THREE AWARDED SCS STAFF RECOGNITION AWARDS...Another round of applause to Alan Guisewite (Robotics), Phyllis Lewis (CS), and John Kozar (Robotics), recipients of the 1998 SCS Staff Recognition Award in honor of their outstanding and consistently high standard of work and inspiring performances at the job. At the packed ceremony on May 1, the winners were recognized for all they have contributed to the SCS environment over the years and acknowledged for their continuing service to the community. Bravo all nominees for helping to make SCS the extraordinary environment it is!

IN DEFENSE...
**MARGARET REID-MILLER is smiling! She presented "Experiments with Parallel Pointer-Based Algorithms" at her CS thesis defense on May 4. Her committee included: Guy Blelloch (Chair), Randy Bryant, Bruce Maggs, Daniel Sleator, and Vijaya Ramachandran (University of Texas).
**JUSTIN BOYAN takes the "stage" with "Learning Evaluation Functions for Global Optimization" at his CS defense on Tuesday, May 12. His well-searched committee includes: Andrew Moore (Co-Chair), Scott Fahlman (Co-Chair), Tom Mitchell, and Tom Dietterich (Oregon State).
**JOHN MURPHY looks to "Panospheric Video for Robotic Telexploration" during his robotics oral on Friday, May 8 at 1:00 pm, FRC100. His committe includes: William Whittaker (Chair), John Bares, Hagen Schempf, and Richard Juday (NASA Johnson Space Center).

PHI BETA KAPPA...Congratulations to the following SCS undergraduates who were inducted into Upsilon of Pennsylvania, the Phi Beta Kappa Chapter at Carnegie Mellon this spring: Gordon Cheng, Kevin Hamlen, Pradeip Hari, Aik-Meng Kuah, Phillip Michalak, David Mitzel, Kenneth Mixter, Kayvon Pirestani, Chotirat Ratanamahatana, Mauricio Vives, Lisa Vizer, Scott Weber, and Leejay Wu.

PROPOSALS...
**ZACK BUTLER presented "Cooperative Cover in Unknown High-Structured Environments" at his robotics thesis proposal on May 4. His thesis committee included: Ralph Hollis (Chair), Alfred Rizzi, Howie Choset, and Bruce Donald (Dartmouth College).

ALUMNI UPDATES...John Ousterhout has been named the recipient of the 1997 Software System Award by The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The award, recognizes the development of a software system that has a lasting influence and will be presented on May 10, 1998 in Washington, DC. and includes a $10,000 prize. John is being honored for his work with "Tool Language and its toolkit." He is currently CEO of Scriptics Corporation in Palo Alto, a company he founded in early 1998 to further develop Tel/Tk. He was most recently a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems.

SCS RUNNERS MAKE THEIR MARK...Six member of the SCS Running Club took part in the May 3 Pittsburgh Marathon. Perhaps you have seen them hobbling around the building? :-) A healthy congratulations to Subash Shankar (3:07), Juergen Dingel (3:18), Adam Berger (3:34), Stanley Chen (3:53), Neil Heffernan (4:00) and Dirk Kalp (4:01). An extraordinary accomplishment!

SCS ARTISTS IN ACTION...Michael Mateas and Marc Bohlen will participate in the community forum, "Can Adults 'Play' in All Seriousness?" at the Andy Warhol Museum on Thursday, May 7 at 7:00 pm. Michael and Marc have collaborated on "Office Plant #1", a robotic artpiece that "responds to email, has keyboard sensors, a text-classification system and much more..." Michael and Marc will also address "The Role of Play in Society" at this open program. The Warhol is located at 117 Sandusky Street on the Northside. A $3 donation is recommended.

MEETING OF THE MINDS...On Wednesday, May 6, the SCS Undergrad Research Thesis students will present oral synopses of their theses as part of the CMU Undergraduate Research Symposium. The presentations will be held in the University Center from Noon to 5:00 pm. In addition, undergrads engaged in CS independent study will present posters during the Symposium in the Connan Room and Commons Area. Stop by and hear about/see the outstanding research these students have been occupied with this past year. Watch for:

• Dan DiPasquo, "Using HTML Structure for Information Retrieval from the World-Wide Web" (Dowd, 12:00 pm)
  
• Eric Farng, "Preprocessing Data for Machine Learning Algorithms" (Dowd, 12:20 pm)
  
• Kevin Hamlen, "Proof-Carrying-Code for x86 Architectures" (Dowd, 12:40 pm)
  
• Aik-Meng Kuah, "Quantum Cryptography and Information Theory" (Wright, 1:00 pm)
  
• Rich LaBarca, "Towards Robotic Bipedal Walking: An Experimental System for Designing Control Software for Dynamically Stable Robots" (Wright, 1:20 pm)
  
• Wuttipong Lertaneksin, "Machine Translation from Thai to English" (Dowd, 1:40 pm)
  
• Khary Mendez, "Model-Based Segmentation of 3-D NMR Heart Images" (McKenna, 2:00 pm)
  
• Hunter Payne, "Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Large Stochastic Domains" (Dowd, 3:00 pm)
  
• Chotirat Ratanamahatana, "Evaluating What is Natural for Beginners" (Dowd, 3:20 pm)
  
• Russ Schaaf, "Issues in the Generation of Multi-resolution Terrain Databases" (Wright, 3:40)
  
• Brian White, "Testing an Optimistically-Replicated Distributed File System" (Dowd, 4:00 pm)
  
• Bin Zhou, "Looking Toward the Future of the Internet" (Dowd, 4:20 pm)

EMIGRATION CONTINUES...Allan Stoltzfus will account for "Money: Where It Goes" at the next CS Emigration Course on Friday, May 8 at 1:00 pm in Wean 5409.

