Peter Lee @ March 31, 2008 # 3 Comments
US News and World Report came out this weekend with their latest rankings of graduate programs. Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon received a score of 4.9 out of a possible 5, which in the overall rankings puts us slightly behind Berkeley, MIT, and Stanford.
This is a good result, but I am disappointed by it. Why? […]
Peter Lee @ March 26, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Something very big is happening. Interest in data-intensive scalable computing (DISC), in both research and industry practice, is taking off. The first Hadoop Summit was hosted yesterday by Yahoo! Research in Santa Clara. (Hadoop is the open-source suite of software packages for “map-reduce” style distributed computing.) The Summit had been planned originally as a workshop […]
Peter Lee @ March 16, 2008 # One Comment
About a year ago, the Physics Department completed a major strategic planning exercise. In their plan, one of the main elements called for hiring as many as 5 new faculty plus several postdocs and graduate fellows, in areas spanning particle physics, computational astrophysics, and cosmology. In response to the plan, our Provost, Mark Kamlet, quipped, […]
Peter Lee @ March 14, 2008 # No Comment Yet
The Sheep Vortex premiere last night was a nice affair. Seeing Spot (or, um, his avatar) there and having a chance to chat was really great. Wandering around in the swirling “vortex” of broken shards of electric sheep was pleasant, even if the performance and resolution of SecondLife’s rendering processes left much to be desired. […]
Peter Lee @ March 13, 2008 # One Comment
Tonight, check it out! Scott Draves will have a premiere of one of his latest artworks, Sheep Vortex, with 3D design by Somatika Xiao, at the Node Zero Gallery in SecondLife, tonight (March 13, 2008) at 6pm-9pm PST. This is based on his Electric Sheep, which is now featured in the permanent online collection […]
Peter Lee @ March 12, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Terrible news this morning. Howard Gobioff, CMU Ph.D. alumnus, co-developer of the Google file system, and political activist, passed away yesterday. The email from Neil Gobioff:
From: Gobioff Neil <gonzonia@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 5:09 AM
Subject: Howard Gobioff
It is with great sadness that I write to you today. I don’t know how some of you […]
Peter Lee @ March 10, 2008 # One Comment
Right now I’m sitting in Palo Alto, in a meeting of the Computing Community Consortium Council. It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted an article on this blog, and so there is a lot to report on. But right now this meeting is taking too much concentration. So, for the time […]
Peter Lee @ March 3, 2008 # No Comment Yet
Matt Mason just passed along some wonderful news: The Robotics Institute’s Takeo Kanade has been selected as the 2008 recipient of the Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science. The award, which is given by the Franklin Institute, explains the award this way:
For 184 years, The Franklin Institute, has honored the greatest men and […]
Peter Lee @ March 3, 2008 # One Comment
Last summer, Scott Fahlman was subjected to a huge flurry of worldwide media attention, for the 25th anniversary of his invention of the emoticon :-). While everyone (especially Scott), felt a bit sheepish about the amount of press coverage this was getting, at some point we all just had to give in to it and […]