Three Cornell faculty members are among this year's recipients of National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Awards. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a foundationwide activity that offers NSF's most prestigious awards for new faculty members. The Career program recognizes and supports the early-career development activities of those teacher-scholars who are considered most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.
Johannes Gehrke and Andrew Myers, assistant professors of computer science, and Anna Scaglione, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, each will receive five-year grants of about $350,000 to support their research.
Johannes Gehrke did his undergraduate study in computer science at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, received a master's from the University of Texas in 1995 and a Ph.D. in 1999 at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the latter under an IBM graduate fellowship. He joined the Cornell faculty in August 1999. Gehrke received the IBM faculty award in both 2000 and 2001 and the James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award from the College of Engineering in 2001.
His research has focused on "data mining," the mechanisms by which computers can scan through large databases to note trends or oddities and present statistics about them, or collect data on specific subcategories. In the project funded by the NSF award, he will be extending this idea to data collected from large arrays of sensors. His grant is titled "Towards Sensor Database Systems." Possible applications include surveying vibration sensors to detect problems in a factory or pulling in data from many temperature sensors to compute average temperature.
Andrew Myers received his B.S. in physics and computer science at Stanford University in1988 and a master's in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1999 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the Cornell faculty in January 1999. He has worked at DEC Systems Research Center, Palo Alto, Calif., and Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, Calif.
His research aims to give computer users more security when running programs supplied by an outside source. The most familiar examples are Java applications that are downloaded by web sites, but there are also important examples in business-to-business transactions. Increasingly, users must allow "visiting" programs access to confidential data, but need to prevent that data from being corrupted and to control what is sent back to the visitor's home base. Myers' approach is to build safeguards into the programs in ways that the local computer can verify at run time. The system, called Java Information Flow (JIF), requires that programs be written in a special version of the Java programming language that builds in security features. The NSF grant supports his project called "Practical Language-Based End-to-End Security."
Anna Scaglione joined the faculty of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell in July 2001 as an assistant professor. Previously she was an assistant professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Mexico, from 2000-2001, and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota in 1999-2000. She received her undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Rome in 1999.
Scaglione's research concerns the design of modems for wireless telephone and computer communications. In a wireless device, the modem is the hardware that converts digital data into a radio-frequency signal. Her goal is to find better ways of "multiplexing," so that many digital signals can occupy a single frequency, and to prevent or correct for errors caused by interference in a busy urban environment. "If you want to give to each user the ability to use the Internet from each cell phone, the algorithms need to be more sophisticated," she explains. With her co-authors, she received the 2000 IEEE Signal Processing Transactions Best Paper Award for the paper "Redundant Filterbank Precoders and Equalizers Part I and II." The NSF grant will support continued development of the ideas in that paper.
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