50 Years of Innovation
Since 1965, our department has been an academic leader in the study and science of computing. Cornell has made groundbreaking achievements in distributed computing systems, information retrieval, computational theory, trustworthy computing, artificial intelligence, social networking, and computer graphics. What will we be doing over the next five decades? To find out, visit our website at cs.cornell.edu
Before Computer Science
Dick Conway and Bill Maxwell of Industrial Engineering develop CORC on the Burroughs B-220 and Control Data 1604 to provide a simpler language than Fortran or Algol. CORC can be described on a single page. CORC is taught beginning in the Fall 1962.
The '60s
1965
The Department of Computer Science (CS) is formed, with Juris Hartmanis as Chair.
Gerard Salton, “the father of information retrieval”, brings his SMART system to Cornell from Harvard. His work with SMART (System for the Mechanical Analysis and Retrieval of Text) forms the basis for 35 years of research in IR, and lays the conceptual foundation for Google and other modern search Engines.
Juris Hartmanis publishes the paper that starts the field of computational complexity, with Dick Stearns: On the computational complexity of algorithms, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 117 (1965), 285-306. Later, they receive the ACM Turing Award for this work.
CS produces its first PhD, Joel Sturman, a transfer from Electrical Engineering.
1966
Juris Hartmanis and Dick Stearns publish the first of many influential texts by CS: Algebraic Structure: Theory of Sequential Machines (Prentice Hall).
1967
Dick Conway, Bill Maxwell, and Louis Miller publish the classic text Theory of Scheduling (Addison-Wesley).
1968
Gerry Salton publishes the classic IR text Automatic Information Organization and Retrieval (McGraw-Hill).
1969
Gerry Salton becomes Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM (Association for Computer Machinery) —the first of many influential editorial positions held by members of CS.
John Hopcroft and Jeff Ullman publish their classic text Formal Languages and Their Relation to Automata (Addison-Wesley).
The '70s
1970
Dick Conway's group develops PL/C, a subset of PL/1, designed for instructional purposes. The PL/C compiler is distributed to 100 institutions and instantly becomes the standard instructional PL/1 compiler.
1971
Gerry Salton becomes Department Chair.
Faculty members Jim Bunch and Jorge More win Householder Prizes for their PhD theses in numerical analysis.
David Gries publishes the first text on compiler construction: Compiler Construction for Digital Computers (John Wiley & Sons).
Gerry Salton publishes The SMART Retrieval System Experiments in Automatic Document Processing (Prentice Hall).
1973.
CS grows to 15 faculty members
Juris Hartmanis becomes the founding editor of Springer-Verlag's LNCS series (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) and continues as editor for 30+ years. LNCS now publishes 600+ volumes annually.
David Gries becomes the founding Editor of Springer-Verlag's Text and Monograph Series (TMCS). He still edits the series, along with Fred Schneider.
John Hopcroft becomes Managing Editor of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Journal on Scientific Computing.
Dick Conway and David Gries publish the first programming text to deal with issues of correctness, like loop invariants: An Introduction to Programming, a Structured Approach Using PL/1 and PL/C (Winthrop).
1974
Al Aho, John Hopcroft, and Jeff Ullman publish their classic text The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (Addison- Wesley).
John Dennis and Jorge More publish their landmark paper Quasi-Newton Methods, Motivation and Theory, which changes the game of non-linear equation-solving through the use of approximate Jacobian matrices.
1975
Gerry Salton's new book, Dynamic Information Library Processing (Prentice Hall), receives the Best Information Science Book of 1975 from the American Society for Information Science (ASIS).
Bob Constable starts the development of PL/CV. Developed over nine years, PL/CV eventually results in Nuprl, a system for mathematical reasoning which is still widely used today. Thirty PhD students learned how to do research using PL/CV and Nuprl.
1976
Dick Conway becomes series editor for Winthrop Publishers.
Dick Conway and David Gries publish several variations of their intro to programming text.
John Dennis and Charlie Van Loan procure HP-67 programmable calculators which make it possible to execute a stored program—a departmental first.
1977
Juris Hartmanis becomes Department Chair for the second time.
CS acquires its first computer, a PDP 11/60.
David Gries and student Susan Owicki receive the ACM Programming Languages and Systems Award for An axiomatic proof technique for parallel programs (Acta Informatica 6, 1976) ). Based on Susan's PhD thesis, this paper introduces interference freedom as the basis for proving parallel programs correct.
1978
CS introduces two undergrad degrees: BA in Arts & Sciences and BS in Engineering.
