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The regional phase of the ACM's International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) took place on November 5th and the University of Chicago sent three teams that all placed amongst the top 20 teams in the region (out of 141 teams in Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee). We were not able to announce the results earlier because the Regional Judges did not certify the results until today.

Our teams and their ranks are:

WHITEBOARD ERASERS Joe DiCapua, Naren Hazareesingh, Kevin Wang Placed 1st in the Chicago site, and 2nd regionally.

TERMINAL 1337NESS Michael Lucy, Rafael Turner, Damon Wang Placed 3rd in the Chicago site, and 9th regionally

NOT YET Naftali Harris, Matt Lee, and Bill Waldrep Placed 5th in the Chicago site, and 16th regionally

We congratulate the exceptionally talented students in our ICPC teams, as well as their coach, Borja Sotomayor, and Louis Wasserman, their assistant coach.

The full regional standings can be found here.

This year's problem set can be found here.

Undergrads interested in this competition should absolutely contact Borja Sotomayor borja@cs.uchicago.edu.

Louis Wasserman (4th year in the College and assistant coach of the CS Department's ACM-ICPC team) won first place on November 4 at the Illinois Technology Association's Fall Challenge competition. Congratulations, Louis!

The Simons Foundation informed us on September 28 that the University of Chicago/TTIC proposal for an Institute for the Theory of Computing has been selected to be one of the final three proposals that they will consider. Last December, after an initial "letter of intent" phase, seven major institutions and consortia across the country were invited to submit full proposals to host the new Institute which will benefit from a $6M/year grant from the Simons Foundation. The three finalists will host site visits in the coming months before the final decision is made.

Enthusiastically supported by President Robert Zimmer and PSD Dean Robert Fefferman, the Chicago plan involves major institutional commitments. The plan has been spearheaded by CS faculty members Laszlo Babai, Alexander Razborov, Stuart Kurtz, and our former faculty member Lance Fortnow (Northwestern University).

The Institute's mission will be to further the core intellectual agenda of the Theory of Computing, the mathematical study of the fundamental nature, power, and limitations of efficient computation, as well as the manifold interactions of this field with other disciplines, ranging from mathematics and statistics to the sciences and engineering.

Nick Seltzer, Lamont Samuels, John Reppy, and Gordon Kindlmann won Best VIS Poster award at the VisWeek 2011 meeting for their poster: Diderot: A Parallel DSL for Computing on Multi-Dimensional Tensor Fields. Congratulations!

The University of Chicago will host a conference to honor the memory of Partha Niyogi, who was the Louis Block Professor in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Chicago. Check the website and conference poster for more details:
http://parthaniyogiconference.cs.uchicago.edu/
http://parthaniyogiconference.cs.uchicago.edu/niyogi_poster.pdf

Andrew A. Chien, the former vice president and director of Intel Research, has been named the William Eckhardt Professor in Computer Science and a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory.

His current research interests include cloud and grid computing applications, system software and architecture, and computer architecture for exascale computers, which would far exceed the capabilities of today’s petascale computers.

Chien began his faculty career in 1990 as a member of the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In 1998 he left Illinois for the University of California-San Diego, where he held the SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation) Chair of Computer Science and Engineering.

An active entrepreneurial leader, he also founded Entropia Inc., an early grid computing company, and served as its chief technology officer and chaired its board of directors. Then he created UCSD’s Center for Networked Systems and served as its founding director before moving to Intel in 2005. As director of Intel Research, Chien led Intel’s global internal and external efforts in disruptive and long-range research, launching notable initiatives in parallel programming, cloud computing and exascale computing technologies.

Chien is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on the National Science Foundation’s CISE Directorate Advisory Committee, the Computing Research Association’s Board of Directors and numerous prestigious editorial boards, including the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery.

He holds three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and a master’s and doctorate in computer science.

John Lafferty, who specializes in machine learning, which combines the power of statistics and computation, has joined the UChicago faculty as the Louis Block Professor in Computer Science and Statistics.

He comes to UChicago from Carnegie Mellon University, where he co-directed the doctoral program in computational and statistical learning and had been a faculty member since 1994.

Lafferty’s research focuses on nonparametric methods, sparsity, analysis of high-dimensional data, graphical models, information theory, and applications in language processing, computer vision and information retrieval.

Lafferty received his doctoral degree in mathematics from Princeton University, where he had been a member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He served on the mathematics faculty at Harvard University, then became a research staff member of the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he worked on statistical natural language processing.

An associate editor of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, Lafferty also served as a general co-chair of the 2010 Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation conference. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Advanced Research and Development Activity of the U.S. intelligence community, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Google.