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Graduating seniors take significant
next steps. Two class of 2008 graduates have been offered
acceptance to and fellowships in strong PhD programs. Dylan Hower
is entering the computer science program at the University of Wisconsin
at Madison, and Chase Smith is entering the mathematics program at
Michigan State University. In addition, mathematics major
Jason Lamella is taking a position with Xerox.
Three students accepted to prestigious summer research
programs. Students John Noecker, Amanda Sgroi, and Kaitlyn Yoha
have been accepted to summer Research Experience for Undergraduates
(REU) programs funded by the National Science Foundation. John will
be at Johns Hopkins, Amanda at MIT, and Kaitlyn at the University of Florida.
First-year professor awarded grant.
Dr. Carl Toews,
in his first year at Duquesne, was awarded a Duquesne
Faculty Development Fund two-year grant for his project,
Medical Imaging Through Voltage Measurements: A Bridge to Undergraduate
Research.
Professor awarded second major grant, publishes
second book.
Dr. Patrick Juola
has been awarded a two-year, $131,465 grant from the National Endowment
for the Humanities. With the assistance of Duquesne students, Dr. Juola
will seek to develop software that will help to produce topical indices for
books, potentially saving authors innumerable hours of tedious work.
This grant complements Dr. Juola's recent award from the National
Science Foundation to study authorship attribution (see
earlier story). In addition, Dr. Juola has published
the book Authorship Attribution.
Student chosen for Google workshop.
Undergraduate math and computer science major Amanda Sgroi was
selected to attend the 2008 Google Workshop for Women Engineers,
an all-expenses-paid workshop at Google's headquarters in Mountain View,
California, February 21-23.
Professor published in JAMA.
Dr. Frank D'Amico is a co-author of a Dec. 26, 2007 publication in the
prestigious
Journal of the American Medical Association.
Student and
faculty member
receive 2007-08 collaborative research grant. The College
of Liberal Arts has awarded a small undergraduate research grant
to student Charles Liddell along
with his advisor, Dr. Patrick Juola, for
the project, "Barrier-Free Web Browsing for People with Aphasia via
Browser Modifications."
Faculty member
receives teaching awards. Dr. John Kern
was the sole recipient of
the 2007 President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, the top award
for teaching at Duquesne. He had previously been awarded the 2007
Faculty Teaching Excellence Award for the
College of Liberal Arts. Dr. Kern has from his first semester
received outstanding evaluations
from students at all levels and has also greatly impressed his faculty
colleagues within the department and elsewhere.
Two professors'
projects funded by NSF. Dr. Patrick Juola and Dr. Jeff
Jackson have
been awarded grants for $212,000 and $250,519, respectively, by the
National Science Foundation. Both grants will support
graduate and undergraduate student research over the next three
years. Dr. Juola's grant comes from NSF's
Office of Cyberinfrastructure to support his project, A Modular
Software Framework for Evaluation, Testing, and Cross-Fertilization of
Authorship Attribution Techniques. Dr Jackson's grant is
through the Theory of Computing program and his project is entitled RUI: Fourier-Based Learning of Fundamental
Function Classes.
Graduating
students receive assistantships for
PhD programs. Three 2007 graduates have accepted admission to PhD
programs along with assistantships that pay their tuition plus a
stipend for living expenses. The students are Matt Fredrikson
(computer science, University of Wisconsin-Madison), Pat Plunkett
(math, University of California at Santa Barbara), and Jeromy Sivek
(math,
University of Iowa).
New faculty
member hired. We're very
pleased to welcome to the mathematics faculty Dr. Carl Toews, who
earned his PhD at the University of Virginia and has
subsequently worked at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory and at the Institute
for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) at the University of
Minnesota. He comes to us highly recommended for both his teaching
and his research potential. Dr. Toews begins his Duquesne duties Fall
2007.
Faculty awarded
internal grants, involve
students. Two faculty members were awarded internal grants during
Spring 2007, and both have hired undergraduate student assistants
through this funding. Dr. John Fleming
was awarded a Faculty
Development Fund grant for the project "Efficient Computation of
Electrostatic Potential for use in Molecular Dynamic Simulations."
Chase Smith is assisting Dr. Fleming. Dr. Lili
Shashaani
was awarded
a Wimmer Family Foundation grant to support writing and submitting for
publication one or more scholarly articles describing her findings
related to her spearheading of the Diversity in Computational
Technology program at Duquesne since 2001. Emily Matthews is
assisting Dr. Shashaani.
Students and
faculty members awarded collaborative research grants.
During Spring 2007, the College
of Liberal Arts awarded small undergraduate research grants
to students Nathan Donahue-Babiak, Jeromy Sivek, and John Noecker along
with their advisors, Dr. Doug
Landsittel, Dr.
John Kern,
and Dr. Patrick Juola,
respectively. Jeromy
studied the validity of non-Euclidean metrics in Gaussian process
models, Nathan investigated statistical properties of tests
that jointly incorporate statistical significance and cut-offs for
biological or clinical significance, and John's project was entitled
Counterfind.
Alum's work on
cover of Berkeley
research publication. Hayley
Iben, a 2001
computer science graduate, had images from some of her computer
graphics work featured on the cover of the 2007 Research Summary of
UC
Berkeley's Department of Electical Engineering and Computer Sciences.
Hayley has recently completed her PhD in computer science at Berkeley and has
accepted a position at Pixar.
Recent graduate's research featured at Slashdot.
Slashdot,
the widely-read "News for Nerds" Web site, has a January 3, 2007 article
describing BitTyrant,
a project to which 2005 Duquesne graduate Michael Piatek
was a key
contributor.
Professors
publish textbooks. Two computer
science faculty members published textbooks during Fall 2006, both with
Prentice Hall. Dr. Jeff
Jackson authored Web
Technologies: A Computer Science Perspective, and Dr. Patrick Juola
authored Principles
of Computer Organization and Assembly Language.
Undergraduate student and professor submit patent
application.
Matthew Fredrikson, a double major in mathematics and computer science,
and Dr. Patrick Juola
submitted
a patent application entitled
"Detecting Malicious Code Using Behavioral Anomalies" in September
2006. The
invention began with a project assigned by Dr. Juola in his
Computer Security course.
Students win awards at national math conference.
Caleb Astey and
Patrick Plunkett, both double majors in mathematics and computer
science, won awards from the Mathematics Association of America for
their presentations at the MAA's Annual Summer Meeting (MathFest) held
August 2006 in Knoxville. Duquesne was the only school with two MAA
award winners. Pat's talk was entitled "Shaping Things Up: The Smallest
Enclosing Ellipsoid of Random Knots" and Caleb's was "Minimal Knots on
3-Dimensional Graph Paper."
Student presents paper at international conference.
Shelly Lukon, while a graduate student in the Computational
Mathematics program, presented her paper "A Context-Sensitive
Machine-Aided Index Generator" (joint work with Dr. Patrick Juola) at
the Joint Annual
Conference of the Association for Computing and the Humanities and the
Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing in July 2006
at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. The work grew out of her thesis
research, which has also produced other conference and journal
publications.
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