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Table of Contents
Professor Rick Lathrop will be a keynote speaker at this
summer's International Conference on Intelligent Systems for
Molecular Biology, to be held in
Halkidiki, Greece, on June 21-25, 1997.
The talk will survey progress in protein structure prediction by
sequence-structure alignment and fold recognition ("threading")
methods, including discussion of Professor Lathrop's recent
work in this area.
Thomas Kistler, a graduate student in ICS working with
Professor Michael Franz, won the Best Presentation Award at the 6th Joint
Modular Languages Conference in Linz, Austria, for his presentation of the
paper "Dynamic Runtime Optimization". This paper describes
current research in this area in the Franz group
and appears in the proceedings as Thomas'
single-authored contribution.
At the conference, all attendees received a ballot on which they marked the
best three of 24 presentations, and Thomas received the highest number of
votes. At the awards ceremony, he received a hefty prize sponsored by
Addison-Wesley: copies of each of the complete Java book series.
UC Irvine has been ranked among the nation's top 20 public research
universities and identified as one of the "rising new elites" in a new book called "The Rise of American
Research Universities: Elites and Challengers in the Postwar Era."
UCI is ranked 17th among rising public research universities in the study by Hugh Davis Graham, a
history professor at Vanderbilt University, and Nancy Diamond, a graduate student at the University of
Maryland at Baltimore County. This ranking is based on a combined index evaluating public universities'
science, social science, and arts and humanities programs.
When ranked by the science index only, UCI
placed third behind UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, respectively.
The study also places UCI seventh on a list of rising public universities that had not previously been
ranked among the nation's top 25 (according to three major comparative studies conducted from
1960-1982).
"This is yet another ranking that places UCI among the nation's top research universities. UCI's rapid
rise in stature reflects the high quality of our faculty as well as the emphasis on innovation in research and
educational programs," said Chancellor Laurel L. Wilkening.
The "Rise of American Research Universities" study (published by The Johns Hopkins University
Press) looks at 203 research universities from 1945 to 1990. The researchers measured per capita faculty
research productivity, examining the creation of new knowledge in everything from medical science to
classics.
The criteria used to measure productivity were: money received from federal grants, number of
articles published by faculty members in all scholarly areas, number of articles published in top-rated
scientific and social science journals, and fellowships in the arts and humanities.
By focusing on per capita research achievement, the researchers reduced the advantages of size and
"soft" reputational data. The study's ranking method rewards institutions that show balanced research
strength across the academic spectrum of the sciences, social sciences and humanities. However, the
researchers noted that the driving force behind UCI's "rapid ascent" in national rankings is its strong
reliance on biomedical research.
Professor Jonathan Grudin, while on leave as Visiting Professor of
Informatics at the University of Oslo, was invited to attend two
working meetings in Washington devoted to aspects of the context of
computing technology. In February, the three-day NSF Workshop on
Human-Centered Systems: Information, Interactivity, and Intelligence
explored approaches to addressing the challenges of producing usable, useful
technology. In April, a two-day NSF Grantees Workshop on Information
Technology and Organizations will review research on the actual and
potential effects of technology on organizations and society. Professor
Mark Ackerman also attended the workshop on Human-Centered Systems.
- Professor David Rosenblum was appointed to the editorial board
of Software Process Improvement and Practice and was
made a Senior Member of the IEEE.
- Professor Padhraic Smyth was appointed an action editor
of the Machine Learning Journal.
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