Timeline from the Cornell Department of Computer Science
40th Anniversary Symposium, October 1, 2005
Before Computer Science.
Dick Conway and Bill Maxwell of Industrial Eng. develop CORC on the Burroughs B-220 and Control Data 1604 to provide a simpler language than Fortran or Algol. CORC can be described on a single page. CORC is taught beginning in Fall 1962.
1965. CS starts with faculty Dick Conway, Pat Fischer, Juris Hartmanis (Chair), Chris Pottle, Gerry Salton, Sid Saltzman, Bob Walker.
The Computer Science Department is formed. (Conway spent his later years in the Cornell School of Management and is retired, and Salton passed away in 1995.) Housed in both Engineering and Arts & Sciences, CS starts with an MS/PhD program.
Gerry Salton brings his SMART system, started in 1961 at Harvard. SMART is his main tool for 35 years of experimental research in information retrieval.
Juris Hartmanis publishes the paper that starts the field of computational complexity, with Dick Stearns: On the computational complexity of algorithms, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 117 (1965), 285-306. Later, they receive the ACM Turing Award for this work.
CS produces its first PhD, Joel Sturman, a transfer from Electrical Engineering.
1966. Ken Brown, Peter Wegner join.
Juris Hartmanis and Dick Stearns publish the first of many influential texts by CS: Algebraic Structure: Theory of Sequential Machines (Prentice Hall).
1967. Roland Sweet, John Hopcroft join.
Dick Conway, Bill Maxwell, and Louis Miller, publish the classic text Theory of Scheduling (Addison-Wesley).
1968. Howard Morgan, Alan Shaw, Robert Wagner, Bob Constable join.
Gerry Salton publishes the classic IR text Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval (McGraw-Hill).
1969. John Dennis, David Gries join.
Gerry Salton becomes Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM —the first of many influential editorial positions held by members of CS.
John Hopcroft and Jeff Ullman publish their classic text Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata (Addison-Wesley).
1970. Ellis Horowitz, Jorge More, John H. Williams join.
Dick Conway's group develops PL/C, a subset of PL/1 designed for instructional purposes. The PL/C compiler is distributed to 100 institutions and instantly becomes the standard instructional PL/1 compiler.1971. Jim Bunch joins. Gerry Salton becomes Chair.
David Gries publishes the first text on compiler construction: Compiler Construction for Digital Computers (John Wiley & Sons).
Gerry Salton publishes The SMART Retrieval System Experiments in Automatic Document Processing (Prentice Hall).
Faculty members Jim Bunch and Jorge More win Householder Prizes for their PhD theses in numerical analysis.
1972. Charles Moore, Tim Teitelbaum join.
1973. Bob Tarjan, Alan Demers join. CS grows to 15 faculty.
Dick Conway and David Gries publish the first programming text to deal with issues of correctness, like loop invariants: An Introduction to Programming, a Structured Approach using PL/1 and PL/C (Winthrop).
Juris Hartmanis becomes the founding editor of Springer-Verlag's LNCS series (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) and David Gries becomes the founding Editor of Springer-Verlag's Text and Monograph Series (TMCS). Hartmanis and Gries maintain these positions for over 30 years.
John Hopcroft becomes Managing Editor of the SIAM Journal on Computing.
1974. Shih-Ping Han joins.
Al Aho, John Hopcroft, and Jeff Ullman publish their classic text The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (Addison- Wesley).
John Dennis and Jorge More publish their landmark paper Quasi-Newton Methods, Motivation and Theory. The nonlinear equation solving business has not been the same since they showed just how far you could go with approximate Jacobians.
1975. Jim Donahue, Charlie Van Loan join.
Gerry Salton's new book receives the Best Information Science Book of 1975 from ASIS: Dynamic Information Library Processing (Prentice Hall).
Bob Constable starts the development of PL/CV. Developed over nine years, PL/CV eventually resulted in Nuprl, a system for mathematical reasoning, which is in heavy use today. Thirty PhD students learned how to do research using PL/CV and Nuprl.
