In early 2009 forecasts showed that the deteriorating economic climate would force a large number of new Ph.D.s in computer science and related fields to delay or altogether abandon a research career. Projected Ph.D. production was high, and jobs in academia and industry were few. Leaders of the computing research community feared a cohort of able researchers would be permanently lost to the profession.
With encouragement from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for Computer Science and Engineering (CISE), the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) proposed to develop and administer a short-term program that would provide postdoctoral positions for about 60 Ph.D.s - called Computing Innovation Fellows, or CIFellows - for one to two years. In its proposal, the CCC cited among the motivations for the program:
- "The nation's universities and industrial research labs are facing unprecedented budget pressure as part of the international financial crisis. The result is considerably fewer openings for computing research and teaching positions than anyone imagined even six months ago."
- "The nation's research universities will be producing a record number of new Ph.D.s in computer science and computing-related fields - approximately 1,800."
- "Award recipients will remain in research positions, enabling them to advance the field while simultaneously gaining an opportunity for further training and learning."
- "Finally, it is important to keep in mind that the primary goal of this program is to put talented people in situations that allow them to innovate. As a group, they persue new endeavors that, in turn, create new opportunities."
The proposal spelled out some key properties of the competition and awards:
- Applicants must propose matches with specific mentors, who must be from institutions other than a given applicant's Ph.D. - granting institution. To facilitate mentor identification, potential mentors may indicate willingness to supervise postdocs by signing up on a webpage and including a summary of their research interests. Applicants are encouraged to propose more than one possible mentor, and are urged to contact mentors to discuss possible research directions. Mentors must endorse a paired applicant.
- Industrial hosts are encouraged, provided an intellectual property agreement allows the CIFellow to publish based on his or her work.
- A postdoc award is portable; the CIFellow may move to another institution provided a mentor pairing exists.
- Awards are for one year, with the possibility of extension to a second year.
In its first year, 2009, the program was organized and executed very rapidly. The proposal was submitted to NSF on March 26; NSF approved a slightly modified proposal on May 15. The program was announced that same day - May 15, together with websites prepared to accept mentors and applicants. Two committees, spanning 35 leading researchers in academia and industry, were recruited and organized to steer the program and review the applications. By the application deadline of June 9, over 1,200 mentors had signed up and 522 applications completed, comprising 945 separate applicant-mentor pairings. On July 8, CCC announced the selection of 60 CIFellows.
Because economic conditions did not improve rapidly, the program was continued in 2010 and 2011 with additional funding from NSF/CISE. Overall, 127 CIFellows were funded - 60 in 2009, 47 in 2010, and 20 in 2011. As it was always intended to be a short-term effort, the program was ramped down in each successive year, and there will be no new CIFellowships awarded in 2012.
The CIFellows Project was designed to determine a set of awards that was diverse along many dimensions. In addition to conventional diversity objectives, reviewers sought to balance awards among the sub-disciplines of the field. A unique component of the selection process was a so-called "max-two rule," which mandated that no more than two awardees could come from a single Ph.D.-granting college or university and no more than two awardees could go to a single host organization. The first part imparted some fairness among applicants; the second part infused "new blood" in institutions unable to hire new faculty because of economic conditions. An additional intent was to ensure "cross-flow" across institutional types, with the hope of establishing long-term collaborations among diverse institutions. (Indeed, it often happened in the selection process that a third, fourth, or fifth candidate from university X or going to organization Y would be encountered, causing reconsideration of the decisions made earlier in the review process. As a consequence, most of the finalists were discussed multiple times by the review committee throughout the process.) The impact was not surprising: many applicants wanted to go to top-ranked institutions (and came from larger programs), and thus ran into exceptionally stiff competition.
A result of the max-two rule described above, was that the 60 awardees in 2009 came from 44 different academic institutions and went to 45 different host organizations. Similar numbers were observed in 2010 and 2011. The following figure above illustrates the "cross-flow" achieved in the full set of 127 awards
The impact of the CIFellows Project cannot be measured well until the CIFellows have progressed further in their careers. However, a qualitative assessment by SRI International, completed in May 2011, concluded in part (emphasis added):
- The results of this evaluation suggest that the design of the program helped to provide the CIFellows with the foundations for productive careers as research leaders and principal investigators. Confirmation of this outcome will not be possible, however, until the subsequent careers of the CIFellows can be studied...
- The CIFellows Project appears to have achieved its short-term objectives of providing interim employment to early-career computing researchers, at least some of whom might have left the field without such support [based on interviews with the CIFellows].
