Indiana University Bloomington
School of Informatics and Computing
Focus on Faculty

In This Issue

Awards

Funded Research

Best Papers

Books

Keynote Addresses

Leadership and Service

Media Coverage

New Faculty

Submitting Newsletter Items

Issues Archive

December 2011

May 2011

October 2010

December 2011  
This edition of Focus on Faculty includes our considerable faculty achievements for the past six months.

Awards

The Association for Computing Machinery has recognized Geoffrey C. Fox for his exceptional contributions to computing by naming him a 2011 Fellow. He was specifically recognized for contributions to software applications for high-performance computing and for diversity outreach. Read more.

Dean Bobby Schnabel was honored by the White House as a "Champion of Change" for his efforts to advance tech opportunites for women. Champions of Change is a program created as a part of President Barack Obama's Winning the Future initiative. Read more.

XiaoFeng Wang and Haixu Tang, along with graduate students Rui Wang, Yong Fuga Li and Xiaoyong Zhou, were awarded the 2011 Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies (the PET Award) for their paper, "Learning our Identity and Disease from Research Papers: Information Leaks in Genome WideAssociation Study." Xiaofeng Wang was also on the team whose paper entitled "Side-Channel Leaks in Web Applications: a Reality Today, a Challenge Tomorrow," was honored as a runner-up in the same competition.

Funded Research

Alessandro Flammini (PI), Fil Menczer (Co-PI) and Geoffrey Fox received word that their DARPA proposal "Detecting Early Signatures of Persuasion in Information Cascades" for $2M was recommended for funding. IU will lead the project, with subcontractors from the University of Michigan and Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs.

Andrew Lumsdaine received an $811,924 grant from the NSF for a project that will enable and facilitate efficient execution of dynamic graph applications on current terascale and petascale systems. Researchers will develop a comprehensive and integrated hardware and software system for scalable graph execution.

Beth Plale received a $606K Sloan Foundation grant for a three-year project to develop a working solution that will provide non-consumptive computational access to copyrighted texts such as are in HathiTrust. The virtual solution, similar to the physical security of a library, will build a "data capsule framework" prototype that allows scholars the freedom to experiment with new algorithms on a huge body of information, but with technological "trust but verify" mechanisms in place to confirm compliance with non-consumptive research policy.

Kay Connelly and Kelly Caine were awarded a $500K NSF grant to help older adults age in place. News release.

Fil Menczer (PI) and Alessandro Flammini (Co-PI) received a $450K McDonnell Foundation grant "Contagion of ideas in online social networks.” Read more.

Peter Todd (Informatics and Cognitive Science), Jerome Busemeyer (Psychological and Brain Sciences), and Edward Castronova (Telecommunications) have received a multi-year grant through the Air Force Research Lab to study the application of serious games to helping people make better, less-biased, decisions. Todd was also part of a $172K Mellon Foundation grant to host a Sawyer Seminar titled "Food Choice, Freedom, and Politics." The three-part seminar by Todd and Richard Wilk (Anthropology) marks only the second time IU has successfully submitted a proposal for a Sawyer Seminar.

Marty Siegel and Erik Stolterman received a $467,066 three-year grant that will conduct research focused on bridging the gap between researchers who are developing new tools, techniques, and methods to support the design of innovative interactive digital products and services and the reality that practitioners in industry experience. Their proposal is made up of five major studies and activities, and will lead to building insights and principles suitable for practitioners on how to strategize and handle their choice and use of design tools, techniques, and methods.

Principal Research Scientist Kelly Caine has been awarded a grant from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to collaborate with researchers at Regenstreif Institute to develop approaches to implement greater patient choice in health information sharing. See Modern Healthcare article "ONC to pilot test PCAST recommendations" (relevant portion pointing to Caine's part of the work is the last sentence, "...developing a user interface allowing patients to have more granular control over the management and sharing of their health information").

David Crandall, along with Chen Yu (Psychology), received an internal Faculty Support Research Program grant on "Understanding Active Vision and Sensorimotor Dynamics in Autistic and Typically Developing Children."

Click here to view a listing of faculty research awards (April 2011- November 2011).

Best Papers

David Crandall was part of the team that was awarded Best Paper Honorable Mention at the annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Colorado Springs this summer. Read more.

V. Garg, L. Jean Camp & N. Husted, “The Smuggling Theory Approach to Organized Digital Crime.” Sixth Annual APWG eCrime Researchers Summit, November 8-9, 2011 (San Diego, CA). Received best paper award. Read more.

"How to Shop for Free Online — Security Analysis of Cashier-as-a-Service Based Web Stores," by associate professor XiaoFeng Wang, Microsoft Research's Shuo Chen and Shaz Qadeer, and SOIC doctoral student Rui Wang was awarded Best Practical Paper at the 32nd annual Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Symposium on Security and Privacy. News release.

Books

Kai Hwang, Geoffrey Fox, and Jack Dongarra’s book, Distributed and Cloud Computing: From Parallel Processing to the Internet of Things was published by Morgan Kaufman.

Eden Medina’s book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile was published by MIT Press. Read more.

Keynote Addresses

Geoffrey Fox presented the following keynote addresses: "Cloud Cyberinfrastructure and its Challenges & Applications" at PPAM 2011, Torun, Poland, September 14, 2011; "Data Intensive Applications on Clouds" at The Second International Workshop on Data Intensive Computing in the Clouds (DataCloud-SC11) at SC11, November 14, 2011; "Sensors and other Data Intensive Applications on Clouds" at the 2011 International Conference on Cloud and Green Computing (CGC2011, SCA2011, DASC2011, PICom2011, EmbeddedCom2011) University of Technology Sydney, Australia, December 13, 2011; "Data Intensive Applications on Clouds, International Workshop on Future Internet and Cloud Computing," Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, December 16, 2011.

