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News Archive

Tom Bruce and Peter Martin of the Legal Information Institute have released a short video that describes the importance of open access to legal information and some of the contributions made by the institute.

Gilly Leshed was cited in an article in the Canadian magazine The Walrus about her work with Theresa Velden, Oya Rieger, and Phoebe Sengers on how in-car GPS users interact with the environment Global Impositioning Systems: Is GPS technology actually harming our sense of direction. Gilly was also cited in the New Scientist magazine on the same work: Robot driving companion brings emotion to navigation. (November 2009)

NIH has funded a major two-year $12M grant to Cornell, the University of Florida, Indiana University Bloomington, and four other partners (including Weill Cornell Medical College) to extend Cornell's VIVO system to create a national network of biomedical researchers. Dean Krafft is the Cornell PI on the project and the chair of its technical advisory board. Carl Lagoze is on the technical advisory board. (October 2009)

Congratulations to Geri Gay, who has been honored with the 2009 College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Research and Extension Award for Outstanding Service to the CALS Community. "This award recognizes the importance of [Geri's] myriad contributions to CALS as Chair of the Department of Communication, Co-Director of the Institute for the Social Sciences, and Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Group. . . . The Awards Committee noted that [Geri] is credited with building the Department of Communication into one of the best communication research departments in the country and . . . [has] forged innovative linkages with Weill-Cornell Medical College and the Johnson Museum, thereby enhancing the stature of the College throughout the University." (October 2009)

Thorsten Joachims and Chun-Nam Yu won the Best Paper Award at ECML 2009 for their paper "Sparse Kernel SVMs via Cutting-Plane Training". (October 2009)

The recent NSF grant to Eva Tardos, Larry Blume, David Easley, Bobby Kleinberg, Jon Kleinberg, and Maureen O'Hara ("Networks, Learning and Markets with Strategic Agents") is discussed in an article in the New York Times Business section on Sunday Sept. 13.  The article, part of a set of pieces written on the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, discuss academic research into how networks of trust can break down in financial markets. (October 2009)

Graduate students Nicholas Chen and Hyunyoung Song were selected for the Doctoral Symposium at UIST 2009 to present their work. (August 2009)

Jon Kleinberg was quoted in the New York Times this week regarding his paper, “Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle,” coauthored also by Jure Leskovec and Lars Backstrom about using the web to track and measure  the news cycle. There is an interactive display of their findings at Memetracking.

There is also an article in the Cornell Chronicle. (July 2009)

Johannes Gehrke has been elected to the Board of Directors of SIGKDD: the ACM special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. (July 2009)

Daniel P. Huttenlocher, the John P. and Rilla Neafsey Professor of Computing, Information Science and Business at Cornell University, has been named the university's dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS). He succeeds Robert L. Constable, CIS's founding dean who is currently concluding his second five-year term. (June 2009)

Thorsten Joachims won Best 10-Year paper at ICML 2009, which is given to "a paper published in ICML 1999 the committee feels has had the most significant and lasting impact." (June 2009)

An Honorary Day for Bob Constable is being held under the auspices of the Lynne and William Frankel Center for Computer Science on June 16, 2009 celebrating 10 years as dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell.  The day includes a special seminar on Verification, Distributed Computing, and Computing Sciences (June 2009)

Tarleton Gillespie's book "Wired Shut" has been honored with two awards: The
2009 CITASA book award given by the Communication and Information Technology Division of the American Sociological Association and previously the ICA Outstanding Book Award, given by the International Communication Association.
(June 2009)

Cornell Chronicle of May 15th reports on the recent Johnson School's student-run "Big Red Ventures" investment in Jodange, the start-up for which Claire Cardie is co-founder and chief scientist. (June 2009)

The Yahoo! Student Teaching Award for outstanding accomplishments and contributions as a teaching assistant went to Stephen Purpura, IS graduate student. He was also awarded a Teaching Assistant award for his outstanding contribution to CS 5150 Software Engineering by Professor William Arms. Other Information Science students Ian Sholtys and Benjamin Cole received Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Awards. They provided outstanding support for Dan Cosley's Human-Computer Interaction Design course and Tracy Mitrano's Culture, Law and Politics of the Internet course, respectively. The IS awards celebration will be held in the Fall. (May 2009)

The Google Fellowship recipients for 2009 represent a very select group of amazing students, among the recipients were Nicholas Chen in Human-Computer Interaction from University of Maryland working with Professor Francois Guimbretiere at Cornell University in Information Science. Ryan Peterson, also from Cornell received the Google Fellowship in Distributed Systems. (May 2009)

The April 2009 issue of the Communications of the ACM contains an article on sentiment analysis that makes reference to several members and alumni of the Cornell computer science department. It mentions Claire Cardie and her startup, Jodange. The book _Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis_, written by Bo Pang and Lillian Lee, makes a cameo appearance. (May 2009)

Congratulations to Jeff Hancock for receiving the Provost's Award in May for Distinguished Scholarship awarded to recently tenured faculty. Jeff was recognized for his distinguished research in the areas of Communication and Information Science. (May 2009)

Cornell Chronicle has a nice article about Jon Kleinberg’s Infosys Award: an award of $150,000 provided by an endowment from the Infosys Foundation.