Perhaps most importantly, the CIFellows have been afforded a unique level of independence and flexibility, as compared to their counterparts in traditional postdoctoral positions. As SRI International wrote in its assessment:
[There is evidence to support that] the CIFellows Project provides an experience that is more likely to prepare postdoctoral fellows for careers as independent, innovative researchers, in contrast to typical postdoctoral training.
...Individuals involved in the Project argued that most postdoctoral positions in science and engineering require the postdoc to conduct whatever research his or her mentor requests. For postdoctoral positions [that] are funded through a specific research grant, the postdoc is expected to perform the research activities required under the grant. In contrast, the CIFellows are expected to pursue independent research under the guidance of [their mentors]. The CIFellows themselves have reported that the support of the CIFellows Project enables them to act in a manner different from other postdoctoral fellows at their host institutions; they have far more independence and flexibility than even colleagues in their labs. Based on their responses to the survey, the CIFellows noted that they have been involved in a wide range of activities beyond conducting research, including:
- Authoring scholarly articles (95% of respondents)
- Collaborative research with colleagues at the host institution (77%)
- Collaborative research with students (71%)
- Advising students or junior staff (68%)
2009 Class of CIFellows
Zlatan Aksamija
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign
Research Interests: Computational nanoscience
CIFellowship Mentor: Irena Knezevic
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Wisconsin at Madison
Current Position: NSF Transformative Computational Science using Cyber Infrastructure (CITraCS) Postdoctoral Fellowship
Current Affiliation: University of Wisconsin at Madison
Sitaram Asur
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Ohio State University
Research Interests: Social computing, data mining, machine learning, information retrieval
CIFellowship Mentor: Bernardo Huberman
CIFellowship Host Organization: Hewlett Packard
Current Position: Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: Hewlett Packard
Paula Bach
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Pennsylvania State University
Research Interests: Human computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work.
CIFellowship Mentor: Michael Twidale
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Current Position: User Experience Researcher
Current Affiliation: Microsoft Research
Cindy L. Bethel
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of South Florida
Research Interests: Human-robot interaction, affective computing, social robotics, and cognitive science
CIFellowship Mentor: Brian Scassellati
CIFellowship Host Organization: Yale University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Mississippi State University
Carleton Bosley
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: New York University
Research Interests: Information assurance, security, privacy, cryptography
CIFellowship Mentor: Antonio Nicolosi
CIFellowship Host Organization: Stevens Institute of Technology
Current Position: Software Engineer
Current Affiliation: Google, New York
Quincy Brown
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Drexel University
Research Interests: Human computer interaction, mobile learning, intelligent supports in learning environments
CIFellowship Mentor: Allison Druin
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Maryland at College Park
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Bowie State University
Yuriy Brun
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Southern California
Research Interests: Software engineering with a particular focus on self-adaptation techniques
CIFellowship Mentor: David Notkin
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Washington
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow
Current Affiliation: University of Washington
Scott Coull
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Johns Hopkins University
Research Interests: Statistical analysis, data mining and machine learning
CIFellowship Mentor: Michael Reiter
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill
Current Position: Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: RedJack, LLC
Nicholas Diakopoulos
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Georgia Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Human computer interaction and information visualization
CIFellowship Mentor: Mor Naaman
CIFellowship Host Organization: Rutgers University
Current Position: Research Fellow
Current Affiliation: City University of New York and University of Bergen
Jeremy Fineman
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Algorithm design and analysis with a focus on parallel algorithms
CIFellowship Mentor: Guy Blelloch
CIFellowship Host Organization: Carnegie Mellon University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Georgetown University
Davide Fossati
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Illinois at Chicago
Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, data mining, intelligent tutoring systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Mark Guzdial
CIFellowship Host Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Current Position: Assistant Teaching Professor
Current Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University - Qatar
Xin Fu
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Florida
Research Interests: Computer architecture, hardware reliability and the impact of nano-scale technology on multi-core processors
CIFellowship Mentor: Sarita Adve
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Kansas
Ronald Garcia
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Indiana University
Research Interests: Programming languages
CIFellowship Mentor: Frank Pfenning
CIFellowship Host Organization: Carnegie Mellon University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of British Columbia
Ragib Hasan
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign
Research Interests: Cloud computing, computer security, secure provenance, trustworthy databases and file systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Randal Burns
CIFellowship Host Organization: Johns Hopkins University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Alabama at Birmingham
Michael Hines
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: State University of New York at Binghamton
Research Interests: Building and analyzing experimental, networked systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Jason Nieh
CIFellowship Host Organization: Columbia University
