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UC's PlanetLab Contribution Upgraded Thanks to Major Equipment Donation from HP

The Department of Computer Science has participated in the PlanetLab project for over four years, and has now carried out a significant hardware and software upgrade thanks to a significant donation of new machines from Hewlett-Packard. One of PlanetLab's main purposes is to serve as a testbed for overlay networks, and research groups at UC and other collaborating institutions are able to request a PlanetLab slice in which they can experiment with a variety of planetary-scale services, including file sharing and network-embedded storage, content distribution networks, routing and multicast overlays, QoS overlays, scalable object location, scalable event propagation, anomaly detection mechanisms, and network measurement tools. There are currently over 800 computing nodes and 600 active research projects running on PlanetLab. Thanks goes to recent Computer Science PhD student, Chad Yoshikawa, who has maintained UC's nodes and carried out the recent upgrade. Chad used PlanetLab to validate his PhD work on distributed load balancing algorithms. If you are interested in getting involved in PlanetLab please contact Prof. Fred Annexstein or Prof. Ken Berman.

Undergraduate Students Roll Out Disaster-Resistant File System

Computer Science undergraduates Ryan McGovern and Chris Siebert have written and released a distributed, disaster-resistant file system they call 'Mimir'. Mimir, named for a primal god of Norse mythology, is based on the recent algorithmic breakthrough of rateless, erasure codes developed by Michael Luby. Their system is running currently on several dozen machines, and creates a dynamic multi-terabyte storage cluster that is immune to failure rates of over 50%-a remarkable achievement. Ryan and Chris maintain a blog site with more information about Mimir at www.lerao.com.

PhD Student Wins Prestigious Appointment

Congratulations to Amit Sinha, the most recent Ph.D. student to graduate from the Department of Computer Science, and who has joined the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, an affiliate of Harvard Medical School in Boston, as a Computational Biologist. He will be working with a research team studying Leukemia. Amit's primary advisor was Raj Bhatnagar and his co-advisors were Jarek Meller and Anil Jegga from the Bioinformatics Division of the Children's Hospital Medical Center.

Prof Hall Creates Comic Books To Help Students

The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Professor Ernie Hall has discovered the joys of using comic books in the classroom.

3rd Annual ECE & CS Poster Competition - Call for abstracts

The Poster Competition organized by the GSA and IEEE is an annual feature on the calendars of ECE and CS students.

"Deep Blue and AI" Discussion on NPR

Dr Raj Bhatnagar discusses the significance of the twelfth anniversary of "Deep Blue's" triumph over chess champion Gary Kasparov. The interview was broadcast on NPR's Cincinnati Edition.

Dr Berman Has "A Fine" Embedding

The recent issue of SIAM Journal of Discrete Math has an article by Dr Ken Berman that describes a new technique using algebraic graph theory that solves the problem of locating Internet servers to achieve optimal fault tolerance.

Cincinnati hosts AI Conference

The MAICS conference will be held April 12 & 13 in Cincinnati.

CS Faculty High on Google Scholar

CS faculty have publications with high citation scores on Google Scholar

New Accend Program Empowers Students

The Computer Science Department now offers a 5-year Accend program that will enable students to obtain a BS. in CS and an M.S. in CS in five years and two quarters.

CS Faculty Welcome Professor Ernie Hall

Professor Ernie Hall has accepted a joint appointment with the Computer Science Department. Computer science students will now have significant research and coursework opportunities in the robotics area.

PhD Graduate Mike Helmick moving to Seattle

Mike T. Helmick received his PhD in Computer Science this year after defending his thesis "Efficient Group Communication and the Degree-bounded Shortest Path Problem." Mike has accepted a position with Amazon.com in the Amazon Web Services area (http://aws.amazon.com/ ). He is excited that he will have the opportunity to work on "cutting edge technologies and truly large scale distributed systems." We wish Mike luck in his new Seattle digs.

Career Path of A CIO

Dr. Fred Siff, Vice President and CIO at the University of Cincinnati discussed the career path of a Chief Information Officer with students.

Dr. Cordeiro, former PhD student, named a "New Face of Engineering 2007" by Engineers Week

Carlos Cordeiro, Ph.D., is an engineer who knows how to get a message across, even in the worst of circumstances. To be precise, he has pioneered the development of new wireless radio technologies that can rapidly restore crucial communications to areas devastated by disasters, such as the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina, as well as provide service to areas of America and the world that lack access to adequate wired infrastructure.

Phd Student finds value for van der Waerden number

Michal Kouril, working with Dr. Jerry Paul, computed the value of the van der Waerden number W(2,6).