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Inside

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Newsletter of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering A department of the Institute of Technology

3 Department News

6 Awards and Achievements

8 Open House Recap

10 Safety Critical Software

11 Bonnie Holub

12 Alumni Spotlights: Rob Cooley John Heinen Hemant Ramnani

15 Donor Recognition

16 Supporting CS&E

Professors Abhishek Chandra and Jon Weissman are researching the future of working in the cloud.

By Pamela Vold

Jon Weissman presenting his research to alumni and friends at a CS&E department Lunch and Learn.

soundbyteFall I Winter 2011-2012

Cloud computing is not just another

corporate buzz word like ‘synergy,’ it’s

a way of working that is already here.

Many computer users have been using

virtual servers over the internet for years,

as users of Hotmail, Facebook, and

Twitter or products like Google docs. Our

shared data, which includes our social

networks, personal music and photos,

work documents, emails, and more, are

located in any number of places. Associate

Professors Abhishek Chandra and Jon

Weissman are looking into the future of

what we can do with the cloud to make it

even more useful to us. Their work includes

several projects on how we will soon be

working in the cloud.

Chandra and Weissman believe one

way to make the cloud more useful lies

in utilizing the cloud to make mobile

applications more efficient and rich. Says

Chandra, “We are increasingly doing

more work on our tablets and phones

as we travel. The desktop is becoming

outdated and laptops are heavy and

cumbersome. So more work is shifting to

mobile and tablet devices which are limited

by performance issues when compared

to traditional machines. They also have

limited battery life. What if we want to use

our mobile devices for real work, much like

we use our desktop?”

Chandra explains that devices like a

tablet can already easily handle some

word processing. But, he adds, “What

about work for a designer, an architect or

an engineer who would need to work on a

project which require more resources? We

can potentially improve the performance

of mobile applications. We can enable

mobile devices to support applications that

current devices cannot execute due to their

resource constraints, and save precious

energy as well. We want to leave the heavy

A Forecast for Increasing Clouds

Open House and Tech Forum

Advocating for Computer Science

Highlights

Department Head

private support for the department has never been

greater.

It is our goal to increase number of named

professorships in the department. Faculty, as our

most important asset, will set the course of CS&E’s

future. Professorships are a way to reward great

teachers and researchers, as well as attracting top-

tier talent.

The Computer Science Associates (CSA), our

industry advisory group has taken this task seriously,

focusing its recent meetings on how the group can

appeal to our state legislators for the University’s

case. At our most recent meeting, Margaret

Anderson-Kelliher, President and CEO of the MHTA

and former speaker of the Minnesota House led a

lively discussion on how we can make the case for

the University and the work that we do here. We look

forward to having our supporters rally to our cause.

We are so grateful for the private support that

we receive. We at CS&E are proud to be one of the

youngest departments in the college, yet with one

of the largest levels of commitment, considering

the ages of our alumni. Gifts to CS&E provide an

essential component of our annual discretionary

funding. Without your help, the department

would struggle to maintain its level of excellence.

My colleagues and I very much appreciate your

commitment to CS&E and its mission. We cannot

mention often enough how appreciative we are to

have your support.

— Vipin Kumar, CS&E Department Head

and William Norris Professor

We have begun

another busy

academic year in

the department.

We started off the Fall with our biennial Open House

and Tech Forum, with over 65 exhibits this year in

a half-day event. Those who made it to this year’s

event had the opportunity to hear IBM Fellow Kerrie

Holley talk about the future of Watson in his keynote

talk. Those that stayed on campus in the afternoon

were also able to attend the panel discussion on

cloud computing led by CS&E faculty. This great

event for past, present, and future students, industry

and friends of the department is always exciting and

this year was no exception. It was a wonderful day

of sharing and learning about computing research

in the department and beyond. You can see photos

from the event in this issue.

In November, members of the College were

invited to hear the dean give his state of the college

address. We learned what many of us had already

understood, our incoming students this year were

the most impressive yet, with higher average ACT

and SAT scores than ever before. Applications for

new students increased as well, and the college was

able to accept one student for every ten applications

sent.

One of our most pressing challenges is having

space and the faculty to teach these new students.

With state support for the University continually

decreasing and a challenging economy, the need for

Message from the

2

Phot

o by

Ric

hard

G. A

nder

son

Local and national newsLoren Terveen’s project Cyclopath

received attention in several recent media

sites including the StarTribune, Pioneer Press

and others. Cyclopath, a website that gives

bicyclists personalized routes from one end of

the Twin Cities to another -- noting bike lanes,

busy streets and even potholes along the way

-- is set to expand to the rest of the state.

Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos was featured

in a story in the Pioneer Press and on twincities.com.

The article discussed the burgeoning robotics

industry in the Twin Cities area and Robotics

Alley, the first regional conference on robots

hosted by Edina-based ReconRobotics and the

Minnesota High Tech Association Thursday,

November 17th at the Carlson School of

Management. Papanikolopoulos discussed the

Scout, the robot created at the University of

Minnestoa in 2006. “It’s just a camera on wheels,”

Papanikolopoulos said. “Why is it so popular?