An interview conducted by Stephen Ibaraki (ACM) with Jon is available to listen to online. The 45-minute segment includes Jon’s thoughts on many points including what attracted him to the field of computing, his work in the area of social network analysis, and his predictions for the future. Selected excerpts from the interview, as well as additional background, are available online. (May 2009)

Geri Gay's new book entitled: "Context-Aware Mobile Computing" describing Affordances of Space, Social Awareness, and Social Influence will make an appearance July 15th, 2009. (May 2009)

John E. Hopcroft, Eva Tardos, and Charles Van Loan, among 183 named SIAM Fellows for key contributions to applied mathematics and computational science.  The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is pleased to announce the SIAM Fellows Class of 2009 and the inauguration of the SIAM Fellows Program. Fellowship is an honorific designation conferred on members distinguished for their outstanding contributions to the fields of applied mathematics and computational science. During this inaugural year of the program, SIAM will confer Fellows status on 183 noteworthy professionals who will be recognized during the 2009 SIAM Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado. (May 2009)

Shaomei Wu, IS PhD student is one of the selected recipients for the The Liu Memorial Award that was established by friends and colleagues in memory of the late Professor Ta-Chung Liu and his wife, Ya-Chao. Shaomei will receive the amount of $2,750 from a very select group of PhD students for her academic ability and performance and dedication. Her award will be available in May, 2009.

Carl Lagoze
has been elected for a two-year term as a research fellow in the graduate school of Library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. According to the letter from the Dean John Unsworth. the fellowship is an honor, and indicates that Carl's work is highly regarded by, and highly relevant to, the GSLIS faculty." (April 2009)

Two CALS Information Science undergraduates, Eli Luxenberg and James Elkins have just won a 2009 One Laptop Per Child-Corps grant and internship. They will be ushering 100 laptops to Mauritanial, Africa this summer and implementing an integrated computing and literacy program with elementary school students. (April 2009)

Best paper award nominations at ACM CHI 2009: "Nourishing the Ground for Sustainable HCI: Considerations from ecologically engaged art" by Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology, Kirsten Boehner, Cornell University, Nicholas A. Knouf, Cornell University, and Phoebe Sengers, Cornell University AND "Cultural Difference and Adaptation of Communication Styles in Computer-Mediated Group Brainstorming" by Hao-Chuan Wang, Cornell University, Susan R. Fussell, Cornell University and Leslie D. Setlock, Cornell University. (April 2009)

Jon Kleinberg won the ACM - Infosys Foundation Award (April 2009)

 Lillian Lee was awarded the Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Prize. Only 4 out of 1600 Cornell faculty received the award. The awards recognize "sustained and distinguished contributions of professorial faculty and senior lecturers to undergraduate advising." (April 2009)

Doug James, Kavita Bala and Steve Marschner received a $1.2 million NSF grant from the Human Centered Computing program to research "Sound Rendering for Physically Based Simulation." (April 2009)

Dave Crandall, Lars Backstrom, Dan Huttenlocher, and Jon Kleinberg's work on analyzing Flickr data to automatically make maps of interesting landmarks without prior knowledge is discussed in articles in New Scientist, Wired, the Guardian, and the Cornell Chronicle. (April 2009)

Thorsten Joachims received the Fraunhofer-Bessel Award of the Humboldt Foundation. The award recognizes young researchers and aims to attract them for an extended research visit to Germany. As a winner Thorsten got to shake hands with the president of Germany. (April 2009)

Tarleton Gillespie has been selected as the 2009 recipient of the International Communication Association's Outstanding Book Award, which "honors one book each year that speaks to significant issues relevant to ICA and the communication discipline as a whole." (April 2009)

Joe Halpern co-wins the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award for fundamental advances in reasoning about knowledge, belief, and uncertainty. (His co-winner, Barbara Grosz, is a Cornell alum). The ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award is presented to an individual selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines. This endowed award is accompanied by a prize of $10,000, and is supported by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and by individual contributions. (March, 2009)

Dan Cosley has been awarded the prestigious Faculty Early Career Development CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for his proposal on: LEVERAGING ONLINE BEHAVIOR TO SUPPORT KNOWLEDGE AND MEMORY. (February 2009)

Lillian Lee was quoted in an article about the incoming Obama adminstration's solicitation of public feedback via the Internet. The article was entitled: "Is Obama's Web-based political revolution real or smoke?" and also ran as "Is Obama's Web-based political revolution real or an illusion?" in The Fort Worth Star Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, the Charlotte Observer, and others. (December, 2008)

Recently, two papers authored by Jeff Hancock and co-authored by three Information Science undergrads (J. Mae, K. Gee, and K. Fenner) received Best Paper Nominations at ACM's Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2008). The papers are titled, “I’m sad you’re sad: Emotional contagion in CMC” and “I know something you don’t: The Use of asymmetric personal information for interpersonal advantage.” (November 2008)

Kavita Bala and Doug James are featured in and article, “Rendering Reality: Cornell Computer Scientists Build a Better World, Virtually” in the Fall Engineering Magazine. (November 2008)

Ken Birman and Jon Kleinberg are quoted in Computerworld in an article entitled "The Computer, Once a Tool for Scientists, Is Becoming a Collaborator". (November 2008)

Jon Kleinberg and Lillian Lee are invited speakers at the Third International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2009), to be held May 17-20, 2009 in San Jose, California. (November 2008)

Paul Ginsparg , who founded the arXiv e-print archive, recounts the early days of the Web and looks at how it has changed scientific communication. (October, 2008)

Dan Huttenlocher believes that a faculty honor is also a call to excellence.
See "Cornell Campaign website" (September, 2008)

