Connect Newsletter

From smart utilities like the smart grid and intelligent transportation systems to social networks on sites like Facebook and YouTube, the infrastructures of tomorrow will heavily utilize information technology. While these “smart” infrastructures promise many benefits, they often require new kinds of interaction between people and the machines meant to serve them. Yet the social, cultural, economic and political side of these relationships often receives little attention.

From taking soil moisture measurements around the country to using sensing for surveillance, many modern technologies rely on networked systems.

But too often, these systems are not as efficient or reliable as they could be. That is largely because networked systems are informationally decentralized, comprise many nodes carrying disparate information and are subject to constraints on energy, data storage and computational capabilities. 

Beckman Institute honored CSL researcher Thomas Huang by creating the Thomas and Margaret Huang Fund for Graduate Research. Initiatied by Huang’s former students, the fund will support graduate student research in human-computer intelligent interaction, which has been the focus of Huang’s research during his 22 years with Beckman. In particular, Huang has made seminal contribution to fields such as image formation and signal processing.

For decades, Moore’s Law has held true, with the number of transistors on a given area of a computer chip doubling every 18 to 24 months. However, as devices shrink in size, researchers are scrambling to continue advancing semiconductor performance.

With his advisor Rakesh Kumar, CSL graduate student John Sartori is addressing this problem with a unique methodology: designing processors and applications that embrace errors.

Recently, CSL Professor Tamer Başar was elected to the IFAC Council. IFAC, the International Federation of Automatic Control, is the leading international body in the field of automatic control. Başar, a Swanlund Chair holder and professor of electrical and computer engineering, was elected to the council for a three-year term, and is representing the United States. As Başar explained, “Election to the council is based on scientific merit as well as visibility within IFAC.”

In September, two CSL graduate students, Joseph Sloan and Rami Abdallah, won Best in Session Awards at the Semiconductor Research Corporations’ (SRC) 2011 Technology Conference, also known as TECHCON.

PCI affiliate Brighten Godfrey (CS) was among a select group of academic researchers and Internet visionaries chosen to participate in Verisign’s “Building a Better Internet Symposium.” Godfrey’s project was one of four chosen internationally to receive a $75,000 infrastructure grant that Verisign awarded as part of its 25 Years of .Com commemorations. The forum, held in November in Washington, DC, explored how the Internet’s core infrastructure can evolve to support the challenges of billions of new users, increasing complexity, and internationalization.