Because it does a very dangerous job and it saves

lives.”

Professor Shashi Shekhar was selected in a

national competition to participate in the inaugural

session of the Leadership in Science Policy Institute

(LiSPI), on November 7th, 2011 in Washington, D.C.

LiSPI was created to educate a small cadre

of computing researchers on how science

policy in the U.S. is formulated and how our

government works. LiSPI presenters include

staff supporting the White House Office of

Science and Technology Policy, the House

Science, Space and Technology committee,

and representatives from NSF, USDOE, NIH,

and others. LiSPI is organized by the Computing

Community Consortium as part of its mission

to develop a new generation of leaders in the

computing research community.

The National Science Foundation awarded $2.2M

to a team of researchers from the University of

Minnesota, the Johns Hopkins University and Central

State University to build a network of robotic boats

to track invasive fish. The effort is led by Associate

Professor Volkan Isler who is joined by Stergios

department NEWS

3(Department news continued on page 4)

Roumeliotis and Peter Sorensen (Fisheries,

Wildlife and Conservation Biology). Together,

the researchers will develop new algorithms

for network-aware search and tracking for

multi-robot systems, and use the developed

network to understand carp behavior. Field

experiments performed at metro area lakes as

well as the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon (in

collaboration with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) are

expected to provide a significant step toward solving

the carp problem faced by numerous inland lakes

across the world.

CS&E hosted the 12th International Symposium

on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD). The

program exhibited diversity across organizations,

geography, career stages, and research life-cycle

stage. It was also featured on the prestigious CRA/

CCC blog.

University of Minnesota computer science

researchers finalized an agreement to launch Ninja

Metrics, a software startup that can analyze

data to identify key traits among massive

multiplayer online gaming communities. Using

this data, game creators can identify each

player’s psycho-social motivations, and take

action to help ensure enhanced user experience.

“If you look at direct mail or other marketing

techniques, it’s targeted at an individual’s behavior,

and ignores the social influences surrounding them,”

said Professor Jaideep Srivastava. “If [marketers]

can analyze the social influences, it allows them to

better target a customer.”

Terra Populus: A Global Population / Environment

Data Network (TerraPop) was awarded a five-year,

$8M grant from the National Science Foundation’s

Office of Cyber Infrastructure. The lead

investigators from the University of

Minnesota are Steven Ruggles (Minnesota

Population Center), Jonathon Foley

(Institute on the Environment), Victoria

Interrante, Wendy Pradt Lougee (University

of Minnesota Libraries), Steven Manson

(Geography), Jaideep Srivastava and Shashi

Shekhar. Additional partners include the Center for

International Earth Science Information Network

at Columbia University and the Inter-university

Consortium for Political and Social Research at the

University of Michigan. Terrapop will combine two

centuries of census data with global environmental

4

Department

NEWS

4

Department Head Vipin Kumar will again invite

local alumni at two luncheons in March and April.

Department lunches are free to attend and lunch is

provided by the department. Last year’s lunch and

learn topics included discovery-based protemics

for oral cancer and providing database support for

scalability, privacy, and personalization of location-

based services. Look for announcements and

invitations in February of 2012.

Faculty speaking engagements

Professor Zhi-Li Zhang gave a

keynote talk, “Know Your Enemy

& Know Yourself: Traffic Behavior

Profiling for Network Security

Monitoring,” at the SPCC 2011 -

The 2nd International Workshop

on Security and Privacy in Cloud

Computing, held June 24, 2011, in Minneapolis,

Minnesota.

Professor Mohamed Mokbel delivered a keynote

speech, “Personalization, Socialization, and

Recommendations in Location-based Services

2.0,” at the Tenth International ACM Workshop on

Data Engineering for Wireless and Mobile Access

(MobiDE’11), June 12, 2011, in Athens, Greece. The

conference was held in conjunction with the ACM

SIGMOD/PODS 2011 Conference.

data including land cover, land use and climate

records. Beyond the goal of integrating this

information into a common database, the team

plans to disseminate the newly available data to

researchers around the world.

CS&E happeningsThe fourth annual Bay Area alumni event was held

Thursday, August 11, 2011 at the Computer History

Museum in Mountain View, California.

This year’s speaker was Branislav Vajdic,

Vice Chairman and Founder of NewCardio.

Vajdic presented the key lessons learned

in commercializing an industry-leading

product, and taking an organization to

publicly held status.

The Department continues to host

technology-related conferences.

DrupalCamp Twin Cities brought together

open source enthusiasts, designers,

hackers, geeks, developers, UI experts,

IT managers and anyone else interested

in Drupal. Twin Cities CodeCamp 11 had

more than 250 attendees, one of the

highest turnouts ever. The free, two day

event, TCCC12, is being scheduled again

for April 2012.

Code Freeze is an annual winter symposium focused on best practices in software engineering and development. Software engineering professionals and academics will join together to discuss business and technology innovations.

Thursday, January 12, 2012 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.