Cornell University gets $10M Expedition grant for the new Institute for Computational Sustainability: Computational Methods for a Sustainable Environment, Economy and Society under the direction of PI: Carla Gomes and will involve 14 Cornell faculty members along with scientists at Oregon State University, Howard University, Bowdoin College, the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Conservation Fund. (September, 2008)

Timothy Graham (ISST) has been chosen as one of the 2008-09 Frank and Rosa Rhodes Scholarship Recipients from Engineering for his contributions to the college through academic achievement and leadership. (September, 2008)

Joe Halpern will be giving an invited talk on "Beyond Nash Equilibrium: Solution Concepts for the 21st Century" at the 27th Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC). (August, 2008)

Lillian Lee was an invited speaker at AAAI 2008. Her talk title was "A tempest: Or, on the flood of interest in sentiment analysis, opinion mining, and the computational treatment of subjective language". Carla Gomes was Program Co-chair. The conference drew over 1000 attendees. (August, 2008)

Claire Cardie was elected a Councilor of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) by the general membership for a term lasting through 2011. The Executive Council is responsible for managing the activities of the AAAI, an organization with more than 6000 members. (July, 2008)

Jon Kleinberg was a keynote speaker at the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia (Hypertext 2008) in Pittsburgh.  He spoke on "Link Structures, Information Flow, and Social Processes". (July, 2008)

Cornell Library names Dean Krafft as chief technology strategist. Dean Krafft is no stranger to Information Technology as his previous experience as Director of Information Technology for Computing and Information Science and as PI for the Cornell Core Integration team of the National Science Digital Library. (July, 2008)

Jon Kleinberg was an invited plenary speaker at the 2008 annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in San Diego.  His talk was entitled, "The Geography of Social and Information Networks". (July, 2008)

Information Science major, Alex Ainslie was recently awarded the Cornell Presidential Research Scholar for 2008. We are also proud of Jenna Holloway another Information Science major who received her merit research scholarship last year to support human computer interaction research in the areas of mobile computing and affective visualizations. Both are currently working with the HCI lab at 301 College Avenue under the direction of Professor Geri Gay. (June, 2008)

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced the grants awarded through the Health Games Research national program. These grants will enable research teams to support the development and use of digital interactive games to improve players' health behaviors and outcomes. Cornell University, Department of Communication ( Ithaca , N.Y. ) receives $165,000 grant for their  Mindless Eating Challenge. A mobile phone-based game designed to encourage healthier eating habits. The game is built to serve as a platform for studying mechanisms of mobile persuasion in the context of improving health and well-being. (May, 2008)

Congratulations to Gilly Leshed selected as a recipient of the 2008-09 Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship Award at Cornell. The Intel Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship Program awards fellowships to Ph.D. candidates pursuing leading-edge work in fields related to Intel's business and research interests. (May, 2008)

Several of Cornell's IS faculty and students presented papers, conducted
workshops, participated in poster sessions, and hosted sessions at CHI 2008 in
Florence, Italy this year. Best of CHI Awards that honor exceptional submissions to Computer Human Interaction congratulations go to: Gilly Leshed, Theresa Velden, Oya Rieger (Comm), Blazej Kot, and Phoebe Sengers for their paper on In-Car GPS Navigation: Engagement with and Disengagement from the Environment. Also congratulations to Gilly Leshed for her honorable mention at CHI 2008 on a paper she wrote "Automating & sharing how-to knowledge in the enterprise" as part of her internship at IBM Almaden Research Labs. (April, 2008)

Jeff Hancock was the recent recipient of the SUNY Chancellors award for Excellence in Teaching. (April, 2008)

Cameron Hall was honored as the 2008 Recipient of the Academic Excellence Award in Information Science. (April, 2008)

Thomas Bruce and the rest of the Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute (LII) team were lauded in a recent issue of the Cornell Chronicle for the IRS' inclusion of LII's version of Title 26 in, according to the Chronicle, "its top-drawer Tax Products CD/DVD package." (March, 2008)

Cyberscholarship: High Performance Computing Meets Digital Libraries per William Y. Arms The convergence of high-performance computing and digital libraries is giving birth to new forms of research that are classified as "cyberscholarship," which is only possible when there are digital libraries with extensive collections in a wide-ranging domain. There must be new strategies for organizing and using library collections in order to exploit cyberscholarship opportunities. High-performance computing is an essential ingredient of very big collections, and the use of high-performance computing systems by researchers who are not computing specialists remains a major challenge. Full Article at Journal of Electronic Publishing (March, 2008)

Dan Cosley, Andrew Herman '07, Jenna Holloway '09, and Jonathan Baxter '09, of the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Laboratory, were featured in the Cornell Chronicle for their work on the Artlinks project, housed in the Johnson Museum. (February, 2008)

Jon Kleinberg was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering. (February, 2008)

Tarleton Gillespie, Jeff Hancock, and Lillian Lee were all recently named Cornell Institute for the Social Sciences (ISS) Faculty Fellows for the Fall 2008 semester, with the following project titles: "The Gesture of Publication in an Information Society" (Gillespie), "The Practice of Lying in the Digital Age" (Hancock), and "The verbal end: Interactions between computational textual analysis and the social sciences." (Lee) (February, 2008)

Fedora has released the first beta version of Fedora 3.0 for testing, which contains a Content Model Architecture (CMA), an "integrated structure for persisting and delivering the essential characteristics of digital objects in Fedora," according to the website, and can be found here: http://www.fedora-commons.org/. (January, 2008)