Current Position: Research Staff Member
Current Affiliation: IBM Research
Daniel C. Howe
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: New York University
Research Interests: Computation, literature, and education
CIFellowship Mentor: Andy van Dam
CIFellowship Host Organization: Brown University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: City University of Hong Kong
Yuho Jin
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Texas A&M University
Research Interests: Computer architecture, interconnection network, multicore architecture, parallel computing
CIFellowship Mentor: Timothy Pinkston
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Southern California
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: New Mexico State University
Jeffrey Johns
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Research Interests: Autonomous learning
CIFellowship Mentor: Ronald Parr
CIFellowship Host Organization: Duke University
Current Position: Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: US Department of Defense
Yong Joo Kil
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of California at Davis
Research Interests: Algorithms and visualization
CIFellowship Mentor: Marshall Bern
CIFellowship Host Organization: Xerox PARC
Current Position: Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: Xerox PARC
Dara Kusic
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Drexel University
Research Interests: Networks and operating systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Daniel Mosse
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Pittsburgh
Current Position: Application Developer
Current Affiliation: Coriell Institute for Medical Research
Benjamin Lee
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Harvard University
Research Interests: Scalable technologies, power-efficient computer architectures and high-performance applications
CIFellowship Mentor: Mark Horowitz
CIFellowship Host Organization: Stanford University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Duke University
Katrina Ligett
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Carnegie Mellon University
Research Interests: Online algorithms, algorithmic game theory, and data privacy
CIFellowship Mentor: Eva Tardos
CIFellowship Host Organization: Cornell University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: California Institute of Technology
Edgar J. Lobaton
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of California at Berkeley
Research Interests: Robotics, computer vision, and sensor networks
CIFellowship Mentor: Ron Alterovitz
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: North Carolina State University
Cristian Lumezanu
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Maryland at College Park
Research Interests: Networking, distributed systems, and security
CIFellowship Mentor: Nick Feamster
CIFellowship Host Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Current Position: Research Staff Member
Current Affiliation: NEC Laboratories
Niti Madan
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Utah
Research Interests: Computer architecture and systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Pradip Bose
CIFellowship Host Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Current Position: Product Development
Current Affiliation: Oracle
Victoria Manfredi
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Research Interests: Ad hoc networks, adaptive sensor networks, and machine learning
CIFellowship Mentor: Mark Crovella
CIFellowship Host Organization: Boston University
Current Position: Network Scientist
Current Affiliation: BBN Technologies
Damon McCoy
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Colorado at Boulder
Research Interests: Privacy and security
CIFellowship Mentor: Stefan Savage
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at San Diego
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: George Mason University
Andrew McPherson
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Pennsylvania
Research Interests: Electronically-augmented instruments and creative expression
CIFellowship Mentor: Youngmoo Kim
CIFellowship Host Organization: Drexel University
Current Position: Lecturer
Current Affiliation: Queen Mary, University of London
Miriah Meyer
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Utah
Research Interests: Data visualization
CIFellowship Mentor: Hanspeter Pfister
CIFellowship Host Organization: Harvard University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Utah
Lilyana Mihalkova
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Texas at Austin
Research Interests: Arfificial intellgence and machine learning
CIFellowship Mentor: Lise Getoor
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Maryland at College Park
Current Position: Researcher
Current Affiliation: Google, Santa Monica
Antonina Mitrofanova
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: New York University
Research Interests: Predictive modeling, bioinformatics, and computational biology
CIFellowship Mentor: Andrea Califano
CIFellowship Host Organization: Columbia University
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow
Current Affiliation: Columbia University
Deidra Morrison
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Northwestern University
Research Interests: Data visualization and social computing
CIFellowship Mentor: Juan E. Gilbert
CIFellowship Host Organization: Clemson University
Current Position: Freelancer and Visualization Developer
Ifeoma Nwogu
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: State University of New York at Buffalo
Research Interests: Image processing, biometrics, computational geometry, and large-scale databases
CIFellowship Mentor: Chris Brown
CIFellowship Host Organization: State University of New York at Rochester
Current Position: Research Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: State University of New York at Buffalo
Iris Oved
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Rutgers University
Research Interests: Arfificial intellgence
CIFellowship Mentor: Ian Fasel and Paul Cohen
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Arizona
Current Position: Director
Current Affiliation: The Paradox Center
Joyojeet Pal
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of California at Berkeley
Research Interests: Social computing and social informatics
CIFellowship Mentor: John Bennett
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Colorado
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Michigan
Jeff Phillips
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Duke University
Research Interests: Algorithms for data analysis
CIFellowship Mentor: Suresh Venkatasubramanian
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Utah
