11/3/2011
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CS@ILLINOIS will be honoring 12 distinguished alumni and former faculty members at the inaugural CS@ILLINOIS Alumni Awards ceremony, to be held on Friday, November 4 at the iHotel and Conference Center. The awards honor computer science graduates and faculty members who have made professional, technical, educational, and service contributions that bring distinction to themselves, the department, and the University of Illinois.
The alumni and faculty to be honored include:
• Mary Jane Irwin
• Mary McDowell
• Max Levchin
• Baochun Li
• C. L. David Liu
• Jane W.-S. Liu
• Jose Martinez
• Dan Peterson
• Ira Cohen
• Donald Gillies
• Erich Hauptmann
• Saburo Muroga
Distinguished Achievement Award Winners
Mary Jane Irwin
Mary Jane Irwin, Evan Pugh Professor and A. Robert Noll Chair, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University which she joined as a junior faculty member after completing her PhD from UIUC in 1977.
Dr. Irwin research and teaching interests include computer architecture, energy-aware and reliability-aware design, and emerging technologies. She has supervised more than 25 Penn State Ph.D’s. She was named a Fellow of IEEE in 1995, a Fellow of ACM in 1996, and was inducted into the NAE in 2003 and into the AAAS in 2009. Awards she has received include the 2003 IEEE/CAS VLSI Transactions Best Paper of the Year Award, the 2004 DAC Marie R. Pistilli Women in EDA Award, the 2005 ACM Distinguished Service Award, the 2007 Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award, and the 2010 ACM Athena Lecturer Award. She received an Honorary Doctorate from Chalmers University, Sweden in 1997.
Mary McDowell
Mary McDowell is Executive Vice President in charge of Nokia’s Mobile Phones unit, with global P&L responsibility for Nokia’s mass market devices and associated services. She is the champion of Nokia’s “Next Billion” strategy which brings information and internet access to a new generation of consumers primarily in emerging markets. She has been a member of the Nokia management team since 2004, and was appointed to her current position in July 2010. Mary reports to the CEO. Mary has a successful track record in building new business and as an industry innovator. Fierce
Wireless named her one of the "Top Women in Wireless" in July 2008.
Mary joined Nokia in 2004 as Executive Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Solutions, responsible for the development and marketing of Nokia's range of business-oriented devices and solutions. These included Nokia Eseries devices, mobility software and security and mobile connectivity solutions. Mary served as Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer from 2008 until assuming her current role.
She serves as a board member of Autodesk, a world leader in 2D and 3D design, engineering and entertainment software.
Before joining Nokia, Mary served 17 years at HP-Compaq, after joining as a systems engineer in 1986. She was Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Industry Standard Server Group at Hewlett Packard and Compaq for five years, leading a multi-billion dollar business and the world's largest server franchise.
She holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois. She serves on the college’s Board of Visitors.
Max Levchin
Max Levchin is the founder and visionary behind PayPal and Slide. Slide was the largest developer of social applications such as SuperPoke!, Top Friends, FunSpace and Slideshows, used by more than 170 million people worldwide. Max is also renowned as the co-founder of PayPal, an expert in combating online fraud and one of the hardest working entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Before starting Slide, he incubated several other start-ups, including Yelp, where he is currently Chairman of the Board.
Max started PayPal in 1998, took the company public in 2002 and then sold it to eBay for more than $1.5 billion at the age of 26. In 2004, Levchin founded Slide, a personal media-sharing service for social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Slide was sold to Google in August 2010 for $182 Million and, on August 25, Levchin joined as Vice President of Engineering.
Originally from Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), Max moved to Chicago at the age of 16 and later received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Max sits on the board of several other companies and is currently planning his next start-up project.
Distinguished Educator Award
Baochun Li
Baochun Li received the B.Engr. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China, in 1995 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, in 1997 and 2000.
Since 2000, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he is currently a Professor. He holds the Nortel Networks Junior Chair in Network Architecture and Services from October 2003 to June 2005, and the Bell Canada Endowed Chair in Computer Engineering since August 2005. His research interests include large-scale distributed systems, cloud computing, peer-to-peer networks, applications of network coding, and wireless networks.