Carl Lagoze recently was awarded a two-year grant from Microsoft for the "e-Chemistry" project, in collaboration with Cambridge University, Indiana University, Penn State, and the University of Southampton. (December, 2007)

Dan Huttenlocher was selected by ACM as one of the 38 new ACM Fellows. The Fellows are granted this acknowledgement, according to the ACM website, for "their contributions to computing technology that have brought advances in the way people live and work throughout the world." (December, 2007)

The Cornell Chronicle referenced once more Johannes Gehrke's recent NYSTAR Faculty Development Award. (September, 2007)

Carla Gomes and Dieter Fox are program co-chairs of the Twenty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2008). (September, 2007)

Bill Arms, Dan Huttenlocher, and Jon Kleinberg have received a new NSF grant, "Computer Science Research Using the Cornell Web Lab to Study Social and Informational Processes on the Web." The grant is for $898,000 and runs for two years from October 1. (September, 2007)

Johannes Gehrke recently was the recipient of one of the 5 NYSTAR faculty development awards for top-level New York university faculty, which total $3.7 million in grants. (August, 2007)

Cornell University was dubbed "Hottest Ivy," according to Newsweek's Hottest Schools list. (August, 2007)

The August 2007 issue of CTWatch Quarterly, focusing on Scholarly Communications and Cyberinfrastructure, features articles by Paul Ginsparg and Carl Lagoze, among others. (August, 2007)


The Ithaca Journal
featured in its August 20 issue Sandy Payette and Fedora Commons. Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, and the IS Fedora Commons team launched Fedora Commons on August 13, 2007 at a reception held at Information Science Fedora Commons is the home of Fedora, the robust integrated repository-centered platform that enables the storage, access and management of any kind of digital content. Fedora Commons provides sustainable technologies to create, manage, publish, share and preserve digital content as a basis for intellectual, organizational, scientific and cultural heritage made possible by an award of $4.9M of start-up funding from the Moore Foundation.
(August, 2007)

Tarleton Gillespie published his first book, Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture, this summer through MIT Press. (August, 2007)

Thorsten Joachims and Jon Kleinberg have been honored with the 2007 College of Engineering Excellence in Teaching Award, the highest teaching award offered by the college. (August, 2007)

Eva Tardos was recently elected by the Board of Trustees to a Jacob Gould Schurman endowed chair, one of the most prestigious to be offered at Cornell. (June, 2007)

Claire Cardie, Cynthia Farina, and Geri Gay were highlighted in a Cornell Chronicle article about their involvement in the eRulemaking Initiative's project to both categorize comments regarding governmental rule-making as well as create an interface to help individuals make more useful comments. (June, 2007)

Lillian Lee was the recipient of the Cornell Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship for her work in the area of Natural Language Processing. This award recognizes high quality research by tenured faculty who distinguish themselves early in their careers. (June 2007)

The May 16 issue of the Cornell Chronicle discusses an upcoming trip from May 30-31 to be undertaken by the Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI), a three-year, $750,000 grant funded by the National Science Foundation. The team will present to the Departments of Commerce and Transportation, and will include Cynthia Farina, Erica Wagner, Claire Cardie, and Thomas Bruce, along with students from Bill Arms' CS 501 (Software Engineering) course. (May, 2007)

Jon Kleinberg was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
(April, 2007)

Carla Gomes was recently elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI) the premier organization in the area of Artificial Intelligence. (April, 2007)

In the first annual North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NAMCLO), local highschool students at the Ithaca site, co-organized by Claire Cardie, Jen Wofford, and Lillian Lee, won first and second place in this national competition in which 195 students participated.

This year's BOOM (Bits on Our Minds), which took place on February 28th in the Duffield Atrium, was showcased by News 10 Now. BOOM is held annually, and features student projects involving digital technology. (March, 2007)

Science News recently showcased research conducted by Cornell University faculty and researchers. The following individuals were contributors: Lars Backstrom, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Xiangyang Lan, as well as by Bill Arms, Michael Macy, and David Strang. (February, 2007)

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Kavita Bala and Bobby Kleinberg, respectively, the Faculty Early Career Development (Career) grant. Bala's sum of $450,000 over the course of 5 years is titled "Scalable Rendering for Visual Realism in Scale-Complex Scenes," while Kleinberg's $400,000 grant is called, "Algorithms for Environments with Incomplete Information." (February 2007)

Kelly Conway and Evan Herbst, Cornell’s nominees for the 2007 CRA undergraduate award for “demonstrated excellence of computing research ability,” both garnered Honorable Mentions in their respective “outstanding” female and male categories. In their combined experience, Conway and Herbst have worked with Thorsten Joachims, Michael Spivey, and Dan Huttenlocher, among others. (January, 2007)

According to the online Cornell Chronicle, the Cornell Theory Center (CTC) is collaborating with 20 academic and at least four research institutions on a project known as the New York State Grid (NYSGrid), which will “share computer applications and data storage and run demanding applications on more than one computer at a time.” NYSGrid, in addition to offering “middleware,” which will render navigation less complex, also supports “grid computing,” or when “large jobs are broken into pieces that run in parallel on several computers in different locations.” (January, 2007)

The Chronicle of Higher Education described in a recent issue a new index, the Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index, which ranked Cornell's IS program #1 in the country. (January, 2007)