McNamara Alumni CenterUniversity of Minnesota Campus

East Bank

For more i n fo rma t i on v i s i t : www.umsec .umn .edu /even ts /Code -F reeze -2012

Continuous Delivery

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55

Instructor and advisor Chuck

Swanson retired from the department

in Spring of 2011. Swanson plans to

have an active retirement that includes

continuing to teach occaisonal courses

in the department. We wish him well.

The Department recently hired two

new teaching instructors. Baylor Wetzel

works at the

intersection of psychology

and computer science. He

studies how humans learn

and make decisions and use

that data to build computer

simulations of this behavior

and improve existing

artificial intelligence techniques. He also does

research in non-psychological aspects

of video game artificial intelligence.

In addition to teaching artificial

intelligence, he is the department’s

writing consultant.

Steve Jensen is taking over the

position of Chuck Swanson as a student

advisor and teaching Introduction to

C++.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt spoke at the

University of Minnesota Wednesday, Nov. 30,

on “The Future of the High-tech Economy: How

Technology is Changing Business, Education and

Government.”

Schmidt joined Google in 2001. As executive

chairman, he is responsible for helping the

company build partnerships and broader

business relationships, reaching out to

government entities and leading the way Google

thinks about technology.

In his presentation, Schmidt addressed

questions like:

How will technology change the way we

work, learn and govern?

How are new forms of collaboration and

efficiency made possible by emerging

technology?

What is the state of the high-technology

infrastructure?

The University of Minnesota is one of the leading

higher education adopters of Google applications

worldwide. There currently are more than 90,000 U

of M Google e-mail account users.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt visits the University of Minnesota

Software Engineering

Preparing superior

through a rigorous 2-year Master of Science program tailored for

Discover MSSE www.msse.umn.edu

6 6

Faculty AwardsProfessors Zhi-Li

Zhang and John Riedl

were recently elected

Fellows of IEEE. IEEE

Fellow is a distinction

reserved for select

IEEE members

whose extraordinary

accomplishments

in any of the IEEE

fields of interest are

deemed fitting of this

prestigious grade

elevation.

Professor Joe

Konstan was recently

elected by the AAAS

Council as Fellow

of AAAS. Konstan

will be recognized

for his contributions

to science and

technology at the

Fellows Forum to be held during the 2012

AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

New Fellows receive a certificate and a

blue and gold rosette as a symbol of their

distinguished accomplishments.

Professor Maria

Gini received the

Mullen-Spector-Truax

Award during the

Women’s Center

Celebrating

University Women awards and recognition

program on Friday, October 21st.

Professor Gini was selected for her

significant impact on women’s leadership

development at the University.

Professor Mohamed

Mokbel has been

elected Treasurer for

ACM SIGSPATIAL and

began his three-year

term on July 1, 2011.

The Institute on the

Environment recently

named Professor

Shashi Shekhar a 2011

resident fellow. He

will begin his three-

year appointment

with the Institute this month. As resident

fellow, Shekhar will receive flexible

funding to engage in creative research and

problem solving, to develop new models

of teaching and training, and to build

new networks and partnerships. As part

of his work, Shekhar will apply spatio-

temporal data analytics to problems posed

by sustainability science in areas such

as environmental forensics and climate

modeling.

Professor Abshishek Chandra has

Best Paper AwardsMatt Staats,

Michael W. Whalen,

and Mats P.E.

Heimdahl won the

ACM Distinguished

Paper Award for

“Programs, Tests,

and Oracles: The

Foundations of

Testing Revisited” at the 33rd IEEE

International Conference on Software

Engineering, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, May

2011.

Professor John

Riedl’s research

group was awarded

a best paper award

for “WP: Clubhouse?

An Exploration of

Wikipedia’s Gender

Imbalance,” at the 2011 WikiSym

Conference. The paper is “a scientific

exploration of gender imbalance in

Wikipedia.” The paper was authored by

Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Anuradha Uduwage,

Zhenhua Dong,

Shilad Sen, David R.

Musicant (Carleton

College), and Loren

Terveen and John

Riedl.

“Sic Transit

Gloria Mundi

Virtuali? Promise and Peril in the

Computational Social Science of

Clandestine Organizing,” co-authored by

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmed and Jaideep

Srivastava, Brian Keegan and Noshir

Contractor (Northwestern U) and Dmitri

Williams (USC) won the Best Paper Award

at the 2011 ACM International Conference

on Web Science held in Koblenz, Germany,

June 14-17, 2011.

A paper by Mohamed

Sarwat, Mohamed

Mokbel, Xun Zhou, and

Suman Nath received

the best research paper

award at the 12th

International Symposium on Spatial and

Temporal Databases.

received an IBM Faculty

Award for 2011. The

award of up to $40,000

cash is intended to

promote collaboration

between universities and

IBM.

Professor Nikos Papanikolopoulos was

recently chosen as a recipient of the IEEE-

RAS Distinguished Service Award at the

IEEE International Conference on Robotics

and Automation. Papanikolopoulos was

chosen for his leadership

in organizing various

RAS conferences and

his continuing service

as Vice President for

Conference Activities.

