McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts

• Professor receives new grant. Dr. Stacey Levine has received a grant of $187,875 from the National Science Foundation for her project RUI: New Variational Models for Denoising, Decomposition, and Deblurring. Dr. Levine is continuing her research project funded by a previous NSF grant of $139,900.
• Professor pilots new high school program. Dr. Lili Shashaani recently piloted a new program aimed at introducing underrepresented male high school students to computer science concepts. This work complements her ongoing similar program for female high school students. Both programs are funded by a grant from Alcoa.
• Recent grads present papers. In the summer following their graduation, former math and computer science majors John Noecker and Michael Ryan presented at Digital Humanities 2009, an international conference held this year at the University of Maryland. John presented both a paper and a poster while Michael presented a poster. Work co-authored by four other current and former departmental students was also presented at the conference. All students co-authored their work with Dr. Patrick Juola and, on one paper, Dr. Stacey Levine.
• Student chosen for summer and fall research programs. Math (and physics) major Kaitlyn Yoha was chosen to participate in two research programs: a summer NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at the University of California at Davis and a fall program at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center with a focus on the design of an X-ray telescope.
• Student selected for international "summer school". Computer science major Sara Ali was selected to participate in the Johns Hopkins University Summer School on Human Language Technology. This "school" is a two-week opportunity for students to learn from distinguished researchers in language technology through lectures and labs. Sara is working in Dr. Patrick Juola's research group.
• Student is General Excellence Award winner. John Noecker, graduating senior majoring in mathematics and computer science, was the College of Liberal Arts General Excellence Award winner for 2009. As such, he was the student speaker representing his class at commencement exercises. John was chosen based on his sterling academic record, exceptionally strong research record under the direction of Dr. Patrick Juola, and extracurricular involvement.
• Professor's teaching recognized by professional society.The Allegheny Mountain Section of the Mathematical Association of America selected Dr. George Bradley as the recipient of its 2009 Award for Distinguished Teaching. Dr. Bradley was honored at the spring meeting of the Section.
• Carnegie Mellon graduate joins faculty. Dr. Karl Wimmer, who recently received his Ph.D. in Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization from Carnegie Mellon, joins the math faculty beginning Fall 2009. He is off to a strong start in research, having already presented his work at international conferences in Poland, Finland, and Canada. Dr. Wimmer has also been selected to participate in Project NExT, a series of workshops for new mathematics teachers sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America.
• Professor receives prestigious appointment. Dr. Patrick Juola has been appointed Adjunct Scientist to the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. This newly founded research center explores and develops highly innovative technologies in extracting information from massive sources of text and speech. Dr. Juola's appointment provides an excellent opportunity to enhance the department's offerings in artificial intelligence and text analysis.
• Undergraduates present papers at conference. Two undergraduate students, both double majors in mathematics and computer science, presented in early November at the 2008 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science poster versions of papers they co-authored with Dr. Patrick Juola. John Noecker was first author on the paper An Empirical Study of Linear Separability on Authorship Attribution Feature Spaces, and Michael Ryan co-authored the paper Authorship Attribution, Similarity, and Noncommutative Divergence Measures.
• Professor awarded third grant. Dr. Patrick Juola has been awarded three significant federal grants within the period of a year. The third grant, in the amount of $58,202 from the National Science Foundation, is titled "CRI: CRD: Collaborative Research: Community Resources for Authorship Attribution Research" and is projected to run through January 31, 2010.
• Graduating seniors take significant next steps. Two class of 2008 graduates have been offered acceptance to and fellowships in top-10 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. In addition, Dr. Juola has published the book Authorship Attribution.

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