The Cisco Systems University Research Program has awarded an unrestricted gift in the amount of $78,000 to Prof. Reza Rejaie. This gift will support Prof. Rejaie's research on "Characterizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Peer-to-Peer Networks", as part of his IONP2P project. In recent years, the pervasive deployment of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications (such as Gnutella and BitTorrent) has had a profound effect on the Internet that is even more tangible than the impact of the Web. The goal of Rejaie's work is the development of measurement techniques for collecting unbiased samples from popular P2P applications, to provide a better understanding of their behavior and impact. Once the ...»

The Cisco Systems University Research Program has awarded an unrestricted gift in the amount of $78,000 to Prof. Reza Rejaie. This gift will support Prof. Rejaie's research on "Characterizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Peer-to-Peer Networks", as part of his IONP2P project. In recent years, the pervasive deployment of peer-to-peer (P2P) applications (such as Gnutella and BitTorrent) has had a profound effect on the Internet that is even more tangible than the impact of the Web. The goal of Rejaie's work is the development of measurement techniques for collecting unbiased samples from popular P2P applications, to provide a better understanding of their behavior and impact. Once the ...»

Ph.D. student Paea LePendu was recently awarded a prestigious National Physical Science Consortium (NPSC) Graduate Research Fellowship award. The award provides funding of up to $200,000 over six years. (Visit NPSC website for more information on this fellowship.) The highly competitive NPSC Fellowship matches industrial and research laboratories with educational institutions to sponsor outstanding doctoral students. The National Security Agency (NSA) selected Paea as their top choice among all applicants in Computer Science. Paea is looking forward to this opportunity to continue his research as well as to participate in summer internships at NSA headquarters in the Washington ...»

Two seniors, CIS major Mike Matloff and CIT minor Sean Wallace, were chosen as members of the Oregon Six by the Alpha of Oregon Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Honorary Society. Each May, the Phi Beta Kappa society elects members based on academic success and recommendations of Phi Beta Kappa faculty. The society honors students whose undergraduate academic records fulfill the objectives of a liberal arts education. Members are generally selected from the top 10 percent of the university's graduating class. Six exceptional members are further designated the Phi Beta Kappa Oregon Six because they combine extraordinary breadth and excellence in upper-division liberal arts ...»

Brown, Rong, and Ochoa (left to right) Two groups of UO students presented posters at the CHI 2006 Student Design Competition. CHI is the leading annual conference in the field of human-computer interaction. It was held this year in Montreal. The competition challenged students to develop computer-based systems that could address problems of nutrition and health. Jiawei Rong, Leo Ochoa, Lee Ritter, and Erik Brown designed a "Food Information Network" to help people make better choices about the food products they purchase. The design process followed a scenario-based design methodology, which included field studies, writing activity scenarios, and early user testing with a paper-based ...»

A pair of prestigious Dunbar scholarships were recently awarded to CIS graduate student Daniel Stutzbach and CIS undergraduate Edward West for outstanding academic achievements in computer science. James Hastings, another CIS undergraduate, won a George and Susan Fugelsang Scholarship, a competitive scholarship. The Clarence and Lucille Dunbar Scholarship, awarded by the UO College of Arts and Sciences, recognizes high achieving undergraduate and graduate students in the areas of biology, chemistry, computer and information science, human physiology, geological sciences, mathematics, physics, or psychology. Candidates were nominated by the heads of these departments, and evaluated ...»

Former UO doctoral student, Yolanda Reimer (Ph.D. 2001), won a prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award for 2006. This five-year, $500,000 award will fund her work as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Montana. The project, "From Pen and Paper to Computer: An Emerging Notetaking Paradigm for Students" investigates how the process of note taking is changing for students in higher education, and how to better support this emerging paradigm by offering critical software support. "One of the goals of this work is to develop an electronic notebook (e-notebook) application that supports the most crucial functions for student note takers, that works ...»

UO professor Jan Cuny is the recipient of a 2005 ACM President Award which recognizes "leaders of IT whose actions and achievements serve as paragons for our field." Prof. Cuny is being recognized for "showing us how to help underserved populations as a computer scientist, a parent, a teacher, a civil servant, and a citizen." The award recognizes Professor Cuny's long record of leadership and service on the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research. Cuny was active in several key CRA-W programs, including an influential series of mentorship workshops for female researchers in academic careers as well as the Distributed Mentor Project, which ...»

For the fifth year in a row, graduate students, professors, software professionals and others from all over the world will gather in Eugene to hear about the latest research in formal software verification techniques. Each year, the UO attracts between 30 and 60 participants in a ten-day summer school on formal methods in computer science. The school showcases speakers from academia and industry from Europe and North America. Set to convene in mid-July, the school is now accepting applications for participants at its web site. The summer school was originally founded by Prof. Zena Ariola in the summer of 2002 with the title "Proofs-as-Programs". The original school featured ...»