7

Outstanding CS&E students recognized with Scholarships, Fellowships, and awards

7

Saturday, November 12, the University

of Minnesota was again a host site for

the ACM IBM International Programming

Contest regional competition. Over

200 teams competed in our region (the

North Central Region) with 20 of those

teams competing at our site. Out of the

more than 200 teams competing in the

North Central Region, three University of

Minnesota teams placed in the top five:

Team 0b00101010: Sang Nguyen,

Jonathan Hsiao, Lu Ye

Team Karl: Lihua Zang, Yuan Li,

HyeonZgJoo Hwang

Team Neutrino: Qiyaun Qiu, Jiaxi Hu,

Zhaosen Wang

One team from Minnesota was invited

to compete in the international finals in

Warsaw in early 2012. The University of

Minnesota had five teams compete in the

regionals--all of which were able to solve at

least one of the problems in the contest.

A group of

three Ph.D.

students were

selected as

finalists in

SIGMOD 2011

Programming

contest. The

group is led by a first-year Ph.D student

Ahmed Eldawy with Emery Mizero and

Mohamed Khalefa as members. The group

is advised by Professor Mohamed Mokbel.

The group was awarded a $4,000 award

to attend ACM SIGMOD 2011 in Athens in

June. The SIGMOD programming contest

is sponsored by NSF and Microsoft. The

task for this contest is to implement a high-

throughput main-memory index that uses

flash-based SSDs for durability.

Aditya Pal,

Rosta Farzan,

Joseph

Konstan and

Robert Kraut

won the

James Chen

Best Student

Paper Award

for “Early

Detection of Potential Experts in Question

Answering Communities” at the 19th

International Conference on User Modeling,

Adaptation, and Personal-ization, held in

Girona, Spain in July. The award carries a

prize money of $1000.

Ph.D.

student Jaya

Kawale won

the 2011

Explorations

in Science

through

Computation

Student

Award for

her work

“Discovering Teleconnections in Climate

Data through Data Mining.” This annual

award, sponsored by The Shodor Education

Foundation, Inc., recognizes students who

have successfully woven together scientific

insight and discovery through the use of

computational modeling, simulation, and/

or data analysis, with an emphasis on

the extent to which these technologies

enabled scientific discovery which would

not otherwise have been possible. The

award includes travel expenses to the 2011

Supercomputing Conference (SC11), where

the accomplishment was recognized at the

awards ceremony on November 15.

Jaya is working with Prof. Vipin Kumar

on an NSF Expeditions in Computing

project entitled “Understanding Climate

Change: A Data Driven Approach.” Her

research focuses on the development of

algorithms for the discovery and analysis of

dipoles in observed and model-generated

climate data.

Ph.D.

Student

Avery

Musbach

made it

to the

finals in

the Dance

your

Ph.D. contest. His video of him dancing

his Ph.D. was featured on sevearl media

sites including sciencemag.org and io9.

com. While he didn’t win, Musbach says,

“I am planning on trying again every year

until I win the contest. As long as I can find

a way to make a new dance that I believe

will have a reasonable chance of winning,

I will probably persist, because I find

this contest exciting.” It was Musbach’s

fist year entering contest for his thesis

“Physics Shedding Light.” His adviser is

Gary Meyer.

Computer Science and Engineering

researchers received recognition at the

12th International Symposium on Spatial

and Temporal Databases. A paper by Dev

Oliver and D. Steinberger received the best

vision/challenge paper award.

8 8

CS&E’s EighthBiennial Open House

CS&E welcomed alumni, students, and industry to the 8th biennial Open House and Tech Forum last October. The successful event had nearly 350 registered guests and more than 65 exhibits from student, faculty and industry research projects.

The Department started the half-day event with a welcome from Dean Crouch and CS&E Department Head Vipin Kumar’s State of the Department address. The 2011 Department of Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award was presented to Honeywell Fellow Kevin Driscoll, for his 40+ years of work in safety critical systems.

Two floors of Keller Hall were dedicated to poster exhibits from CS&E faculty, students and industry partners such as Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, IBM, CISCO, and 3M. IBM Fellow Kerrie Holley provided the keynote address. Holley discussed how Watson used analytics in predicting and providing insights for the Jeopardy challenge answers. Holley also talked about Watson’s potential and the impact its computational power can have on business and industry.

In the afternoon, attendees were invited back to the building for a special panel discussion on cloud computing. Associate Professors Abhishek Chandra and Jon Weissman with Professor David Du spoke with industry representatives Marc Coyle (Senior Vice President, Appirio) and Christopher Dickson (Symantec) about the current state and the future of cloud computing. The group discussed the challenges and opportunities in using cloud computing and the role of industry and academia in its sustenance and growth.

The CS&E department is looking forward to hosting the next Technology Forum and Open House in October of 2013.

99 9

10

“How do we know when software works?

