August 19, 2008 — Four Viterbi School engineering faculty in computer science and electrical engineering have won 2008 IBM Faculty Awards.
The award recipients are: Barry Boehm and Leana Golubchik of the Computer Science Department, and Murali Annavaram and Shri Narayanan of the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering.
The IBM Faculty Awards are a competitive worldwide program intended to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research and development. They also serve to promote courseware and curriculum innovation to stimulate growth in disciplines that are strategic to IBM.
Winners are selected for their outstanding reputation and unusual promise for contributions in their field. Award candidates are nominated by an IBM employee with common interests who will serve as a liaison for the collaboration.
Barry Boehm is co-director of the USC
Center for Software and Systems Engineering and is internationally known for developing the spiral model of software development. His award is primarily for research in integrating his value-based software engineering processes with IBM's next generation of the Rational Unified Process (RUP), which also integrates agile methods with traditional software processes.
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Barry Boehm
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Four computer science PhD students have worked on this and also served as IBM interns: LiGuo Huang, now an assistant professor at SMU; Ye Yang, now an associate professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Monvorath Phongpaibul, about to return to professor at Thammasat University in Bangkok; and Supannika Koolmanojwong, now completing her PhD in the process integration area.
Boehm is working primarily with Walker Royce, now a vice president at IBM-Rational, Per Kroll, an author of a couple of books on agile extensions to the RUP, and Sunita Chulani, a Viterbi School PhD graduate now at IBM Watson. His research also involves expressing the resulting processes in the Eclipse Process Framework and experimenting with it in his computer science courses.
Leana Golubchik’s research interests include computer systems modeling and performance evaluation, Internet-based computing and multimedia storage systems.
Her award research will quantify the reliability and performance of web services. These are self-contained applications which are typically invoked across the network. Examples include airline reservation systems, inventory systems, credit check services, data collection services, medical records access systems, and many more. Such systems are increasingly pervasive and critical to the economy.
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Leana Golubchik
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Currently an associate professor in the Viterbi School Computer Science Department, she has received numerous awards, including the IBM Faculty Award, the Faculty Award from the Okawa Foundation, the NSF CAREER award, the IBM Doctoral Fellowship, and the NSF Doctoral Fellowship.
She is a past Chair and Vice-Chair of ACM SIGMETRICS (2001-2005), as well as a member of its Board of Directors (1999-2001, 2005-2007). She was a guest co-editor for special issues of the
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, the
Parallel Computing journal, and the
International Journal of Intelligent Systems. She was a co-chair of HotMetrics 2009, a general chair for SIGMETRICS 2007, a program co-chair of the 2001 Joint ACM SIGMETRICS/Performance Conference and MIS'99, as well as a program committee member of numerous conferences.
Murali Annavaram’s award is for his work with novel processor architectures enabled by the 3D stacking of several separate chips that are combined to make an integrated single unit. As chip fabrication technologies continue to scale to smaller dimensions, unavoidable device manufacturing variations increasingly and adversely affect their performance. His research aims at improving the predictability and reliability of processors as their feature dimensions approach the nanoscale.
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Murail Annavaram
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He is an assistant professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering with four patents pending in microarchitecture and variation-tolerant designs. He came to USC from the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA. Prior to his work at Nokia, Annavaram was a senior researcher at the Intel Microarchitecture Research Lab in Austin, Texas.
Shri Narayanan's work explores human-centric speech and audio processing that integrates knowledge-driven and data-driven approaches. His research is concerned with the tremendous amount of information, in diverse forms and modalities, that is generated today, with speech and audio playing a significant part.
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Shri Narayanan
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The work addresses a critical need not only for discovering and reconciling the rich patterns in these data for aiding analysis, and decision-making, but in communicating with end users in personalized ways. His approach uses both mathematically principled engineering solutions as well as human-centric designs for ensuring desirable user experiences.
Shri Narayanan, professor of electrical engineering, computer science,
linguistics and psychology and the Andrew J. Viterbi Professor of Engineering, directs the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL). He has received many professional and technical awards and honors for his work, and is a prolific, highly cited author who has greatly influenced the research of others.