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Utah
Sally Pias
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: New Mexico State University
Research Interests: High-performance computing for biomolecular simulations
CIFellowship Mentor: Carlos Simmerling
CIFellowship Host Organization: State University of New York at Stony Brook
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
Anna Pyayt
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Washington
Research Interests: Biomedicine and computer architerctures
CIFellowship Mentor: Olav Solgaard
CIFellowship Host Organization: Stanford University
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow
Current Affiliation: Stanford University
Emilee Rader
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Michigan
Research Interests: Understanding individual - , group - , and system level influences on information sharing in the cloud
CIFellowship Mentor: Darren Gergle
CIFellowship Host Organization: Northwestern University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Michigan State University
Ioan Raicu
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Chicago
Research Interests: Scientific computing, high performance computing, and data-intensive scalable computing
CIFellowship Mentor: Alok Choudhary
CIFellowship Host Organization: Northwestern University
Current Affiliation: Assistant Professor at Illinois Institute of Technology
Leena Razzaq
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Research Interests: Human computer interaction, human learning, and user modeling
CIFellowship Mentor: Beverly Woolf
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Current Position: Lecturer
Current Affiliation: University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Lev Reyzin
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Yale University
Research Interests: Theory and practice of machine learning
CIFellowship Mentor: John Langford
CIFellowship Host Organization: Yahoo! Research
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Illinois at Chicago
Guy Rothblum
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Theoretical computer science and computer security
CIFellowship Mentor: Boaz Barak
CIFellowship Host Organization: Princeton University
Current Position: Researcher
Current Affiliation: Microsoft Research
Sushmita Roy
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of New Mexico
Research Interests: Computational biology, machine learning
CIFellowship Mentor: Aviv Regev
CIFellowship Host Organization: Broad Institute, Cambridge, MA
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Wisconsin at Madison
Linda Sellie
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of New Mexico
Research Interests: Systems and biomedicine
CIFellowship Mentor: Aviv Regev
CIFellowship Host Organization: Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
Current Position: Part-time Instructor/Researcher
Current Affiliation: Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Stelios Sidiroglou
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Columbia University
Research Interests: Systems, security, and programming languages
CIFellowship Mentor: Martin Rinard
CIFellowship Host Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Current Position: Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: Massachusettes Institute of Technology
David Soloveichik
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: California Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Molecular programming
CIFellowship Mentor: Georg Seelig
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Washington
Current Position: Systems Biology Fellow
Current Affiliation: University of California at San Francisco
Veselin Stoyanov
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Cornell University
Research Interests: Machine learning and computational linguistics
CIFellowship Mentor: Jason Eisner
CIFellowship Host Organization: Johns Hopkins University
Current Position: Assistant Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: Johns Hopkins University
Julia Stoyanovich
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Columbia University
Research Interests: Modeling and data analytics
CIFellowship Mentor: Susan B. Davidson
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Current Position: Visiting Scholar
Current Affiliation: University of Pennsylvania
Cui Tao
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Brigham Young University
Research Interests: Ontologies, standard terminologies, and the semantic web
CIFellowship Mentor: Christopher G. Chute
CIFellowship Host Organization: Mayo Clinic
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Mayo Clinic
Lydia Tapia
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Texas A&M University
Research Interests: Motion planning, robotics, computational biology, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality
CIFellowship Mentor: Ron Elber
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Texas at Austin
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of New Mexico
Duygu Ucar
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: The Ohio State University
Research Interests: Scientific data mining and computational biology
CIFellowship Mentor: Kai Tan
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Iowa
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow
Current Affiliation: Stanford University
Stephen Voida
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Georgia Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Human computer interaction and information systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Gloria Mark
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Irvine
Current Position: Assistant Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: University of Californi at Irvine
David Van Horn
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Brandeis University
Research Interests: Reliable software construction
CIFellowship Mentor: Matthias Felleisen
CIFellowship Host Organization: Northeastern University
Current Position: Research Assistant Fellow
Current Affiliation: Northeastern University
Lawton Verner
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Johns Hopkins University
Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and vision
CIFellowship Mentor: Simon DiMaio
CIFellowship Host Organization: Intuitive Surgical
Current Position: Research Engineer
Current Affiliation: Intuitive Surgical
Virginia Vassilevska Williams
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Carnegie Mellon University
Research Interests: Theoretical computer science and computational social choice
CIFellowship Mentor: Satish Rao
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Current Position: Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate
