2005

September 2005

Dear Computer Science Alum,

As we begin a new academic year, it is my pleasure to write to you on behalf of the Department of Computer Science to extend our warmest greetings and bring you news of some of the past year's events and activities. I also want to thank the many of you who have contributed so generously to the department's success this past year and to invite you to make your annual gift for the new academic year today. The generous support of alumni is vital to our continued success in meeting the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

The Computer Science department has had another wonderful year. The department is truly an extraordinary place: International and national surveys place the department at the top; faculty members teach and conduct research on a broad range of topics at the forefront of computing; and we continue to attract the best and brightest students from around the world.

This newsletter covers the highlights of the past year: the arrival of new faculty, promotions and retirements of existing faculty, a glimpse at some research, and the celebration of a number of awards and honors bestowed upon department members.

One change since the last newsletter is the CS department chair. After four years of exemplary service, Hector Garcia-Molina stepped down as chair to return full time to teaching and research in the area of database systems. I hope all of you will join me in thanking Hector for his time and effort on behalf of the department. Under his leadership, the department has thrived and enhanced its already stellar reputation. I hope I can do as well in my term as chair.

For those of you who don t already know me: I am a computer architect. I work on the design of computer systems at two extremes: supercomputers and embedded computers (like those found in your cell phone). My research runs the gamut from circuit design to compilers. I received my master's degree from Stanford's EE department in 1981 and then earned a PhD in CS from Caltech in 1986. I was a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT for 11 years before becoming tired of winter and returning to Stanford in 1997.

As department chair, my primary goal is to keep the department at the cutting edge of computer science research and teaching. CS is an exciting field because it is constantly changing. Subfields such as computational biology are created, while other fields are redefined (such as programming systems and AI). As topics reinvent themselves, Stanford invariably leads the revolution and others follow.

New Faculty

This has been a very successful year for faculty recruiting with three new faculty members joining us.

Vladlen Koltun is a theorist who comes to us after completing a post doc at the University of California at Berkeley. Vladlen received his PhD from Tel Aviv University in 2002 and has solved a number of open problems in computational geometry. He is now broadening his work to address more general problems in theory.

Phil Levis is joining us from the University of California at Berkeley where he received his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science. His research focuses on the area of sensor network systems. His work includes the design and implementation of the TinyOS operating system and its simulator, TOSSIM, network algorithms, and protocols such as Trickle, the nesC programming language, and sensor network system design principles. His thesis work proposed using application specific virtual machines to provide a user-level programming environment in wireless sensor networks. He is well-known for the Trickle dissemination protocol. This is considered an important and innovative networking concept. In fact, he won the Networked Systems Design and Implementation 04 Best Paper award for his paper, Trickle: A Self- Regulating Algorithm for Code Propagation and Maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks. Phil's contributions make him a very high impact researcher; he is already considered a rising star in the emerging field of sensor networks.

David Mazières joins us from New York University where he has been an assistant professor since 2000. David's research interests center around computer systems and security. He and his collaborators have produced a number of distributed storage systems including SFS, a secure, global file system with decentralized control; LBFS, a file system for low-bandwidth networks; SUNDR, a file system that stores data on untrusted servers; and Shark, a distributed file system in which mutually distrustful clients cooperate to reduce load on servers. He has also worked on Coral, a widely-used peer-to-peer content distribution network; xok, an exokernel operating system; and various anti-censorship, privacy-enhancing, and anti-spam systems. Today he works on Asbestos, an operating system designed to contain and isolate untrusted code. He received an NSF career award in 2001, and was named a Sloan Fellow in 2002.

Promotions and Retirements

Please join me in congratulating Dawson Engler on his promotion to associate professor of computer science with tenure. Dawson's research is in the area of computer systems. His past work has ranged from extensible operating systems to dynamic code generation. His current research focuses on developing techniques to find as many software errors as possible. The tools developed by Dawson and his group have found thousands of errors in widely used systems such as Linux and OpenBSD. Dawson's research is described in more detail below.

After 38 years at Stanford, Professor Ed McCluskey has retired. He joined the faculty with a joint appointment in electrical engineering and computer science after serving as professor of electrical engineering and director of the computer center at Princeton University. He founded the Stanford Digital Systems Laboratory (now the Computer Systems Laboratory) in 1969, and was co-founder and first director of our industrial affiliates program, which began in 1970. Ed is recognized for his pioneering contributions to the understanding and design of reliable and fault-tolerant computers.

