August 1st, 1999
Dear Alumni and Friends:
Each summer it is the tradition
for the Chair of the Computer Science Department to send news to the department
alumni and friends. Each year this is a great opportunity to recall events that
occurred during the academic year that just came to a close, and it gives me
great pleasure to do so. The '98-99 academic year, the last of the millennium
(I am sure that some of you will argue that the 21st century only begins on
January 1st, 2001), has been a great productive year for our department. Paradoxically, this is a far-from-obvious
performance in a Silicon Valley where the Internet economy sizzles, employment
is at an all-time high, and venture capitalists see a potential new startup in
almost each one of our faculty and students.
I remember that in '97-98 journalists were questioning us about the
shortage of workers specialized in information technology and what we were
doing to train more of them. This year, most inquiries were about faculty
members leaving universities, students dropping from their programs to join
companies, and a student applicant pool dwindling (especially at the PhD
level). Fortunately, nothing of that
has happened to us¾at least, so far.
So, let me tell you what
happened...
New
faculty
Four new faculty members joined
the department as assistant professor. Balaji
Prabhakar, who arrived in September 1998, was the first to join. Balaji got
his PhD from Stanford in 1994 and was Research Scientist in the Laboratory for
Information and Decision Systems at MIT prior to joining Stanford on a joint
EE/CS position. His research interests
are in the field of computer networks. Chris
Bregler joined in January 1999, with a PhD from U.C. Berkeley. Since he
arrived Chris has started a research and teaching program in graphic animation
that spans both the Graphics Lab and the Robotics Lab. Dawson Engler also came in January 1999 on a CS/EE position, just
after getting his PhD from MIT. He conducts research in operating systems,
compilers, reverse engineering, and program verification. Armando Fox joined in January with a PhD from UC Berkeley. Armando's research areas are the design and
deployment of large-scale Internet services and mobile/pervasive computing. He
started developing a new curriculum covering the fundamental technologies of
Internet applications.
For many years, many CS
students had expressed the wish that we search for a faculty member in the area
of natural language processing. Finally, in '98-99, we did so and conducted
this search jointly with the Linguistics Department in the School of Humanities
& Sciences. As a result, Chris
Manning, a Stanford graduate (PhD'95) and currently a faculty member at the
University of Sydney, will join Stanford in the fall on a CS/Linguistics
Assistant Professor position. With the explosion of information in natural
language available on the Web, we think that the timing is just right and we
are very excited that Chris has chosen to join Stanford. We also look forward
to greater interaction with the Linguistics Department.
One CS faculty member left this
year. Anoop Gupta, who was on leave
at Microsoft, chose to stay there. We will regret losing him very much, but
Anoop nevertheless remains a Consulting Faculty member in the department. In
addition, Andrew Stuart, an
Associate Professor of Scientific Computing in ME and CS, will take a chaired
position in Mathematics at the University of Warwick in England this coming
fall.
Promotions
Mendel Rosenblum was promoted to Associate Professor with
tenure. Mendel's research focuses on
system software and simulation systems for high-performance computing
architectures. Since he joined
Stanford, Mendel's research group has generated a stream of major results,
including SimOS (a fast simulator to study operating systems at a fine level of
detail), Hive (a scalable OS kernel for large multiprocessor machines), and
Disco (a thin layer of software allowing unmodified OS to run on new machines).
SimOS has become a standard tool in the computer system research community.
Jennifer Widom, who already was an Associate Professor, was
granted tenure and is now an Associate Professor with tenure. Jennifer conducts
research in the InfoLab, focusing on the management of semistructured data
(Lore system) and data warehousing (Whips project).
Honors
Each year our faculty members
distinguish themselves by winning a number of prestigious awards. This year
again they have not failed in this tradition.
John Hennessy, the Willard and Inez Kerr Bell Professor of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, became Stanford's new Provost on
July 1st, 1999. John was the Chair of CS in '94-96, before becoming the Dean of
Engineering. We are very proud that a computer scientist was chosen for the
Provost position. Jim Plummer, the
current Chair of EE, will succeed John Hennessy as Dean of Engineering.
Pat Hanrahan was elected to the National Academy of
Engineering for his contributions to the field of Computer Graphics. Pat is
currently involved in several research projects, including the Immersive
Television and the Interactive Workspaces projects.