Current Affiliation: University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University
Ilya Wagner
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Michigan
Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and vision
CIFellowship Mentor: Shih-Lien Lu
CIFellowship Host Organization: Intel Corporation
Current Position: Research Engineer
Current Affiliation: Intel Corporation
Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Pennsylvania
Research Interests: Machine learning, algorithmic aspects of economics, and social computing
CIFellowship Mentor: Yiling Chen
CIFellowship Host Organization: Harvard University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of California at Los Angeles
Weijun Xiao
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Rhode Island
Research Interests: Computer system and architecture, distributed systems, and high performance computing
CIFellowship Mentor: David J. Lilja
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Minnesota
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Virginia Tech
Liangjun Zhang
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research Interests: Path planning, visual, and control algorithms for autonomous vehicles
CIFellowship Mentor: Jean-Claude Latombe
CIFellowship Host Organization: Stanford University
Current Position: Research and Development
Current Affiliation: Honda Research Institute
2010 Class of CIFellows
Jae-wook Ahn
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Pittsburgh
Research Interests: Information retrieval, human-computer interaction, and (adaptive) social network information visualization
CIFellowship Mentor: Ben Shneiderman
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Maryland at College Park
Alvin AuYoung
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of California at San Diego
Research Interests: Distributed systems, with a focus on resource allocation and scheduling
CIFellowship Mentor: Partha Ranganathan
CIFellowship Host Organization: Hewlett-Packard Labs
Aruna Balasubramanian
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Research Interests: Systems and networking
CIFellowship Mentor: David Wetherall
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Washington
Robert Bocchino
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign
Research Interests: Programming language design, type theory, formal verification, and concurrency
CIFellowship Mentor: Jonathan Aldrich
CIFellowship Host Organization: Carnegie Mellon University
Lillian Chang
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Carnegie Mellon University
Research Interests: Control, human motion simulation, humanoid robotics, and manipulation
CIFellowship Mentor: Dieter Fox and Joshua Smith
CIFellowship Host Organization: Intel Corporation and University of Washington
Current Title: Researcher
Current Affiliation: Intel Corporation
Yanhua Chen
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Wayne State University
Research Interests: Data mining, machine learning, and biomedical/health informatics
CIFellowship Mentor: Peter X.-K. Song
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Michigan
Marc Chiarini
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Tufts University
Research Interests: Provenance-aware troubleshooting, performance analysis, system configuration management, and tools for system adminstration
CIFellowship Mentor: Margo Seltzer
CIFellowship Host Organization: Harvard University
David Choffnes
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Northwestern University
Research Interests: Practical approaches for improving Internet realiability and performance
CIFellowship Mentor: Tom Anderson
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Washington
Current Affiliation: University of Washington
Tamara Clegg
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Georgia Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Educational technology
CIFellowship Mentor: Allison Druin
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Maryland at College Park
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Maryland at
College Park
Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Texas at Austin
Research Interests: Formal methods, tools, and algorithms for the verification, analysis, synthesis, and repair of software systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Rajeev Alur
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Xiaoning Ding
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: The Ohio State University
Research Interests: Operating systems, computer architecture, distributed systems, and database systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Phillip Gibbons
CIFellowship Host Organization: Intel Labs - Pittsburgh
Current Position: Assistant Professor - Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: Intel Labs
David Doty
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Iowa State University
Research Interests: Theoretical computer science, particularly algorithmic information theory and computational complexity
CIFellowship Mentor: Erik Winfree
CIFellowship Host Organization: California Institute of Technology
Jenny Rose Finkel
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Stanford University
Research Interests: Natural language proccessing, machine learning, and probabilistic graphical models
CIFellowship Mentor: Michael Collins
CIFellowship Host Organization: Columbia University
Current Affiliation: Columbia University
Current Position: Postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University
S. Dov Gordon
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Maryland at College Park
Research Interests: Theoretical cryptography and practicial applications of secure computation in modern computing environments
CIFellowship Mentor: Tal Malkin
CIFellowship Host Organization: Columbia University
Current Title: Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: Telcordia
Elena Grigorescu
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Theoretical aspects of computer science, particulary property testing, sublinear algorithms, codes, and complexity theory
CIFellowship Mentor: Chris Peikert and Santosh Vempala
CIFellowship Host Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Purdue University
Haryadi S. Gunawi
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Wisconsin at Madison
Research Interests: Cloud reliability and cloud storage
CIFellowship Mentor: Joseph M. Hellerstein
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Chicago
David Harmon
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Columbia University
Research Interests: Physical simulation, contact mechanics, numerical methods, modern geometry, and computing animation
CIFellowship Mentor: Denis Zorin
CIFellowship Host Organization: New York University
