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ISR News archives: 1998
These ISR news stories predate the current "news engine" system and are outside the search system. You may search internally on this page for people and items of interest. We hope someday to put all these stories into the news engine. Please note that many of the links on this page no longer work.
January
January 12, 1998
With the addition of a site in Croatia in January, FSQP optimization
software -- developed by an ISR/Electrical
Engineering research group headed by Dr.
André Tits (ECE/ISR)
-- is now being used in 54
countries around the world.
January 20, 1998
Professor Stuart
S. Antman (Math) was
recently named an ISR affiliate faculty member. His research involves
concrete problems for general classes of constitutive equations.
These include problems on the interaction of fluids with deformable
solids, the nature of dissipative mechanisms and shock waves in
inelastic solids, asymptotics of the large motions of light flexible
structures with heavy attachments, and global bifurcation for nonlinearly
elastic and elastoplastic structures. A number of his current research
projects involve magnetostrictive materials. He is affiliated with
the Center for
Dynamics and Control of Smart Structures.
February
February 1, 1998
Professor Lung-Wen
Tsai (ME/ISR) is now
the technical editor for the ASME Journal of Mechanical
Design. In addition, he is the conference chair of the ASME 1998
Mechanisms Conference and the general conference chair for the
six ASME 2000 Technical Conferences.
February 4, 1998
Associate Professor K.J. Ray Liu (ECE/ISR) is co-editor
with UCLA's Kung Yao of High
Performance VLSI Signal Processing: Vol. 1 --Algorithms and Architectures, and Vol.
2 --Systems Design and Applications, just published by IEEE
Press and SPIE Optical Engineering Press.
February 20, 1998
CRC Press, publishers of The
Control Handbook, edited by Professor William
Levine (ECE/ISR), has
announced that the book soon will be translated and published in
India.
February 20, 1998
Associate Professor Guangming
Zhang (ME/ISR) has written
a new book, Engineering
Design and Pro/ENGINEER, published by College House Enterprises.
The book is a comprehensive treatment of engineering design with
a focus on solutions based on information technology.
February 26, 1998
The A. James Clark School of
Engineering at the University of Maryland is the fastest rising
engineering school in the nation, as evidenced by recent
rankings in US News & World Report. Ranked
37th in 1994, the Clark School's graduate programs were ranked 25th
in 1995, 18th in 1997 and 13th in 1998 among all institutions,
public and private. The Clark School is especially proud of the
fact that both its undergraduate and graduate programs are consistently
ranked among the top 25 nationally.
The University of Maryland's Gemstone multidisciplinary undergraduate honors program (which ISR administers) is the subject of a feature story in the April 1998 issue of the American Society for Engineering Education's PRISM magazine.
March
1, 1998
The Chronicle of Higher Education featured a story on Assistant
Professor David B. Stewart (EE)'s ENME
459B/ENEE 459Q, an interdisciplinary engineering course that
gives students hands-on experience in building a new breed of pinball
machine. The story can be found on page A11 of the February 27 edition,
or online here if you are a subscriber to the Chronicle. You also
can read our
own story on David's class. To see a large pictire of the Comet
Commander pinball machine as it appeared at the World Pinball Championships
in Las Vegas this February, click on the image above (thanks
to Eric Schurr and the Electrical
Engineering Dept for this photo).
March 12, 1998
Professor William
Levine (ECE/ISR) hosted
a short course on the use of CONDUIT , a new multidisciplinary integration environment for flight control
development. The program was held at the University of Maryland's
Inn and Conference Center the week of February 23. Story
March 15, 1998
Congratulations to Professor and Chair of the Electrical
and Computer Engineering Department Nariman
Farvardin (ECE/ISR) who
was recently elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and
Electronic Engineers (IEEE).
April
April 22, 1998In 1997 ISR became a graduated Engineering Research Center of the National Science Foundation. Our 12-page Final Report is now available for you to read or download.
April 27, 1998
John
Baras, ISR's founding director and currently the director of
the ISR-affiliated Maryland Hybrid Networks Center (formerly the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks) and John Kenyon,
senior vice president of engineering at Hughes
Network Systems in Gaithersburg, Md., spoke
about their successful reasearch partnership at a special
summit March 27. The summit was an effort by the presidents of the
University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University and George Mason
University to better coordinate the Baltimore-Washington- Northern
Virginia area's technology and research efforts. In addition to
our story on the event, you also can read The Washingon Post's March 28 story. Story
May
May 1, 1998
Professor P.S. Krishnaprasad (ECE/ISR) has been named a
Distinguished Faculty Research Fellow by the University of Maryland
Graduate School, one of only three awards given this year.
May 4, 1998
Congratulations to
Professor Lung-Wen Tsai (ME/ISR) and Assistant Professor Don DeVoe (ME), who
have received a three-year funding award of $874,902 from the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for their project
to develop three-dimensional micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS).
