2000

September 2000

Dear Alumni and Friends,

The Department of Computer Science at Stanford has many alumni and friends. When I travel and visit other places in the US and abroad, I often encounter people who tell me that they read the annual departmental newsletter and how much they like receiving it (nothing comparable to the success of Harry Potter, however). For these people, being at Stanford was a great period in their lives and the newsletter contributes to maintaining the emotional link they have with our department and the university. In a time when so many things happen so fast, this letter is also a unique opportunity for me to reflect back on events that occurred during the academic year.

NEW FACULTY

As I mentioned in last year's letter, Chris Manning, a Stanford graduate (PhD '95), joined Stanford in September 1999 as an assistant professor appointed jointly in the CS and linguistics departments. Chris was previously a faculty member at the University of Sydney. His specialty is natural language processing. Within our department, he joined the InfoLab, with Hector Garcia-Molina, Jeff Ullman, Jennifer Widom, and Gio Wiederhold.

We have also recruited Ken Salisbury as a research professor in the CS and surgery departments. Ken was previously at MIT. He is considered to be the father of "haptic interaction'' with computers, allowing users to touch and feel virtual objects through force feedback on actuated mechanical transducers. Ken is also a Stanford graduate (PhD '81). Among many other contributions, he designed the famous Stanford/JPL Dextrous Hand (also called the Salisbury Hand), which has been used, and is still used, in many labs around the world to investigate dextrous manipulation by robots. At Stanford, Ken will investigate robot-assisted surgery and personal robotics.

Ron Fedkiw will also join us in September as an assistant professor of CS. Ron's domain of expertise is computational fluid dynamics. One of his goals at Stanford is to expand this expertise into scientific visualization and physics-based modeling for graphics and image processing. Ron already has considerable experience in applying scientific computing techniques to generate special effects for movies. He obtained his PhD from UCLA in 1996. Among his many skills, he used to be a competitive weightlifter with a personal best squat of 800 pounds, bench press of 555 pounds, and dead lift of 735 pounds, all in the 198-pound weight class. You will be glad to know that he is also a very friendly person.

Finally, Colin Williams, principal scientist and supervisor of the Quantum Computing Technologies Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, will soon join the CS department as an acting associate professor. At Stanford, Colin will do research in quantum computing with graduate students and will also give courses. His stay at Stanford is part of a new collaboration between our department and JPL. In the future we expect this collaboration to extend to other areas, such as software for autonomous systems and virtual reality.

Despite all the rumors about professors resigning from their university positions to take positions in startups and other fast-growing companies, none of our faculty members have left the department. On the contrary, some of them have recently returned to Stanford after a leave of absence during which they successfully launched new companies.

PROMOTIONS

David Dill and Monica Lam were both promoted to the rank of full professor.

David does research in formal analysis of hardware and software systems. He has made high-impact contributions to symbolic model checking, timed automata, and compositional verification. His group developed Murphi, a now widely used verification tool for finite-state systems.

Monica's specialty is in compilation for high-performance and parallel computing. She has made key contributions to software pipelining, loop transformations, and the use of interprocedural analysis to parallelize large programs. Her SUIF compiler has become the standard for work in the area of parallelizing compilers.

RETIREMENTS

Two distinguished faculty members of our department are retiring in 2000:

����� Tom Binford became professor emeritus in January 2000. Tom has been at Stanford for 30 years. His research contributions span a large domain, including computer vision, robotics, and artificial intelligence. Tom is most famous for his pioneering work on low-level vision, model-based image understanding, and robot programming.

����� Ed Feigenbaum will become professor emeritus in September 2000. Ed joined the CS department in 1969 and has had an exceptionally distinguished research career in artificial intelligence. He is widely regarded as a pioneer in expert systems and other knowledge-based systems. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1986 and received the 1994 ACM Turing Award. He was the chair of the CS department from 1977-1980. He served as chief scientist of the United States Air Force from 1994 to 1997, and received the U.S. Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Award in 1997. After his retirement, Ed will be spending part of his time in London and Tokyo helping the US Air Force with its international science programs. In addition, he plans to write and edit several technology books.

Both Tom and Ed will continue to participate in department's activities for years to come.