Timothy Havens
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Missouri
Research Interests: Pattern recognition and machine learning, with an emphasis on classification and clustering in large-scale and hetereogenous data
CIFellowship Mentor: Anil Jain
CIFellowship Host Organization: Michigan Technological University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Michigan Technological University
Michael Hay
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Research Interests: Developing practical tools for privacy-preserving data analysis
CIFellowship Mentor: Johannes Gehrke
CIFellowship Host Organization: Cornell University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Colgate University
Houman Homayoun
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of California at Irvine
Research Interests: Computer architecture including CAD and VLSI circuit design
CIFellowship Mentor: Dean M. Tullsen
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at San Diego
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: George Mason University
Daniel C. Howe
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: New York University
Research Interests: Computation, literature, and education
CIFellowship Mentor: Andy van Dam
CIFellowship Host Organization: Brown University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: City University of Hong Kong
Shaili Jain
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Harvard University
Research Interests: Incentives in peer production and crowdsourcing systems, network economics, mechanism design, and contract theory
CIFellowship Mentor: Joan Feigenbaum
CIFellowship Host Organization: Yale University
Saket Joshi
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Tufts University
Research Interests: Artificial Intelligence, particularly at the intersection of decision theoretic planning, knowledge representation, and machine learning
CIFellowship Mentor: Prasad Tadepalli
CIFellowship Host Organization: Oregon State University
Thomas R. Kiehl
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Research Interests: Computational neuroscience
CIFellowship Mentor: Scott Tenenbaum
CIFellowship Host Organization: State University of New York at Albany
Samantha Kleinberg
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: New York University
Research Interests: Causality, inference from complex data, and biomedical informatics
CIFellowship Mentor: George Hripcsak
CIFellowship Host Organization: Columbia University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Stevens Institute of Technology
J. Zico Kolter
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Stanford University
Research Interests: Applying machine learning and control techniques to problems in energy and sustainability
CIFellowship Mentor: Russ Tedrake
CIFellowship Host Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Carnegie Mellon University
Lukas Kroc
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Cornell University
Research Interests: New techniques and approaches for solving hard combinatorial problems, especially with application in artificial intelligence
CIFellowship Mentor: Allon Percus
CIFellowship Host Organization: Claremont Graduate University
Current Title: Research Scientist
Current Affiliation: SpaceX
Vijay S. Kumar
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: The Ohio State University
Research Interests: High-performance computing, distributed systems, performance modeling and evaluation, and big data
CIFellowship Mentor: Jay Wylie
CIFellowship Host Organization: Hewlett Packard Labs
Current Title: Researcher
Current Affiliation: GE Global Research
Homin K. Lee
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Columbia University
Research Interests: Computational learning theory, combinatorics, and computational complexity
CIFellowship Mentor: Adam Klivans
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Texas at Austin
Current Title: Senior Data Scientist
Current Affiliation: Bundle
Yuliya Lierler
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Texas at Austin
Research Interests: Artificial intelligence, particulary in the areas of knowledge representation, automated reasoning, declarative problem solving, and natural language understanding
CIFellowship Mentor: Miroslaw Truszczynski
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Kentucky
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Nebraska at Omaha
Xiaojuan Ma
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Princeton University
Research Interests: Augmented human-human and human-robot interactions
CIFellowship Mentor: Jodi Forlizzi
CIFellowship Host Organization: Carnegie Mellon University
Amon Millner
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Human computer interaction, tangible user interface design, community organizing, and the learning sciences
CIFellowship Mentor: Lynn Andrea Stein
CIFellowship Host Organization: Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering
Arifa Nisar
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Northwestern University
Research Interests: High performance I/O systems, parallel I/O, and file systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Ethan Miller
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Santa Cruz
Amit Pande
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Iowa State University
Research Interests: Various aspects of multimedia systems including compression, communications, security, and architectures
CIFellowship Mentor: Prasant Mohapatra
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Davis
Sharoda A. Paul
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Pennsylvania State University
Research Interests: Human-computer interaction, computer supported cooperative work, social computing, and healthcare informatics
CIFellowship Mentor: Ed Chi and Peter Pirolli
CIFellowship Host Organization: Google and Palo Alto Research Center
Current Title: Collaboration researcher at GE Global Research
Current Affiliation: GE Global Research
Brian Price
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Brigham Young University
Research Interests: Computer vision
CIFellowship Mentor: Scott Cohen
CIFellowship Host Organization: Adobe Systems
Current Position: Researcher at Adobe Systems
Current Affiliation: Adobe Systems
Dustin Reishus
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Southern California
Research Interests: Self-assembly and self-organization with emphasis on the theoretical foundations, fundamental limits, and potential applications of self-organizing systems
CIFellowship Mentor: Nikolaus Correll
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Colorado
Ricky J. Sethi
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of California at Riverside
