Newsletter

It's hard to believe that it has been over six months since I took this department chair job. Until last year, I thought I was smart; by climbing mountains (in addition to working hard at Stanford), I imagined that I would elegantly escape the job. But John Hennessy obviously outsmarted me and convinced me to give it a try. So, immediately after I returned from a climbing trip on Ama Dablam in Nepal, I found myself chairing the department. In his '96 newsletter, Jeff Ullman wrote that I should find it easy by comparison. If this were the case, I would advise Jeff to start a mountain climbing career.

Gates Building

We continue to enjoy our new home in the Gates Computer Science Building. As predicted, a number of new collaborative efforts have sprung up, while previous ones have been improved. John Mitchell and David Dill have begun a collaboration on the verification of security protocols. Mendel Rosenblum, Marc Levoy, and Pat Hanrahan are developing new graphic tools for the visualization of complex computer systems. Carlo Tomasi, Serge Plotkin, and Oussama Khatib are starting a new project in computer/network-based surgery in collaboration with the Neurosurgery Department across the street. And these are only a few examples.

By now we have completely filled up the building and several voices are rising to suggest that we must add a third wing. Of course, this too was predicted. What we did not predict, however, is that we would have endless problems with our computer-controlled keys. If you happen to visit us on a Sunday and if you see an angry professor behaving strangely in front of the building's main door, very likely the disrespectful computer in control just phased out his/her key.

Computer Museum

The Computer Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, is planning to open a major Computer History Center in the Bay Area in 3-4 years. In preparation, they have proposed a "mini-museum" of historical computer artifacts and exhibits for open areas of the Gates Building. We have enthusiastically agreed, and are looking forward to the first series of displays which should be ready by this fall.

Promotions

John Mitchell has been promoted to professor of computer science. Oussama Khatib, Marc Levoy, Rajeev Motwani, and Serge Plotkin have been promoted to associate professor with tenure.

John Mitchell's research in programming languages has prompted him to write a textbook entitled "Foundations for Programming Languages" which provides a deep and comprehensive treatment of recent progress in language semantics and type systems.

Oussama Khatib is currently working on mobile manipulation and has developed two mobile robots, Romeo and Juliet, equipped with manipulator arms. Among many other things, these robots can iron your shirts without burning them and clean windows without breaking them. Oussama recently started a project in haptic communication.

Marc Levoy's area of expertise is graphics. He received the 1996 Siggraph Achievement Award for his pioneering work in volume rendering. This work has made a significant impact on the fields of medicine and scientific visualization. Marc's recent projects include the 3-D fax machine and light-field rendering.

Rajeev Motwani is best known for his work on algorithms, in particular randomized, online and approximation algorithms. He recently wrote a textbook entitled "Randomized Algorithms" with Prabhakar Raghavan. He now designs information retrieval techniques for Web searching and data mining. He also conducts research in combinatorial geometry, with applications to drug design and robotics.

Serge Plotkin is interested in combinatorial optimization, especially in relation to the design, management and maintenance of broadband communication networks. His current research deals with the design of efficient routing, admission control, and resource allocation strategies with provable performance guarantees for ATM and other high-speed networks, under dynamically changing conditions.

Next Generation Internet

Hector Garcia-Molina and Ted Shortliffe were appointed by President Clinton to the Presidential Committee on High Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology and Next Generation Internet (HPCCITNGI). This is a "three-in-one" committee, giving advice on the HPCC initiative, Information Technology in general, and the NGI initiative. The HPCCITNGI committee (easy to remember) is co-chaired by Ken Kennedy and Bill Joy, and reports to the President through the Office of Science and Technology Policy and its director, Jack Gibbons.

Honors

Eric Roberts has been appointed the Charles Simonyi Professor for Innovation in Teaching. Charles Simonyi, an alumnus of the department (PhD '77), is Chief Scientist at Microsoft and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Andrew Stuart has been awarded the Wilkinson Prize. This prize is awarded every six years by the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to recognize research in Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing. It is named in honor of James Wilkinson, a pioneer in the field of Numerical Analysis and a former CSD faculty member. Nick McKeown has been selected as a Sloan Research Fellow. He joins former and continuing Sloan Fellows Mary Baker, Daphne Koller, Rajeev Motwani, and Mendel Rosenblum. Carlo Tomasi has been named the Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar. Oussama Khatib received the 1996 Japan Robot Association (JARA) award in Research and Development. He was also named the Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (1997). Jeff Ullman won the SIGMOD Contributions Award for 1996. Hector Garcia-Molina, John Hennessy, and Vaughn Pratt were named Fellows of the ACM. David Liddle received the 1996 University of Michigan Merit Award for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and he has been elected a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art.