HONORS

����� John Hennessy was chosen to become the new president of Stanford University. John was the chair of CS from 1994-1996, the dean of the School of Engineering from 1996-1999, and Stanford's provost from 1999-2000. Some say that his career follows Moore's Law, but we sincerely hope that he will serve as our president for many years. As good news bring more good news, John also received two major awards. He is the co-recipient of the prestigious 2000 IEEE John Von Neumann Medal, along with David Patterson of U.C. Berkeley, "for creating a revolution in computer architecture.'' In addition, he received the 2000 Benjamin Garver Lamme Award, the highest honor given by the American Society for Engineering Education.

����� Jennifer Widom was awarded a 2000-2001 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for her study of "New Query and Search Techniques for the Internet.'' She also received the 10-Year Best Database Paper Award at the Twenty-Sixth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, September 2000, for her 1990 VLDB paper "Deriving Production Rules for Constraint Maintenance" with Stefano Ceri.

����� Terry Winograd received the Rigo Award for "lifetime contributions to computer documentation" at the ACM SIGDOC conference in New Orleans in September of 1999.

����� Dan Boneh was awarded a highly selective Packard Fellowship.

����� Daphne Koller received the PECASE Award (Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers) for "devising theories of probabilistic representation that allow automated systems to reason in complex domains and autonomously learn to solve inference problems.'' This is "the highest award bestowed by the United States Government on young professionals at the outset of their independent research careers.''

����� Balaji Prabhakar was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship.

����� Dan Boneh, Nick McKeown, and Balaji Prabhakar each received an NSF CAREER Award.���

����� Eric Roberts served as the "Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor of Social Change" at Swarthmore College during the first semester of 2000.

����� Marsha Berger, a CS alum and former PhD student of Joe Oliger, was elected to the National Academy of Science.

THE BIO-X PROJECT

In my 1999 newsletter I mentioned the launching of Bio-X, a major interdisciplinary initiative centered around biology and life sciences, which involves the Schools of Engineering, Medicine, and Humanities & Sciences. Thanks to generous gifts, including a stunning one by Jim Clark (a previous Stanford professor and the founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and other successful companies), a new building is being designed and the preliminary construction work has already started. This building, called the Clark Center, will be located between the Gates CS building and the medical school. It will eventually host 45 faculty members from multiple departments. Biocomputation ranging from computational genetics and biology to computer-assisted surgery to medical knowledge management will be one major component of the Bio-X project. A group of researchers in biocomputation is already active writing research proposals and planning new educational programs.

STUDENT NEWS

Undergrads: In June 2000 we delivered 139 BS degrees in computer science and computer engineering. This represents an increase of almost 40% over last year, which had previously been our largest graduating class.

Five CS students (John Bauer, Michael Sawka, Hovav Shacham, Yirong Shen, Stephen Sorkin, and Marissa Treinen) 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.

Six of our graduating students (Anat Caspi, Alex Roetter, Michael Sawka, Hovav Shacham, Stephen Sorkin, and Ken Takusagawa) completed an Honors research thesis. The Ben Wegbreit Prize for the best Honors thesis was awarded to Stephen Sorkin. In his research, Stephen developed new algorithms to efficiently compute distances and check collision among objects undergoing continuous deformations. One application of his work is in simulating human-body soft-tissues for surgical training and planning. Another application is to the graphic animation of deformable objects.

Masters: We delivered 150 M.S. degrees in June 2000. Five students (Sundar Iyer, TJ Giuli, Sergio Marti, Laurence Melloul, and Derek Poppin) graduated with Distinction in Research. Among them, Sundar Iyer received the Chris Stephenson Award for the best masters thesis.

Ph.D.: Finally, we delivered 20 Ph.D. degrees in June 2000. The Arthur Samuel's Thesis Award is given to at most two Ph.D. students who have graduated the previous year. The winning theses are selected, from those nominated by faculty advisors, by a specially appointed committee. The winners in 1999 were Chandra Chekuri (advisor: Rajeev Motwani) and Narayanan Shivakumar (advisor: Hector Garcia-Molina). The selection committee consisted of Nils Nilsson (chair), Dawson Engler, Kurt Konolige, and Pandu Nayak.

One of our current Ph.D. students, Carlos Guestrin, won the Centennial TA Award. This award recognizes outstanding teaching by Stanford teaching assistants in the Schools of Engineering, Humanities & Sciences, and Earth Sciences. It is a very prestigious award granted to only a few students each year.