Claire Cardie was a keynote speaker at the 21st International Conference on the Computer Processing of Oriental Languages, which took place in Singapore recently. Her talk was entitled, "A sentimental journey". (December, 2006)

Nature, a weekly science journal, has published an article about the plagiarism detection work of Johannes Gehrke, Simeon Warner, Paul Ginsparg, and Daria Sorokina. (December, 2006)

Rich Caruana has been named Program Co-Chair for the Thirteenth Annual ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, which will be in San Jose in August. (December, 2006)

Thorsten Joachims recently received a $95,000 Yahoo! Research Alliance gift for his proposal, titled “Large Margin Methods for Predicting Structured Outputs". As stated on the Yahoo!Research website, "Yahoo! Research performs fundamental research in areas of interest to Yahoo!, to create groundbreaking technology that will improve the online experience of our users." (December, 2006)

Sandy Payette, researcher and director of the Fedora Project, met with the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories and other visionaries in Sydney last January to share information about how Dspace, Fedora, and Eprints repositories were changing the nature of scholarly and commercial information communities of practice. The upcoming Open Repositories Conference will bring user communities and others a step closer to understanding the pivotal role that repositories play in the emerging information landscape. Open Repositories 2007 (OR07) will bring global stakeholders together again to discuss the challenges inherent in the conference tagline, "Achieving Interoperability in an Open World."  What are the policy issues that are implied in an 'open world'?  What are the technical challenges in achieving interoperability across heterogenesous repositories and related services?  How can advanced repository-based systems enable the collaborative processes around "e-science" and scholarly communication?  What are the challenges in enabling users to discover and access information across distributed repositories?  What does open access to content mean across cultures? These are just some of the questions that attendees will ponder during the three and a half day conference scheduled for January 23-26, 2007 in San Antonio, Texas. Advance registration for the conference is open until December 22, 2006. (December, 2006)

Jeff Hancock recently received a $680,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to be the principal investigator of "The Dynamics of Digital Deception in Computer Mediated Environments." His co-PIs are Claire Cardie and Mats Rooth. (November, 2006)

Bart Selman was quoted in a New York Times article in which he stated, "In web world, [the] rich now envy the superrich." (November, 2006)

Kavita Bala and co-authors Phil Dutre and Philippe Bekaert have released the 2nd edition of "Advanced Global Illumination." The focus of this graduate level textbook is the rendering of algorithms to create a realistic synthesis of images. (November, 2006)

Graeme Bailey was given accolades at the Annual Greek Faculty Appreciation Reception for, to quote the event coordinator, "...actions, inside the classroom and out, [that] have truly touched the lives of the members of the community." (November, 2006)

Phoebe Sengers and Kirsten Boehner have received an NSF grant in collaboration with Michael Mateas of UC Santa Cruz, titled “Closing the Affective Gap.” The grant, consisting of $554,768 over three years, is for the development of design and evaluation strategies that will enable individuals to gain an awareness of and ability to reflect on their emotions. Writes Sengers, “..these systems encourage emotional interpretation by reflecting the complex, ambiguous nature of affect, allowing people to actively make sense of the system’s output in the context of their everyday lives and relationships.” (November, 2006)

NSDL appears in the current issue of The Earth Scientist, the National Earth Science Teachers Association’s journal. The article showcases DLESE, both the Teaching Boxes feature as well as resources from an online seminar on hurricanes. (November, 2006)

The November edition of the National Science Teachers Association’s monthly newspaper, NSTA Reports, spotlights NSDL in a front-page article. Along with providing a background of the project’s development and detailing its goals, the article features a quote from principal investigator Dean Krafft, who asserts, “I believe we have the tools, the momentum, and the community to make NSDL a new, vibrant, and transformational digital library…” (November, 2006)

Our new major is now being highlighted that combines the study of the design of computer programs with the way in which such programs are utilized. The Information Science, Systems and Technology (ISST) major is sub-divided into two categories: ISST-MS (management science) and ISST-IS (information science) which are administered, respectively, by the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (ORIE) and Computer Science (CS). (October, 2006)

Tracy Mitrano (IS and Office of VP for Info Tech) will be the featured expert on the Chronicle of Higher Education's "The Brown Bag" live discussions on Thursday, October 26 at noon, speaking on “IT Security and Legal Liability for Colleges.” (October, 2006)

Claire Cardie was cited in the October 4th edition of the New York Times, regarding government-funded software being developed to monitor public opinion of the U.S. from global news sources published in the years 2001 and 2002. Cornell University is among the participating universities, who will receive a $2.4 grant over three years for the project. Ultimately, this software will be used to identify potential Homeland Security threats. Cardie explained that the software will be sophisticated enough to differentiate between such statements as “this spaghetti is good” and, “this spaghetti is not very good – it’s excellent.” (October, 2006)

Carl Lagoze and Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos have been awarded funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the amount of $524,000 over the next two years for their proposal, titled: “Repositories Interoperability Framework Agency: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.” According to their abstract, the goal of this project is to “develop, promote, and disseminate standards that facilitate interoperability among repositories of scholarly information worldwide.” (October, 2006)

In other news for Lagoze, he and NSDL colleagues Dean Krafft, Tim Cornwell, Dean Eckstrom, Susan Jesuroga and Chris Wilper received the Best Paper award for Representing Contextualized Information in the NSDL at the 2006 10th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL) in Alicante, Spain. This success marks the group’s second Best Paper award at a major digital library conference since June. (October, 2006)

