Microsoft Research Awards New Faculty Fellowships for 2005
In an effort to help outstanding new faculty buck the trend of shrinking research
dollars, Microsoft Research University Relations, a division of Microsoft Research
established a program to identify and support exceptional first-, second-, and
third-year professors whose research will substantially advance computer science
research. Each winner will receive a $200,000 cash grant to support their work.
Frédo Durand, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, one of this year’s winners, mixes teaching computer
graphics and computer science at MIT, with advanced research in realistic image
synthesis and computational photography.
He says the grant will allow him to push the envelop in his explorations of
how humans perceive their visual environment and what differentiates a compelling
picture from an ordinary one.
Durand told Microsoft Research that he loves his work in computer graphics because
it's an interdisciplinary field that provides a "wonderful opportunity"
to broaden his horizons in math, physics, psychology and the visual arts. But
he argues that his work is not just academic. "Beyond the computer graphics
community, I think that the impact of my work will lie at the interface between
vision and graphics," Durand told Microsoft Research. "… our
work on computational photography is at the convergence of computer vision and
computer graphics, with exciting cross-fertilization between these two fields."
The other winners Microsoft Research announced this week (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2005/may05/05-25FacultyAwards.asp)
were:
Subhash Khot, a first-year assistant professor in the College of Computing
at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Khot’s research
tackles fundamental questions regarding which problems can and cannot be solved
quickly on a computer. The questions he addresses in his work often have deep
connections to diverse areas in mathematics, logic, cryptography and computer
science.
Dan Klein, a first-year assistant professor in the Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences department at the University of California, Berkeley.
Klein’s area of interest is natural language processing, which involves
getting computers to analyze and understand human languages. His research focuses
specifically on designing systems that learn language in an unsupervised way
by automatically detecting linguistic structure.
Radhika Nagpal, a first-year assistant professor of computer science in the
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University
(MA). Her research interest is in engineering self-organizing, self-repairing
systems, using inspiration from biology, and in better understanding robust
collective behavior in biological systems.
Wei Wang, an assistant professor in her third year of teaching at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A faculty member in the Department
of Computer Science, Wang pursues research in the area of data mining, a branch
of computer science that focuses on finding patterns within vast data collections.
She specializes in bioinformatics applications.