New Faculty to Join the CMU CS Department

News

We haven’t quite wrapped up our faculty recruiting for the year, but we already know that we’ll have at least two new faculty members joining the Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Department in the fall of 2008.

This year’s hiring season was extremely busy. The CS Department interviewed 10 candidates at the fresh Ph.D. level. In addition, a few other interesting people at more senior levels came by to visit, with varying levels of possible interest in positions at CMU. On top of all of that, the other departments such as ECE, HCI, Machine Learning, Robotics, and Language Technologies, also interviewed many candidates in areas such as interactive media, machine learning, robotics, computer security, human-computer interaction, machine translation, and more. So, in the end, there were dozens of faculty candidates coming through this year.

Whew!

Every candidate invited by the CS Department was great. They spanned many different research areas, such as computational game theory, parallel programming, operating systems, AI, etc. In the end, after careful consideration, the department decided to make just one offer, to Andre Platzer, a finishing Ph.D. student at the University of Oldenberg, in Germany.

We have actually known Andre for the past few months, because he has been a visiting student in Ed Clarke’s research group. Even so, Andre just blew us away during his interview. He works in the area of “hybrid systems“, which is an extremely active (and well-funded) research area in Europe, and is today emerging as “cyber-physical systems” in the USA. Roughly speaking, a hybrid system is one that can be modeled as a combination of discrete systems (e.g., state machines) and continuous systems (e.g., systems of differential equations). Think of a robot that needs to interact with the real world, or an ultra-high speed train that needs to avoid collisions, or a device to be implanted in a person. Specifying, analyzing, and verifying such systems is an area of rapidly growing importance, and requires techniques ranging from logical specifications to model checking to symbolic differentiation.

Andre has developed an awe-inspiring mastery of the mathematics needed to work in this domain and has shown remarkable creativity and cleverness in solving some large-scale, real-world problems. Interestingly, he has also been deeply involved in successful grant proposals worth many millions of dollars. We think Andre will be a star, collaborating with a wide range of people here. And thanks to people like Ed Clarke, we were able to snatch him up without any other US universities even getting a chance to interview him!

Another new faculty member will be Adrien Treuille. Adrien interviewed with us last year but has been spending this past year on a postdoc. He will officially join us this fall, on a faculty appointment made jointly by Robotics and Computer Science.

Adrien is a graphics researcher who studies methods for modeling very high-dimensional nonlinear phenomena, such as large crowds, fluid flows, and human motion. (I’ve poked fun at him, by explaining that his research is all “smoke and mirrors.” ;-) One example of his work that I personally found to be particularly elegant is on model reduction for real-time fluid flow simulation. In this work, Adrien uses classical (and computationally intensive) modeling techniques to obtain models for flows around solid objects. He then computes a “reduced” model that permits near-real-time interaction with the object in the fluid. See his project page for example videos. The potential for both scientific and artistic applications is tremendous. This research was done with his advisor (and former CMU CS Ph.D. student) Zoran Popovic, and was even highlighted on an ESPN telecast of a NASCAR race, to allow viewers to see the “drafting” effect of race cars following each other around a race track.

In addition to his graphics research, Adrien has also been part of a team at UW that has been developing Fold.It, an online game that allows people to compete by folding proteins. I spent a few days playing Fold.It and was impressed with the fit-and-finish of the game and, even more by how addicting it is. Basically, one gets hooked by wanting to spend “just a few more minutes” trying to beat someone else’s score, and of course one also learns something about protein folding.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that one of our Ph.D. students, David Brumley, has received and accepted an offer to join the ECE Department as an Assistant Professor. David is one of the most exciting young researchers in computer network security. He will be working in the CyLab and will undoubtedly collaborate with many faculty in the Computer Science Department.

Andre Platzer and Adrien Treuille are two superb additions to our faculty. While we still have one offer pending (and some of the other departments also have pending offers), I think we can already call this year’s faculty recruiting season in the Computer Science Department a great success.

Peter Lee @ June 10, 2008