Engineering school appoints Cooper associate dean for research
Keith Cooper, the L. John and Ann H. Doerr Professor of Computational
Engineering, will become the associate dean for research for Rice’s
George R. Brown School of Engineering July 1.
Cooper has been associated with Rice since 1974, when he enrolled as a
freshman studying electrical engineering. He served as chair of the
Computer Science Department from 2002 to 2008.
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Brown Teaching Award winner shows students math is 'beautiful'When Mark Embree talks about math, he uses the words “creative” and “beautiful,” “satisfying” and “rewarding.”
That enthusiasm for mathematics has both educated and inspired his
students: Embree is the winner of this year’s George R. Brown Prize for
Excellence in Teaching – Rice’s top annual teaching award.
Embree, who has taught computational and applied mathematics at Rice
since 2002, holds the John and Ann Doerr Professorship of the Rice
Center for Engineering Leadership and is also professor of computational
and applied mathematics.
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Professor looks at the data in biologyWhen asked “how people began” by his 6-year-old daughter Brooke, Dr.
Luay Nakhleh said that he did not have all the answers. However, as part
of his job, he is looking for them.
To address the question of how life on Earth evolved, Nakhleh, an
associate professor of computer science at Rice University and a
Pearland resident, is developing computer software that will assist in
tracing genetic histories and decoding genetic links between species.
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Vardi Receives Distinguished Achievement Award Moshe Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor
of Computational Engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute
for Information Technology at Rice University, has received the
Distinguished Achievements Award 2012 from the European Association for
Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS), one of the most prestigious honors
in the discipline.
Since 2000, EATCS has annually honored
scientists and engineers for their contributions to theoretical computer
science over a lifelong career. Vardi is the fourth American to receive
the award.
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Bringing Open Education to the Main Stream Large-scale open education initiatives, like
M.I.T.'s OpenCourseWare or
Rice University's Connexions,
have the potential to change the landscape of higher education by
creating a learning community that spreads beyond the walls of the
university, providing students and faculty with free, high-quality
resources and materials from diverse sources. Yet with all that
promise, wide-scale adoption of open education resources remains slow.
What's the hold-up?
One problem, cites Rice University professor and Connexions founder
Richard Baraniuk, is that the current open education landscape as a
whole is quite fragmented. "There are all of these open ed depositories,
but you can't easily mix and match across platforms, let alone search
across them," he explains. Often, open education proponents focus on the
idea of instructors sharing their resources, rather than on the end
user who’s attempting to access those resources.
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Flat baron may take many formsWhen is nothing really something? When it leads to a revelation about
boron, an element with worlds of unexplored potential.
Theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his team at Rice University
have taken an unusual approach to analyzing the possible configurations
of two-dimensional sheets of boron, as reported this week in the
American Chemical Society journal
Nano Letters.
Treating it as Swiss cheese – in which the holes are as defining as
the cheese itself – was the key concept in figuring out what atom-thin
sheets of boron might look like. Those sheets, when rolled into a hollow
tube, or nanotube, could have a distinct advantage over carbon
nanotubes; boron nanotubes are always metallic, while the carbon atoms
in a nanotubes can be arranged to form either metallic or semiconducting
nanotubes. This variation in atomic arrangement — known as chirality —
is one of the major hurdles to carbon nanotube processing and
development.
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Bacteria use chat to play the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ gameWhen faced with life-or-death situations, bacteria — and maybe even
human cells — use an extremely sophisticated version of game theory to
consider their options and decide upon the best course of action,
according to a recent study led by Rice University scientist and K2I member José
Onuchic.
Onuchic, who reported the results March 27 at the 243rd National
Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society in San Diego,
said microbes “play” a version of the classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game.
He said these and other new insights into the “chat” sessions that
bacteria use to communicate among themselves — information about cell
stress, the colony density and the stress status and inclinations of
neighboring cells — could have far-reaching medical applications.
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Programming computers to help computer programmersComputer scientists and Ken Kennedy Institute members from Rice University in partnership with computer scientists from the University of Pennsylvania and seven other institutions are teaming up to address one of the greatest ironies of the information age: While computers and robots have automated the manufacture of thousands of products, the software that allows them to do this is still written mostly by hand.
Armed with a $10 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the researchers hope to create intelligent software agents — smart programs that can first observe and learn from human programmers and then help humans write code faster and with fewer errors. Based at Penn, the five-year effort is dubbed Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering, or ExCAPE. It is funded by the NSF’s Expeditions in Computing program, which supports ambitious research agendas that will define the future of computing.
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Rice University, IBM partner to bring first Blue Gene supercomputer to TexasRice University and IBM announced a partnership March 30 to build the first award-winning IBM Blue Gene supercomputer in Texas. Rice also announced a related collaboration agreement with the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in Brazil to initiate the shared administration and use of the Blue Gene supercomputer, which allows both institutions to share the benefits of the new computing resource.
Rice faculty will use the Blue Gene to further their own research and to collaborate with academic and industry partners on a broad range of science and engineering questions related to energy, geophysics, basic life sciences, cancer research, personalized medicine and more.
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STROBE technology could change the nature of wireless network securityNaren Anand is worried about your Wi-Fi, and he’s working on a way to make it safer.
“When it comes to Wi-Fi security,” says the computer engineering Ph.D. student at Rice University, “we depend on passwords and encryption methods to keep our information safe. But hackers can always come up with a new way of breaking encryption.”
Anand, a member of the Rice Networks Group, is working a new kind of security. Specifically, he wants to make sure that the wireless network signal reaches you, the intended user, while dodging the prying eyes of Internet eavesdroppers intent on stealing sensitive information online.
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