The new Information Science, Systems, and Technology (ISST) major is highlighted in the Cornell Engineering magazine. Combining the study of the design of computer programs with the way in which such programs are utilized, the ISST major is sub-divided into two categories: ISST-MS (management science) and ISST-IS (information science) which are administered, respectively, by the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (ORIE) and Computer Science (CS). (Summer, 2006)

Jon Kleinberg received the 2006 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for his "deep, creative and insightful contributions to the mathematical theory of the global information environment.” The prize has been awarded every four years since 1982 by the International Mathematics Union in recognition of the most notable advances made in mathematics for the information sciences. (August, 2006)

IS/ISST Students and Faculty -- We will be holding an informal orientation event for the new freshman Information Science students in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and their advisors on Monday, August 21st between 2:30 and 4:00 pm at 301 College Ave. (August, 2006)

Eva Tardos received the 2006 George B. Dantzig Prize. The prize, established in 1979, is awarded every three years jointly by the Mathematical Programing Society (MPS) and SIAM for original research, which by its originality, breadth and scope, is having a major impact on the field of mathematical programming. The prize was awarded at the SIAM Annual Meeting to be held July 10-14, 2006, at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. (July, 2006)

Members of the Core Integration Team of the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) Carl Lagoze, Dean Krafft, Tim Cornwell, Naomi Dushay, Dean Eckstrom, and John Saylor won the ACM Vannevar Bush Best Paper award at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2006. Their paper is entitled: Metadata Aggregation and "Automated Digital Libraries": A Retrospective on the NSDL Experience. (June, 2006)

Carla Gomes (AEM/IS) and Bart Selman (CS/IS) won an Outstanding Paper Award at the upcoming 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-06). The paper is one of two award papers among nearly 800 submissions. The paper is entitled "Model Counting: A New Strategy for Obtaining Good Bounds" by Carla Gomes, Ashish Sabharwal, and Bart Selman. Ashish did his Ph.D. at University of Washington and is currently a postdoc here in Carla's Intelligent Information Systems Institute (IISI). (June, 2006)

Joseph Halpern (CS/IS), Larry Blume (Econ/IS), and David Easley (Econ/IS) have won the Best Paper Award for "Redoing the Foundations of Decision Theory" at the 2006 Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Conference. Another of Joseph Halpern's papers was among the short list of nominees,"Reasoning About Knowledge of Unawareness". This paper was co-authored with Joe's recently graduated ECE student, Leandro Rego. (June, 2006)

In connection with Michael Macy's talk last week, there is a nice write-up of the upcoming "special year" on social networks that will take place AY2006-7 at Cornell. Bill Arms, Geri Gay, John Abowd, David Easley, Larry Blume, Jeffrey Prince, Jon Kleinberg, Dan Huttenlocher and Kathleen O'Connor are involved. (May, 2006)

Eva Tardos (CS, IS) has accepted the position of Computer Science Department Chair effective July 1, 2006 for a five year term. Eva is a very distinguished scientist whose appointment will start a buzz in the international community. She is also a sensitive mentor, a superb advisor, and an inspiring example to all of us. (April, 2006)

E-print arXiv founder Paul Ginsparg (Physics, IS) is the latest recipient of the Paul Evan Peters Award, the biggest honor in the US digital library world. "Paul Ginsparg's accomplishments as a theoretical physicist, alone, distinguish him as a superb scholar, but his innovations in scientific publication, for which the Paul Evan Peters award honors him, truly place him in the annals of history as a transformative figure who has changed the landscape of scholarly communication forever," remarked Ronald Larsen, Dean of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of the award search committee. The Award is sponsored by the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), the Association of Research Libraries, and EDUCAUSE. (February, 2006)

The eSciDoc project, a cooperative project between the Max Planck Society and FIZ Karlsruhe, has chosen Fedora as the foundation object storage layer for the project. Quoting from the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft information page:
     "eSciDoc is a 5 year project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). It is an important component of the Max Planck Society (MPG) wide sInfo program and will establish a sustainable infrastructure for scientific information, communication and distribution of research results via Open Access."
     This application of Fedora as a foundation component for eScidoc is one example of an increasing number of deployments of Fedora for new scholarly communication models in cyberinfrastructure and the Grid. Fedora was developed jointly at Cornell and U Virginia. (February, 2006 )

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $25 million to Cornell University to support the construction of the signature building for a planned information campus that will bring together the units of Cornell's Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS). Read about it in the Cornell Chronicle, the Cornell Daily Sun and the Ithaca Journal. (January, 2006)

Geri Gay (COMM, IS) has been named the first endowed Bissett chair of Communication. Ken Bissett was a student in the Communication department with interests in Information Science who was killed in the Libyan bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. Read about Prof. Gay's award in the Cornell and national press. (January, 2006)

Eugene Medynskiy, an undergraduate active in the Information Science program, was selected as a finalist in this year's CRA Ugrad Research competition. Over the years Eugene has worked with Profs. Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Phoebe Sengers, Michael Macy, and Geri Gay. This is a very high honor—congratulations, Eugene! (December, 2005)

Claire Cardie was recently elected to the Executive Committee of the international Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) for a 2006-2008 term. The Executive Committee consists of eight elected members, and is responsible for the administration of the Association, including the annual ACL meeting. The ACL is the international scientific and professional society for people working on problems involving natural language and computation.
     Claire was also chosen to be the Program Co-Chair of COLING/ACL 2006, a joint meeting to be held in Sidney, Australia