Research Activities

The department is active at the leading edge of a broad spectrum of research. This year, we will look briefly at three projects that span from computational biology to robotics to program verification:

Serafim Batzoglou and his group are comparing the human DNA sequence with those of mammals such as rats, mice, and dogs. Since the completion of the human genome, scientists have been trying to find the best way to decipher the biological information present in our DNA for example, the location of genes and other functional elements that affect how genes are expressed. Comparing DNA from different organisms can point to the elements that are responsible for common biological functions. Therefore, the National Institutes of Health is sponsoring an enormous project to sequence the DNA of 20 to 30 additional mammals. Since common genes tend to be shuffled across genomes, comparing DNA between mammals is a very challenging task. Serafim's group has developed methods for whole-genome comparison. They currently are comparing the genomes of the five mammals that have been sequenced to the human genome. The end goal is to comprehensively locate and study the genes and functional elements that are responsible for mammalian biology, and to see how these elements have evolved across the different organisms. For more information, go toai.stanford.edu/~serafim/research.html.

As you read in last year's newsletter, Stanford Engineering is fielding an entry for the DARPA Grand Challenge; that is, to build a robot car that can drive 175 miles through punishing desert terrain in less than 10 hours, with no human intervention. A multidisciplinary team of students and faculty is developing the car under the leadership of CS faculty members Sebastian Thrun, Vaughan Pratt, Alex Aiken, Andrew Ng, and David Cheriton. The car, nicknamed Stanley, is a 2004 Volkswagen Touareg equipped with lasers, cameras, GPS, and radar. You can see pictures of Stanley at www.stanfordracing.org.

According to Sebastian, the challenge is all about AI. The team already has developed a number of new algorithms for environment perception, terrain assessment, and control. Stanley uses machine-learning techniques to adapt its computer vision algorithms for road detection. Andrew currently is developing advanced machine-learning algorithms for high-speed off-road navigation. The Stanford Racing Team is one of 40 semifinalists from an original field of 195 competitors. Race day is October 8, 2005. Stay tuned!

Dawson Engler and his group are working on techniques to find bugs in large software systems. His first approach uses lightweight, customized compiler analysis to check code statically (i.e., without having to run it) for errors such as buffer overflows, deadlocks, race conditions, using freed memory, null pointers, etc. He and his graduate students started the company Coverity to commercialize their work. Coverity now has fifty customers including Oracle, Synopsys, Cadence, and EMC. Dawson's second bug-finding approach adapts ideas from the formal verification approach of model checking to real software in this case, to file systems. Model checking finds corner-case errors by comprehensively exploring the state spaces defined by a system. File systems have two dynamics that make them attractive for such an approach. First, their errors are some of the more serious ones, since they can destroy persistent data and lead to unrecoverable corruption. Second, traditional testing requires an impractical exponential number of test cases to determine if a system will recover if it crashes at any point during execution. As an example, this approach was applied to three widely-used and heavily-tested file systems: ext3, Jfs, and ReiserFS. Most of the serious bugs found led to patches within a day of diagnosis. Learn more about Dawson's work at www.stanford.edu/~engler.

Educational Affairs

Educational Affairs continues to update and revise the lower-division courses. After major changes to our introductory programming sequence CS106A and CS106B (moving from C to Java and C++), we are now working on downstream courses CS107 (Programming Paradigms) and CS108 (Object-Oriented Design). Jerry Cain is incorporating more C++ and systems-level material into CS107, and Nick Parlante is adding more advanced Java techniques along with design practice to CS108. Both courses provide opportunities for students to move to a new level of maturity as software engineers.

Over the summer, 50 undergraduates worked with faculty members in our research internship program (CURIS). We saw substantial growth in applications and faculty interest this past year. However, the number of students declaring CS as a major is still declining. We have seen this trend since the burst of the dot-com bubble, though it appears to be leveling off. Nevertheless, we still have more CS declarations than in the pre dot-com days.

Computer Forum

The Computer Forum, our industrial affiliates program, continues to provide benefits and services to our academic and industrial colleagues. An expanded membership directory (forum.stanford.edu/membership/directory) includes Stanford startups alongside established industry icons.

The Forum's recruiting program was strengthened by the addition of company tours for students to visit Forum affiliates, a fall job fair, and an exclusive job listing page for companies offering summer internships. The JobLunch program, which hosts affiliates, alumni, and former visiting scholars to give talks on technologies and career skills, returned with a busier schedule.