May 8, 1998
Maryland ranks ninth among all states in research and development
expenditures, according to a new study by the National Science Foundation.
May 12, 1998
At the Autonomous Mobile Robotics Laboratory web site you can download an
article written by Julio Rosenblatt (formerly of UMIACS) about his and Greg Walsh's (ME) experiences in leading the Maryland
students who won the Robot Grand Prix in Japan last summer. The
article appeared in the January/February 1998 issue of IEEE
Intelligent Systems.
Congratulations to first-year Gemstone students Sabastian Niles, Melissa Murray, Peggy Wood and Maggie Lassack for being named four of the University of Maryland's "Top 10 Freshman" by the national leadership honor society Omnicron Delta Kappa. ISR administers the Gemstone program.
May 18, 1998
Associate Professor Michael
Fu (BGMT/ISR) will
receive the Institute of Industrial
Engineers (IIE) Transactions Best Paper Award on Operations
Engineering during the Industrial Engineering Solutions '98 Conference
in Banff, Alberta this May. The award is for "Optimization
of Discrete Event Systems via Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic
Approximation," a paper Fu co-authored with Stacy Hill of the
Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and which appeared in
the IIE
Transactions in 1997.
May 28, 1998
Read the story of how Assistant Professor Jeffrey
Herrmann (ME/ISR), Ioannis
Minis (a former ISR-affiliated faculty member) and ISR Research
Engineer Edward Lin developed an Internet-based display system for an
assembly line at Black
& Decker's Easton, Md. plant.
May 28, 1998
Professor Thomas McAvoy (ChE/ISR) recently
delivered a lecture on his artificial nose project as part of being
a 1997-98 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland. Story
May 28, 1998
Space
Systems Lab M.S. candidate Brian
Roberts recently won a proposal to fly his thesis research project,
a sprag
wrench, on an upcoming Space Shuttle flight.
June
June 1, 1998
With the addition of a site in Macau in May, FSQP optimization software -- developed by an ISR/Electrical
Engineering research group headed by Dr.
André Tits (ECE/ISR)
-- is now being used in 55
countries around the world.
June 10, 1998
The
contract bridge computer program
developed by Professor Dana
Nau (CS/ISR), Ph.D. graduate Steve Smith and Tom
Throop, head of Great Game Products, Inc., was a finalist for the
University of Maryland's Invention of the Year Award. Bridge Baron won the American Contract Bridge League's computer bridge tournament
last year--making it the world champion.
June 10, 1998
Associate Professor Jim Hendler (CS/ISR) and two
of his grad students, Killian
Stoffel and Merwyn
Taylor, won the University of Maryland's Invention of the
Year award for PARKA-DB.
It is a high-performance knowledge representation (KR) system that
deviates from the norm by using a database-management system to
provide run-time storage advantages. PARKA-DB supports the same
representational functionality as its memory-based predecessor,
but also supports larger knowledge bases while consuming less internal
memory. PARKA-DB is projected to be a useful KR technology for computer
systems limited by main memory, running on today's smaller personal
computers and individual workstations. The Invention of the Year
Award is sponsored by the university's Office
of Technology Commercialization.
June 29, 1998
Assistant Professor Greg Walsh (ME/ISR) has just been named to a joint faculty appointment. He's also a new father. Congratulations on both counts!
A proposal by Professor Dana Nau's (CS/ISR) "Flexible Factories" group of seven second-year Gemstone students was accepted by the 1998 Artificial Intelligence and Manufacturing Workshop: State of the Art and State of Practice. The conference is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, August 31- Sept. 2, 1998.
June 29, 1998
ISR-affiliated faculty are working on fundamental and applied investigations
in the field of Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Visit
the Maryland MEMS Lab
August
August 7, 1998
Visit the new
site for the National Center of Excellence in Aviation
Operations Research (NEXTOR).
August 10, 1998
The
National Science Foundation has just made available online access to the proceedings from its 1997 Engineering Education Innovators
Conference. The University of Maryland was represented at this
conference by ISR Director Gary Rubloff (MNE/ISR), Associate Professor Mark Austin (CEE/ISR),
ISR Assistant Director Sue
Frazier, Professor Michael Pecht (ME) and Associate
Dean of the A. James Clark College of Engineering/
Glenn L. Martin Institute of Technology Thomas Regan.
