Cisco Systems, Inc.
Cisco is actively involved in supporting the Department's research. Recently, the company provided research funding to Assistant Professor Yanlei Diao for her work on "In-Network Event Processing over Distributed Streams."
In addition, Cisco awarded two scholarships to CS students this fall. Alison Bird and Tiffany Chao received Cisco Systems Undergraduate Scholarships targeted towards underrepresented groups in computer science. Cisco also sponsors the ACM student chapter meetings and was instrumental in getting the new chapter established in 2008.
EMC Corporation
In September, EMC spent a day at UMass Amherst at various departments on campus. In the Computer Science Department, Daniel Bailey gave a research talk on "Wireless Authentication Token Protocols." Bailey is a Senior Research Scientist at RSA Laboratories, part of the Security Division of EMC. UMass Amherst alum, James Pearson, EMC2 Vice President introduced Bailey and spoke briefly about the current state of EMC.
In addition to bringing technical speakers to campus, EMC's RSA Labs continues to support the RFID Consortium on Security and Privacy both academically and financially. Led by Assistant Professor Kevin Fu, RFID CUSP is a partnership between academic and industrial scientists specializing in RFID security and privacy. Its mission is to make RFID safe for consumers by conducting open research and educating the next generation work force that will develop, deploy and maintain secure RFID infrastructures.
Google, Inc.
In October, Google Research Scientist Gideon Mann gave a talk on "A Baseline for Large Vocabulary Video Annotation." Mann is a former Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Department's Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory, and he is still in active collaboration with that group. In addition to the technical talk, Google hosted a reception in which other Googlers, including CS alum Vitaliy Lvin (MS '07), were available to answer questions about the company and its research.
McKesson Corporation
McKesson Corp., the Department newest industrial affiliate, visited in October to give students an overview of the company, located just down the road in Hadley, MA. During an afternoon seminar, McKesson researchers discussed the current research being undertaken at the world's largest health care services company. Their office started in the 70's as Amherst Associates, a spin-off company from the UMass Amherst School of Public Health. Their software caught the attention first of HBO & Company and then McKesson who acquired them in 1998. They are in the Performance Management/Business Intelligence domain. McKesson visitors included Steve Yarrows, and CS alums Sally Waisbrot (MS '81) and Kevin Peret (B.S. '08). Waisbrot, McKesson's Director of Research and Development, also spoke at a Departmental seminar in the spring.
Yahoo! Inc.
Yahoo! is partnering with Professor James Allan on BOSS (Build your Own Search Service). Yahoo!'s open search web services platform gives researchers the ability to conduct open research on search engines that was impossible in the academic environment. The Department was one of seven universities initially chosen to partner with Yahoo! on the BOSS project.
In addition to sponsoring the Department's weekly Machine Learning & Friends technical seminar series luncheons, Yahoo! researchers visited the Department to present their work. CS alums Fernando Diaz (Ph.D '08) and Hema Raghavan (Ph.D. '07) spoke in the Department this fall. Both are Research Scientists at Yahoo!
Yahoo! also actively supports the Department's students and activities. The company provided funding for the CS Women's group, the ACM chapter, travel funds for the Grace Hopper Conference, and they also sponsor the Department's outstanding undergraduate student awards and graduate student thesis and synthesis project awards. In the spring, Yahoo! sponsored a foosball tournament to make use of the foosball table they donated to the CS department.