Hector Garcia-Molina won the 1999 ACM SIGMOD
Innovations Award for "innovations in numerous areas of database systems,
including main memory database systems." Terry Winograd received the 1999 ACM SIGDOC Rigo Award, which
honors lifetime contribution to computer documentation.
Leo Guibas was elected Fellow of the Association of
Computing Machinery (ACM). Craig
Partridge was elected Fellow of the IEEE Society "for contributions to
the development of Internet protocols that support larger and faster
networks." Russ Altman was
elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, and a Fellow
of the American College of Physicians.
Yoav Shoham was elected Charter Member of the Game Theory
Society. This new society gathers a
number of famous economists, including several Nobel Prize winners. Only five
computer scientists are Charter Members.
Dan Boneh and Terry
Winograd were selected for IBM University Partnership Faculty Awards. Dan
also received a Sloan Research fellowship from the Sloan Foundation.
Daphne Koller won an ONR Young Investigator Award to support
her research in Artificial Intelligence. This year ONR had received 216
proposals; there were 21 awards, only two of which were in Computer Science.
Our four new faculty members¾Chris Bregler, Dawson
Engler, Armando Fox, and Balaji Prabhakar¾were named Terman Fellows by
the Dean of the School of Engineering.
In addition, Armando was named Noyce Family Scholar.
Oussama Khatib is the General Chairman for the IEEE
International Conference on Robotics and Automation that will be held in San
Francisco in April 2000.
Spotlight on some research projects
THE SECURITY LAB: As you all know, network
security is an increasing concern as the Internet continues to grow. Skilled hackers are repeatedly breaking into
computer systems and corrupting web sites and files. It seems that the information super-highway goes through some bad
neighborhoods. This led us to put computer/network security at the top of our
priority list in our faculty search strategy in '97-98, and as a result we
recruited Dan Boneh. After starting
several research projects of his own, ranging from cryptography to electronic
purses, Dan, along with John Mitchell,
set up a Security Lab that brings together faculty and students with an
interest in security research. Current
faculty lab members include Mary Baker,
Dan Boneh, David Dill, Ed Feigenbaum,
Daphne Koller, John Mitchell, and Gio
Wiederhold. Research projects in
the lab focus on secure network management, intrusion detection, cryptography,
formal verification of security protocols, digital copyright protection, and
database access control. For more
information please contact Dan Boneh, dabo@cs.stanford.edu.
MODELING HUMAN MOTIONS: Daphne Koller is leading a new project for understanding human
motion at a symbolic level, using video as input. Chris Bregler, Carlo Tomasi,
Jean Heegaard (Mechanical
Engineering Department), and Diane Frank
(Dance Division in the Drama Department) are also working on the project.
Models of human motion are developed at many different levels, from image
appearance at the bottom, to the kinematics and dynamics of human bodies in the
middle, to people's mental states and interaction habits at the top. The
top-level models are symbolic descriptions of situations such as "the
teacher is writing on the board," represented as nodes of a Bayesian
network. Low-level trackers feed inferences at the high level, and high-level
reasoning constrains the trackers. The initial application domain will be the
interpretation of dance movements. Other possible applications include any
domain in which it is necessary to track or interpret human motion at a
symbolic level. Examples include sports medicine, remote instruction,
human-computer interaction, aids for the vision-impaired, entertainment, and
video database annotation.
INTERACTIVE WORKSPACES PROJECT: This project has
developed from an earlier project called the "Information Mural,"
which supported multi-person interactive work on a large, high-resolution,
wall-mounted interactive display. The Interactive Workspaces project extends
the mural to working space with multiple interconnected devices, including
tablets and PDAs. Current research focuses on designing a scalable display
architecture that provides: (1) a single virtual display abstraction to the
programmer, (2) an interaction architecture allowing users to control
computation and display with gesture and motion of simple devices tracked by
multiple cameras, and (3) a flexible multi-device networking that allows
devices to be easily introduced into (and removed from) the workspace. A number
of applications are being explored to test the effectiveness of the workspace,
including construction management, computer system and networking monitoring,
radiology, molecular biology, and learning spaces. CS faculty members involved
in this project are Pat Hanrahan, Terry Winograd, Mary Baker, Mendel Rosenblum,
Armando Fox, and Russ Altman. For more information see
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/iwork/.