Research Interests: Machine learning, computer vision, social computing, collaborative intelligence, financial modelling, science learning, and physics education research
CIFellowship Mentor: Jennifer Wortman Vaughan and Yolanda Gil
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Los Angeles and University of Southern California, Information Science Institute
Current Affiliation: University of California, Los Angeles
Saurabh Srivastava
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Maryland at College Park
Research Interests: Theory and tools for program synthesis and program verification
CIFellowship Mentor: Rastislav Bodik
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Cornell University
Research Interests: Cryptography and complexity, with focus on building theoretical foundations and techniques to secure protocols in the Internet, i.e., concurrent security
CIFellowship Mentor: Yevgeniy Dodis
CIFellowship Host Organization: New York University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: State University of New York at Rochester
Erin Walker
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Carnegie Mellon University
Research Interests: Adaptive technology for influencing student learning from collaboration
CIFellowship Mentor: Winslow Burleson
CIFellowship Host Organization: Arizona State University
Current Position: Assistant Professor (effective winter 2013)
Current Affiliation: Arizona State University
Susan P. Wyche
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Georgia Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Research focuses on human-computer interaction, interaction design, and cultural studies of technology
CIFellowship Mentor: Steven Harrison
CIFellowship Host Organization: Virginia Tech
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: Michigan State University
Yinglong Xia
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Southern California
Research Interests: High performance computing, parallel algorithm design, and their applications in sparse solvers, graphical models, and machine learning problems
CIFellowship Mentor: Anshul Gupta
CIFellowship Host Organization: IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Yang Xiang
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Kent State University
Research Interests: Biomedical informatics, computational biology, algorithms, graph theory, data mining, databases, and networks
CIFellowship Mentor: Kun Huang
CIFellowship Host Organization: The Ohio State University
Cem Yuksel
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Texas A&M University
Research Interests: Computer graphics
CIFellowship Mentor: Doug James
CIFellowship Host Organization: Cornell University
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: University of Utah
Ting Zhu
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Minnesota
Research Interests: Energy-aware computing, embedded systems, network protocols and architecture, mobile computing, smart-grid, security, and wireless sensor networks
CIFellowship Mentor: Don Towsley
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Current Position: Assistant Professor
Current Affiliation: State University of New Yorkat Binghamton
Caroline Ziemkiewicz
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Research Interests: Information visualization for structuring a user's thinking process
CIFellowship Mentor: David Laidlaw
CIFellowship Host Organization: Brown University
Current Affiliation: Aptima
Current Title: Associate research engineer at Aptima
2011 Class of CIFellows
Amin Ansari
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Michigan
Research Interests: Computer architecture with a focus on reliability, low-power design, and single-thread performance
CIFellowship Mentor: Josep Torrellas
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ferhat Ay
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Florida
Research Interests: Bioinformatics, computational biology, epigenomics, and regulatory genomics
CIFellowship Mentor: William Noble
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Washington
Selina Chu
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Southern California
Research Interests: Machine learning, data mining, audio signal processing, and pattern recognition
CIFellowship Mentor: Thomas Dietterich
CIFellowship Host Organization: Oregon State University
Shay Cohen
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Carnegie Mellon University
Research Interests: Computational linguistics and machine learning
CIFellowship Mentor: Michael Collins
CIFellowship Host Organization: Columbia University
Travis Deyle
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Georgia Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Novel sensor and actuator technologies, robotics, and wireless power harvesting
CIFellowship Mentor: Matt Reynolds
CIFellowship Host Organization: Duke University
David Feil-Seifer
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Southern California
Research Interests: Socially assistive robotics algorithms, systems for post-stroke rehabilitation, elder care, and therapeutic interaction.
CIFellowship Mentor: Brian Scassellati
CIFellowship Host Organization: Yale University
Lakshmi Ganesh
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Cornell University
Research Interests: Scaling reliability and availability in large-scale distributed storage
CIFellowship Mentor: Mike Dahlin
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Texas at Austin
Jonathan Huang
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Carnegie Mellon University
Research Interests: Probabilistic reasoning and learning algorithms
CIFellowship Mentor: Leonidas Guibas
CIFellowship Host Organization: Stanford University
Mohit Tiwari
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of California at Santa Barbara
Research Interests: Program analysis, computer architecture, and system software
CIFellowship Mentor: Krste Asanovic
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Hemanta Maji
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Research Interests: Cryptography with emphasis on lower bounding techniques
CIFellowship Mentor: Amit Sahai
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Los Angeles
David Mimno
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Research Interests: Extracting meaning from large document collections and topic modeling
CIFellowship Mentor: David Blei
CIFellowship Host Organization: Princeton University
Ankur Moitra
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Research Interests: Algorithms, learning, and convex geometry
CIFellowship Mentor: Avi Wigderson
CIFellowship Host Organization: Institute for Advanced Study
Rohan Murty
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Harvard University
Research Interests: Networking and distributed systems.