Dr. Li was the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Award in the Field of Communications Systems in 2000. In 2009, he was a recipient of the Multimedia Communications Best Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society, and a recipient of the University of Toronto McLean Award. He is a member of ACM and a senior member of IEEE.
C. L. David Liu
C. L. Liu received his B. Sc. degree at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan and his S. M. and Sc. D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His teaching career spans over forty years, at MIT, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and the National Tsing Hua University, where he is now the William Mong Honorary Chair Professor of Computer Science. His academic administrative duties include serving as Associate Provost at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign from 1996 to 1998, and as President of the National Tsing Hua University from 1998 to 2002.
His research areas are: computer-aided design of VLSI circuits, computer-aided instruction, real-time systems, combinatorial optimization, and discrete mathematics. He has published over 180 technical papers, and 8 technical books. In addition, he has published three books which are essay collections.
He received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Millennium Medal, and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Golden Jubilee Medal in 2000. He also received the IEEE Computer Society, Real Time Systems Technical Committee 1999 Technical Achievement Award (inaugural winner) for his contributions in the area of real time scheduling, and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society 1998 Technical Achievement Award for his contributions in the area of computer aided design of VLSI circuits. He received an Outstanding Talents Foundation Award in 1998. He is the recipient of the 1994 IEEE Education Medal. He also received the Taylor L. Booth Education Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 1992, and the Karl V. Karlstrom Education Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1990. In 2004, the University of Macau awarded him an honorary doctorate and the National Chengchi University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011. He will receive the 2011 Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to Electronic Design Automation (EDA).
He serves on the Boards of a number of high tech companies and educational and charitable foundations in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the US. Since 2005, he hosts a weekly radio show on Technology and Humanities in the radio stations IC975 in Hsinchu, Bravo in Taipei, and Mradio in Taichung.
He is a member of Academia Sinica, and a Fellow of IEEE and ACM.
Jane W.-S. Liu
Jane W.S. Liu received her BSEE degree from Cleveland State University and her Sc.D. from MIT. She is currently a Distinguished Visiting Fellow of Institute of Information Science of Academia Sinica and Bill Benter Honorary Chair Professor of Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. Before joining Academia Sinica in 2004, she was a software architect in Microsoft Corporation from 2000 to 2004 and a faculty member of Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1972 to 2000.
Her research interests are in the areas of real-time and embedded systems. In addition to over 160 journal and conference publications, she has also published two text books, one on real-time systems and the other on signals and systems. Her recent research focuses on technologies for building user-centric automation and assistive devices and services and for disaster preparedness and response. While at Illinois, she advised over 30 Ph.D. and over 100 MS students. She continues to supervise graduate students in Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University and recently graduated her first Tsing Hua University Ph.D. student.
She received the Achievement and Leadership Award of IEEE Computer Society, Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems in 2005; Information Science Honorary Medal of Taiwan Institute of Information and Computing Machinery in 2008 and Linux Golden Penguin Award for special contributions of Taiwan Linux Consortium in 2009. She is a fellow of IEEE.
José Martínez
José Martínez is associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and graduate field member of computer science at Cornell University. His research area is computer architecture, and his work has earned several awards; among them: two IEEE Micro Top Picks papers; a HPCA Best Paper Award; a NSF CAREER Award; and two IBM Faculty Awards. On the teaching side, he has been recognized with a 2005 Kenneth A. Goldman '71 Excellence in Teaching Award, as a 2007 Merrill Presidential Teacher, and as the 2011 Tau Beta Pi Professor of the Year in the College of Engineering.
Prof. Martínez earned MS (1999) and Ph.D. (2002) degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; his adviser was Prof. Josep Torrellas. He is a senior member of the ACM and the IEEE, Associate Editor in Chief of IEEE Computer Architecture Letters, as well as Associate Editor of ACM Trans. on Computer Architecture and Code Optimization.
Distinguished Service Award
Dan Peterson is a Product Manager on Google+ with a passion for developer platforms and open source projects. Dan was a member of the Google Wave team, where he grew the developer community and promoted the federation protocol. Prior to that, Dan helped establish the OpenSocial specification, Apache Shindig, co-founded the OpenSocial Foundation, and guided the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) team as it became an open source project. Dan began at Google on the core infrastructure team, contributing to web search and data center management. Dan earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as minors in Technology & Management and Philosophy. Dan is also active on the Department of Computer Science's Executive Advisory Council and an occasional angel investor.