August 28, 1998
Associate Professor Jim Hendler (CS/UMIACS/ISR)
has been chosen as a member of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory
Board. Story
August 28, 1998
The University
of Maryland has reached an agreement for a nonexclusive license
to CFSQP source code, developed by a team led by Professor André
Tits (ECE/ISR), for use
in Cadence's "Resolve Optimizer for Analog Artist." Story
August 28, 1998
Professor Steve Marcus (ECE/ISR)
has been named to the editorial board of a new SIAM series of texts
and monographs on advances in design and control. Story
August 31, 1998
ISR's six 1998 Research Experience for Undergraduates students presented
the results of their summer work on August 5. Story
September 9, 1998
Two University of Maryland
student teams led by Assistant Professor David B. Stewart (EE and ISR
affiliate) were "top-10" finishers in the 1998
Motorola University Design Contest. Story
October
October 1, 1998
The Electrical and Computer Engineering
Department is sponsoring a Microelectronics Colloquium Series Mondays at 4 p.m. during the fall semester. Schedule,
speakers and topics
October 4, 1998
The Tropical Rainfall Measuring
Mission (TRMM) spacecraft recently captured dramatic images
of a 59,000-foot skyscraping cloud rising from the eye of Hurricane
Bonnie. ISR associate faculty member Ben
Kedem (Math) has played
a keyrole in the TRMM mission. Washington
Post story
October 30, 1998
Visit the new Learning Binaurally-Directed Movement web site. In this National
Science Foundation Learning and Intelligent Systems project,
a multi-disciplinary, multi-university consortium is investigating
time coding in the central nervous system. ISR faculty participants
include P.S. Krishnaprasad, Steve Marcus,
and Shihab Shamma.
November
November 4, 1998The second class of Gemstone undergraduate honors students has chosen its long-term projects. You can view the progress of many of the projects from both the class of 2000 and 2001 online. Information
November 10, 1998
NEXTOR Research Associate Bob
Hoffman's PhD thesis, "Integer Programming Models for
the Ground Holding Problem in Air Traffic Managment" has
been awarded second place in the INFORMS Transportation Science
Section Dissertation Prize. The award will be made at the INFORMS
meeting in Seattle this fall. View
or download Bob's thesis online
November 20, 1998
The
ISR-affiliated Maryland Hybrid Networks Center (formerly the Center for Satellite and Hybrid Communication Networks) held its Peer Review on October 29. At
left, NASA officials view a demonstration in the HyNet lab.
November 23, 1998
Albert Pisano of the Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and
the University of California at Berkeley explained DARPA's five-year
vision for Micro Electro Mechanical devices at a special ISR/EE colloquium on Nov. 23.
| Slides
of Pisano's MEMS 2003 and Beyond presentation | DARPA's
MEMS page |
November 24,
1998
The National Science Foundation is investing $10 million for the creation of five new Engineering
Research Centers (ERCs). ISR was in the first group of ERCs created
back in 1985 and is now a "graduated" center. Story at the NSF web
site
November 24, 1998
Admiral Stansfield Turner, former director of Central Intelligence, was the first Gemstone Distinguished Lecturer of the year, Nov 4. Story
December 2, 1998
Assistant
Professor John N. Kidder, Jr. (MNE) is the newest
affiliate member of the ISR faculty. Dr. Kidder's research interests
lie in thin film growth and characterization studies; and the thin
film formation process from a perspective of molecular-scale reaction
kinetics and dynamics.
December 2, 1998
Space Systems Lab M.S. candidate Brian
Roberts' thesis research project, a three-dimensional roller
mechanism sprag wrench, flew with John Glenn and the rest of the
Discovery astronauts on the recent space shuttle mission. Learn
more about this shuttle experiment
December 11, 1998
Professor Michael
Fu (BMGT/ISR) has won
the 1998 Outstanding Simulation Publication Award from the INFORMS College
on Simulation for his research monograph, Conditional
Monte Carlo: Gradient Estimation and Optimization Applications.
The publication was co-authored with Jian-Qiang
Hu. Dr. Fu will receive the award at the Winter
Simulation Conference in Washington, D.C. on December 14th.
December 18, 1998
Associate Professor Mark Austin (CEE/ISR) and ISR Faculty Research Assistant David Chancogne, have
written a new book, Introduction to Engineering Programming:
in C, MATLAB, and JAVA, just published by John Wiley and Sons. Information
Professor Gary W. Rubloff (MSE/ISR), along with Ichiro Takeuchi (MSE) and Ellen Williams (Physics), were awarded $750,000 from the W.M. Keck Foundation for their proposal "Combinatorial Nanosynthesis and Multiscale Characterization Laboratory." This highly innovative concept brings together nanostructures, probes and combinatorial approaches to materials, processes and devices. Rubloff is a former director of ISR.
The grant establishes the W.M. Keck Foundation Laboratory, a highly featured part of the Nanotechnology Center in the new Kim Building, set to open in 2005.
The W. M. Keck Foundation is one of the nation's largest philanthropic organizations. Established in 1954 by the late William Myron Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Co., the Foundation's grantmaking is focused primarily on the areas of medical research, science, and engineering.