And how can we verify and demonstrate

that it really does?” says Professor

Mats Heimdahl. Proving, verifying, and

demonstrating that software works is just

what he and his research team are trying

to do. Heimdahl is the head of the Critical

Systems Research Group (CriSys) in the

Department of Computer Science. CriSys

research interests are in the general area

of software engineering, in particular,

software development for critical software

applications--applications where incorrect

operation of the software could lead

to loss of life, substantial material or

environmental damage, or large monetary

losses.

Software has become integral to

most industries, including aerospace

and medical devices. The long-term

goal of CriSys research activities is

the development of a comprehensive

By Pamela Vold

Safety Critical Software

Mike Whalen and Mats Heimdahl of the Software Engineering Center

(Story continued on page 14)

framework for the development of software

for critical software systems. Their work

has focused on some of the most difficult

and least understood aspects of software

development, requirements specification,

requirements validation/verification, and

testing.

As Heimdahl explains, “When an

engineer designs and builds a bridge,

how does she know that it will work? She

can build the bridge and first send a bike

across, and if the bridge can handle the

bike then then they send a small car,

and if the bridge still stands you send a

larger car. Now, if the bridge works for the

larger car and for the smaller car, you can

assume that it works for a medium sized

car. Unfortunately, software does not work

that way. Software is not ‘continuous’ in

the sense physical systems are, it is quite

possible to have a software system that

works for cars of all sizes but crashes if

the car happens to be red. In addition,

an engineer can easily design a bridge to

be twice as strong as it needs to be, but

you can’t do that with software. You can’t

necessarily build software that is twice as

good as it needs to be. ”

Some of the group’s recent work deals

with the way we regulate and approve

modern medical devices, which are

software intensive and network enabled. As

Heimdahl explains in a recent paper, “The

nature of safety is continuing to be widely

misunderstood and there is seemingly

a widespread ignorance of established

safety techniques. For example, safety

is often confused with reliability, leading

to resources being spent on improving

component reliability rather than designing

safety into the system. Second, there

is a difference between developing a

safe system and demonstrating that the

system is safe (assuring safety). Our

ability to demonstrate (certify) that safety

requirements have been met is currently

inadequate.”

A current project in his group centers on

these problems. In particular, the focus is

on the needs in medical device community

where there is a dramatic increase in the

amount of software in the medical devices

as well as a need to assemble medical

devices into new system configurations to

match the need of patients with special

circumstances—something not possible

with today’s stand alone devices. Network

interfaces in medical devices and advances

in medical device interoperability are

likely to make that possible in the near

future. However, there are currently no

techniques to reason about the safety

of these dynamically created systems.

His group is creating a new development

paradigm to enable the effective design

and implementation of medical device

cyber-physical systems and improving

patient safety.

University of Minnesota Software

Engineering Center Program Director Dr.

1111

Alumni

Mike Cardosa (Ph.D. 2011) joined

Google in September and is now a Software

Engineer in the content ads team.

Chi-Yin Chow (Ph.D. 2010) joined the

City University of Hong Kong in 2010.

Vasileios Christopoulos (Ph.D. 2011)

A portion of CS&E alumnus Vasileios

Christopoulos’s doctoral thesis was

accepted for publication in the Journal

of Neural Computation. The excerpt

of “An Optimal Feedback Control

Framework for Grasping Objects with

Position Uncertainty” was featured as the

cover paper of the October 2011 issue.

The article describes a study in which

Christopoulos’s research group developed

a stochastic optimal feedback control

model to evaluate the optimality of human

grasping strategies. Christopoulos is

currently working as a Postdoctoral Scholar

in Neuroscience in the Andersen Lab at the

California Institute of Technology.

Yu Gu (Ph.D. 2010) joined Singapore

University of Technology in 2010.

Wolfgang Ketter (Ph.D. 2007) has been

granted early tenure at the Rotterdam

School of Management, Erasmus

University, Rotterdam. He has also been

Bonnie Holub returns to St. Thomas’ Graduate Programs in Software

Alumni achievementsappointed as the director of the newly

formed “Erasmus Center for Future Energy

Business.”

Hui Xiong (Ph.D. 2005) has received

a three-year appointment as Vice Chair

for the Deparment of Management &

Information Systems at Rutgers University.

The appointment began in July and runs

through 2014.

Ting Zhu (Ph.D. 2010) joined the State

University of New York at Binghamton in

2011.

Ziguo Zhuo (Ph.D. 2010) joined The

University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2011.

Bonnie

Holub, (Ph.D

1992) is the

Honeywell

Endowed

Chair in

Global

Technology

Manage-

ment at the

University of

St. Thomas.

After leaving St. Thomas as an associate

professor in 2000, Holub founded and led

three Minnesota-based high-tech research

and consulting firms. As holder of the

Honeywell chair, she will help develop

curriculum and serve as a liaison to

business. “I’m delighted to be returning to

St. Thomas” she said. “My background as

a faculty member and experience running

high-tech companies is a perfect fit with

the mission of the university’s engineering

programs.”