The
Bio-X project
The university has launched a
major interdisciplinary initiative centered around Biology and Life Sciences,
which involves the Schools of Engineering, Medicine, and Humanities &
Sciences. The goal of this initiative,
called Bio-X, is to build upon existing strengths in these three schools and to
foster the coming together of leading-edge research in basic, applied and
clinical sciences to enable advances across the full spectrum from molecules to
organs. The Bio-X project raises
considerable enthusiasm throughout the university, and CS is a major partner in
this initiative, with interests ranging from computational biology, to data
mining of genomic data, to medical imaging, vision-guided surgery and
robotics. In the long run, the Bio-X
project may also help CS design new computational schemes and computer
organizations. Bio-X will start a new
seminar series and will contribute new interdisciplinary courses in '99-00. A
specific Bio-X building that will house 40 to 50 faculty members and their
research groups is also being planned at a location between the Gates building
and the Medical School. For more information, see
http://cmgm.stanford.edu/biochem/biox/.
Student
news
UNDERGRADS: This
year has seen our largest graduating class of undergrads majoring in computer
science and engineering, with 108 degrees delivered. With the enrollment in CS
increasing sharply (399 declared CS majors in '98-99, 325 in '97-98, and 278 in
'96-97), we expect an even bigger graduating class next year.
For the third time in the past
4 years, and the second year in a row, a CS undergrad, Douglas Anderson, won the Ford Scholar Award, the highest award
given to undergrads by the School of Engineering. In addition, four CS
students, Douglas Anderson, Dragomir Angelov, Martin Gavrilov, and Chad
Whipkey have received the Frederick E. Terman Award for Scholastic
Achievement in Engineering. The Terman Awards are the most selective academic
awards for undergraduate students in the School of Engineering.
To allow for undergrads who
wish to get a significant research experience by working with a faculty member
over an extended period of time, we recently created the BS degree with Honors.
This degree requires completing at least 9 units of research under the
direction of a faculty member and an Honors thesis. We have delivered our first
BS degrees with Honors this year to Dragomir
Angelov and Benjamin Chelf. Ben
Wegbreit, the founder of Epiphany, is generously supporting this program,
and the Wegbreit Prize for Excellence in UG Research was awarded to Dragomir Angelov. We expect this
program will encourage more undergrads to do research and go for PhD studies
(at Stanford or elsewhere).
We started implementing the
curriculum changes proposed in '97-98 by a committee led by John Mitchell. The new curriculum
provides more flexibility to the students. In addition, Eric Roberts co-chairs the joint IEEE-ACM committee
"Curriculum 2001" that develops new curriculum guidelines for
Computer Science.
MASTERS: We
delivered 135 Masters degrees in June '99.
As in the CS Major, we recently created a new Masters with Distinction
in Research program that requires completing three quarters of research with a
faculty advisor. Stephane Kasriel
was the first student to graduate in this program.
The department is helped in its
teaching mission by many students who serve as teaching assistants. One CS
teaching assistant, Marissa Mayer,
received the very prestigious Centennial Teaching Assistant Award, which
recognizes outstanding teaching by Stanford TAs in the Schools of Engineering,
Humanities & Sciences, and Earth Sciences.
A Memorial Fund in the memory
of Christopher Stephenson has just been created. Starting in '99-00, this fund
will allow us to offer the Stephenson Prize of Excellence in Masters Research
to the most meritorious students.
Christopher J. Stephenson spent most his career at IBM doing research in
computer software, and spent a year teaching at Stanford during the '72-73 academic
year. The fund was set up at the request of his friends and colleagues at IBM.
PHD: Between October
1st, 1998, and September 30th, 1999, about 35 students will get the PhD degree.
In September '98, 31 new students started in the PhD program; in September '99,
37 PhD students (selected from a larger pool) will join the department.
Sudipto Guha, a student advised by Rajeev Motwani, was awarded an IBM Graduate Fellowship Award.
We had a special hooding event
at this year's Commencement Ceremonies. Wilfred
Hansen got his PhD in CS in 1971. He was unable to attend the hooding
ceremony, and he has regretted that all these years. He came this year with his family and was hooded by Michael Genesereth.
The Arthur Samuel's Thesis
Award is given to at most two PhD students who have graduated the previous
year. A specially appointed committee selects the winning theses from among
those nominated by the faculty advisors. The winners in '98 were Eric Veach (advisor: Leo Guibas) and Luca de Alfaro (advisor: Zohar
Manna). The selection committee consisted of Rajeev Motwani,
Prabhakar Raghavan, Victor Pereyra, and Stan
Rosenschein.