1976. Corky Cartwright joins.
Dick Conway becomes series editor for Winthrop Publishers.
Dick Conway and David Gries publish several variations of their intro to programming text.
John Dennis and Charlie Van Loan procure HP-67 programmable calculators. For the first time within the confines of the department, it was possible to execute a stored program.
1977. Juris Hartmanis becomes Chair for the second time.
CS acquires its first computer, a PDP 11/60.
David Gries and student Susan Owicki receive the ACM Programming Languages and Systems Award for their paper An axiomatic proof technique for parallel programs, Acta Informatica 6 (1976), 319-340. Based on Susan's PhD thesis, this paper introduces interference freedom as the basis for proving parallel programs correct.
1978. Frank Luk, Fred Schneider join.
CS introduces two undergrad degrees: BA in Arts & Sciences and BS in Engineering. CS started with just an MS/PhD program in order to produce PhDs to populate future CS departments.
Bob Constable and student Mike O'Donnell publish A Programming Logic (Winthrop).
1979. Daniel Leivant joins.
Cornell adopts the Cornell Program Synthesizer for instruction in programming. Tim Teitelbaum and student Tom Reps developed this precursor to today's integrated development environments (IDEs) for teaching a subset of PL/1 on Terak microcomputers, replacing the batch-processing punch-card system then in use. In 1980-1981, the Cornell Program Synthesizer is distributed to 80 institutions.
Gerry Salton becomes Chair of ACM SIGIR.
1980. Bengt Aspvall, John Gilbert, Sam Toueg join.
CS obtains a $2.6 million, 5-year CER (Coordinated Experimental Research) grant, a major step in increasing its presence in experimental computing.
1981. Ozalp Babaoglu, Paul Pritchard, Dale Skeen, Tom Coleman join.
David Gries publishes The Science of Programming (Springer-Verlag), which brings ideas on the formal development of programs to the undergrad level.
1982. Kevin Karplus, Ken Birman join. David Gries becomes Chair. CS grows to 20 faculty.
The 1982 NRC Assessment of Research-Doctorate CS programs places Cornell fifth out of 58 departments.
Bob Constable, with students Johnson and Eichenlaub, publishes a book on their verifier: Introduction to the PL/CV Programming Logic (Springer-Verlag).
Gerry Salton receives the first SIGIR Award for outstanding contributions to information retrieval.
1983. Dina Bitton, Greg Johnson, Abha Moitra join.
Tom Coleman publishes Large Sparse Numerical Optimization (Springer-Verlag LNCS 165).
CS begins to move into interdisciplinary work, helping to start a new graduate field of "manufacturing systems engineering".
Tom Reps receives the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD thesis, Generating Language-Based Environments (MIT Press). Reps, whose advisor was Tim Teitelbaum, is now a Professor at Wisconsin, Madison.
1984. Gianfranco Bilardi, Alexandru Nicolau, John Solworth, Vijay Vazirani join.
The Synthesizer Generator is distributed to over 330 institutions. Developed by Tim Teitelbaum and student Tom Reps, this tool for automating the construction of interactive language-based environments is based on Reps's 1983 thesis prototype. The Synthesizer Generator was subsequently commercialized and is still in use.
Gene Golub and Charlie Van Loan publish Matrix Computation (Johns Hopkins Press).
The CS computing facility serves as the gateway for the entire university to Arpanet and CSnet. CS is instrumental in the university's Project Ezra to increase the use of computers on campus, with a 5-year, $8 million grant from IBM.
1985. Prakash Panangaden, Dexter Kozen join.
The Cornell Theory Center, founded in 1984, becomes one of four NSF supercomputer centers. IBM provides an additional $30 million in hardware, software, and staff.
Ken Birman develops the first version of Isis, the first system for fault-tolerance in distributed systems. Isis has impacted the theory and practice of distributed computing. Two years later, the virtual synchrony model is defined and incorporated.
CS receives its second 5-year NSF CER (Coordinated Experimental Computing) grant.