Bob Constable and student Mike O'Donnell publish A Programming Logic (Winthrop).
1979
Cornell adopts the Cornell Program Synthesizer for instruction in programming. Tim Teitelbaum and student Tom Reps develop this precursor to today's integrated development environments (IDEs) for teaching a subset of PL/1 on Terak microcomputers. In 1980-1981, the Cornell Program Synthesizer is distributed to 80 institutions.
Gerry Salton becomes Chair of ACM SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval).
The '80s
1980
CS obtains a $2.6 million, 5-year CER (Coordinated Experimental Research) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), a major step in increasing its presence in experimental computing.
1981
David Gries publishes The Science of Programming (Springer-Verlag), which brings ideas on the formal development of programs to the undergrad level.
1982
David Gries becomes Department Chair.
CS grows to 20 faculty.
The 1982 National Research Council (NRC) Assessment of Research Doctorate CS programs places Cornell fifth out of 58 departments.
Gerry Salton receives the first ACM SIGIR Award for outstanding contributions to information retrieval.
Bob Constable, with students Johnson and Eichenlaub, publishes a book on their verifier, Introduction to the PL/CV Programming Logic (Springer-Verlag).
1983
CS begins to move into interdisciplinary work, helping to start a new graduate field of "manufacturing systems engineering".
David Gries receives a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Tom Reps receives the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD thesis, Generating Language-Based Environments (MIT Press).
ACM SIGIR establishes the Gerard Salton Award to honor those who have made significant, sustained, and continuing contributions to research in information retrieval. The first recipient is Gerry Salton himself.
Tom Coleman publishes Large Sparse Numerical Optimization (Springer-Verlag LNCS 165).
Charlie Van Loan and Gene Golub publish Matrix Computation (Johns Hopkins Press).
1984
The CS computing facility serves as the gateway for the entire university to Arpanet and CSnet. CS is instrumental in the university's Project Ezra to increase the use of computers on campus, which is funded by an $8 million grant from IBM.
Use of the Cornell Synthesizer Generator grows to more than 330 institutions.
1985
CS receives its second five-year CER grant from the NSF
The Cornell Theory Center, founded in 1984, becomes one of four NSF supercomputer centers. IBM provides an additional $30 million in hardware, software, and staff.
Ken Birman develops the first version of Isis, the first system for fault-tolerance in distributed systems.
David Gries receives the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) Education Award for his contributions to computer science education.
Joe Halpern receives a best paper award at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
1986
CS moves to Upson Hall, and adds 22,000 square feet of space.
John Hopcroft shares the ACM Turing Prize with Bob Tarjan "for fundamental achievements in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures". The work was Bob Tarjan's PhD thesis at Stanford, advised by Hopcroft. Their major achievement was a linear algorithm for graph planarity testing, and many more ideas on algorithm design and data structures came out of their collaboration.
Former PhD student Kurt Mehlhorn and frequent visitor Wolfgang Paul receive the German Leibniz Prize.
The Nuprl work reaches a milestone: Bob Constable and his students publish Implementing Mathematics with the Nuprl Proof Development System (Prentice Hall).
David Gries publishes the first of five years of Taulbee Surveys, which give data on PhD-granting departments. The five years of surveys have an almost 100% completion rate.
1987
John Hopcroft becomes Department Chair.
CS grows to 25 faculty members and 200 computers.
David Gries chairs the Computer Science Board (the precursor to the Computing Research Association) which provides a forum for the discussion of issues in computer science research and education.
John Hopcroft chairs the NSF Advisory Committee for Computer Research.
Don Greenberg receives the ACM Steven Coons Award which honors lifetime contributions to computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Gerry Salton receives the Distinguished Science Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany.
Ramin Zabih and David McAllester receive the best paper award at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference.
1988
Don Greenberg receives the National Computer Graphics Association Academic Award.
Juris Hartmanis and John Hopcroft are elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Gerry Salton is named a Pioneer of Computing in the Annals of the History of Computing. He receives the ACM Award for Best Review in Computing Reviews.
Bart Selman receives a best paper award at the Canadian Society for the Computational Studies of Intelligence (CSCI) conference.
Eva Tardos receives the American Mathematical Society’s Fulkerson Prize for her paper, A strongly polynomial minimum cost circulation algorithm.
David Gries becomes a Managing Editor of Information Processing Letters.
Fred Schneider becomes Editor-in-Chief of Distributed Computing.
Tom Coleman and Charlie Van Loan publish the Handbook for Matrix Computations (SIAM).