AIPS COMING TO CAMPUS...No monkey-business here, rather the Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems conference (AIPS'98) will be held at the University Center from June 7-10. Under the direction of Conference Program Chairs, Reid Simmons, Stephen Smith, and Manuela Veloso, the conference includes among the invited speakers: Herbert Simon, Richard King Mellon Professor of Computer Science and Psychology; Michael Georgeff, Director of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute; and Craig Coutilier, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. The program includes four parallel track workshops: 1) Planning as Combinatorial Search: Propositional, Graph-Based, and Disjunctive Planning Methods; 2) Integrating Planning, Scheduling and Execution in Dynamic and Uncertain Environments; 3) Knowledge Engineering and Acquisition for Planning: Theory and Practice; and 4) Interactive and Collaborative Planning AIPS. conference is also hosting a "planning systems competition", the goal of which is to foster development of state-of-the-art planning systems and to encourage the comparison of competing approaches to planning. For all particulars, visit www.cs.cmu.edu/~aips98/

CLAW ARRIVES IN MAY...The Second International Workshop on Controlled Language Applications (CLAW98), sponsored by the LTI, will be held May 21-22 at the University Center. A preliminary list of papers and registration information is available at: www.lti.cs.cmu.edu/CLAW98/ To attend, please contact Martha Puzio by May 10. Registration fees will be waived for SCS students, staff and faculty. Copies of the proceedings will be available for a separate fee. If you would like to have a copy, please indicate this on your registration.

15-612 PRESENTS...Formal project presentations by students in 15-612, "Distributed Systems", are scheduled for 9:00 am-4:30 pm in Wean 5403 on Wednesday/Thursday, May 5-6. Per Raj Rajkumar, "most if not all of these projects have some or all of the following ingredients: Java, CORBA/IIOP (mostly VisiCalc), support for high availability (mostly a primary with one or more backups), load-balancing, security (mostly flexible sandboxing support for downloaded applets/agents), and multimedia. Some notable projects include: a distributed/secure agent execution environment, a real-time interactive multimedia communications system, a virtual classroom facility with multimedia and an auxiliary human moderator, a highly available stock trading system, and a highly available online entertainment package purchasing system"...and more. A complete presentation schedule, with links to all the projects, is available at: www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15612-s98/www/home.html

SCS COMMENCEMENT!...Be sure you have your times and locations straight for Sunday, May 17. The SCS scheduled events include:

• SCS COMMENCEMENT BRUNCH: FRC High Bay and Patio
  8:30 am to 10:00 am
  
• CARNEGIE MELLON COMMENCEMENT '98: Gesling Stadium
  11:00 pm-12:00 pm
  
• GRADUATE PROCESSIONAL: Starts at 10:30 am
  MS/Undergrads march from Wean,
  PhD candidates from the Intramural [IM] Field Tent.
  
• SCS DIPLOMA CEREMONY: Rangos Ballroom --- 12:30 pm
  

INVENTING THE FUTURE...AI and CS in the 21st Century" is the focus of much attention on June 4-5, as SCS hosts a symposium in honor of Raj Reddy's 60th Birthday! A distinguished list of speakers is assembling for the occasion, including: James Baker, Roberto Bisiani, Michael Dertouzos, Ed Feigenbaum, Ed Fredkin, Xuedong Huang, Katsushi Ikeuchi, Robert Kahn, Victor Lesser, Tom Murrin, Andreas Nowatzyk, Fritz Prinz, George Robertson, Paul Wright, and Victor Zue. Many members of the SCS faculty will also be participating. Special event-sponsorship is being provided by SEEQ Technology and Carnegie Group, Inc. If you are interested in attending, send email to: raj-sym@cs to assure a space. All programs will take place in the University Center. For schedules, please visit: www.cs.cmu.edu/~raj-symposium.

ALUMNI BUSINESS...
LYCOS ACQUIRES WISEWIRE FOR $39.75 MILLION...A virtual CMU-miniconglomerate was formed on April 30, 1998. As noted in the many "newswires", "[Lycos] acquired WiseWire Corporation and its proprietary technology for directory-building on the Internet. The acquisition, valued at approximately $39.75 million in Lycos shares, establishes Lycos as the only online service to offer an automated Web directory and to integrate it with Internet search results....immediately, users searching with Lycos will benefit from Lycos' new integrated search results page which features categories found in the WiseWire-powered directory..." This acquisition of WiseWire will include new appointments at Lycos, including Ken Lang, who developed WiseWire's proprietary technology, as Chief Technology Officer of Lycos. WiseWire President Dennis Ciccone will be named Vice President of Mergers/Acquisitions, and Robert O. Frasca, Senior Vice President of WiseWire, who has been named a Vice President of Lycos.

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