David Gries receives the AFIPS Education Award for his contributions to computer science education.
1986. Keith Marzullo, Alberto Segre, Keshav Pingali join.
The Nuprl work reaches a milestone: Bob Constable and his students publish Implementing Mathematics with the Nuprl Proof Development System (Prentice Hall).
John Hopcroft shares the ACM Turing Prize with Bob Tarjan, "For fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures". The work was Bob Tarjan's PhD thesis at Stanford, advised by Hopcroft. Their major achievement was a linear algorithm for graph planarity testing, but many more ideas on algorithm design and data structures came out of their collaboration.
CS moves into 22,000 additional sq. ft. of new space constructed on top of Upson Hall.
Former PhD student Kurt Mehlhorn and frequent visitor Wolfgang Paul receive the German Leibniz Prize.
David Gries publishes the first of five years of Taulbee Surveys, which give data on PhD-granting departments. The five years of surveys have an almost 100% completion rate.
1987. Bruce Donald, Dave McAllester join. John Hopcroft becomes Chair. CS grows to 25 faculty members and 200 computers.
David Gries chairs the Computer Science Board, the precursor to the Computing Research Association (CRA). This Board was formed in 1972 to provide a forum for the discussion of issues in research and education in computer science.
John Hopcroft chairs the NSF Advisory Committee for Computer Research.
Gerry Salton receives the Distinguished Science Award from the Humboldt Foundation. This foundation, created by the German government in 1953, enables scholars to do research in Germany.
Don Greenberg receives the ACM Steven Coons Award. This highest award in graphics honors lifetime contributions to graphics and interactive techniques.
Ramin Zabih and David McAllester receive the Best Paper Award at the AAAI Conference. McAllester is now Professor and Chief Academic Officer, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.
1988. Devika Subramanian, Dan Huttenlocher join.
Juris Hartmanis and John Hopcroft are elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Gerry Salton is named a Pioneer of Computing in the Annals of the History of Computing. He receives the ACM Award for Best Review in Computing Reviews.
Don Greenberg receives the National Computer Graphics Association Academic Award.
Eva Tardos receives the 1988 Fulkerson prize for the paper A strongly polynomial minimum cost circulation algorithm.
Fred Schneider takes over as Editor-in-Chief of Distributed Computing, and David Gries becomes a Managing Editor of Information Processing Letters.
Ken Birman starts a company based on Isis. Isis is used extensively on Wall Street and in telecommunications and VLSI FAB systems. Today, Isis is still the core technology in the New York Stock Exchange (every trade and every quote since 1993 ...), the Swiss Exchange, the French Air Traffic Control system, the US Navy's AEGIS warship, and the Florida Electric and Gas SCADA system.
Tom Coleman and Charlie Van Loan publish the Handbook for Matrix Computations (SIAM).
Tim Teitelbaum and former student Tom Reps publish two books on the Synthesizer Generator, with Springer-Verlag.
1989. Bard Bloom, Steve Vavasis join.
The Computer Science Board, chaired by Gries, changes its name to the Computing Research Association (CRA), opens an office in Washington, and works to represent the national interests of computing research.
John Hopcroft authors a report for the NSF Advisory Committee for Computer Research (with Ken Kennedy). "Computer Science: Achievements and Opportunities" helps set the direction of the NSF computing research funding.
Gerry Salton is Chair-Elect of Section T of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science). Section T concerns Information, Computing, and Communication.
Tom Coleman becomes Director of the Cornell Advanced Computing Research Institute, a unit of the Cornell Theory Center. The interdisciplinary institute is concerned with scientific computation research and its application to engineering and scientific problems.
Gerry Salton receives the ASIS Award of Merit, the American Society of Information Science and Technology's highest honor, bestowed annually to an individual who has made a noteworthy contribution to the field of information science.
John Hopcroft receives an honorary doctorate from Seattle University.
Bob Constable and student Doug Howe publish Implementing Metamathematics as an Approach to Automatic Theorem Proving (Elsevier Science).
Gerry Salton publishes Automatic Text Processing (Addison Wesley).
