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OAA 2012 Award Recipient Biographies

Justin Borgman  - Outstanding Achievement by a Young Alum

Justin Borgman is Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Hadapt, a company that provides an adaptive analytical platform for performing complex analytics on structured and unstructured data in a cloud-optimized system.

Prior to founding Hadapt, Mr. Borgman led product development for COVECTRA, an anti-counterfeiting technology firm.  As one of the first employees of this startup, he led development of the company's flagship product AuthentiTrack.  Prior to this, he founded an online social media company and worked as a software developer at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and at Raytheon Corporation.

Hadapt commercializes inventions that exploit analytical database research in virtualized environments. Hadapt is expanding the Hadoop architecture with a more complete SQL interface, a patent-pending Adaptive Query Execution(tm) capability, and a hybrid storage engine to handle structured as well as unstructured data in a single platform. Adaptive Query Execution(tm) dynamically load balances queries in virtualized environments and allows analytical workloads to be split automatically between relational database engines and Hadoop to get the best possible performance out of systems.

Mr. Borgman is a member of the Golden Key National Honor Society, the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, and the Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2002, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar. He attended graduate school at the Yale School of Management. 
 

Frederick W. Byron, Jr. - Outstanding Support for the Department

Frederick W. Byron, Jr. served as the Vice-Chancellor for Research of the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1994 to 2004 and was Dean of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) from 1979 to 1993.

Dr. Byron joined the University's physics faculty in 1966 and rapidly advanced through the administrative ranks, becoming Dean only 13 years after joining the faculty.  As NSM Dean, Dr. Byron showed great vision in recognizing that the science and technology of computing would ultimately have a revolutionary impact on our society.  Determined that UMass would be a leader in this emerging area, Dean Byron arranged for significant investment to be made in the Department of Computer Science, setting it on its path to become the world-class department it is today.

During his administrative career at UMass, Dr. Byron took a lead role in establishing the Pioneer Valley Life Sciences Initiative, a collaborative effort between the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Baystate Medical Center aimed at positioning our region to be a major center for biotechnology research. In 1995 under Dr. Byron's supervision, the campus created the Office of Commercial Ventures and Intellectual Property to oversee the commercial application of UMass research. Under Byron's leadership, external funding to University faculty for research and instruction increased 97 percent.  In 1994, the Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) Graduate Program established the Byron Prize in honor of Dr. Byron, who was instrumental in establishing the MCB program. He received the Chancellor's Medal, the campus's highest form of recognition, in 1993. 

Dr. Byron is currently serving as President of the Board of Directors of the Amherst Cinema and Pleasant Street Theater and is a Business Leader of the Economic Development Council of Western Massachusetts.
 

Claire Cardie - Outstanding Achievement in Education

Claire Cardie is a Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science (IS) at Cornell University and Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Appinions, a company that specializes in sentiment and opinion analysis using technology based on her research in natural language understanding.

In 2005 Prof. Cardie was named the first Charles F. and Barbara D. Weiss Director of Cornell's Information Science program, and she became its first Department Chair in 2009. She played an important role in shaping IS's far-reaching transformation of society by integrating computing and information science into education, research, and scholarship in engineering, the physical sciences, the arts and humanities, and the social sciences. Under Dr. Cardie's leadership, concentrations in IS that were started in each of Cornell's undergraduate colleges in the mid-1990's grew into full undergraduate majors, a Ph.D. program, and a Masters program.

A member of several professional organizations, Prof. Cardie served as an action editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research from 2000 to 2007 and as an associate editor for the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research from 2005 to 2007. She was elected to two terms as secretary of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics.  Dr. Cardie earned the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (1996-2000). She served as an elected Councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence from 2008-2011. She received a College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award and a Lilly Teaching Fellowship from Cornell University in 1996.

Prof. Cardie received a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale in 1982 and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1989 and 1994, respectively.
 

Edmund H. Durfee - Outstanding Achievement in Research

Edmund H. Durfee is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and in the School of Information, at the University of Michigan.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1988, he was a Research Computer Scientist in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Prof. Durfee studies computational mechanisms for planning and coordinating the activities of sophisticated, autonomous computational agents that adjust their behaviors to achieve their individual or collective objectives in time-critical environments. He has pioneered the use of distributed planning and constraint satisfaction techniques for agent coordination, and has led projects that employ these techniques in applications such as reconnaissance by unmanned vehicles, information gathering in digital libraries, and delegating command and control tasks to computational agents in reduced-crewsize ships. He has published extensively in these areas, and is author of the book Coordination of Distributed Problem Solvers (Kluwer Academic Press).

Dr. Durfee received the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator award in 1991, and is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.  He has served on many conference program committees and served as conference co-chair for the 2007 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. He has won several academic awards for his work, including two Influential Paper Awards (in 2008 and 2010) from the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

Prof. Durfee received an A.B. degree in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard University in 1980 and an M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a Ph.D. degree in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1984 and 1987, respectively.
 

Andrew E. Merlino, Jr. - Outstanding Achievement in Entrepreneurship

Andrew Merlino, Jr. is President and Founder of Pixel Forensics.

Founded in 2007, Pixel Forensics provides products and services to rapidly locate, analyze, browse, and search various forms of media, such as video, images, and audio

Prior to founding Pixel Forensics, Mr. Merlino gained technical, business and management skills while working for Raytheon, where he was on the electronic part analysis team, using CAD/CAM and decision tree analysis; MITRE Corporation, where he managed "Broadcast News Navigator", breaking new ground in automated on-demand news processing; and Virage, where he established and managed the Virage Advanced Technology lab in Massachusetts, building it into a successful, self-funded research and product development organization. More recently, Mr. Merlino established and managed a successful and profitable image analysis group at BBN Technologies.