For years researchers have worked on technologies to allow children with severe disabilities to use their eyes to reach out and communicate with those around them, to express basic human needs and desires that would otherwise remain locked inside their heads. The UO is moving towards a future where many such children are able to express themselves artistically as well. Professor Anthony Hornof and his students have has already developed EyeDraw, a software package that allows children to draw pictures with their eyes, and is now hoping to move into music. In December, Prof Hornof was awarded $140,000 from the National Science Foundation's Universal Access program as a one-year ...»

When Professor Steve Fickas and Professor McKay Sohlberg met on their children's soccer field, they had no idea how much collaboration was in store for them. They started as co-instructors in a CIS graduate seminar that created a pilot study on email use by people with traumatic brain injury(TBI), and ended up as co-CEO's in a new assistive technology company. The seminar lead to a 5-year $1.5 million grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) . The grant provided funding for a team of CIS undergrads and grad students to build a prototype assistive email system. The stand-alone system is now available as Think-and-Link , an open source ...»

On the night of July 3, 2005 at 10:52 p.m. NASA's Deep Impact became the first space craft to hit a comet. The craft was sent to study the interior of comet Tempel 1, by excavating a crater more than 25 m deep and 100 m in diameter. With $330 million invested, the fault protection system was critical to the mission success. Before the mission could proceed, the fault protection system had to be verified by a team comprised of CIS graduate student Ny Aina Razermera Mamy, Professor Stephen Fickas, and Jet Propulsion Lab researcher Dr. Martin Feather. The team used a formal verification process that was presented in a paper at the Sixth IEEE International Symposium on High Assurance ...»

2005 was a banner year for open source developer and CIS graduate student Tom Bulatewicz, with two applications winning awards, but these are not the first accolades for Bulatewicz's project Nosleep Software. In October, Bulatewicz released nosleep's newest application, Super Analyzer, a Mac and Windows tool that works with iTunes, and immediately received a 5 star rating and two awards from Softpedia, a major internet distributor of free software. Bulatewicz founded Nosleep in May 1999, when he wrote Due Yesterday, a student organizer for Palm OS devices, which was awarded second prize in the Handheld Design Awards for Education sponsored by the Center for Innovative Learning ...»

This month, the Eugene Register Guard ran a story about the alarming increase in children living in foster homes: over 1000 children in Lane County. While others scratch their heads, or silently shed a tear, some CIS professors are doing something about it. Professor David Atkins and his wife, Nancy, started fostering infants over ten years ago. Since then, Dr. and Mrs. Atkins have cared for eleven babies, often from homes torn apart by drug use and domestic violence. The infants have come to their home as young as 23 hours old, and stay with them for anywhere from a few months to nearly a year. The goal of the foster care system, and the reason that the state intervenes in ...»

AI Professor Juan Flores replaces mentor in sabbatical switch While Dr. Art Farley spends his sabbatical abroad, Dr. Juan Flores is using his own sabbatical to return to the University of Oregon for the 2005-2006 school year. Dr. Flores earned his doctorate in 1997 under Dr. Farley's tutelage, and now sits on the faculty of the University of Michoacan in Mexico as a full professor. His research work deals with applications of Artificial Intelligence to Electrical Engineering and Financial Analysis. He studies qualitative reasoning, evolutionary computation, and artificial neural networks with applications to electrical engineering, modelling dynamic systems, and financial ...»

NSF's Division of Environmental Biology has awarded Dr. John Conery and Dr. Joe Thornton (Biology) $353,000 to study Mixed-Model Phylogenetic Methods for Evolutionarily Heterogeneous Data. According to PhD student and fellow researcher Bryan Kolaczkowski, "Heterogeneity in the evolutionary process is a hot topic right now, as current models assume a large degree of homogeneity, yet we know that this assumption is wrong. In addition, our earlier work - and the work of others - has shown that failure to incorporate hetergeneous evolutionary features can bias current methods toward the wrong inference." To counter this bias, the team has been developing a heterogeneous mixed-model ...»

Congratulations to Professor Jun Li and Professor Dejing Dou of CIS and David Meyer of the Advanced Network Technology Center, recipients of a National Science Foundation grant entitled "NeTS-NBD: Internet Routing Forensics -- A Framework for Understanding, Monitoring and Detecting Abnormal Border Gateway Protocol Events.", which will be funded by National Science Foundation (NSF). This three-year grant is from the highly competitive networking program of NSF, NeTS. The research team, led by PI Jun Li, will investigate a systematic means for understanding and detecting networking anomalies from the Internet control plane, such as large-scale power failure, malicious attacks, or router ...»