1990.
With completion of Rhodes Hall, CS expands to 38,000 sq. ft. of space.
David Gries receives the ACM SIGCSE Award for Contributions to CS Education.
David Gries receives the CRA (Computing Research Association) Award for Service to the CS Community.
Juris Hartmanis is elected a Foreign Member of the Academy of Science of Latvia.
John Hopcroft receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Seattle in Washington.
Charlie Van Loan becomes a member of the SIAM Council.
Tom Coleman and Yuying Li publish Large-scale Numerical Optimization (SIAM Publications).
1991. Paul Pedersen, Carlo Tomasi, Nick Trefethen join.
The CS research budget tops $6 million. CS receives an NSF grant on Revitalizing the Computer Science Curriculum and acquires an 8000-node CM-200 data parallel computer.
Don Greenberg is elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
John Hopcroft is appointed to the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation.
John Hopcroft becomes Chair of the Board of Trustees of SIAM.
Dexter Kozen publishes The Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Springer-Verlag).
Steve Vavasis publishes Nonlinear Optimization: Complexity Issues (Oxford Science).
1992. Tom Henzinger, Ronitt Rubinfeld join. Juris Hartmanis becomes Chair. John Hopcroft becomes Dean of Engineering.
Dick Conway is elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Dexter Kozen receives a Prize from the Polish Ministry of Education.
Students Aravind Srinivasan and Alessandro Panconesi receive the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing.
CS undergrads do well on the Putnam Math Competition. The team of Kleinberg, Munoz, and Krosky places fifth out of 284, and Zhang places in the top ten individuals.
Juris Hartmanis is Chair of the NRC Committee that produces Computing the Future (National Academy Press). This influential report assesses academic computer science and engineering. It advocates a broader research and educational agenda that builds on the field's impressive accomplishments.
Charlie Van Loan publishes Computational Frameworks for the Fast Fourier Transform (SIAM).
Juris Hartmanis is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
1993. Monika Rauch Henzinger, Thorsten von Eicken join. Bob Constable becomes Chair.
Juris Hartmanis shares the ACM Turing Award with Dick Stearns, "in recognition of their seminal paper, which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory" (see the entry for 1965).
Juris Hartmanis receives a Humboldt Foundation Award for Senior U.S. Scientists. This foundation, created by the German government in 1953, enables scholars to do research in Germany.
Researcher Yuying Li receives the 1993 Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis from the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
David Gries and Fred Schneider publish A Logical Approach to Discrete Math (Springer Verlag).
Stratus Computer acquires Ken Birman's Isis Distributed Systems, Inc. Isis technology is deployed in the NY and Swiss Stock Exchanges, the French Air Traf fic Control System, and other places.
1994. Brian Smith, Claire Cardie, Ramin Zabih join.
Ken Birman becomes Editor-in-Chief of the ACM Transactions on Computing Systems.
David Gries receives the IEEE Computer Society Taylor Booth Education Award for his "commitment to education in CS and Engineering as demonstrated by a record of outstanding teaching and mentoring, writing of textbooks, curriculum development ..."
Dan Huttenlocher is the CASE New York State Professor of the Year. The award covers all disciplines. It is given by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for impact and involvement with undergraduates, scholarly approach to learning, and contributions to undergraduate education.
David Gries receives a Cornell Presidential Weiss Fellowship for his contributions to undergrad education. Three such awards are given each year; Cornell has 1600 faculty members.
T.V. Raman receives the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD thesis, Audio System For Technical Readings (Springer-Verlag, 1998). Raman's advisor was David Gries. Raman is now a researcher at Google.
Researchers Jim David, Dean Krafft, and Carl Lagoze release Dienst, which becomes the foundation for future digital library interoperability.
1995. Eva Tardos, Joe Halpern, Jon Kleinberg join.
CS mourns the passing of Gerry Salton, a founding member of the department and the father of information retrieval.
David Gries receives the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. The citation reads, "His visionary emphasis on critical thinking and mathematical precision has dramatically changed the face of computer science education ..."