Holub received her master’s and

doctorate in computer science and

artificial intelligence, from the University of

Minnesota in 1992.

She began a 13-year career as a full-

and part-time scientist with Honeywell in

1982. As president of Knowledge Partners

of Minnesota from 1992 to 2000, she led

expert-systems research for Fortune 500

corporations in the Midwest.

In 2002 she founded Adventium Labs

and Adventium Enterprises, which she

led until selling her ownership interest

in 2010. The 39-employee research and

development firm worked extensively in

the field of complex systems and computer

security. In addition to commercial

clients, Adventium worked with the federal

Department of Energy, Department of

Homeland Security, NASA, National

Institutes of Health and National Science

Foundation.

In 2010 she founded ArcLight

Technology Consulting and continues to

be its president and CEO. The firm focuses

on technology consulting for the aerospace

and defense industries. Over the years

Holub has been involved with an extensive

range of projects that have included

Minnesota state parks, Boeing 757 and

F-16 aircraft, and the space station

Freedom.

Holub was named the 1993 Minnesota

Young Engineer of the Year by the

Minnesota Federation of Engineering

Associations. In 2009 she received the

Distinguished Alumnus award from the

Computer and Engineering Science

Department at the University of Minnesota.

She is chair of the board of the St. Paul

Area Chamber of Commerce and also

serves on the boards of the Minnesota High

Tech Association, High Tech Kids, and

Dodge Nature Center. She also is on the

board of advisors for St. Thomas’ Graduate

Programs in Software and the College of

Science and Engineering at the University

of Minnesota.

Alumni Spotlight:

John HeinenAlumni Spotlight: John Heinen (B.S. 1986)

is the last of eight kids from

a dairy farm in the Melrose

area. When it was time for

him to head to the University

of Minnesota, he grabbed the

family’s pick-up truck, dropped

his things off at the U, and then

headed back to drop off the

car, and take the bus back to

school. John had been exposed

to the University and computer science and

physics through his older siblings, and he

knew he enjoyed problem solving.

“What I enjoyed about the university

is that you could go to different areas

within the university and it would feel like

a completely different place, with different

populations of students. You could go

from the Saint Paul Campus to Wilson

Library and it was a completely different

atmosphere.” While he may now wish he’d

been more engaged in student clubs and

organizations on campus, he did seize the

opportunity to pursue an internship with

GE in Milwaukee.

After completing his B.S., John was

offered a full-time position at GE and a

place in their Edison Engineering Program,

which was geared towards developing the

career of promising engineers. He went on

for his M.S. at UW Milwaukee and worked

for GE’s Healthcare division for 24 years,

which included assignments in Paris,

London and Seattle.

John says, “Then I did a career

assessment. While I loved my experience

with GE, and being able to work in so

many areas in the company, I had only

ever worked at one company. I decided I

wanted to have the opportunity of working

in a smaller company and help make it

grow.” Heinen had a former colleague who

had just the company that was in need of

leadership.

Heinen is now the Senior Vice President

of Product Management at Intermedix

EMSystems, a provider of web-based

Rob Cooley

12

Rob Cooley (Ph.D.

2000) has a wonderful

problem. His company,

OptiMine Software, Inc.,

needs to hire 15-30

people in the next six

months. “It would be

great to have 30 people

next week, because I have

the work for them,” he says. OptiMine’s

bid optimization software forecasts the

performance of each paid search ad

placement each day and automatically sets

optimal bids, giving marketers the best

return on their paid search investment.

At this point Cooley says he needs to be

patient with adding to his staff, so that he

doesn’t grow too quickly. “We need to be

careful about the office culture.”

Earlier this year OptiMine received

funding from Hummer Winblad Venture

Partners. It now boasts client’s like

Overstock.com. Cooley describes his

company as a way to solve Wanamaker’s

advertising paradox, “Wanamaker said,

‘Half of the money I spend on advertising is

wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which

half.’ We can now track the results of all of

online advertising.” OptiMine maximizes

paid search campaigns by analyzing the

individual click, cost, conversion and value

data for every keyword.

It’s not work that Cooley initially

pursued in college. As a Navy ROTC

student at Cornell, Cooley majored in

civil engineering. Then, as he says, “The

Navy decided that I should not be on a

ship.” He was placed in Washington D.C.,

doing mechanical and nuclear engineering

for the Navy, which lacked challenge for

him, “Nuclear engineering is conservative

design. If something works, they do not

want to change it.”

In the early 90s, computers were still

a relatively new addition to the Navy’s

offices. “The secretaries were still

essentially using them as typewriters,”

Cooley says. To keep himself busy, he

designed a simple tracking database

application that the secretaries, managers

and engineers could use. The project

fueled Cooley’s interest in problem solving

and he then applied to the Ph.D. program

at Minnesota for data mining, where he

worked with Jaideep Srivastava, John Riedl,

and Joe Konstan doing work in data mining

for the internet.

After completing his Ph.D., Cooley

moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and

worked in several start-ups before settling

at KXEN, a French data mining company.