In '98-99, for the first time,
we provided a laptop computer equipped with a wireless modem to about
two-thirds of the new PhD students. This is a first step toward transforming
the Gates building into a more interactive environment. Students can use their
laptops throughout the building, including the classrooms in the basement, and
outside around the building. Thanks to
the hard work by Tom Dienstbier and
his team, this program was very well received by the students. The wireless network was recently upgraded
from 2 to 6Mbits, and next year we will renew the program for all the incoming
PhD students. In the future, if costs allow, we will equip several meeting
rooms in our building with the technology developed in the Interactive
Workspaces project (see above).
Freshman
and Sophomore Seminars
The CS Department continues to
participate enthusiastically in the Freshman and Sophomore Seminars programs
initiated by President Casper two years ago.
These courses, which present advanced topics in computer science to
freshman and sophomore students, are extremely well received by the students.
In '99-00, we will give the following seminars:
- Downside of Computing
Systems, by Mary Baker
- The Science of Art, by Marc
Levoy
- Great Ideas in Computer
Science, by Rajeev Motwani
- Business on the Information
Highways, by Gio Wiederhold
- Computer Security in the
Electronic Age, by John Mitchell
- Digital Actors, by
Jean-Claude Latombe
- How Are We to Know?, by Nils
Nilsson
- Computer and Information
Security, by Dan Boneh
- Ruler, Compass, and Computer:
Computational Representations of Geometry, by Leo Guibas
- Smart Computers and Other
Technological Opportunities, by John McCarthy
- Sophomore College, by Eric
Roberts.
Equipment
upgrades in Gates
The CS Computer Facilities
group led by Tom Dienstbier has
upgraded the Gates building wireless network to a system that is 802.11
compatible. This increases the speed of the wireless network to about 6Mbit.
This upgrade was made possible by a donation from Lucent Research Labs.
We currently have 1GB Ethernet
connection between the Gates building and the new Packard Electrical
Engineering building across Serra Street.
This provides us the opportunity to share VLANs between the two
buildings, a real benefit to research groups that will soon be spread between
the Gates and Packard buildings. Lucent
has provided us two Cajun P550 switches for this purpose.
We are also in the process of
adding more 100MB ports to the Gates building network. This will bring the number of 100MB switched
ports to 456, up from 120. In addition
we have 1000 10MB switched ports. The Cisco switches (22 catalyst 5000's) are
connected to a 100MB backbone.
We expect to be upgrading the
PUP cluster used by students with new Intel-based systems by mid-year 2000.
These systems donated by Intel will be using the new Merced CPU. We currently
have twenty-two systems for students to use. Eight of these systems are running
MS NT and the rest are running SUN Solaris.
Computer
Forum
The Computer Forum Affiliates
Program continues to prosper in its mission to connect our department and the
Computer Systems Lab to companies. The
current membership stands at 78 industrial affiliates. Joining Director Oussama Khatib and Manager Suzanne Bentley this year on the Forum
team are Member Services Associate/Recruiting Coordinator Kersten Farah and Web
Coordinator Nuriya Janss. Student recruiting continues to be a peak event among Forum
affiliates. The Forum website has a new
look and a new logo. For up-to-date
information about Forum events and programs, visit their website at
http://www-forum.stanford.edu.
The Computer Forum held its
31st Annual Affiliates Meeting in March, chaired by Leo Guibas. Over 150
participants from academia and industry gathered to hear about the research
currently taking place in the Computer Science Department and the Computer
Systems Lab. Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo and former CSL student, was guest
speaker at the Forum's banquet. Following the Annual Meeting, a well-attended
workshop chaired by Dan Boneh
focused on the research under way in the Security Lab.
In May, the Forum co-hosted a
workshop with SIMA (the Stanford Integrated Manufacturing Association) on
Motion Support in Virtual Prototyping. It was chaired by yours truly and was
attended by over 75 academic and industry researchers. More of these focused workshops on
current topics are being planned
for the year 2000. Originally scheduled
for this fall, the second of the World Symposia Series will now take place next
year in Paris.