David Gries receives an honorary doctorate from Daniel Webster College.
Fred Schneider becomes Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso, Norway.
Juris Hartmanis receives the Bolzano Gold Medal of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for Merit in the Field of Mathematical Sciences.
Juris Hartmanis receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Dortmund.
Ken Birman chairs a DARPA ISAT study on survivability of critical infrastructure; Fred Schneider is on the committee. The study establishes a major DARPA effort in the area and lays the groundwork for a broader government engagement of the challenge.
Neil Immerman (former student of Juris Hartmanis) and Róbert Szelepcsényi get the Gödel prize for their paper showing that nondeterministic logarithmic space is closed under complement.
1996. Srinivas Keshav, Greg Morrisett, Praveen Seshadri, David Shmoys join.
Don Greenberg receives the ASCA Creative Research Award in Architecture.
Dan Huttenlocher receives a Cornell Presidential Weiss Fellowship for his contributions to undergraduate education. Three such awards are given each year; Cornell has 1600 faculty members.
David Gries receives an honorary doctorate from Daniel Webster College in New Hampshire.
Bruce Land gets first place in the instructional materials (Web-based) competition of the ACM SIGUCCS Use Services Conference XXIV. The award was for the Web site for his graphics programming course: http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/cs418-land.
Joe Halpern becomes Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM.
1997. Graeme Bailey, Lillian Lee, Bart Selman join. CS grows to 30 faculty and has over 500 computers.
Juris Hartmanis takes a two-year leave to serve as Assistant Director of the NSF for CISE. During his tenure, he effectively positions NSF and CISE to assume a leadership role in response to the PITAC report, and he is instrumental in shaping the discussion that lead to NSF's playing the lead role in the Information Technology Research (ITR) program.
Joe Halpern shares the 1997 Gödel Prize with former student Yoram Moses. Their paper Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment, says the citation, "provided a new and effective way of reasoning about distributed systems".
David Shmoys becomes Editor-in-Chief of the SIAM Journal of Discrete Mathematics.
The faculty publish six books:
Ken Birman, Building Secure and Reliable Network Applications (Prentice Hall).
Srinivas Keshav, An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking: ATM Networks, the Internet, and the Telephone Network (Addison-Wesley).
Dexter Kozen, Automata and Computability
Fred Schneider, On Concurrent Programming (Springer-Verlag). Nick Trefethen and student David Bau, Numerical Linear Algebra (SIAM). Charlie Van Loan, Introduction to Scientific Computing: a Matrix Approach Using MATLAB (Prentice Hall). With CS providing leadership, Cornell starts the Faculty of Computing and Information Science,
to provide a home for interdisciplinary computing work of all kinds.
CS, the Program for Computer Graphics, and Digital Libraries are part of it. David Gries receives an honorary doctorate from Miami University. Juris Hartmanis receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Missouri. Pedro Felzenszwalb is the CRA Outstanding Male Undergraduate Awards Runner-up. David Liben-Nowell receives an Honorable Mention in the CRA Outstanding Male Undergraduate Awards competition. Bill Arms becomes Chair of the ACM Publications Board and Editor-in-Chief of D-Lib Magazine. Joe Halpern is founder and administrator of CoRR (the ACM-sponsored Computing Research Repository). Fred Schneider is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE journal Security and Privacy. Fred Schneider is Chair of the NRC committee that produces the report Trust in Cyberspace
(National Academy Press). This report assesses the state-of-the-art procedures for constructing
trustworthy networked information systems and proposes directions for research in computer and
network security, software technology, and system architecture. Tom Coleman becomes the Director of the Cornell Theory Center. Jon Kleinberg publishes his Web-search work on using hubs and authorities.
