Indiana University Bloomington
School of Informatics and Computing
Focus on Faculty

In This Issue

Teaching Awards

Funded Research

Best Papers

Books

Keynote Addresses

Leadership and Service

Media Coverage

Submitting Newsletter Items

Issues Archive

December 2011

May 2011

October 2010

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

Teaching Awards

Eden Medina received the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award
"The university faces challenges in retaining the very best of its young faculty members," said Tom Gieryn, vice provost for faculty and academic affairs. "These awards recognize our exceptionally talented assistant professors while providing resources which enable them to continue their excellent research and scholarship in Bloomington." News release.

Inspiring Teachers   
Eden Medina (Informatics Undergrad teaching), Kris Hauser (Computer Science Graduate teaching), and Selma Sabanovic (Informatics Graduate Teaching) received the Women in Computing Inspirational Teacher Awards. 

IU Trustee's Teaching Awards for 2010-11 School Year:

Dan Friedman
Amr Sabry
David Leake
Suzanne Menzel

Funded Research

Collaborative Research Grants: SoIC was well-represented in the inaugural IU Collaborative Research Grants sponsored by Vice-President for Research Jorge Jose. Five SoIC faculty were included in the 18 project awards across the IU System:

Haixu Tang
Luis Rocha
Jonathan Mills
Andrew Lumsdaine
Kris Hauser

Beth Plale and the PTI Data to Insight Center are part of a collaborative research venture with the University of Illinois and the HathiTrust Digital Repository to develop cutting-edge software tools and digital infrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.
News release.

Eden Medina received a CITL Summer Program Writing-Teaching Grant.

Click here to view a listing of faculty research awards (August 2010 - April 2011).

Best Papers

A. Lumsdaine, T. Hoefler (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and T. Schneider (University of Technology Chemnitz), “Characterizing the Influence of System Noise on Large-Scale Applications by Simulation,” Best Paper award at the highly competitive Supercomputing conference (SC ’10) in New Orleans in November. "The committee believes that this is likely to be the definitive paper in a debate on the impact of system noise that has been going on for a decade," added Barbara Chapman, technical papers co-chair at Supercomputing 2010. News release.

Books

Doug Hofstadter and Ray Solomonoff at the NKS Midwest Conference 2005, Bloomington, INAdrian German was a contributor to a book, Randomness Through Computation (Some Answers, More Questions) that documents two international conferences held on the Bloomington campus in 2004 and 2007. The book is dedicated to Ray J. Solomonoff, who passed away in December 2009.

Doug Hofstadter and Ray Solomonoff at the NKS Midwest Conference 2005, Bloomington, IN. (Photo by Adrian German)

Keynote Addresses

Shaowen Bardzell was invited to speak at the annual 2010 Grace Hopper Conference, in the “New Voices in Human Computer Interaction” track. Read more.

Jean Camp, “Human Dimensions of Security,” Cyber Security Policy Forum, National Press Club, March 8, 2010, Washington, DC.

Jean Camp, “Computer Security and, versus, or Security Informatics,” Annual Meeting of the Consortium of Computing Sciences in Colleges, Southwestern Region, Loyola Marymount, April 2010, Los Angeles, CA.

Daniel Leivant, Collegium Logicum 2011 Workshop on Proof Theory, Ecole Polyhtchnique, February 28, 2011. Read more.

Daniel Leivant, DICE Second International Workshop (ETAPS 2011), April 2, 2011, Saarbrucken. Read more.

Daniel Leivant, CHOCO Workshop, Ecole Normale Superieur de Lyon. April 5, 2011. Read more.

Andrew Lumsdaine gave a distinguished lecture at the University of Houston on October 11, 2011.

David Wild was invited by the IU School of Medicine Center for Computational Biology and Bioninformatics to discuss algorithms for large-scale chemogenomic data mining in drug discovery. February 2011, Indianapolis.

Geoffrey Fox gave lead off presentations at two "Cyberinfrastructure Day" events at Minority Serving Institutions—University of Arkansas Pine Bluff on April 22 and South Carolina State University on March 3. These are part of an ongoing activity (the Minority Serving Institutions Cyberinfrastructure Empowerment Coalition) to encourage use of Cyberinfrastructure at Historically Black, Hispanic Serving, and Tribal Colleges and Universities. PowerPoint Presentation

Leadership and Service

Founding Dean Mike Dunn was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.

Dean Bobby Schnabel was named a fellow in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The organization specifically cited Bobby for "leadership of the computing community in education and diversity, and for contributions to numerical optimization." News release.

Geoffrey Fox was named a distinguished professor by President McRobbie - the rank of distinguished professor, the most prestigious academic appointment Indiana University can bestow upon its faculty, was created by the IU Board of Trustees in 1967. News release.

Eli Blevis was elected as CHI Sustainability Community Co-Chair.

Andrew Lumsdaine accepted invitations to: become the Associate Editor in Chief for the software area of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing; serve as the Chair of the software area of the HIPC 2011 Program Committee; serve on ACM Computing Classification Scheme (CCS) committee; serve on PPoPP 2012 conference program committee.

Alex Vespignani was elected to the editorial board of Mathematical Biosciences and PLOS One, and is co-directing the one-year long program on “complex networks” at the Statistical Applied Mathematics Science Institute (SAMSI).

Media Coverage

IUB’s Office for Women’s Affairs featured Shaowen Bardzell in its Spring 2011 issue of Majority Report.

Johan Bollen’s Twitter/Dow work was covered in the New York Times, Huffington Post, Dutch TV and Radio, CNBS, CNN, Bloomberg, BBC, France24, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Times, Forbes, Business Week, the Chicago Sun-Times, etc.  

Kelly Cain was featured in a cover story of the American Psychological Association’s gradPSYCH magazine on “Mixing it up: What are the pros and cons of aligning your self with a hybrid field.” She was also cited in a New York Times article and was an invited blogger on the Human Factors Blog.

David Crandall had a map featured in a Wall Street Journal article about Manhattan’s Street Grid.

Apu Kapadia’s work on Soundcomber got some significant coverage, including in blogs from Forbes and ComputerWorld, and in publications such as PC World. Read more.

Fil Menczer, Alessandro Flammini, Alex Vespignani, and Johan Bollen’s Truthy work was covered by Communications of the ACM, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, New Scientist, OC World, NPR, New York Times Magazine, Fast Company, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Discovery.

Andrew Lumsdaine’s plenoptic camera project was mentioned in Bloomberg Business Week.

XiaoFeng Wang and doctoral student Rui Wang were widely quoted (CNN, WFIU, WIBC, numerous print publications) for a study that found security flaws in a number of online commercial sites. News release.

Security doctoral students by Rui Wang and Zhou Li discovered a security vulnerability in Facebook that enabled malicious websites to impersonate legitimate websites, and then obtain the same data access permissions on Facebook that those legitimate websites had received. The work was covered in the Indianapolis Star, Bloomington Herald-Times, IDs, and a number of national publications. News release.

Christopher Raphael's article "The informatics philharmonic" was featured in Communications of the ACM, Volume 54, Issue 3, March 2011.

Submitting Newsletter Items

To submit items for the next newsletter, send them to newsletter@soic.indiana.edu.