ACM Programming Contest - This year 58 teams, including two from Stanford, competed in the ACM Pacific Western Regional Programming Contest. The two Stanford teams came in first and second. Our top team managed to complete all eight problems, and our second team completed seven. None of the other competing teams completed more than six. The members of the Stanford programming teams were John Bauer, Eric Mao, and Ken Takusagawa for Team #1, and Matt Bell, Matt Ginzton, and Michael Sawka for Team #2.

ALUMNI NEWS, OCT 2000

Doug Appelt (CS PhD '81). "I have subsequently been employed by SRI International as a Senior Computer Scientist. I have served the Association for Computational Linguistics as president, and several other executive capacities. I am currently engaged in research on information extraction."

Vint Cerf (EE BS '65), former Assistant Professor, CSL, is Senior Vice President for Internet Architecture and Technology, WorldCom Corporation. He is responsible for design and development of advanced Internet systems. Vint is also a Distinguished Visiting Scientist responsible for architecture and design of an Interplanetary Internet at JPL, and he also sits on about 15 boards.

Bill Coughran, (CS PhD) is a Consulting Professor in CS, and Director of Bell Labs Research Silicon Valley for Lucent Technologies. Brian Reid (former CSL faculty member), Glenn Trewitt (EE PhD) and Martin Abadi (CS PhD) have joined him. http://www.pa.bell-labs.com

Barry Hayes (CS PhD): "I'm working at PlaceWare, Inc, a growing pre-IPO company founded by, among others, Mike Dixon (CS PhD), where I've turned into the head of the Impossible Bugs Forces.

"I've also been busy with volunteering for Guide Dogs of America, raising and socializing puppies. I raise one at a time, starting when they are about 8 weeks old and keep each until it is about a year and a half old. They then go to what I call either "doggie grad school" or "doggie boot camp". You might understand why these concepts are muddled together in my head. If they make it out [again, a familiar concept] they go on to work with a partner. If they don't make it, they get to be happy pets. Of the three I've raised, Mascot is a happy pet in Marin, Arthur is working in Olympia, Oregon, and doing well, and Vanya, being a bit too feisty for guide work, has just begun training for Search and Rescue work with the National Disaster Search Dog Foundation.

"I have a new dog, Ansel, coming on the 21st of July. The main focus of my work is socialization, so Ansel will be with me pretty much everywhere. You may see us at the SF Opera, or a movie, or a restaurant. [Oh, at the opera, we're usually also with Paul Asente (CS PhD) and Frank Yellin (CS PhD), and occasionally Per Bothner (CS PhD), the last tatters of the department opera co-op.]

"And yes, it breaks my heart to give them up after a year and a half, but going to Arthur's graduation, and the hope of going to more in the future, makes it worthwhile. Well, that and having a dog I can take with me everywhere."

Arthur Keller (CS MS '79, PhD '85) left Stanford last year to form Minerva Consulting to provide technical and business advise ("mentor capital") to e-commerce and database startups. See http://www.minervaconsulting.com/arthur.html for more information.

Brian McCune (CS PhD '80): After selling Advanced Decision Systems (ADS) to Booz, Allen & Hamilton in 1991 and seeing ADS's spinoff, Verity, go public in 1995, Brian is now consulting in a two-person firm, Cyladian Technology Consulting, of Menlo Park, CA. There he splits his time between helping knowledge management startups, consulting to larger IT and aerospace companies, and architecting systems and helping start programs for DARPA."

Judy Estrin (EE/CSL MS '77), who in April stepped down as Cisco Systems chief technology officer, has started a new venture, Packet Design. www.packetdesign.com. The company aims to solve long-term Internet infrastructure problems.

Paul Flaherty (CSL/EE PhD '97) in May became CTO of Zindigo Ventures, which is a tech strategy/marketing consulting firm. "We're growing like crazy, and I really like the people I work with and the work that I'm doing. Mostly, I'm working as a consultant to the VC community, either judging the merits of a technology company, or helping one out with better business strategies.

"I'm currently working on two books, one on corporate strategies for tech startups, and one on AltaVista as a business case study. There's an emerging field which I've been referring to as "business engineering" which applies some very specialized mathematics (nonlinear statistical vector fields) in the hopes of improving the startup success rate.