The research is credited, together with the Brin-Page work on PageRank, with
forming the basis for the current generation of Internet search tools. Don Greenberg receives an honorary doctorate from the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Juris Hartmanis receives the CRA Distinguished Service Award for his service in the areas of government affairs, professional societies, publications, conferences, and leadership, which had a major impact on computing research. Dexter Kozen is the Class of 1960 Scholar, Williams College. Joe Halpern is named the Milner Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Greg Morrisett and students Steve Zdancewic and Dan Grossman receive the Best Paper Award in the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems Conference on Principles, Logics, and Implementation of High-Level Programming Languages. Keshav Pingali and his students receive the Best paper Award at the International Conference of Supercomputing. Former students John Belizaire and Julian Pelenur sell their company, Theory Center, Inc. The one-year-old company, a leading provider of Java Beans, was sold to BEA Systems for $100 million. Bill Arms becomes the Series Editor of the MIT Press series on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing. Johannes Gehrke publishes the second edition of Database Management Systems (McGraw Hill), with Ragu Ramakrishnan. David Schwartz publishes Introduction to UNIX (Prentice Hall) and Introduction to Maple (Prentice Hall). Under the leadership of Tom Coleman, the Cornell Theory Center opens the Financial Solutions Center on Broad Street in Manhattan. Bart Selman's work on phase transitions and complexity is featured in The New York Times. Ramin Zabih receives a joint appointment with the Cornell Medical School, the first such joint appointment at Cornell. Jon Kleinberg receives the Best Paper Award, ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems. Eva Tardos is elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Juris Hartmanis receives the Lielo Medal from the Latvian Academy of Sciences. This highest award given by the Academy to scientists of Latvia and of foreign countries is for outstanding creative contributions. Jon Kleinberg receives the 2001 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award for Initiatives in Research. Jon was cited for "his development of deep and innovative algorithms to solve fundamental problems in network, information extraction, and discrete optimization". Bart Selman is elected Fellow of the AAAI. Fred Schneider chairs the International Review of UK Computer Science Research. The review was sponsored by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the UK Government's leading funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences. The AFRL/Cornell Information Assurance Institute (IAI) is founded with a $1M/year grant from AFOSR. See www.cis.cornell.edu/iai/about.htm. Former undergrads Greg Pass and Frank Wood sell their company, ToFish, to AOL. Bill Arms publishes Digital Libraries (MIT Press). Intelligent Information Systems Institute (IISI) is established, with Carla Gomes as director. The national organization Engineers for a Sustainable World is started at Cornell (with a different name) under the inspiration of Regina Clewlow (CS 2001). There are now chapters in 21 universities. Allegra Angus receives the CRA Outstanding Female Undergraduate Award. Andrew Myers and students Steve Zdancewic, Lantian Zhen, and Nathaniel Nystrom receive the Best Paper Award at SOSP 2001 for their paper on secure program partitioning. Tim Roughgarden receives honorable mention in the ACM PhD thesis competition and receives the MPS Tucker Prize. His advisor was Eva Tardos. PhD student Ioannis Vetsikas and his software "whitebear" wins first place in the Trading Agent Competition. Programs compete by bidding in over 25 simultaneous electronic auctions. Researcher Donna Bergmark receives the Best Paper Award for Collection Synthesis in the ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries. Fred Schneider chairs the NSF ITR Program Review. PhD '92 Daniela Rus and BA '93 Sendhil Mullainathan win MacArthur Genius Award. Researcher Carl Lagoze, with three others, de fines the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The work has lead to renewed interest in shared metadata and increased ability to locate relevant digital assets regardless of geographical location. Student Tim Roughgarden wins the "Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award" at STOC 2002. Ramin Zabih and student Vladimir Kolmogorov receive the Best Paper Award in the European Conference in Computer Vision. Their paper dealt with minimizing energy functions via graph cuts. CS offers an undergrad Information Science major in Arts & Sciences. Bob Constable is elected to the CRA Board. Fred Schneider receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K. Jon Kleinberg, Eva Tardos, and student David Kempe receive the Best Research Paper Award
in the ACM SIGKDD Intl. Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Their paper,
Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network,
is one of a series of papers on social networks produced at Cornell. The Cornell Game Design Initiative is formed, under the direction of Dave Schwartz. Steve Marschner shares a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Science with Henrik Jensen and Pat Hanrahan for their model of subsurface scattering
of light in translucent materials. The model has been used often, including for Gollum in
The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Lillian Lee's work with postdoc Regina Barzilay on a system that learns to paraphrase
is featured in The New York Times. The CS Programming Team wins honorable mention in the world finals in the ACM meeting at the Czech Republic. Omar Khan receives the CRA Outstanding Male Undergraduate Award. Undergrad Eugene Lee takes first place in a national Intel Student Research Contest.