Daniel Leivant did an invited talk at the sixth ANR/Complice workshop. Read more.

Eden Medina delivered the keynote "The Geopolitics of Ethical Computing" at ETHICOMP in Sheffield, England. Read more.

Thomas Sterling presented the keynote address at this year’s IEEE International Cluster Computing Conference in Austin, Texas. Sterling’s talk was entitled “The New Cluster Paradigm for Exascale Computing.” He also gave a talk entitled “Towards an Execution Model-Driven IESP X-stack Strategy” at the Juelich Supercomputing Centre, and he delivered the banquet address at the DOE ASCR Exascale PI meeting in Annapolis, Maryland with a presentation entitled “Exascale or End-Game: On the Anvil of the S-curve.”

Leadership and Service

Jeff Bardzell is Associate Chair for ACM CSCW (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work) 2012; Associate Chair for ACM CHI 2012; and Co-Chair for Videos of the program committee for ACM CHI 2012.

Shaowen Bardzell is on the editorial board for Interacting with Computers (Elsevier), a journal that is consistently ranked as one of the top five of all HCI journals; co-chairing the Student Research Competition for CHI2012, and Associate Chair for CHI2012, CSCW2012, and DIS 2012.

Kelly Caine was elected to the Executive Committee of the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) Read more.

Matt Hottell is a service learning fellow for the IU Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning for the 2011-12 academic year. He also serves on the Office for Service Learning Board of Advisors.

Eden Medina chaired the 2011 committee for the IEEE Life Member's Prize in Electrical History; in addition, she was named a Fulbright Senior Specialist in the area of engineering education. With funds from the Fulbright foundation, the U.S. Department of State, and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, Medina will spend spring 2012 in Santiago, Chile developing ways to integrate social informatics into the computer science curriculum at the School of Engineering at the University of Chile.

Fil Menczer was invited to join the Editorial Board of EPJ Data Science, a new journal; is co-chair of the social networks track for the WWW 2012 Conference; and was appointed interim director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research.

Suzanne Menzel is an editor of the ACM-W CIS newsletter, whose mission is to celebrate, inform, and support women in computing. Read more.

Thomas Sterling is a member of the Steering Committee of the ICCC.

Media Coverage

Jeffrey and Shaowen Bardzell's research on the 3rd-wave of HCI (where users interact with machines on an emotional level) and designerly sex toys is featured in MIT's Technology Review. Read more.

Johan Bollen’s Twitter/Dow work has received extensive media coverage including CNBC, NPR, The London Times, BBC, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, New Scientist, and Huffington Post as well as many others in the US and Europe. Johan founded a start-up, Guidewave Consulting, and signed a deal with a London-based hedge fund through the IURTC to market the technology behind this work.

Kay Connelly and Kelly Caine’s grant on aging was covered by Health Care Finance News and Senior Housing News.

The Truthy Team (Fil Menczer, Alessandro Flammini, Johan Bollen and Alessandro Vespignani) had their work featured in the Wall Street Journal (print and online), Science, Columbia Journalism Review, The Atlantic Wire, CTV, CBC News, and the Australian Broadcasting Company. View the Wall Street Journal video.

A special issue of Interacting with Computers on "Feminism and HCI: New Perspectives" was released on Oct 26, 2011. This special issue is co-edited by Shaowen Bardzell and Yahoo! Research’s Elizabeth Churchill. Bardzell and Churchill also contributed an Editor’s Introduction (10,000 words), which motivates the topic, maps out the vision of a research agenda, and introduces each of the papers in the issue. The special issue is Volume 23, Issue 5 and can be accessed here.

Kelly Caine is quoted in NPR’s All Things Considered broadcast on password security. She was also featured in I3P podcast on human factors in security.

New Faculty

The School welcomes four new faculty this year.

AhnAssistant Professor Yong-Yeol Ahn received his PhD in physics in 2008 at KAIST (formerly known as the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) in South Korea. His research focuses on the structure and dynamics of complex systems, such as society and living organisms. He will join the School's complex systems group.



NewtonAssistant Professor Ryan Newton, who holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from IU, completed his PhD at MIT where he worked in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). His research interests include compiler construction, language design, and novel parallel architectures. He will be a member of the computer science faculty and teach an advanced topics class on domain-specific languages this fall.


SterlingProfessor Thomas Sterling comes to IU from Louisiana State University where he was the Arnaud and Edwards Professor of Computer Science. After receiving his PhD from MIT as a Hertz Fellow, he worked at the Harris Corporation, the IDA Supercomputing Research Center, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, and the University of Maryland before taking a joint appointment as a principal scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and as a faculty associate at Caltech's Center for Advanced Computing Research. Dr. Sterling is best known as the "father of Beowulf" for his pioneering research in commodity/Linux cluster computing. He is currently involved in several projects that are developing the MIND architecture, an advanced computing component sponsored by NASA. Sterling will share an appointment with the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology (OVPIT).

SwanyAssociate Professor D. Martin Swany comes to IU from the University of Delaware's Department of Computer and Information Sciences. A 2004 recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator award, his research interests include high-performance parallel and distributed computing and networking. He will be teaching a class on advanced operating systems this fall. Like Professor Sterling, Swany will share an appointment with the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology (OVPIT).

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