New Faculty

Bill Dally joined Stanford as a professor of computer science and electrical engineering this month. Bill has been leading the Concurrent Architecture group at MIT. This group developed the J-Machine, which demonstrates mechanisms to reduce the overhead involved in inter-processor communication, and the
M-Machine, an experimental parallel computer. At Stanford he will teach courses on Computer Architecture and Computer Design. He will also conduct research in the architecture and implementation of high performance computer systems.

Also, Dan Boneh just joined us this fall as an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering. Dan got his PhD from Princeton in 1996. His research expertise is Security and Cryptography in Computer Systems. He will fill an area in which our department was notoriously weak.

Other Faculty News

Bill Miller, who holds a joint appointment with CS and the Graduate School of Business, retired
August 31. Bill, a founder and former director of the Computer Forum, has served as the Chair of the Forum Committee since 1988. Bill was Provost of Stanford and President of SRI International and is currently the Director of the Stanford Computer Industry Project. He will remain a member of the Computer Forum Committee. Ed Feigenbaum has completed his three-year assignment as Chief Scientist of the United States Air Force and returned to teaching and research this September. Gene Golub and Barbara Morris were married on November 15, 1996, in the Gates Building with Carolyn Tajnai officiating.

Freshman Seminars

CSD has enthusiastically moved to participate in Stanford's Freshman Seminars project, which is part of the broader Undergraduate Studies Program initiated by President Casper. This project aims to increase faculty participation in undergraduate education. CSD professors are now offering five freshman seminars per year. These seminars present advanced topics within computer science in a way that makes them accessible to students with relatively little background. In CSD, we see these seminars as a great opportunity to attract the brightest freshmen to CS. The following are two examples of our new Freshman Seminars:

"The Downside of Computing Systems" by Mary Baker

How often have you walked into a bank, a restaurant, or a store only to be told that you couldn't be helped because "the computer is down?" Computers are increasingly critical components of our world, now participating in such tasks as surgery, air traffic control and international banking. Computer failures thus have the potential both to help and to hurt us as never before. In this seminar we will look at how computing systems fail, how such failures may affect our society in the future, and how we can build and maintain systems to avoid such failures. We will investigate case studies of computer-related disasters, including the Therac-25 accidents, the Internet worm, and the Ariane 5 crash. Topics will include computer security, robust distributed systems, fault-tolerant architectures, organizational behavior and other subjects.

"The Science of Art" by Marc Levoy

From the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, revolutions in science and mathematics have inspired parallel revolutions in the visual arts. Some familiar examples are Brunelleschi's invention of linear perspective, Newton's discoveries in geometric optics, and the theories of color vision proposed by Goethe, Young, Helmholtz, and others. To this rich history, modern physics has added a precise understanding of the interaction of light and matter, and computers have added the ability to experimentally verify these principles by creating our own images-a discipline called digital image synthesis. In this seminar, we will examine the scientific principles behind image-making and, through readings and discussion, survey the interwoven histories of science and art. Using graphics workstations and commercial software packages, we will perform our own experiments in image-making. No programming experience is required.

University Fellowships

To support the University's commitment to attract the very best graduate students and to reduce its dependence on federal funding for PhD training, President Casper has established the Stanford Graduate Fellowship program which begins this academic year. The three-year fellowships are available in Engineering, Science, Mathematics, and Medicine. In '97-98, six first- and second-year CSD PhD students will be supported by these fellowships.

Stanford Online

The School of Engineering recently completed a two-year Sloan Foundation project designed to deliver on-demand graduate and continuing professional education to engineers, scientists and managers while at work, home or traveling. The Asynchronous Distance Education Project (ADEPT) demonstrated the feasibility of producing, storing, and delivering courses and supporting materials in the form of digitized video, audio, graphics and text accompanied by tools for collaboration. Using classes from the Stanford Instructional Television Network, ADEPT digitized 18 full-length courses and supporting materials and made them available to 450 industry students. The courses were also available to campus students. They were accessed by file transfer and/or streamed playback through the Internet or one of the prototype high-speed network testbeds. Students asked questions and interacted with the instructor, teaching assistant and/or other students asynchronously from their computer.

Mendel Rosenblum, Jeff Ullman, Nick McKeown, Dave Cheriton, Nick Parlante, Anoop Gupta, and Terry Winograd offered their courses through ADEPT. The lessons learned from ADEPT and a distance education marketing study have been used to create a new School of Engineering educational delivery service called Stanford Online. A full range of engineering courses are being offered via Stanford Online in this year. For more information, see http://stanford-online.stanford.edu

Student News

Apostolos Lerios, a CS graduate student, received the Gores Award for excellence in teaching. He was cited at the '97 commencement ceremonies for his devotion to computer science instruction and for "going the second and third mile to create innovative software for his students...transcending the expectations of his students and professors, and inspiring his fellow teaching assistants." The Gores awards are named for Professor Walter J. Gores, a member of the Stanford Class of 1917.

