brian Scassellati's group, has been named one of the 40 Intel Science Talent Search finalists. A complete list of the Intel STS finalists can be found here.

In December, Avi Silberschatz was elected by the AAAS Council as a Fellow of AAAS. Individuals elected will be recognized for their contributions to science and technology at the Fellows Forum to be held in February during the AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The new Fellows will receive a certificate and a blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their distinguished accomplishments.

Thank you to everyone who entered the Computer Science Poetry Contest, held in conjunction with the Grace Hopper Birthday and Computer Science Education Week Celebration on December 8th. Entries can be viewed here.

Congratulations to Eleanor Avrunin, who was selected as a finalist in the CRA Outstanding Undergraduates Research Awards.

Daniel Spielman named the Henry Ford II Professor. Read Yale Daily Bulletin article.

Yale sent two teams to Rutgers University, coached by Bryan Ford and Yitzchak Lockerman, on Sunday, October 24th for the regional contest of the Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest. Read Yale Daily News article.

Amittai Aviram, Shu-Chun Weng, Sen Hu, and Bryan Ford received the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award at OSDI 2010 for their paper, Efficient System-Enforced Deterministic Parallelism.

Professor Vladimir Rokhlin has been selected as the recipient for the ICIAM Maxwell Prize in 2011. He is being recognized for his research in the area of fast multipole methods. His research has revolutionized the field of numerical electromagnetism for radar and molecular dynamics for chemistry, among others. Details.

DBMS Musings: The problems with ACID, and how to fix them without going NoSQL, Daniel Abadi and Alexander Thomson

Daniel Spielman, professor of computer science and applied mathematics, has won the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize, one of the highest honors in the field of mathematics. Details.

Congratulations 2009-2010 Degree Recipients!

Yale University Commencement, May 24th, 2010

Two CS majors, Chris Riederer '10 and Henry Corrigan-Gibbs '10, win Microsoft US Imagine Cup 2010, an annual competition that awards prizes to young people for their technological innovations.

Professor Michael Fischer is featured in an article in the Yale Bulletin on figure skating, Being ‘Pretty Good’ Is Not Enough for Skating Computer Scientist. Read article.

Professors Julie Dorsey and Holly Rushmeier have received a Google Research Award for their project, "Sketch-Based Exploration of the Relationship Between Built Form and Landscape." Congratulations to both!

Congratulations to the two teams sent by Yale to the Greater New York Regionals of the ACM Collegiate Programming Contest, held at Hofstra University, Hempstead NY on Sunday, October 18th. Full details (including both problems and standings) will be available soon at http://www.acmgnyr.org/.

On August 23rd, Daniel Spielman was awarded the 2009 Fulkerson Prize for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics. It was awarded at ISMP by the Mathematical Programming Society and the American Mathematical Society. Congratulations!

Computer Science Degree Recipients 2008-09 Congratulations!

Richard Alimi has been awarded an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award.

Paul Hudak has been interviewed by InfoQ regarding the philosophy of higher order programming, the success and influence of Haskell, its use in the mainstream, and the idea of teaching computer music and Haskell simultaneously. Watch the interview.

Christopher Crick is the winner of the 2009 Higher-Level Cognition Modeling Prize at the 2009 Cognitive Science conference for his paper Intention-based Robot Control in Social Games.

Congratulations to Elaine Short, class of 2010, on winning the 2009 Google US Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship.

Both Brian Scassellati and Richard Yang have been granted tenure by the Board of Permanent Officers, composed of full professors in Yale College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Congratulations go out to both.

Avi Silberschatz has recently been elected to the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE). It is in recognition of his sustained, pioneering research contributions to diverse areas of computer systems, for the design and productization of leading-edge system technologies, and for outstanding contributions to Computer Science education. (Taken from the CASE announcement.) Congratulations on this honor!

Daniel Abadi, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, has received notification from NSF regarding his CAREER grant proposal, Architecting a Database Management System for Semantic Web Data. He has been informed that it has been funded for 5 years. Congratulations to Professor Abadi.

Computer science major Justin Kosslyn '09, had an article in Yale Daily News, published January 12, Elegance, not tech support, The World Beautiful. Read article.


Paul Hudak, Master of Saybrook College

President Richard Levin accounced on January 15th that Paul Hudak, Professor of Computer Science, will be the ninth master of Saybrook College, taking over the post from Edward Kamens. His term will last five years, beginning July 1, 2009. Yale Daily News article.

Results from the Greater New York Regionals of the ACM Programming Contest, held at St. Joseph's College in Patchogue, NY on Sunday, October 26th. Two teams from Yale participated.

The Yale Computer Science Department is deeply saddened by the untimely death of Robert Dunne on August 16th, who joined the Department faculty in 1999. He was well-known for his lecture, Computers and the Law, which was among the University's most heavily enrolled courses. In 2006, he was awarded the William Clyde DeVane Medal, the highest honor conferred for undergraduate teaching at Yale. He was held in high esteem by both his colleagues and students and will be greatly missed by everyone. Yale Daily News article.
A memorial service was held at Battel Chapel on September 13th.

Joan Feigenbaum discusses issues of controlling availability and use of private and sensitive information in a Yale University Engineering and Technology podcast.

Joan Feigenbaum has been interviewed by Computerworld magazine regarding" the problem with encryption, the need for 'information accountability' and what's wrong with role models". Read full article.

Victor Cheng, CS major -- balances practice, books and business -- written up in College Sports at ESPN.com. Read article.