"For fun, I've returned to the hobby that I had when I was a teenager -- photographing trains. I've published twice, and you can see some of the collection at http://www.viking.org/rail if you like. I also work on the Niles Canyon Railway (http://www.ncry.org ) which runs between Fremont and Pleasanton; it's a seven (going on nine) mile railroad built, maintained, and operated by volunteers, on the original Transcontinental mainline that was abandoned in 1984. I work on the track gang (it sure beats 24 Hour Nautilus) and as a Conductor (just got promoted today) on the operations. Since we carry passengers and interconnect with other railroads, we're subject to all of the federal regulations, including training and testing. We carry about 1000 people every Sunday, mostly kids and their parents. If you've never been through Niles Canyon, I'd encourage you to visit."

Ralph Garvin (CS BS student) founded Woosh!, "The Next Generation E-Commerce Infrastructure.'

Roy Goldman (CS MS '98, CS PhD '00) co-founded a company building Kidar, an open-source relational database system. http://www.kidar.org

Himanshu Gupta (CS PhD) and Yue Zhuge (CS PhD) were among the first employees of Escalate, an information-integration company.

Daphne Koller, CS Assistant Professor, (CS PhD '93) received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in a White House ceremony in April. This is the highest award that the US government gives to a young researcher.

Amy Lansky (CS PhD) "If you did indeed read my web page (renresearch.com) you will find that I have left computer science completely (as of about 2 years ago) and am fully embedded in a new world... homeopathy! I'm a student of the Devon School in England and also of several clinical programs here in the US, I'm co-editor of a national journal (The American Homeopath), and I am nearing a completion of a book on homeopathy for the general public... Very exciting. So I spend my life doing the same thing as I always did -- sitting alone in my office and writing -- but on a very different subject. My life goal now is essentially to promote homeopathy in the USA, mostly as a writer/educator."

Svetlozar Nestorov (CS BS, CS PhD student) is a founder and CTO of Andalay a venture-backed pre-IPO company that simplifies the shopping experience by leveraging the collective intelligence of the web.

Larry Page (CS PhD student) and Sergey Brin (CS PhD student) co-founded Google. Larry is CEO, Sergey President and Urs H�lzle (CS PhD), Professor UC Santa Barbara, is Vice President of Engineering. Google won the Yahoo contract to provide search replacing Inktomi.

Inderpal Mumick (CS PhD) founded Savera, the world's leading provider of 100% Web based billing solutions for the telecom and IP markets.

Vaughan Pratt, (CS PhD '72) Professor of CS, and, Greg Defouw, (CS PhD student) founded TIQIT in March. "TIQIT builds TIny ubIQuITous Technology, starting with the Matchbox PC, see http:/www.tiqit.com. Vaughan said, "I'm planning to retire at the end of summer, which will allow me to stay on as CEO of TIQIT. But I'll still teach the occasional course and advise the occasional Ph.D. student."

Vasilis Vassalos (CS MS '98, CS PhD student) and Yannis Papakonstantinou (CS PhD) co-founded Enosys Markets, an XML company which offers state-of-the-art data integration infrastructure for eBusiness application development. Serving as advisors to Enosys are Professors Hector Garcia-Molina, Rajeev Motwani and Jeff Ullman.

Professor Gio Wiederhold submitted the following: "Not all Stanford startups start in Silicon valley, but they still come back. Daniel Borel (CS MS '83) and Pier-Luigi Zappacosta (CS MS '83), aided by Prof. Nicoud of EPFL in Lausanne, started building computer mice in Switzerland in 1986, to support the Lilith computer, being developed at ETH Zurich by a first generation Stanford CSD Professor, Niklaus Wirth. In 1987 they signed a contract with Apple in the farmhouse of Daniel's father-in-law, located in Apples near Lausanne. In 1990 Logitech went public, and now also has major operations in Fremont, across they Bay from Stanford. Doug Engelbart, the original inventor of the mouse while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI), shares office space with them there."

Four of our PhD grads are Associate Professors at UC Santa Cruz:

Dave Helmbold (CS PhD '87). "I am now a professor in the CS department at UCSC with a major research interest in the area of machine learning."

