Campus News: Week of October 1, 2001

Zaki Wins NSF CAREER Award

Mohammed Zaki, assistant professor of computer science, was awarded the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The award, aimed at young faculty members actively engaged in research and education, is one of the NSF's most competitive and prestigious awards.

Zaki received a five-year, $300,000 grant for his SPIDER (Scalable, Parallel, and Interactive Data Mining and Exploration at Rensselaer) project, in which he creates novel data-mining techniques for bioinformatics, materials informatics, and astronomy. Currently, large databases of information often remain unused because organizations do not have the resources and tools to analyze them.

Data mining searches a database for interesting information that can, for example, be used to determine how well a company's Web site is structured, to predict the 3-D shape of a protein, or to detect interesting structure-property relationships for materials.

Zaki hopes that his techniques, when developed, will be used by the end user and not experts alone. Current data mining technology is often too complex and specific for general users, according to Zaki.

Zaki received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science, both from the University of Rochester, in May 1995 and July 1998, respectively. He received his B.S. in computer science and mathematics in 1993 from Angelo State University, Texas.

NSF Director Rita Colwell Among the Honorees at Honors Convocation

NSF Director Rita Colwell will receive an honorary doctor of science degree at Rensselaer's eighth annual Honors Convocation Friday, Nov. 2, at 4 p.m. in the Alumni Sports & Recreation Center (Armory). Colwell will give a keynote address at the event, which honors students and faculty for their outstanding academic achievements.

The 2001 Founders Award, the ceremony's highest honor, will be given to students who have been chosen for "creativity, leadership, discovery, and the values of pride and responsibility." The celebration also will honor Class of 2005 Rensselaer Medalists, students with a 4.0 GPA, graduate student fellowship awardees, and faculty award winners.

Director of the National Science Foundation since 1998, Colwell has spearheaded the agency's emphases in K-12 science and mathematics education, graduate science and engineering education/training, and the increased participation of women and minorities in science and engineering. She has also established support for major initiatives including nanotechnology, biocomplexity, and information technology.

Before coming to NSF, Colwell was president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute, and professor of microbiology at the University Maryland. Born in Beverly, Mass., Colwell holds a B.S. in bacteriology and an M.S. in genetics from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Washington.

A reception in the Armory will follow immediately after Honors Convocation. For more information, contact Joe Michels at michels@rpi.edu or ext. 6237.

New Look for Campus.News

Beginning in October, Campus.News will have a new look.

We express our thanks to everyone who took time to respond to our readership survey. We took your comments seriously, and the new version will reflect many of those suggestions.

Each feature story will appear on an individual page, allowing for simplified e-mailing or printing of individual stories and shorter download time. The new "Search Campus.News" feature will put archival stories right at your fingertips.

Survey respondents expressed general satisfaction with Campus.News. Fifty-two percent of the respondents rated Campus.News 6 or 7 on a scale from 2 to 7, with 7 being excellent.

In general, people felt the newsletter was quite comprehensive. The most-frequented items include the "Around Campus" section, stories about the Rensselaer Plan, research stories, and "Accolades."

The majority of the respondents (82.1 percent) found the length of the e-mail bulletin just about right. The same percentage endorsed the length of the individual articles. Most people go to the Web site from the e-mail bulletin (73.7 percent).

As a thanks for participating, five people were selected at random from survey respondents to receive a gift certificate to the RU Bookstore.

As always, we welcome your continuing comments and questions. Contact Ellen Katzman at katzme@rpi.edu or Tracey Leibach at leibat@rpi.edu.

Nobel Laureate Visits Rensselaer

On Sept. 18, Leo Esaki, world-renowned Japanese scholar and researcher, visited Rensselaer to explore potential partnerships between Rensselaer and organizations in Japan. In 1973, Esaki and Rensselaer's Institute Professor of Science Ivar Giaever '64 shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for their experimental discoveries regarding tunneling phenomena in semiconductors and superconductors.

Esaki is the president of the Shibaura Institute of Technology, a private technological university in Tokyo, and chairman of JANBO (Japan Association of New Business Incubator Organizations). His visit was sponsored by the Japan External Trade Organization.