A former CS PhD graduate, Steven A. Gold, passed away on July 4, 2008. He was founder and CEO of GraphLogic Inc., a cutting edge software company in Branford, Connecticut. NY Times death notice.

Joan Feigenbaum has been appointed the inaugural Grace Murray Hopper Professor of Computer Science. Details.

ACM's Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computing Theory (SIGACT) honors Daniel Spielman and Shang-Hua with 2008 Gödel Prize for helping computers solve practical problems. Details.

Stanley Eisenstat has been awarded the Dylan Hixon '88 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

Brian Scassellati gets Microsoft “Breakthrough Research Award” for Robotics. Details.

Yale hosted the 2008 NSF Cyber Trust PI Meeting.
(http://www.cs.yale.edu/cybertrust08/)

Vladimir Rokhlin has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer. Academy membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice, or education.

On February 7, 2008 the Yale College Faculty approved a new major on
“Computing and the Arts.” The new major is designed for students interested in
integrating work in computing and one of the arts disciplines: Art, History
of Art, Music or Theater Studies.

Joan Feigenbaum has been added to the Science Council for the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI), along with 3 others. The new members will join 15 current members of the council in providing scientific guidance for the GENI project -- a proposed experimental facility to allow research on a wide variety of problems in communications, networking, and distributed systems.

Julie Dorsey won a fellowship to support development of innovative teaching materials for CPSC 179, Digital Photorealism.

Professor Paul Hudak received the Most Influential ICFP Paper Award for the paper Functional Reactive Animation, written jointly with Conal Elliott, and presented in 1997 at the ACM International Conference on Functional Programming. The award is presented annually by ACM to the authors of an ICFP paper that is judged to be the most influential paper in the past ten years. Hudak and Elliott were presented their award on October 2 at the annual conference, held this year in Freiburg, Germany.

Daniel Abadi won the VLDB-2007 Best Paper award, 33rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases September 23-27 2007, University of Vienna, Austria.

Kevin Gold and Marek Doniec won the Best Paper award at the 6th IEEE
International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL 2007) for the
paper "Learning grounded semantics with word trees: prepositions and
pronouns" coauthored with faculty member Brian Scassellati.

Lev Reyzin won the Best Student Paper Award at the 20th Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2007) for the paper "Learning Large-Alphabet and Analog Circuits with Value Injection Queries" coauthored with faculty members Dana Angluin and James Aspnes, and Jiang Chen of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University.

Tom Kempner – a Yale 1975 Alumni with a B.A. in Computer Science – has agreed to establish the Thomas L. Kempner, Jr. Fellowship Fund, which will provide support to Ph.D. students in Computer Science. The fund’s initial value is about $2,200,000. Tom graduated magna cum laude from Yale. After Yale, Tom went to Harvard Business School where he obtained his M.B.A. He is the Executive Managing Member of Davidson Kempner Capital Management LLC, a New York-based hedge fund with $12 billion of assets under management. Tom’s son Nathaniel Kempner graduated from Yale in 2005 with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and his son Trevor Kempner is a Theatre Studies major in the Class of 2009.

David Gelernter wrote an article that appears in Forbes 90th Anniversary issue, The Inside-Out Web, May 7, 2007.

The National Science Foundation awarded graduate research fellowships to two Computer Science students: senior Emily Pitler (Artificial Intelligence) and graduate student Lev Reyzin (Machine Learning).

Could robots help provide better diagnostic tools for children with autism? An article in Monitor on Psychology, APA online, discussing autism research being conducted by Brian Scassellati and his team.

Brian Scassellati has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Press Release.

Yale sent four teams to the Greater New York Regionals of the ACM Collegiate Programming Contest on October 29th. Full details (including both problems and standings) will be available soon at http://www.acmgnyr.org/. Lev Reyzin won the Best Student Paper Award at the 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2006) for his work with Robert Schapire on "How Boosting the Margin Can Also Boost Classifier Complexity."

Holly Rushmeier has recently been promoted to a Distinguished ACM Member, having achieved a significant impact on the computing field.

Collin Jackson, BS '04, is part of the team that won the 2006 Computerworld Horizon Award for anti-phishing tool PwdHash. Details.

John Fujii, BS '87, was presented the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Service Award at the recent SIGGRAPH conference held in Boston. John is the seventh recipient of the award, which is presented once every two years. John is an advanced graphics software engineer for the Hewlett-Packard Workstations in Fort Collins, Colorado. Fred Shic won Best Applied Computational Modeling Paper at the 28th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. The paper was based on collaboration with Ami Klin and Fred Volkmar at the Yale Child Study Center (Shic F, Jones W, Klin A, Scassellati B., Swimming in the Underlying Stream: Computational Models of Gaze in a Comparative Behavioral Analysis of Autism). CogSci is the primary conference venue for the Cognitive Science Society. Vladimir Rokhlin has been named recipient of the 2006 IEEE Honorary Membership. Sponsored by the IEEE, the award honors Rokhlin for his invention of fast multipole methods (FMM), a revolutionary way for engineers and scientists to solve tough problems. Details.Robert Dunne, who was recently named Senior Lecturer, has been voted recipient of the undergraduate PBK DeVane Medal. Each year the Alpha of Connecticut confers the DeVane Medal on members of the faculty who have distinguished themselves as teachers of undergraduates in Yale College and as scholars in their fields. Pictures and speech.Yale sent four teams to the Greater New York Regionals of the ACM Collegiate Programming Contest, held at Nassau Community College (Garden City, NY, on Long Island) October 29th. Full details (including both problems and standings) will be available soon at http://www.acmgnyr.org/. Congratulations to all who participated.