Eric Mankin
June 19, 2007 — Professor Ramesh Govindan will assume the chairmanship of the 36-year-old Viterbi School Department of Computer Science on an interim basis effective July 1, Dean Yannis Yortsos has announced.
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Govindan: interim appointment begins July 1
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Appointment of a new chair to a full 5-year term will take place in coming months, Yortsos added.
Yortsos praised outgoing chair Professor Gérard Medioni in making the announcement. "Gerard has continued a great tradition at Viterbi CS," he said, "and has worked diligently to uphold the department’s position among the elite CS Departments in the country."
Yortsos singled out Medioni's role in the creation and approval of new B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science with emphasis in games, among the first such degrees ever offered by a research university, and the growth of the GamePipe Laboratory.
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Medioni: achievements praised
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"The result was a striking upsurge in enrollments," Yortsos said, "and national attention on Viterbi CS as a leader in the field.”
Govindan joined USC in 1994, beginning at the Viterbi School's Information Sciences Institute, where he worked until 2001, then going to UC Berkeley for one year before returning to join the USC department of computer science. In January, 2007 he was one of five Viterbi faculty promoted to the rank of full professor.
Govindan heads USC's Embedded Networks Laboratory, which is or has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Intel, DARPA, NASA and the Okawa Foundation. He is also a senior researcher at the NSF-sponsored Center for Embedded Networked Systems, a large research initiative to advance the state of networked sensing and their use in scientific applications.
Ramesh Govindan received his B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras in 1987, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989 and 1992 respectively. Prior to joining USC, he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Communications Research in Morristown, NJ from 1992-1994.
The University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering Department of Computer Science was established in 1971 by then-dean Zohrab Kaprielian, with George Bekey as chair.