CIFellowship Mentor: Hari Balakrishnan
CIFellowship Host Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Joshua Reich
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Columbia University
Research Interests: Software defined networking, virtualization, cloud computing, and green computing
CIFellowship Mentor: Jennifer Rexford
CIFellowship Host Organization: Princeton University
Suchi Saria
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Stanford University
Research Interests: Data-driven solutions to improve the delivery and consumption of health care
CIFellowship Mentor: Kenneth Mandl
CIFellowship Host Organization: Harvard Medical School / Children Hospital Boston
Erin Solovey
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Tufts University
Research Interests: Human-computer interaction, including brain-computer interfaces, tangible interaction, and reality-based interaction
CIFellowship Mentor: Missy Cummings
CIFellowship Host Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Ian Stevenson
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Northwestern University
Research Interests: Improving statistical models of neurons in primary visual cortex as they respond to natural scenes
CIFellowship Mentor: Bruno Olshausen
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Kalliopi Tsota
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Purdue University
Research Interests: VLSI computer-aided design, reconfigurable computing, and numerical methods for large-scale optimization.
CIFellowship Mentor: Jason Cong
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of California at Los Angeles
Lirong Xia
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: Duke University
Research Interests: Computing at microeconomics.
CIFellowship Mentor: David Parkes
CIFellowship Host Organization: Harvard University
Hong-Sheng Zhou
Ph.D.-Granting College/University: University of Connecticut
Research Interests: Cryptography, both classical and quantum
CIFellowship Mentor: Jonathan Katz
CIFellowship Host Organization: University of Maryland at College Park
Feedback from our CIFellows
Feedback from hiring committees
Success Stories
Together, the cross-flow and independence have contributed to exceptional experiences for the CIFellows and their mentors, furthering the careers of both in most cases. For example, Hanspeter Pfister, a graphics/visualization researcher at Harvard University, is mentoring 2009 CIFellow Miriah Meyer from the University of Utah. Hanspeter says that the CIFellows Project allowed Miriah (and him) to explore a new research area, for which they would have been unlikely to obtain grant support (given the initial stage of the project). The area in which they are working is visualizing data that do not have any inherent spatial characteristics, specifically genomics visualization. If one is visualizing a brain image, or a fluid flow simulation, it is pretty obvious how to "lay it out," because the data are inherently spatial. By contrast, there exists a new challenge - a "design" challenge - in how best to lay out data that lack inherent spatial information, and that's what Hanspeter and Miriah are exploring.
Similarly, Yiling Chen, an economic mechanisms expert at Harvard, mentored CIFellow Jennifer Wortman Vaughan from the University of Pennsylvania during the 2009-10 academic year. Jennifer earned her Ph.D. from the group of Michael Kearns – a computer scientist and expert on machine learning and game theory renown for his work on the connections between networks and human behavior. Yiling, too, is effusive in her praise of CIFellows. Jennifer departed the CIFellows Project at the end of her first year, assuming a faculty position at UCLA this past fall – and, in an interesting example of cross-flow, she immediately took on a 2010 CIFellow, Ricky Sethi. Meantime, Yiling was in the derby for a second CIFellow in 2010, and she would likely enter it again this fall should this Project be funded.
It is also worth noting that Hanspeter and Yiling are both new faculty members. They each had some previous experience under their belts (Hanspeter at Mitsubishi Research and Yiling at Yahoo! Research), but these are cases in which the CIFellows Project has paired an outstanding new graduate with an outstanding new faculty member and achieved a really excellent result.
Finally, Sitaram Asur, a CIFellow working at HP Labs under Bernardo Huberman, made tremendous progress on the development of a new algorithm that uses Twitter to gauge real-time interest in movies and accurately predict how they will perform at the box office on opening weekend. The work received substantial publicity in the popular press, including the Los Angeles Times. Sitaram's outstanding contributions prompted HP Labs to hire him as a permanent Researcher effective summer 2010.
These accomplishments serve to illustrate how the CIFellows Project is having a broader impact for our computing research community.