During the visit, Esaki and President Jackson signed a draft agreement to establish a partnership between Rensselaer and the Shibaura Institute for academic exchanges and potential research collaboration. According to Debra Geer, director of international advancement, "Shibaura's education emphasizes the application of scientific and technological research to address societal needs—a goal strikingly similar to Rensselaer's mission."

Esaki also met Pulickel Ajayan, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, who will participate in an October conference organized by Esaki in Japan, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the discovery of the carbon nanotube.

Esaki, who spent 32 years at IBM before returning to Japan in 1992 to assume the presidency of the University of Tsukuba, serves on numerous international scientific advisory boards and committees. He is a director of the Yamada Science Foundation and the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan. He is a foreign associate member of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the American Physical Society, the Physical Society of Japan, and an honorary member of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan.

Rensselaer Plan Update: School of Architecture

One of the main goals of the School of Architecture, as spelled out in its performance plan, is to create a Virtual Environments Laboratory (VEL). This multidisciplinary research center will enable the study of the relationship between computational and physical environments within the context of architectural design.

In this setting, which will initially find space in the Greene Building, designers will apply virtual technology to help them tackle pressing social, political, and ethical problems, such as how technology can be utilized to significantly increase our understanding of how we impact ecosystems, support sustainable design and construction practices, and provide tangible benefits to humans in terms of health and comfort.

The vision of the VEL is to "restructure the School of Architecture to become an international center for the integration of innovations in technology and science into design at many scales—from products to community—applied to sustaining and enabling global environments," said Dean Alan Balfour.

In addition, the School of Architecture plans to build graduate programs by creating new graduate fellowships in key areas that include acoustics, informatics and architecture, workplace design, building conservation, building systems, and materials design and application. The school also plans to seek approval for doctoral degrees in areas of specialization, including lighting, acoustics, informatics, and architecture, some of which would be unique in the United States.

Plant Seeds of Entrepreneurship, Chatter Urges in Keynote Address

On Friday, Sept. 21, Mukesh Chatter '82, founder, president, and CEO of Axiowave, was on campus to receive the William F. Glaser '53 Entrepreneur of the Year Award given by the Severino Center for Technological Entrepreneurship. In his keynote address, Chatter lauded the Institute's initiatives to infuse the aspects of entrepreneurship across the curriculum.

"Once the seed of entrepreneurship is planted, there is nothing like it," said Chatter. "I urge you to try it.Although experience is the best teacher, Chatter suggested students could benefit from courses in how to write and communicate effectively, how to understand the financial aspects of a business, and how to effectively work with the media.

However, the ultimate success of a business depends on its people, Chatter said.

"Furniture, fancy chairs, and expensive parties don't bring in revenue," he said. "People and equipment do. They are the two things we focus on and invest in. At the end of the day they are the only things that have the capability of making money for your business."

Chatter has a master's degree in electrical, computer, and systems engineering from Rensselaer. Prior to founding Axiowave he was the co-founder, president, and CEO of Nexabit Networks Inc., an ultra-fast terabit switch/router company acquired by Lucent Technologies in July 1999. That same year, Red Herring Magazine named Chatter one of the Top Ten entrepreneurs in the country.

Ajayan-Japan Collaboration in Nanotechnology

Pulickel Ajayan, associate professor of materials science and engineering, is part of a team of worldwide experts working to lay the groundwork for building nanodevices that could create computing and other electronic systems thousands of times faster than those in use today.

Under a grant from the Japanese government, Ajayan will work with researchers from Japan, Canada, the U.S., and England on "Nanointegration Through Semiconductor and Interconnection Self-Assembly."

For his part, Ajayan will work to assemble carbon nanotubes and metallic nanowires to create junctions and networks. He will then experiment with integrating these structures with nanoscale semiconductor devices and molecular architectures built by other members of the team.

The three-year grant from Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization is 72 million yen, or $625,000, for the six-member team. Japan is a leading country on the cutting edge of semiconductor technology.

"It's a perfect opportunity to collaborate with the best researchers in the world," Ajayan said. "Nanotechnology crosses many different fields that must be brought together if we want it to really expand."

Ajayan will be working with Andrew Briggs of Oxford University; James Heath from the University of California, Los Angeles; Paul Finnie of the National Research Council, Canada; and Toshio Ogino and Yoshikazu Homma of NTT, a telephone company in Japan.