Five CSD students, Denise Ho, Peter Kim, Reuven Levitt, Brian O'Connor, and Matthew Schnitz have been selected as this year's recipients of the Terman Award for Scholastic Achievement in Engineering.

Harry Lai, Mehran Sahami, and Tomas Uribe have been selected to receive the Centennial Teaching Assistant Award. There were only six such awards in the entire School of Engineering, and to earn half of them speaks volumes for the quality of our TAs.

While the Stanford football team was busy defeating Cal in November, two teams of Stanford Computer Science undergraduates participated in the 1996 ACM Pacific Regional Programming Competition. Stanford's first team (Team A) placed 2nd overall behind the University of Washington, and Stanford's second team (Team B) placed 3rd. Team A consisted of Sean Treichler, Chad Whipkey, and Peter Kim. Team B included Theodore Hwa, Grant Glouser, and Hubie Chen.

Alumni and Friends

President Clinton has selected Bob Kahn and Vincent Cerf to be awarded the National Medal of Technology. Kahn and Cerf have also been awarded the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal.

Margaret Wright (PhD '76), Cleve Moler (PhD under George Forsythe), Charles Simonyi (PhD '77), Ruzena Bajcsy (PhD '73), Robert Sproull (PhD '77), and friends Takeo Kanade, Alan Kay, Robert Metcalfe, and Donald Chamberlin were elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Ramin Zabih (PhD '94) is an assistant professor of computer science at Cornell. Nick Trefethen (PhD '82) has been appointed professor of numerical analysis at Oxford University. Richard Brent (PhD '71), who is a professor at the Australian National University, will become a professor in the Computing Laboratory at Oxford University early in 1998. Alan Hu (PhD '96) is an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia. Lydia Kavraki (PhD '95) is an assistant professor at Rice University. Devika Subramanian (PhD '89) is a professor at Rice. Steve Vavasis (PhD '89), an associate professor at Cornell, is currently on a Guggenheim Fellowship at Argonne National Laboratories. Tom Henzinger (PhD '91) is an assistant professor at U.C. Berkeley.

Joe Halpern, a former CSD consulting professor, has been appointed professor of computer science at Cornell University. James Varah (Math PhD '67), an advisee of George Forsythe and a professor at the University of British Columbia, is spending his sabbatical as a visiting professor with CSD Scientific Computing Division. Geoff Phipps (PhD '92) and Kate Morris (PhD '91) have a son, Rowan, born September 26, 1996, in Australia. Roger Crew (PhD '91) was married this past August.

Computer Forum

After 25 years of outstanding service to the department, Carolyn Tajnai retired July 31. In addition to being the Associate Chair for External Relations and Graduate Studies, Carolyn was also the Director of the Computer Forum. During the past decade, Carolyn has made the Forum into an extremely successful industrial affiliate program, which has largely contributed to our partnerships and cooperations with the industrial community throughout the world. Today, 75 companies are members of the Computer Forum.

On August 1, Oussama Khatib became the new Computer Forum Director and Suzanne Bentley its Manager. The Computer Forum is the best vehicle that we have for developing our vital relationships with industry. Oussama and Suzanne will work hard to make the Forum even more effective than it is today.

Using her experience at Stanford, Carolyn has recently written a report entitled "From the Valley of Heart's Delight to the Silicon Valley and the Role of Stanford University in the Transformation," (CSL-TR-97-713 and STAN-CS-TR-97-1579). This report is also available on the Web at http://www-forum.stanford.edu/About/History/valley_of_hearts.html. Carolyn will continue updating this report after retirement, so if you have started a company in the Valley, please send information to tajnai@leland.stanford.edu.

Equipment Gifts

CSD has received from Intel a large donation of various models of Pentium systems. These range from 120MHz Pentiums, used mostly in the student cluster and by first-year PhD students to high-end Pentium Pro multiprocessor models used mostly in research. We now have well over 100 PC systems installed with OSs that include MS Windows 95, MS Windows NT workstation/server, SUN Solaris and Linux.

SUN Microsystems has donated an Enterprise 3000 system to be used by our students and alumni. This new system, which will replace the existing system called Xenon (SUN 4/670), will bring much needed speed, disk space and overall reliability to the CS student and alumni computing environment. The new system is now fully functional. There are approximately 2,000 alumni user accounts on the Xenon system.

Since we have been in the Gates building, we have benefited from a very aggressive pricing program on selected workstations from SUN Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, and Hewlett-Packard.

Keep Us Informed

We appreciate hearing from you and learning of developments in your lives and careers. Don't hesitate to provide us with updated information. Also, if you are nearby, please drop in and see us.