This semester's Cornell Engineering Magazine includes articles on Carla Gomes' (AEM, CIS) Intelligent Information Systems Institute and Kavita Bala's (CS) grant from the President's Council of Cornell Women (PCCW). (November, 2005)

The NSF has awarded $2M to Cornell to study social networks and related objects, using the huge collections of Web data that have been assembled by the Internet Archive. The principal investigator is Michael Macy and the other members of the faculty team are Bill Arms, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Geri Gay and David Strang. (October, 2005)

This week's Cornell Chronicle contained an article on the Information Science program, as did the Oct. 20 Cornell Daily Sun. Highlights include quotes from two 2005 IS graduates:
—Ross Housewright: "I was encouraged to take a broader range of courses, including psychology and socially oriented courses. I wanted to know how to apply technology to change how society works."
—Will Kruse on his decision to major in ISST: "[It] was the best decision I ever made. It really took all my interests and got them in one place." (October, 2005)

Jakob Nielsen, the leading commercial web design and usability authority, dedicated the most recent issue of his bi-weekly newsletter to the SIGIR '05 paper by Thorsten Joachims (CS), Laura Granka, Bing Pan (COMM/HCI), Helene Hembrooke (COMM/HCI), and Geri Gay (COMM/HCI). The newsletter is read by several hundred thousands of designers and usability practitioners. (September, 2005)

Professor Jon Kleinberg (CS) was selected as one of this year's MacArthur Prize winners! Jon was chosen for "...revealing the deep structure of complex networks such as genomes or computer networks, and creating new methods to extract the information embedded in them." Read more from the MacArthur Foundation and the Cornell News Service. (September, 2005)

Articles in this week's Cornell Chronicle highlighted two IS faculty members: Professor Shimon Edelman (Psychology), for his recent paper concerning natural language processing and machine learning; and Professor Dan Huttenlocher (Johnson School of Management, CS), who is Chairing the Task Force on Wisdom in the Age of Digital Information, one of three University-wide groups that are looking at major academic issues. (September, 2005)

Dean Krafft, PI, and others from the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) presented NSDL work at the House STEM Caucus in Washington D.C. on September 7. The presentation was part of the STEM Work Force Issues Solution, and was attended by about 60 congress members and staff. (September, 2005)

Johannes Gehrke (CS) gave a keynote address at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Germany last August, and will give another one this October at the SAS Data Mining Technology Conference in Las Vegas. (September, 2005)

This week's Cornell Chronicle featured an article on Professor Graeme Bailey (CS) and his multidisciplinary interests, both personal and professional. Read "Graeme Bailey reaches digital understanding via hockey, judo and the cello". (August, 2005)

In this month's Wired there is an article on the birth of Google. An interesting paragraph towards the end relates an interaction between the founders and CS Professor Jon Kleinberg. (July, 2005)

The Featured Collection for the July/August issue of D-Lib Magazine is Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL), contributed by Kizer Walker (Project Manager) and John M. Saylor (P.I.), Cornell University. Initial development of KMODDL was funded by a 2002-2004 National Science Digital Library (NSDL) collections grant from NSF. (July, 2005)

Professor Claire Cardie is now the Charles and Barbara Weiss Director of the Information Science Program. She can be reached at director@infosci.cornell.edu.

Carla Gomes (AEM/CIS) and Bart Selman (CS) write about constraint satisfaction in the News & Views section of the 9 June 2005 issue of Nature: "Can get satisfaction" (.pdf or .html versions available). (June 2005)

The founding class of Information Science and Information Science, Systems, and Technology majors graduated this May. A ceremony and reception were held in their honor at 301 College Avenue on Saturday, May 28th to mark this special event.

CS PhD student Daria Sorokina and CIS/Physics Professor Paul Ginsparg are highlighted in the 19 May 2005 issue of Nature Taking on the Cheats. (May, 2005)

The Social Science Advisory Council has selected "Computational Social Science: Social and Information Networks" as the second Theme Project of the Institute for the Social Sciences. The project will be led by Michael Macy (Sociology), with David Easley (Economics), Geri Gay (Communication), Dan Huttenlocher ( Johnson School and Computer Science), and Jon Kleinberg (Computer Science). (April, 2005)

Tarleton Gillespie (Communication) was featured (and IS major Ben Walther quoted) in a front page article of the Cornell Daily Sun (Apr 21) covering Tarleton's lecture "Why You're in the Trenches of the Copyright Wars."

The Fedora Project, led by Sandy Payette, was in the news recently. For a description of Fedora and its broader impact please see the article in the XML Cover Pages.

Sandy Payette will also be giving the keynote presentation at the upcoming DELOS Network of Excellence Workshop on digital repositories for e-learning and e-research, which will be held on May 11-13, 2005 in Heraklion, Crete.

Carl Lagoze will give an invited talk at the University of Pittsburgh School of Information science later this month: A Network Overlay Architecture for Contextualized Digital Libraries. (April 2005)

Claire Cardie, keynote speaker at the Workshop on Machine Learning of Information Extraction, held at the University of Antwerp, Belgium.  (March 2005)

"Cornell Scientists Tackle 'Hard' Problems by Teaching Computers to Solve Tough Tasks the Human Way" -- Cornell University Intelligent Information Systems Institute director Carla Gomes and associate computer science professor Bart Selman have developed new methods for solving hard "combinatorial" computer problems, which were detailed on Feb. 21 at the annual meeting of the American Association for ...