“I had access to great data to work with,

including Walmart, Sears, Wells Fargo. At

one time I had access to data from 35 of

the Fortune 100 companies.”

It was in 2008 that Cooley decided

to start OptiMine with the support of

friends and family. “There is a new issue

for advertising. It used to be that you

had to trust the ad men who would tell

you how much an ad would cost, and

that it would get you a certain amount

of coverage. Now it’s not one ad, it’s

millions of ads. Essentially, every web

page is an advertising opportunity.”

Cooley’s customers are seeing results from

OptiMine’s successful data mining and

modeling. “Our clients are seeing a 25-75%

bump. On our website we say we offer a

minimum increase in performance of 25

percent for paid-search advertising.” For

Cooley, work sounds like fun, “The data

is noisy, there is sparse data, there are

layers of complexity – it’s a great computer

science problem.”

13

Alumni, we want to hear from you!

Send your news about jobs, promotions, and awards to newsletter@cs.umn.edu. Submissions will be included in the next newsletter.

Hemant RamnaniAlumni Spotlight:

healthcare information management

solutions used in medical emergency event

preparation, detection, and response.

The company was created by emergency

department physicians who wanted

to improve communications between

hospitals and emergency medical service

agencies to improve patient treatment.

Heinen explains, “We help states plan

and prepare for the coordination and

collaboration of emergency services that is

necessary in the event of a tornado, a plane

crash, a hurricane or an earthquake. They

also need to coordinate the volunteers who

want to help out after an emergency. So

if Joe Schmidt says he’s a doctor, how do

we know that Joe Schmidt is a doctor? Our

company helps states set up a database

so that we can help them verify volunteers

and get to responding to the emergency

much sooner.” He adds, “We also have

technology to track how many people each

local hospital can take and tag each patient

to track which hospital they go to. That can

be helpful in the case that there is a family

and one member of the family is taken to

one hospital and another is taken across

town.”

The company builds mobile tablet

applications used by paramedics to begin

a patient’s clinical record at the scene of

an accident. These clinical records are

then uploaded via the internet for access

by hospital emergency departments

and incident billing, a service for which

Intermedix is an industry leader.

The software and systems are helping

to save lives, something that has been very

rewarding to Heinen through his career in

healthcare technology. Heinen says one of

the most important courses he took as an

undergraduate was in software engineering.

“It was an invaluable experience to take

into consideration how people need to work

together, creating strategies, plans, and

designs that solve problems with effective

IT solutions.”13

If you had asked

Hemant Ramnani

(M.S. 2003) when he

started at Persistent

Systems, a software

product and technology

company, in 1999 if he

saw himself working

there again 12 years

later he would have said, “No way.” Today

however, he is happy and proud to have

built his career with the company. Hemant

received his bachelor’s degree from the

University of Pune in 1999 and started

working for Persistent Systems when it had

a relatively small staff of about 100. After

working there for about a year, he started

thinking about going back to school for a

Master’s degree. “It was a very competitive

environment and I saw many of my co-

workers applying going to school to further

their careers.”

When researching masters programs

that were known for their programs in

databases and data-mining work he was

immediately directed to Minnesota and

the work of Professors Vipin Kumar and

Jaideep Srivastava. Hemant came to

Minnesota for his Masters degree, and had

the opportunity spend some time interning

with Microsoft. When that did not turn

into a full time position after graduation

he returned to India and to working at

Persistent Systems.

Yet, the decision to return to his former

employer was not a step backwards. After

working hard in India, in 2006 Hemant

had the opportunity to make a change

and move to the Persistent Systems

office in the Bay Area. He also seized the

opportunity to move from a technical

position to working in sales, where he

has really been able to excel. “I’ve had

the chance to build my own sales team

from the ground up.” Hemant says, “It

really fits my personality. I’m the sort of

person that thinks ‘new is good.’ I love to

meet new people, go to different places

meeting customers and helping them

solve their business problems. I’m still

very much able to use my schooling. In

order to do this kind of work, I need to

be able to talk to the client on a technical

level considering the technology DNA of

Persistent Systems.” He adds, “It also

appeals to me to know a little bit about

everything, if I were still working in a

technical area, I would be working with the

same group all the time, this way I get to

get out and meet different kinds of people

and get to know them and learn about

them.”

Hemant is also very happy to have

made the transition to the Bay Area. “It

is amazing that we have all of these high

tech companies so close by, the access to

them. Of course there are other smaller

tech centers around the country, but there

is such a concentration of them here.” The

culture of the Bay Area allows him to strike

a good balance between work and home,

though Hemant notes with a laugh, “I’m

still a workaholic.”

Hemant is well satisfied with the

career that he has had with Persistent

Systems, where last year he was named

the Global Partner Executive, managing

the salesforce.com partnership globally.

Hemant says, “We think of the U.S. as the

land of opportunity and for me working

at Persistent Systems has been a land of

opportunity for me as well. This company

has allowed me to find something that I

wanted to do and to go for it. I have been

able to stand up the challenges and I’ve

been rewarded for it. The leadership have

been very open to me. Part of that may be

my history with the company. I was there

when we had a staff of 100 and now we

have 7,000. It’s been a great journey for

me.”