Alumni news
After a 15-year career with
Tandem Computers, Richard Carr (CS
MS '73, PhD '81) started an independent company to build and market a database
gateway that enables Tandem customers to upgrade their applications from the
original Tandem file system to SQL with no programming changes. Despite the acquisition of Tandem by Compaq,
Carr Scott Software is thriving with customers from the major banking, stock
brokerage, 911 services, resort hotels and retailing markets. Unlike many of his peers, Richard enjoys the
life of an independent entrepreneur and has no desires for going public.
Malcolm CasSelle (CS MS '94) in 1994 co-founded NetNoir, the first
(and most popular) online community, content provider and commerce space for
African Americans.
Bill Coughran (CS PhD '80) is now in Palo Alto and is
co-director of Lucent's new laboratory.
Ron Crane (EE/CSL MS '74), who was considered by 3COM
founder Robert Metcalfe to be a founder too, left 3COM in 1990. In 1992 he founded LAN Media. LMC's mission is to provide
high-performance, low-overhead solutions for broadband Intranet and Internet
connectivity using standard platforms.
David Boggs (EE MS '73, EE PhD '82) is LMC's Chief Engineer.
Judy Estrin (EE/CSL MS '77) became Chief Technology Officer
of Cisco Systems, Inc. in April 1998 when Cisco acquired Precept Software, the
company she founded with her husband, Bill Carrico, in March 1995.
Robert Filman (Math BS '74, CS MS '74, CS PhD '79) left Lockheed Martin and is now safely
ensconced in the Variational Design group at NASA/Ames, working on frameworks
for distributed computing. He is also working on IEEE Internet Computing, where
he is the Associate Editor in Chief and has a column in which he tours the web.
Mark Horowitz (EE/CSL PhD '84) and Mike Farmwald (CS PhD'81) founded Rambus in 1990 and took it public
in May 1997. Rambus designs, develops,
licenses and markets high-speed
chip-to-chip interface
technology to enhance the performance and cost-effectiveness of consumer
electronics, computer systems and other electronic systems.
Hemant Kanakia (EE/CSL PhD '91) left Bell Labs in 1996 and
founded Torrent Networking Technologies Corporation in Silver Spring, MD.
Torrent is developing an Internet traffic director¾a combination of chips and
software to route data throughout the Internet at record speed with advanced
sorting capabilities.
Richard Karp (CS PhD '80) founded Catapult Communications in
1985 to develop telecom test solutions, and went public in 1999 on the Nasdaq
exchange, trading as CATT. Catapult's test systems support the most protocols
and variants on the market, and their customers include the leading names in
the field. Richard designed Catapult's test system in 1985, and the
architecture remains fundamentally unchanged today. Richard said, "The basic design survived so long, in large
part, because of all the good stuff I learned while I was working on my
dissertation!"
Dinesh Katiyar (CS PhD '94) worked at Sun for three years and
then founded Mayasoft in 1997. Their
core technology raises the bar on frameworks for building publish-subscribe
applications. It is privately held.
ccRewards.com was founded by Sanjai Tiwari (CS MS, PhD CE '94) and Arthur Keller (CS MS '79, PhD '85) in
late 1998. Ron Burback (CS MS '82,
CS PhD '99) joined as VP Engineering in April 1999. Jeff Ullman (CS Prof.)
is an advisor. ccRewards.com's mission
is to connect online buyers and sellers by delivering savings and
convenience. ccRewards.com released its
initial service in July 1999 and plans a full launch in the fall.
John Levy (CS PhD '73) recently retired from Quantum and is
now a consultant living in Inverness.
Sriram Sankar (CS PhD '89) started Metamata, a Java developer
tools company in November 1997 along with three others. One of the other founders, Anagha Raje, is
also a Stanford alumnus (MBA 1989).
Their motto is Debugging + JAVA =3D Metamata.
Anton Schwartz (CS MS '96) produced a CD-ROM, "When Music
Calls." Jazz tenor saxophonist
Anton followed his heart and is making quite a splash in the jazz community. To
be added to his distribution list, visit http://www.antonjazz.com.
Margaret Wright (CS PhD '76) is now a Lucent Fellow.
More
happy events
Kersten Farah, Dan Boneh,
and Eric Roberts got married. Nick McKeown had a daughter, Jessica.
... So, this is what happened
(among many other things), and now we are looking forward to another fruitful
academic year. In closing, the CS
faculty, staff, and students join me in thanking you for your continuing
support and wishing you the best for yourselves and your families.
Sincerely,
Jean-Claude Latombe