NSDL Whiteboard Report is published bi-weekly and contains research news, and notes from the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) of interest to the NSDL community of projects, collaborators, and funders. NSDL (NSDL.org) is the National Science Foundation's online library of resources for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education. The Whiteboard Report 2000-2005 archive (February 2005)

Technology Research News magazine's "Top Picks: Technology Research Advances of 2004" (December 29, 2004/January 5, 2005 issue) includes the appearance by Information Science Cornellians present and past:
Jon Aizen, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Tony Novak, in the Internet category: "Researchers from Cornell University and the Internet Archive devised a way to measure users' reactions to an item description: a "batting average" of the number of users who go on to download the item divided by the number of users who read the description."

Natural language processing research on sentiment analysis by graduate student
Bo Pang and Associate Professor Lillian Lee draws attention in the news. (November, 2004)

On Monday, November 1st, the Information Science Program hosted a Fall Ugrad Open House and Information Session at the IS building (301 College Ave.). IS faculty and a number of our new IS/ISST undergraduate majors attended --- to answer questions about the new IS programs and the spring INFO course line-up; to see demos in the HCI lab (courtesy of Professor Geri Gay and her students); and, of course, to socialize with the help of mulled apple cider and brownies! (November, 2004)

Carla Gomes and Bart Selman received the Distinguished Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP-2004) for the paper entitled "Statistical Regimes Across Constrainedness Regions. (November, 2004)

Carla Gomes was quoted on complexity theory in the Chicago Tribune as a speaker at the inaugural event for the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), Northwestern University. (November, 2004)

In President Jeffrey Lehman's State of the University Address he gives high profile to a new CIS (Computing & Information Science) building in the next 5 - 6 years and features the major in Information Science in three undergraduate colleges and the minor in seven undergraduate colleges and a new Ph.D. in Information Science. (October, 2004)

The National Science Foundation has funded Pathways Projects to add user-tailored access to the National Science Digital Library (NSDL). Introducing NSDL Pathways: Internet Scout Project, WGBH Teachers' Domain, The Mathematical Association of America, Shodor Education Foundation, and Eisenhower National Clearinghouse. (October, 2004)

Bart Selman talked about artificial intelligence in two articles, "Types of AI: Living up to the nightmare" and "The evolution of artificial intelligence", in the September 2004 issue of Graduating Engineer and Computer Careers magazine.

NSF Awards $1.8 Million to CS, Astronomy, the Program in Computer Graphics, and the Cornell Theory Center. The overall "Petabyte Storage devices for Data-Driven Science" project will be be directed by Al Demers. Al is joined by Prof Jim Cordes from Astronomy and  Profs Kavita Bala, Steve Marschner, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, Bill Arms, Johannes Gehrke and Jai Shanmugasundaram from CS. (September, 2004)

NSF awards $1.3 million for investigation of a new scholarly communication infrastructure ("Pathways: Lifecycles for Information Integration in Distributed Scholarly Communication").    Investigators include Carl Lagoze, Sandy Payette, and Simeon Warner, along with Herbert Van de Sompel  from LANL and John Erickson  from HP Labs.  The project is funded through the NSF Science and Engineering Information Integration and Informatics program.  (September, 2004)

IMLS awards grant for Digital Library of Printable Machines: Models for Collection Building and Educational Outreach. (September, 2004)

Johannes Gehrke appointed Associate Professor of Theory Center. He will provide leadership to CTC's data-intensive computing initiative. (August 26, 2004)

FALL 2004 INFO COURSES (August 20, 2004)

Paul Ginsparg's information Op-Ed in New York Times, "The Truth Is Still Out There" (August 3, 2004)

The July 28/August 4th issue of Technology Research News contains article on: Jon Aizen, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Tony Novak's work on tracking the popularity of downloadable items on the Web, and the use of this at the Internet Archive. The work appeared in the January 6, 2004 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy Of Sciences (July 30, 2004)

IS Seminar special talk by Paul Dourish, School of Information and Computer Science, University of California Irvine. Title of talk: The Social and the Technical in Ubiquitous Computing (July 1, 2004)

Cornell University's Human-Computer Interaction Group has made a specialty of designing digital guides with place-specific content as referenced in the NY Times - Circuits article entitled: For Wandering Tourists, Help From on High (June 10, 2004)

The NYS Education department has now approved a new Information Science Doctor of Philosophy program (Ph.D.) at Cornell University. More information will be available as soon as possible through this website. (June 3, 2004)

Johannes Gehrke receives Provost Award for Distinguished Series. (April 4, 2004)

Carl Lagoze wins the American Library Association's Frederick G. Kilgour Award for research in library and information technology. (March 24, 2004)

Geri Gay honored with Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellowship teaching award. (March 18, 2004)

E-mail doesn't lie (that much), says Jeff Hancock, Cornell assistant professor of communication. (February 18, 2004)

Thanks to CU project, L-VIS is in the library. (February 05, 2004)

Internet-First publishing project at Cornell University offers the old and the new. (January 29, 2004)

Undergraduate major in Information Science approved in Arts & Sciences, CALS, and Engineering. (January 1, 2004)

Among the Ivy, a Campus Tour Guide That Beeps. (August 10, 2003)

Cornell professor Paul Ginsparg, science communication rebel, named a MacArthur Foundation fellow. (September 26, 2002)

Corinne 10/28/09