In this issue…

From the Chair…

Dear Alumni and Friends of the CS Dept at Boston University:

First, I would like to thank you all for your enthusiastic support of our BUCAN initiative as evidenced by the number of alumni who have registered with the BUCAN database either on-line or by regular mail. Please encourage your friends and members of your graduating class to “re-connect” by registering on-line at http://www.cs.bu.edu/CAN. I also thank all of you who have indicated your willingness to volunteer for various BUCAN activities.

This is the first of what we hope will become a regular quarterly newsletter to keep members of BUCAN informed of the various on-going activities and initiatives within the department. More importantly, we hope that this newsletter will become a venue for communication between all of you alumni and friends of CS at BU. Please don’t hesitate to send us news and/or announcements that you feel are appropriate to share with the BUCAN community, either in future newsletters or on the BUCAN web site at http://www.cs.bu.edu/CAN. You can do so via email to: bucan-admin@cs.bu.edu.

I hope you will find this infrequent communication useful in keeping you informed and in keeping you connected.

Sincerely,
Azer Bestavros
Associate Professor and Chairman
CS Department, Boston University

IAP Research Day to be held on February 22, 2002

Mark your calendars! This year’s Industrial Affiliate Program (IAP) Research Day will be held on Friday February 22, 2002. The day will start with an overview of the department, followed by demonstrations and posters by our students in our Graduate Research Laboratory. Lunch will be provided.

You can find abstracts of posters and demonstrations submitted (so far) by students at http://www.cs.bu.edu/IAP/abstracts.html.

This event is open to members of BUCAN. If you are planning to attend, please RSVP to Prof. Matta (matta@cs.bu.edu).

Industry Talk Series off to a Great Start!

Last fall, we launched the new Industry Talk Series (ITS) as part of our IAP program. ITS brings industry experience to the Boston University CS community. It enables industry to talk directly to students through its leading experts, who discuss the real issues and current challenges faced by the technologists working in computer-related fields. ITS talks focus on the real-life industrial development projects and experiences, rather than academic research. Thus, ITS complements the BU-CS Colloquium Series, which is a traditional academic colloquium. The ITS has so far featured speakers from IBM, GeoTrust, The Privacy Foundation, and VeriSign.

You are invited to check (and of course attend) the upcoming talks scheduled for this semester at http://www.cs.bu.edu/ITS. For more information or to suggest speakers (or better yet, to volunteer as a speaker), please contact Prof. Itkis (itkis@cs.bu.edu).

Professor Shanghua Teng Joins the CS Department Faculty

Starting on January 2002, Shanghua Teng (PhD’1991, CMU) has started as a Full Professor of Computer Science in our Department. Prior to joining our faculty, Shanghua held appointments as a Full Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (UIUC) and as a senior research scientist at Akamai Technologies Inc. Shanghua’s research interests include smoothed analysis of algorithms and heuristics, internet algorithms and software, large scale information processing and organization, combinatorial optimization, linear programming, parallel scientific computing, mesh generation, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, computational geometry, graph partitioning and data mining, VLSI and circuit simulation, probabilistic analysis, and cryptography. This semester, Shanghua is teaching a new course on Computational Geometry and Scientific Computing.

Professor George Kollios Secures a Prestigious NSF Award

Assistant Professor, George Kollios, who joined our department in Fall 2000 has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to support his research on Efficient Indexing and Data Mining in Spatio-Temporal Databases. This prestigious award will support George and his students for five years. This is a big accomplishment for George and I am sure that you will join me in congratulating him on this important achievement.

George is the tenth faculty member on our faculty to secure a NSF Career (formerly RIA) award. This is a record of which our department is very proud.

CAIDA Equipment Award Adds to Systems Sandbox Teaching Laboratory

A generous equipment award from CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) to Assistant Professor Ibrahim Matta will provide our undergraduate and graduate students with hands-on experience related to the operation and use of state-of-the-art Internet routing technologies. The four Cisco 7000-series routers will be integrated in the newly-established Systems Sandbox–a teaching laboratory that caters to a number of our systems and networking courses, including CS-470 (Performance Evaluation), CS-553 (Experimental Operating Systems), and CS-556 (Advanced Networking).

Event Planning for Groundbreaking of the New CS Building

We are at the initial stages of planning a CS Departmental event in Summer or early Fall of 2002 to coincide with the groundbreaking of the new CS Building. In this event, we hope to involve members of our alumni body. If you would like to help plan for this event, please contact us at bucan-admin@cs.bu.edu.

Email Forwarding for Life!

Many of our BUCAN members have inquired about the availability of mail forwarding services to alumni of Boston University. The answer is yes! You can obtain a lifetime email alias from Boston University Alumni Web. Check the description of this service here.