The Visiting Scholar Program currently hosts 12 researchers from 10 affiliate companies. The scholars research areas range from network design to ubiquitous and distributed computing to traversing graphics, with a brief pause in multimedia transmission technologies.

Over 350 company representatives, faculty, and students attended the 37th Annual Affiliates Meeting in the Arrillaga Alumni Center. The three-day event attracted attendees from around the world. Presenters from across the nation spoke at the Human-Computer Interaction Workshop, chaired by Scott Klemmer and Terry Winograd. Dan Boneh and John Mitchell cochaired the Security Workshop, which focused mainly on research from Stanford's Security Lab in privacy, networking, and encryption. Steve Trilling, vice president of research and development at Symantec Corporation, commandeered the stage as our after-dinner speaker.

The Forum Web site continues to evolve with the launch of the CS/CSL Research site atforum.stanford.edu/research. Other sites of interest:

Forum News Blog forum.stanford.edu/blog
Monthly Research Spotlight forum.stanford.edu
Events and Seminar Calendar forum.stanford.edu/calendar

Awards and Honors

Faculty Our faculty members continue to demonstrate that they are the best in the world, both by the extraordinary work that they do and by the awards they receive in recognition of it.

In February, Dan Boneh received the RSA Conference Award for mathematics. This award recognizes innovation and ongoing contributions in the field of cryptography.

Bill Dally won the 2004 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award. The citation reads: For fundamental contributions to the design and engineering of high-performance interconnection networks, parallel computer architectures, and high-speed signaling technology.

Ron Fedkiw received the National Academy of Sciences Award for Initiatives in Research. It is given annually to recognize innovative young scientists and to encourage research likely to lead toward new capabilities for human benefit. Ron was cited for his many innovations in the modeling and numerical simulation of flows, and his pioneering contributions to physically based computer graphics.

John McCarthy has been elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland's National Academy. Fellows are chosen in recognition of outstanding contributions to their field and achievement in public service.

Nick McKeown is now a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK). The distinguished list includes some of the brightest minds in the fields of bioelectronics, computer science, software engineering, and mobile communications.

Eric Roberts was appointed to chair the Education Board of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The volunteer committee within ACM is responsible for educational policy. Eric also was nominated by his peers to lead the 38th Senate of the Academic Council this year.

Jennifer Widom was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the design and implementation of active and semi-structured data management systems. Election to the academy is among the highest professional distinctions accorded an engineer.

Staff

Suzanne Bigas (Computer Forum) and Cheryl Lundquist (Graduate Admissions) won the CS department's Distinguished Service Awards for 2004. The annual award recognizes staff members for outstanding performance in support of the department's goals.

Alumni

Recent graduate Guido Appenzeller (MS 00, PhD 05) was named to the Technology Review 100. The MIT-sponsored magazine lists the top 100 technology innovators in the United States under 35. Guido was recognized for his work with Voltage Security, the startup he co-founded with other CS students.

Staying Connected

I encourage you to keep abreast of the activities in the department by visiting our Web site at cs.stanford.edu and by remaining an active member of our alumni community by keeping us apprised of your activities and whereabouts. You can log on to soe.stanford.edu/alumni/update.html to update your contact information. Or, if it is more convenient, fill out the enclosed alumni news update form. We look forward to hearing from you.

The Importance of Annual Giving

Faculty support, student recruiting, and facilities development all benefit from the generosity of alumni gifts to the CS department and to the Engineering Fund. Our ability to perform these functions is essential to the vitality of our department and dependent, largely, on the loyalty and generosity of our donors. Your gifts have helped to provide essential start-up funds for new faculty and financial aid for our graduate students.

These are clearly exciting times for our department, with many challenges and opportunities on the horizon. As a beneficiary of a Stanford Engineering education, you are in the best position to understand and support us in meeting our goals. Please join me in setting the new standard for engineering education by making your annual gift today. Each gift is important and makes a difference.

With best regards,

William J. Dally
Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor
Chair, Department of Computer Science 

P.S. Please send your gift today. A response card is enclosed for your convenience, or you can make your gift online at soe.stanford.edu/giving/makeagift.html. Thank you.

P.P.S. You may be able to double or even triple the value of your gift to Stanford Engineering if your company has a corporate matching program. Please check the enclosed brochure to verify if your company will match your gift. Thanks again.