Tim Teitelbaum and former student Tom Reps publish two books on the Synthesizer Generator (Springer Verlag).
Ken Birman starts a company called Isis Distributed Systems, Inc., which brings the Isis system to the private sector, industry, and government.
1989
Tom Coleman becomes Director of the Cornell Advanced Computing Research Institute, a unit of the Cornell Theory Center.
Chaired by David Gries, the Computer Science Board changes its name to the Computing Research Association (CRA), opens an office in Washington, and works to represent the national interests of computing research.
John Hopcroft authors a report for the NSF Advisory Committee for Computer Research (with Ken Kennedy). Computer Science: Achievements and Opportunities helps set the direction of NSF computing research funding.
Gerry Salton is Chair-Elect of Section T of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) which is concerned with issues of Information, Computing, and Communication.
Don Greenberg receives the National Computer Graphics Association Academic Award.
Joe Halpern receives a best paper award at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
Gerry Salton receives the ASIS Award of Merit, the American Society of Information Science’s highest honor, bestowed annually to an individual who has made a noteworthy contribution to the field of information science.
Bart Selman receives a best paper award at the conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR).
Bob Constable and student Doug Howe publish Implementing Metamathematics as an Approach to Automatic Theorem Proving (Elsevier Science).
Gerry Salton publishes Automatic Text Processing (Addison Wesley).
The '90s
1990
With the completion of Rhodes Hall, CS expands to 38,000 square feet of space.
David Gries receives the ACM SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) Award for his contributions to CS education.
David Gries receives the CRA (Computing Research Association) Award for Service to the CS Community.
Juris Hartmanis is elected a Foreign Member of the Academy of Science of Latvia.
John Hopcroft receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Seattle in Washington.
Tom Coleman and Yuying Li publish Large-scale Numerical Optimization (SIAM Publications).
1991
The CS research budget tops $6 million. CS receives an NSF grant to investigate Revitalizing the Computer Science Curriculum and acquires an 8000-node CM-200 data parallel computer.
Bob Constable receives a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Don Greenberg is elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
John Hopcroft is appointed to the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation. He also becomes Chair of the Board of Trustees of SIAM.
Dexter Kozen publishes The Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Springer-Verlag).
Steve Vavasis publishes Nonlinear Optimization: Complexity Issues (Oxford Science).
1992
Juris Hartmanis becomes Department Chair for the third time.
John Hopcroft becomes Associate Dean of Engineering.
Juris Hartmanis is Chair of the NRC Committee that produces Computing the Future (National Academy Press). This influential report assesses academic computer science and engineering, and advocates for a broader research and educational agenda. This paves the way for the interdisciplinary vision of CIS--that computing should touch every department at Cornell.
Bart Selman receives a best paper award at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI).
Dick Conway is elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Juris Hartmanis is elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Dexter Kozen receives a Prize from the Polish Ministry of Education, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Students Aravind Srinivasan and Alessandro Panconesi receive the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on the Theory of Computing.
CS undergrads do well on the Putnam Math Competition. The team of Kleinberg, Munoz, and Krosky places fifth out of 284, and Zhang places in the top ten individuals.
Charlie Van Loan publishes Computational Frameworks for the Fast Fourier Transform (SIAM).
1993
Bob Constable becomes Department Chair.
Juris Hartmanis shares the ACM Turing Award with Dick Stearns, "in recognition of their seminal paper, which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory". (See the entry for 1965).
Juris Hartmanis receives a Humboldt Foundation Award for Senior U.S. Scientists. This foundation enables scholars to do research in Germany.
Researcher Yuying Li receives the 1993 Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis from the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications.
David Gries and Fred Schneider publish A Logical Approach to Discrete Math (Springer Verlag).
Stratus Computer acquires Ken Birman's Isis Distributed Systems, Inc. Isis is now the core technology used in the NY and Swiss Stock Exchanges, the French Air Traffic Control System, and by the US Navy.
1994
John Hopcroft becomes Dean of Engineering.
David Gries receives the IEEE Computer Society Taylor Booth Education Award from the world’s largest professional organization of electrical and electronics engineers for his "commitment to education in CS and Engineering as demonstrated by a record of outstanding teaching and mentoring, writing of textbooks, curriculum development ..."
Juris Hartmanis receives the Senior Distinguished Scientist Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany.
Dan Huttenlocher is the CASE New York State Professor of the Year. The award is given by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education for an individual professor’s positive impact on undergraduates, scholarly approach to learning, and contributions to undergraduate education.
