"The Hermans' generosity will allow us to make entrepreneurship a centerpiece of the Rensselaer culture," said President Shirley Ann Jackson. "All students will be introduced to the principles and practices of entrepreneurship, and to the many entrepreneurial opportunities on campus." Entrepreneurship will be a critical component of capstone experiences that will ask students to solve a significant, open-ended design problem and show competence in opportunity recognition, market assessment, and the execution of business plans. Herman has spent 30 years practicing and encouraging new business formation. He has developed nuclear fuels, been a venture capitalist, worked as a top executive in pharmaceuticals, headed a major league baseball club, and has long served on the board of the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation, America's pioneering force in entrepreneurship education. Herman graduated from Rensselaer with a degree in metallurgical engineering and earned an MBA from the University of Chicago. He received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Rensselaer in 1998.
Student Startup, ProductivityNet, Nets $250,000 in Venture Funding
Based in Rensselaer's on-campus business incubator, ProductivityNet is the first company run by Rensselaer undergraduates to obtain such a lucrative venture capital windfall. ProductivityNet's first product, intranet Management Solution (iMS), which will debut in June, will enable a systems administrator to manage the company's network over the Web or by using any wireless device. This will be the first product of its kind in the marketplace. "It's a mobile toolbox for any network systems administrator," says Vinny Pasceri '01, 21-year-old founder and CEO of ProductivityNet. "Using a Palm Pilot, cell phone, pager, or laptop, one person can manage, control, and monitor a company's network environment wherever one happens to be in the world." Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett Packard tout similar products, but they are geared for enterprise companies, cost $100,000 or more, and do not have wireless capability. ProductivityNet's iMS will sell for substantially less and is targeted toward small to medium-sized businesses. The student-run company has received glowing endorsements from area high-tech business people, including John Cavalier, co-chairman of MapInfo Corporation. Cavalier has agreed to become ProductivityNet's chairman of the board. ECSE Department Wins Accolades From Peers
Since the mid-1990s, ECSE has revised most of its core undergraduate courses to the studio format as part of Rensselaer's pioneering efforts in interactive learning. In addition to designing and building studio classrooms specifically for ECSE courses, the department also developed a large body of interactive multimedia materials to help make the studio environment effective.
Adding studio courses to the core undergraduate curricula has resulted in a more educationally rewarding experience and a more fertile environment in which to develop faculty as teachers, said Ken Connor, acting ECSE chair, who accepted the award on behalf of the department. Connor told the NEEDHA audience that it was an honor to be recognized by one's peers and emphasized the team effort required for the success of the program. "This work involved the efforts of essentially all of the staff and faculty of the ECSE department," said Connor. "We worked hard to create our studio-based curricula, and now the leaders of all of the other electrical engineering, computer science, and similar academic departments around the country have seen that we did something very special." The success of studio learning at Rensselaer is reaching other universities. Several schools have begun to implement their own version of studio courses, including City University in Hong Kong and Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
Taking the Guesswork Out of Internet Searches With an NSF grant of almost half a million dollars, Rensselaer researchers are creating software for the Internet that will provide a paragraph summary of search results and links to related Web sites. The goal of the research is to eliminate the need for the user to manually browse through a large number of Web sites. "We want to build a trustworthy system," said William (Al) Wallace '61, professor of decision sciences and engineering systems. "Some search engines can identify authorities, or sites that receive the most links from other sites. Our goal is to take that a step further and create trustworthy summaries of the results so that users don't have to examine each site."
Funded by a $477,249 Information Technology Research grant from the National Science Foundation, Wallace, doctoral student Kari Chopra, Mark Goldberg, professor of computer science, and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University are using algorithms to develop text summaries and graphs of similar sites. Highlighted in the summary are key words and phrases that when clicked on would open a pop-up box of links to Web sites that contain information on the topic or word, explained Chopra. Users can also click on a set of graphs that will show how each site is connected to others, which allows the user to see which site is most authoritative. Information can then be taken directly from the summary paragraph, or from one or more of the links in the summary. The user could also go to the graphs and find a representative, or authoritative, site to gather information. Wallace plans to make this tool and its source code available free over the Internet. He hopes that it will benefit not only everyday users but also researchers who can access the source coding and build upon it to perhaps make improvements. A test version of the software could be ready within a year. Hayden Planetarium's Director to Deliver Garnet Baltimore Lecture
His
talk will be held at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18, in Room
337 of the Darrin Communications Center. The lecture is free
and all are welcome. Tyson
earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard and a Ph.D.
in astrophysics from Columbia University. He is a member of
the American Museum's department of astrophysics and is a visiting
research scientist in the department of astrophysics at Princeton
University. The
lecture series, started in 1991, is named in honor of Garnet
D. Baltimore who, in 1881, became the first African-American
graduate of Rensselaer. Born in Troy in 1859, Baltimore worked
after graduation as a civil engineer on various bridge and railroad
projects in upstate New York. In 1903, Baltimore was hired by the city of Troy as a landscape engineer to design an urban park on Mount Ida. The result is Prospect Park. Baltimore went on to design parks, hospitals and cemeteries throughout the Capital Region. He died in 1948 at the age of 89.
U.S. News & World Report's annual "Best Graduate Schools" issue featured Rensselaer biomedical engineer Matt Freshman in a story about the symbiotic relationship between engineering and entrepreneurship. "Rather than burying star pupils in ever-narrower fields of research, engineering schools are encouraging graduate students to broaden their experiences and consider the entrepreneurial potential of their work," says U.S. News.The story also appeared in the weekly edition of U.S. News on April 9. The Best Graduate Schools guide will remain on newsstands for a full year. Read the full story at: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/beyond/grad/gbentrepreneur.htm. Future
of Wireless Communications Discussed at RAA The program featured executives of local and national firms involved in the growing field of wireless communications: John Cavalier, co-chair of MapInfo; Michael Farese '68, president and CEO of the West Coast-based Tropian Inc; Gary Ide '86, partner at Accenture; and Martin Schoffstall '82, co-founder of PSINet and now principal of Schoffstall Ventures. John Kolb '79, chief information officer at Rensselaer, moderated the program. Panelists provided different perspectives on the direction of wireless technologies and communications systems and touched on many issues facing the wireless industry. "This event provided wonderful exposure of Rensselaer alumni to students, staff, faculty and local alumni, and gave the RAA great visibility as the sponsoring organization," said David Bohan '82, director of the Office of Alumni Relations.
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Mike
Herman '62, his wife, Karen, and their children have committed
$1 million from the Herman Family Foundation to make Rensselaer
the first technological university where students in all fields
will learn the principles of entrepreneurship and what it takes
for companies to succeed in the 21st century.
ProductivityNet
Inc., a company run by a foursome of 20-somethings, received
$250,000 in venture funding from iDeal Partners, an Albany-based
investment group. In addition to the funding, iDeal has agreed
to finance capital equipment, provide strategic corporate advice
and management, and assist with identifying and facilitating
potential partnerships. 
The
Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering
(ECSE) received the National Electrical Engineering Department
Heads Association (NEEDHA) Innovative Program Award for its
successful implementation of studio courses. The award, which
has been given only twice in the last 10 years, was presented
at the annual NEEDHA meeting in San Diego in March.
Neil
de Grasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden
Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New
York City, will deliver the 11th annual Garnet D. Baltimore
Lecture at Rensselaer.
A
standing-room-only crowd in DCC 318 listened to a lively and
multifaceted presentation of the future of wireless communications
as part of the RAA Back-to-Campus Speaker Series on March 30.