Dr. Carla Brodley (Ph.D. '94), was appointed Dean of the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Previously, she was a Professor of Computer Science at Tufts University and was Chair of Tufts Department of Computer Science from 2010 to 2013. Also this year, Brodley was elected to the 2014 class of AAAI Fellows.
Alexander L. Wolf (Ph.D. '85) was elected ACM President for a two-year term beginning July 1st. Wolf, a Professor in Computing at Imperial College London, UK, was also awarded the 2014 SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award "for formative work in software architecture, influential research in distributed event-based systems, and important contributions in software deployment, configuration management, and process."
Akshat Kumar (Ph.D. '13) was selected as the winner of the ICAPS (International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling) 2014 Best Dissertation Award. His dissertation "Exploiting Domain Structure in Multiagent Decision-Theoretic Planning and Reasoning" was completed in 2013. The award was presented at the 24th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling that took place in Portsmouth, NH in June. Kumar is currently a faculty member at the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University.
The Computing Research Association (CRA), in consultation with the National Science Foundation, appointed Debra Richardson (Ph.D. '81) as one of six new members of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council. She began serving a three-year term on July 1st.
Dr. Michael Franklin (B.S. '83), Thomas M. Siebel Professor of Computer Science, was named the Chair of the Computer Science Division, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, at the University of California Berkeley.
Bruno Ribeiro (Ph.D. '10) and Benyuan Liu (Ph.D. '03), current graduate student Kun Tu, Distinguished Professor Don Towsley, and co-authors collaborated on a research project involving studying the behavior of users of dating websites. Their paper "Who is Dating Whom: Characterizing User Behaviors of a Large Online Dating Site" was featured in MIT Technology Review and a number of other media sites. In another of Ribeiro's projects, partially completed while he was a UMass Amherst CS Postdoc, a model that he developed predicts the growth and potential death of Facebook and other membership-based websites. Ribeiro notes that his model shows Facebook will not fail anytime soon. This work was presented at the World Wide Web Conference this spring.
Jennifer (Cotter) Cannon (B.S. '03) is a Software Engineer working at BAE Systems in Hudson, NH for the past 10 years. She received a Master's in Systems Engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 2012. She and her husband are the proud parents of a 10 month old son. "I am grateful for the education I received at UMass Amherst," notes Cannon.
CS is saddened to announce the passing of one of our alumni, James Tung (M.S. '69), who died on July 21, 2014 in Poughkeepsie, New York. He was a Systems Analyst for IBM and SAIC.