Harris starts workshop devoted to System Test
Computer science professor Ian Harris and Tony Ambler, Chair of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin, have collaborated to initiate a new workshop devoted to research in System Test.
Ian
HarrisA typical system contains many different types of components (i.e. hardware, software, digital, analog, etc.) and this heterogeneity is the source of much of the complexity of the system test problem.
This workshop will be a focal point of research in this important and emerging field. The first annual Electronic System Test (EST) Workshop is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and will be held in Charlotte, North Carolina October 28-29.
Professors paper wins award
David
EppsteinComputer science professors Gopi Meenakshisundaram and David Eppstein's paper "Single strip triangulation of manifolds with arbitrary topology" won the 2nd Best Paper Award at the annual Eurographics conference held in Grenoble, France from September 1-3, 2004.
Meenakshisundaram's research can be considered under the broad areas of computer graphics and geometry. Within these areas, he has worked on various problems including collision detection, solid modeling, geometric simplification of models, surface reconstruction, efficient rendering of curved surfaces, texture mapping on curved surfaces, image mosaicing for teleconferencing application, and graphics architectures.
Eppstein's research interests are varied and include: geometric optimization, finite element mesh generation and mesh improvement, information visualization and graph drawing, robust statistics and estimation of web-graph properties, graph theory and graph algorithms, exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems, and cellular automata and combinatorial games.
Undergraduate student receives summer research grant
Bren School undergraduate student Christopher Welch has received a Summer Undergraduate Research Program grant to continue his work with computer science professor Gopi Meenakshisundaram on vision-based surface reconstruction of static scenes.
Mjolsness recieves $5 million grant from NSF for "The Computable Plant"
Computer science professor Eric Mjolsness and Elliot Meyerowitz, a plant developmental biologist at California Institute of Technology will work together to provide a quantitative and cellular description of plant development.
Eric
MjolsnessThey will study meristem development in Arabidopsis thaliana, the model plant that has been used extensively in contemporary plant biology research. Meristems are the inner plant tissues, where regulated cell division, pattern formation and differentiation give rise to plant parts like leaves and flowers.
The investigators at Caltech will use green fluorescent proteins to mark specific cell types in the apical meristem and image their lineages through meristem development and differentiation leading to specific arrangement of leaves and reproductive growth.
Automation of image acquisition and analysis will help them generate and visualize a vast amount of data, which will be used by the UCI investigators to model cells and their patterns in the developing meristem and simulate developmental processes under different conditions. These simulations will result in predictions that will be tested experimentally using mutants, altered hormone gradients, and other manipulations.
Dechter publishes a book on constraint satisfaction
Constraint satisfaction is a simple but powerful tool. Constraints identify the impossible and reduce the realm of possibilities to effectively focus on the possible, allowing for a natural declarative formulation of what must be satisfied, without expressing how.
Rina
DechterThe field of constraint reasoning has matured over the last three decades with contributions from a diverse community of researchers in artificial intelligence, databases and programming languages, operations research, management science, and applied mathematics.
Today, constraint problems are used to model cognitive tasks in vision, language comprehension, default reasoning, diagnosis, scheduling, temporal and spatial reasoning.
In Constraint Processing, computer science professor Rina Dechter, synthesizes these contributions, along with her own significant work, to provide the first comprehensive examination of the theory that underlies constraint processing algorithms. Throughout, she focuses on fundamental tools and principles, emphasizing the representation and analysis of algorithms.
