Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Bio:
Kleinberg’s research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other on-line media. He is the recipient of a 2005 MacArthur Fellowship and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a recipient of the Packard and Sloan Foundation Fellowships, the Nevanlinna Prize from the International Mathematical Union and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research.

Tuesday, October 28, 2007

Bio:
Arora’s research areas are computational complexity, approximation algorithms, uses of randomness in computation and geometric embeddings of metric spaces. Arora has received awards such as the ACM Doctoral Dissertation award, the NSF Career award, Sloan and Packard fellowships and the EATCS-SIGACT Godel Prize. Arora is finishing a new book that he hopes will become a standard reference for computational complexity.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Bio:
Kahn designed the world’s first packet network (the ARPANET) an initiated the Internet program at DARPA. He is the co-inventor of TCP/IP, the technology used to transmit information on the internet. He is the recipient of a number of very prestigious awards, including the 1997 National Medal of Technology, the 2004 Turing Award, and the 2005 Presidential Medal of Freedom. Kahn is a former member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, and the President’s Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Bio:
Kavraki’s research is in physical algorithms and their applications in robotics and structural bioinformatics. Kavraki is a co-author of a recent robotics textbook titled “Principles of Robot Motion”. Her awards include the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, a Sloan fellowship and the Duncan Award for excellence in research and teaching from Rice University.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Bio:
Ellis’ research interests are in operating systems, mobile computing and sensor networks. She is also committed to energy conservation, leading the Milly Watt Project, which focuses on setting energy use policy by developing power-aware architectures that cooperate with power management functions in the operating systems. She is on the board of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and is Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computing Systems.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Bio:
Dr. Rashid oversees Microsoft Research’s worldwide operations. He is a member of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Directorate Advisory Committee, and his research interests have focused on artificial intelligence, operating systems, networking and multiprocessors. He has published papers on a wide variety of topics and was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2003 for his work in operating systems and for innovation in industrial research.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Bio:
Luis von Ahn is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, and was named one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” scientists of 2006. One of his more familiar inventions is CAPTCHA, the colorful images with distorted text seen at the bottom of Web registration forms. More recently, he was selected as a Microsoft New Faculty Fellow for 2007. His research interests include encouraging people to do work for free, as well as catching and thwarting cheaters in online environments.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Bio:
Thrun is the project leader of the Stanford Racing Team that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge, creating an autonomous robotic car that traversed 132 miles of unrehearsed desert terrain in 7 hours. Thrun has published 300 refereed articles (including eleven books), won six best paper awards, a German Olympus Award, a NSF CAREER award, and the research award of the City of Braunschweig. He is also an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and the German Academie of Science Leopoldina.