The Pixel Forensics product, TreX, enables users to quickly locate, encode, and process content in a wide variety of formats; to understand content using automated tools; to perform near real-time browsing of incoming content; and to perform sophisticated visual search to discover key information and perform similarity matching.

Mr. Merlino holds two patents, has published a number of highly regarded papers, and has given presentations at numerous technical conferences.

Mr. Merlino graduated with a B.S. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1985 and an M.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from Northeastern University in 1989. He and has continued his education, taking business and management courses at Boston University.
 

Ken Schmidt - Outstanding Support for the Department

Ken Schmidt is the Academic Relations Director for Yahoo! where he manages relationships with several schools, including the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Previously, Mr. Schmidt was a Research and Development Consultant at Sarnoff Corporation, Research Operations Consultant at Yahoo! Research, ASSIST Program Operations Consultant at DARPA, and Operations and Planning Consultant at DARPA-IPTO. His career also includes work at AT&T Labs and Western Electric.  He is President of KS TechPros, a consulting service that he established in 2001.

Yahoo's Academic Relations team works with key contacts at over 30 schools in the U.S. and more than 10 in India to strengthen Yahoo!'s relationship with academia.  Under Mr. Schmidt's leadership, Yahoo! provides funds to support numerous activities in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  These include support for the very popular Machine Learning and Friends weekly lunch and the Computational Social Sciences Initiative lunch series, sponsorship of the UMass student chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, the undergraduate and graduate student annual achievement awards, CS Women's group activities including travel funding to the Grace Hopper Conference, departmental foosball tournaments (4 so far), and the UMass ACM Hackathon.  In addition, with Mr. Schmidt's support, UMass CS grad students have received Yahoo! Fellowships and Key Scientific Challenges Awards, and faculty have received numerous Yahoo! Faculty Research Awards along with access to Yahoo! databases and the Yahoo! cloud computing cluster. With Mr. Schmidt's coordination, Yahoo! also sends prominent researchers to speak in the department each semester.

Mr. Schmidt received a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1971 and 1973, respectively, and an MBA from New York University in 1981.
 

Henning Schulzrinne - Outstanding Achievement in Research

Henning Schulzrinne is Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and Chief Technology Officer of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Before joining Columbia's faculty, he was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, and an associate department head at GMD-Fokus (Berlin). From 2004 to 2009 he served as Chair of Columbia's Department of Computer Science. He was an Engineering Fellow at the FCC from 2010 to 2011, before being appointed its CTO in January 2012.

Dr. Schulzrinne's research interests encompass real-time network services, ubiquitous and mobile computing and network reliability. He is a pioneer in modernizing telephony and bringing Internet technologies to bear on global communications challenges. He has published more than 250 journal and conference papers, and protocols co-developed by him are now Internet standards, used by almost all Internet telephony and multimedia applications. He is editor or past editor of many journals in his field, and has held many positions of leadership in the networking community.

Prof. Schulzrinne is a Fellow of the IEEE, has received the New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, the VON Pioneer Award, TCCC Service Award, and the IEEE William Terry Award for Lifetime Distinguished Service to the IEEE.

In 1984 Dr. Schulzrinne received an undergraduate degree in Economics and Electrical Engineering from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. He received an MSEE degree as a Fulbright scholar from the University of Cincinnati in 1987, and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1992. 
 

Ted Selker - Outstanding Achievement in Technology Development

Ted Selker is the Associate Director of Mobility Research and Visiting Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley.

From 1998 to 2008 Dr. Selker was an Associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory where he created the Context Aware Computing Group, co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and directed the Counter-Design Intelligence: Product Design of the Future project. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, he directed the User Systems Ergonomics Research Laboratory at IBM Research, where he became an IBM Fellow in 1996. He has served as a consulting professor at Stanford University, taught at Hampshire College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Brown University.

Dr. Selker is noted for research that has contributed to products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems.  His visualizations have made impacts ranging from improving the performance of the PowerPC to usability OS/2 ThinkPad setup to Google maps.  Among many computer innovations, he is known for inventing the TrackPoint pointing device and for designing the Thinkpad 755CV notebook computer, which doubles as an LCD projector.

His work has resulted in 56 patents, many awards, and many papers. Dr. Selker's inventions have received more than 30 industry awards. He was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for the Scientific American 50 in 2004, the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology in 2006, and the Telluride Tech Fest Award in 2008.

Dr. Selker received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University in 1979, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1981, and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York in Artificial Intelligence and Education in 1992. 
 

Elliot Soloway - Outstanding Contributions to Society 

Elliot Soloway is an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the College of Engineering, the School of Information and the School of Education at the University of Michigan.

Dr. Soloway's university career spans 30 years. His current research interests are in the use of mobile technologies to fundamentally change pedagogy in the world's classrooms. He co-directs the Intergalactic Mobile Learning Alliance, a consortium of research organizations and schools dedicated to using mobile technologies to transform teaching and learning. He was one of the founders of the Center for Highly Interactive Computing in Education (HI-CE), where he works to develop technology-embedded curricula for school-based programs.

To transition research into practice, Dr. Soloway also co-founded GoKnow(tm), Inc., a Dallas TX-based commercial organization. Over 40,000 K-12 students, from Detroit to Singapore, have used GoKnow's products productively. Evaluation has provided statistical evidence that GoKnow's products lead to increased test scores and improved classroom performance.

In 2001, the University of Michigan undergraduates selected him to receive the Golden Apple Award as the Outstanding Teacher of the Year. In 2004 and in 2011 the EECS College of Engineering HKN Honor Society awarded Dr. Soloway the Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award. And, while a grad student at UMass Amherst, he received the Distinguished Teaching Award.

He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, awarded in 1973 and 1978, respectively.

 

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