Ira Cohen received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from the College of Engineering in 1980. He co-founded Advanced Systems Concepts in Schaumburg, Illinois in November of 1982 and helped to author software involving database systems and programmer productivity aids. The company was sold in 2006. Ira has remained active in various charitable pursuits including the American Cancer Society and the Jesse Owens Foundation. He also has remained connected to the University through the Computer Science Department and College of Engineering and is a current member of the University of Illinois foundation.
Memorial Achievement Award
Donald B. Gillies
University of Illinois computer science professor Donald B. Gillies, a native of Canada, did his undergraduate work at the University of Toronto, and received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton University in 1953. While in graduate school he worked as a graduate assistant at the Institute for Advanced Study with John von Neumann in the fields of game theory and computer science. Before coming to the University of Illinois in 1956, he spent two years with the National Research Development Corporation at Cambridge University and London, England. He was among the first mathematicians to become involved in the computer field, helping to program the first Sputnik orbit and later discovering three new prime numbers in the course of checking out Illiac II. Before his death in 1975, he was experimenting with educational uses and networking possibilities of minicomputers.
Professor Gillies was an inspiration to his students, taking an interest in both their professional and personal lives. Long before timesharing terminals, minicomputers and microprocessors made “hands on” computer experience commonplace, he recognized the need for students to have this opportunity and implemented a system to provide it. Throughout his work and teaching he stressed the importance of the ethical use of computing machines in contemporary science. Dedicated to the honest uses of technology, environmentally concerned, a man of wit, vigor and understanding, he challenged and stimulated all who knew him.
The Donald B. Gillies Lectureship in Computer Science was established in the department of computer science in remembrance of his legacy. The lectureship continues to enrich the lives of students and colleagues as an appropriate memorial to a man whose intellectual excellence and moral purpose made him a distinguished teacher and scientist.
Erich Hauptmann
Erich William Hauptmann, 25, received a B.S. degree in Computer Science in 2008. His employment with Digital Domain, the award-winning special effects studio in Venice, CA was a dream come true for him.
He worked on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, GI Joe: The Rise of the Cobra, TransformersL Revenge of the Fallen, Star Trek, Speed Racer, and 2012. He is credited as Technical Assistant for Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightnig Thief. Shortly before his death he was promoted to Assistant Technical Director of the Commercials division and participated in the production of the first 3D cinema spots ever created for a consumer electronic brand, the Samsung LED TV.
One of Erich’s managers said: “Erich was able to cross the line between artist and engineer, teacher and student, colleague and friend. ... [He] earned the respect of his colleagues by his sheer motivation, proving that he could tackle any problem thrown his way, no matter how difficult.”
Saburo Muroga
University of Illinois computer science professor emeritus was one of Japan’s computer pioneers and a globally significant leader in the extensive field of information processing, and he taught and mentored generations of computer science researchers.
Professor Muroga was a pioneer in threshold logic, and was the author of the classic book on the topic “Threshold Logic and Its Applications”, published in 1971. The book enjoyed a renewed interest in recent years, as researchers of neural networks recognized its relevance to their field as well.
Muroga’s research in threshold logic was directed at minimizing the complexity of networks that would still be able to support high-level performance by, for example, minimizing the number of logic gates, interconnections among gates, or number of levels in a logic circuit. His revolutionary thinking led also to the creation of the ‘transduction method’, representing a new method for simplifying logic circuits based on permissible functions. The transduction method was adopted by major CAD companies and is now considered an industry standard.
Muroga also published widely on improving design automation using mathematical approaches and computer-aided design of VLSI chips.
Muroga joined the computer science faculty at the University of Illinois in 1964. While initially he planned to spend only three years at Illinois before returning to Japan, in fact, he remained at the university teaching and conducting research for 38 years until his retirement in 2002.
In 2004, Muroga was honored by his homeland, receiving the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Office of the Emperor. His award, the “Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon” was given in recognition of his contributions to the area of information processing, and to the industry of computing in Japan.