Kevin Karplus (CS PhD): "I've been spending my summer predicting the structure of proteins for CASP4 (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction), a rather fun event that has really helped make structure prediction an honest science. http://PredictionCenter.llnl.gov/casp4/

"UCSC will be starting a BS, MS, and PhD program in bioinformatics as soon as we get approval from the bureaucracy (probably a year from now). I'll be heading up the undergrad program, at least until there is a new department (Biomolecular Engineering) to hand the majors over to.

"I've also been spending a lot of time with my four-and-a-half-year-old son Abraham, who is a real joy to be with. Lots more about me on www.cse.ucsc.edu/~karplus"

Tracy Larrabee (CS PhD). "I am an associate professor at UC Santa Cruz, and I do research in hardware test and diagnosis."

Allen Van Gelder's (CS PhD) research interests include development of parallel algorithms, use of logic programming for problems in database and AI systems, analysis of algorithms, methods for verifiable software systems, theorem proving, and scientific visualization. He received an NSF PYI Award in 1989.

Three of our PhD grads are faculty members at UC Santa Barbara:

Urs H�lzle (CS PhD) is an associate professor of computer science at UC Santa Barbara. His field is in object-oriented programming languages and systems; compilers; programming environments; computer architecture; garbage collection.

Martin Rinard (CS PhD) is an assistant professor with an interest in parallelizing compilers, parallel and distributed computation, parallel programming languages.

Hugh McGuire (CS PhD '95) is a lecturer, i.e. an instructor. Fall quarter 2000, he is teaching ``Introduction to Computer Programming'', ``Programming Methods'', and ``Introduction to UNIX, C, and C++''. For a couple of years, in connection with this position, in addition to teaching courses he served as Undergraduate Advisor for the department. Prior to that, Hugh was a Postgraduate Researcher for Professor Laura Dillon at UCSB, researching specification and validation of concurrent software-systems, using graphical interval temporal logic.

And new babies:

Edith Cohen (CS PhD) and Alex Chang (CS PhD): "Not too much to report. Alex is now working for Arbitrade who got bought by Knight Trimark. I am still at AT&T Labs. We had a second son (Benjamin) born back in November, and we are busy enjoying him and his brother."

Roger Crew (CS PhD) and his wife Emma Crew had a baby, Philip Malcolm, born 6/24/2000; picture at http://www.overlakehospital.org/whcbc/pics/philipmalcolm624.jpg

Kate Morris (CS PhD), Geoff Phipps (CS PhD) and their son, Rowan, welcomed Darcy Ian, who was born July 31, 1999. They live in Sydney, Australia.

Elizabeth Wolf (CS PhD) and Scott Seligman (CS MS) have a baby girl, Shana Helen Seligman, born October 23, 1999.

Please send news items to Tajnai@cs.stanford.edu

STAFF NEWS

����� Jutta McCormick, the Robotics Lab Manager, retired in the summer of 2000. Jutta joined the Robotics Lab in 1987 soon after I arrived at Stanford and became the head of the Robotics Lab. We have closely worked together since then. Jutta has been instrumental in establishing the Robotics Lab as one of the largest labs in the CS department and a wonderful place to conduct research. She will be greatly missed by faculty and students alike, and especially by me. Jutta became a grandmother for the first time two days after leaving Stanford!

����� Sara Merryman also retired during the summer of 2000. She managed the Ph.D. program for many years. Sara accomplished this task with enthusiasm and passion. Her Ph.D. weekends (when we invite the candidates admitted to our Ph.D. program to visit Stanford) were highly successful. The weekends helped us to keep a high acceptance rate in our program, which has been the envy of CS departments at other universities.

����� In addition, the Gates Building recently got a new building manager, Christine Fiksdal. Our building which is now the home of almost 600 people (staff, faculty, students, postdocs, visitors, etc.) is truly a big village, and the building manager has much to do to keep its inhabitants happy.

����� To conclude on a personal note, one of my goals for the summer is to climb Muztagh Ata, a mountain located in the Chinese Pamir not far from the border with Kirgizstan and Tadjikistan. Muztagh Ata is roughly 25,000ft or 7500m high. I will go there with three other people. Two of us plan to take our skis to the top and ski the mountain down. Using Google, I found a Web site that describes Muztagh Ata as the easiest 7000m-mountain in the world. I will tell you if this is true when I come back...

I hope you had a great summer and I thank you for your continuous support to the department.

Sincerely,

Jean-Claude Latombe