14

cloud computing continued (Story continued from page 1)

14

Mike Whalen also works with safety critical

systems. As he puts it, “Software is in

charge of lots of things that can kill you,

so it’s important to be sure that it work

correctly.” Whalen’s work explores the

foundations of software testing, the goals,

the underlying problems and limitations.

His previous work at the University

and with Rockwell Collins included

contributions to a software development

standard that is used by the avionics

industry to develop critical software.

As Heimdahl sums up their work, “We

need methods and tools to help us develop

software with predictable behavior for

these safety critical systems. What we do is

try to figure out is how to develop software

where we can confidently answer questions

such as ‘Does the software always do x

when it is supposed to? Does it never ever

do y?’”

(Story continued from page 10)

lifting to the cloud.”

To address this Chandra and

Weissman are working on using the

cloud as a backend to outsource mobile

computations. A public cloud, such as

Amazon EC2, can provide elastic and

“unlimited” computation and storage

resources. It can adjust the amount of

resources according to the service requests

and provide large-scale deployment easily.

It can also enable easy data, and compute

sharing among multiple devices interacting

with each other or through the same

application.

Weissman and Chandra are also working

on a project called Nebula, which allows

users to use resources located at the

edge of the cloud. While the cloud has

many benefits such as locality and as

a sharing platform, users don’t always

want all of their data going to the cloud.

Says Weissman, “A centralized cloud may

introduce privacy, cost, and performance

bottlenecks.” Weissman and Chandra

are looking at ways to obtain cloud-like

properties by making the cloud more

distributed. That means “moving” the

cloud closer to the data, end-users and

other clouds. “For instance, say you want

to deploy a certain application. A Nebula

can be used to host this application using

resources located near required data

sources or interacting end-users. That

may mean a group of machines in my

department or within my firewall. A lot of

the data is located at the edges.” Nebula

is a decentralized, less managed cloud.

So far the findings of their research are

positive, showing that Nebula can preserve

cloud behavior with a stronger notion of

external locality.

Another project for Weissman and

Chandra is in exploring MapReduce

efficiency with highly-distributed data. Use

of MapReduce is prominent in the high-

performance computing of large data sets

in large-scale platforms. Yet, when the

source data and the computing platform

are widely distributed, using MapReduce

is inefficient. Weather forecasting, click-

stream analysis, web crawling, and social

networking applications can have several

distributed data sources. According to the

research group, large-scale data could be

collected in separate data center locations

or even across the Internet. For these

applications, there are usually multiple

data centers. Finding the most efficient

architecture for running MapReduce

jobs over the entire data set becomes

important, and Weissman and Chandra

are looking for alternative distributed

MapReduce setup configurations to make

the work more efficient.

Yet another project for the group

involves minimizing communication

overhead in virtualized computing

platforms. This project addresses the

bottlenecks in network bandwidth that

are common in large-scale computing

environments like clouds. Using the

technique created by Chandra and his

group, they have been able to minimize

communication overhead and get a

significant improvement in the runtime

of the application, and also a drastic

reduction in the network communication

cost. “We are trying to look at how virtual

systems deploy, manage, save energy and

give high performance. Not just how it will

run, but how to use a server and when to

shut it down.”

The desktop computer on our desks may

not disappear anytime soon, but with the

work like that of Chandra and Weissman,

the future of our work is in the cloud.

Associate Professor Abhishek Chandra

Safety critical system are vital in the design and function of space shuttle.

15

Many thanks to our supporters

Supporting Innovation

Please contact Sally Euson at 612-625-6035 or

aqdavis@umn.edu for more information on ways

to give.

Always consult tax, legal, or financial advisors before

making major gifts.

15

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Individual donors David C AbramsonSusu J AdriansJohn B Ahlquist JrGregory D AllenLee J BarringtonFazil H BhimaniIsaac A BoakyeNicole R BussGerry T Cardinal IIIDavid ChouDaniel D DassowRobin S EhrlichSteven R EnglundJordan E FochtJeffrey D FynbohJoseph E Gliniecki

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We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the following companies, alumni, and friends of CS&E who have provided generous financial support for our work. We look forward to continuing this partnership.

Gifts listed are from May 2011 to December 1, 2011

16

Soundbyte is produced twice yearly by the University of Minnesota’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. All photos and content are produced and edited by Pamela Vold, unless otherwise noted.

Please direct all questions or comments to:Soundbyte Editor Department: (612) 625-2424Fax: (612) 625-0572E-mail: newsletter@cs.umn.eduhttp://www.cs.umn.edu/newsletter

Vipin KumarDepartment Head

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Joseph A KonstanAssociate Department Head

Victoria InterranteDirector of Graduate Studies

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The University of Minnesota is an equal opportunity educator and employer. This publication is available in alternate formats upon request; call Pamela Vold at (612) 625-2424. For disability accommodations, call (612) 626-1333.

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