Lee's project, supervised by Kavita Bala, tackled the challenge of producing high-quality,
interactive rendering of sophisticated graphics, such as those used in movies or computer games. Fred Schneider co-chairs the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board. Eva Tardos becomes editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Computing. Bill Arms becomes series editor of the MIT Press Series on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing. Joe Halpern publishes Reasoning About Uncertainty (MIT Press). Kavita Bala publishes Advanced Global Illumination (AK Peters) with Philippe Bekaert, and Phil Dutre. CS offers an undergrad degree in Information Science, Systems, and Technology in Engineering,
joint with Operations Research & Industrial Engineering. The PhD program in Information Science is approved. The new lab (CL)3, designed by David Schwartz, is inaugurated. Dick Conway is honored by Management Science for his early, seminal research in computer simulation.
The citation describes Conway's findings as "visionary" and says that they
"established the research agenda for the simulation field for decades". Researcher Carl Lagoze receives the LITA Frederick G. Kilgour Award. Lagoze's research,
the citation says, "has led to significant achievements in the areas of distributed digital
collections, the harvesting of metadata, and establishment of open standards." Lillian Lee shares the Best Paper Award at the Human Language Technology Conference,
with Regina Barzilay. Their incorporation of context models in information ordering and
extractive summarization yields substantial improvements. Carla Gomes and Bart Selman receive the Distinguished Paper Award
at the Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming. Johannes Gehrke receives a Cornell University Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship. David Gries publishes Multimedia Introduction to Programming Using Java
(Springer-Verlag), with his son, Paul. Once again, PhD student Ioannis Vetsikas and his software "whitebear" wins first place
in the Trading Agent Competition. From 2001 to 2005, his worst finish is third. John Hopcroft receives the 2005 IEEE Harry Goode Memorial Award for "fundamental contributions to
the study of algorithms and their applications in information processing". Technology Research News magazine, in its "Top Picks: Technology Research Advances
of 2004", includes work by two CS groups: Jon Aizen, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Tony Novak
deviseda way to measure users' reactions to an item description; and Lillian Lee and Regina Barzilay
developed software that picks up the topic structure of whole documents to generate more accurate
automatic summaries. Fred Schneider is named chief scientist of TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies) a new five-university NSF Science and Technology Center. Student Filip Radlinski receives the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM SIGKDD Conference. Student Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil receives a Distinguished Student Paper Award at ICML. Student Thomas Finley receives a Distinguished Student Paper Award at ICML. Thorsten Joachims receives the Best Paper Award at ICML. Jon Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, and Christos Faloutsos receive the Best Research Paper Award at the 11th Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Jon Kleinberg and Eva Tardos publish Algorithm Design. (Addison-Wesley). Rafael Vinoly architects begin a feasibility study for a CIS information campus signature building; CS is included as a core unit of CIS.1998. Bill Arms, Andrew Myers, Ron Elber join.
1999. Johannes Gehrke, David Schwartz join. Bob Constable becomes Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science. Charlie Van Loan becomes Chair.
2000. Gün Sirer, Golan Yona join.
2001. Rich Caruana, Daisy Fan, Thorsten Joachims, Jai Shanmugasundaram, Jeanna Matthews, Radu Rugina join.
2002. Kavita Bala, Steve Marschner join.
2003. Uri Keich joins. David Gries becomes Assoc. Dean of Engineering.
2004. Juris Hartmanis becomes Sr. Assoc. Dean of CIS.
2005. Bobby Kleinberg joins.