David Gries is among the first ten to receive a Cornell Presidential Weiss Fellowship for his contributions to undergrad education.
Three such awards are given each year; Cornell has ~1600 faculty members.
T.V. Raman receives the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his PhD thesis, Audio System For Technical Readings (Springer-Verlag, 1998). Raman, whose advisor was David Gries, is now a researcher at Google.
Ken Birman becomes Editor-in-Chief of the ACM journal, Transactions on Computing Systems.
Researchers Jim David, Dean Krafft, and Carl Lagoze release Dienst, which becomes the foundation for future digital library interoperability.
1995
CS mourns the passing of Gerry Salton, a founding member of the department and the father of information retrieval.
David Gries receives the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award and an honorary doctorate from Daniel Webster College in New Hampshire.
Juris Hartmanis receives the Bolzano Gold Medal of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for Merit in the Field of Mathematical Sciences. He also receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Dortmund in Germany.
Neil Immerman (former student of Juris Hartmanis) and Róbert Szelepcsényi are awarded the Gödel prize for their paper showing that nondeterministic logarithmic space is closed under complement.
Fred Schneider becomes Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso, Norway.
Ken Birman chairs The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology study on the survivability of critical infrastructure as it relates to the Department of the Defense. Fred Schneider is also on the committee.
1996
Bruce Land wins first place in the Web-based instructional materials competition of the ACM Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services (SIGUCC) Conference.
Don Greenberg receives the Associate of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ASCA)Creative Research Award. .
.Dan Huttenlocher is one of three faculty members (out of 1600) to receive a Cornell Presidential Weiss Fellowship for his contributions to undergraduate education.
Bart Selman receives a best paper award at the AAAI Conference.
Joe Halpern becomes Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the ACM.
1997
CS grows to 30 faculty and has over 500 computers.
Juris Hartmanis takes a two-year leave to serve as Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science Engineering at the NSF. During his tenure, he effectively positions NSF and CISE to assume a leadership role in response to the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee report, and is instrumental in shaping the discussion that leads to NSF's Information Technology Research (ITR) program.
Joe Halpern shares the 1997 Gödel Prize with former student Yoram Moses for their landmark paper Knowledge and Common Knowledge in a Distributed Environment.
Stephen Vavasis receives a Guggenheim Fellowship.
David Shmoys becomes Editor-in-Chief of the SIAM Journal of Discrete Mathematics.
Ken Birman publishes Building Secure and Reliable Network Applications (Prentice Hall).
Srinivas Keshav publishes An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking: ATM Networks, the Internet, and the Telephone Network (Addison-Wesley).
Dexter Kozen publishes Automata and Computability (Springer-Verlag).
Fred Schneider publishes On Concurrent Programming (Springer-Verlag).
Nick Trefethen and student David Bau publish Numerical Linear Algebra (SIAM).
Charlie Van Loan publishes Introduction to Scientific Computing: a Matrix Approach Using MATLAB (Prentice Hall).
1998
With CS providing leadership, Cornell starts the Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS) to provide a home for interdisciplinary computing work of all kinds. CS, the Program for Computer Graphics, and Digital Libraries are part of it.
Tom Coleman becomes the Director of the Cornell Theory Center.
Joe Halpern is founder and administrator of CoRR (the ACM-sponsored Computing Research Repository).
Pedro Felzenszwalb is the CRA Outstanding Male Undergraduate Awards Runner-up. David Liben-Nowell receives an Honorable Mention.
David Gries receives an honorary doctorate from Miami University.
Juris Hartmanis receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Missouri.
Bill Arms becomes Chair of the ACM Publications Board and Editor-in-Chief of D-Lib Magazine.
Fred Schneider is Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) journal Security and Privacy.
Fred Schneider is Chair of the NRC committee that produces the report Trust in Cyberspace (National Academy Press). This report assesses the state-of-the-art procedures for constructing trustworthy networked information systems and proposes directions for research in computer and network security, software technology, and system architecture.
Jon Kleinberg publishes his Web-search work on using hubs and authorities. The research is credited, together with the Brin-Page work on PageRank, with forming the basis for the current generation of Internet search tools.
1999
Charlie Van Loan becomes Department Chair.
Bob Constable becomes Dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science.
Under the leadership of Tom Coleman, the Cornell Theory Center opens the Financial Solutions Center on Broad Street in Manhattan.
Carla Gomes receives a Special Recognition Award, Information Directorate, Air Force Research Laboratory, for her groundbreaking research in integrating AI and operations research techniques.
Don Greenberg receives an honorary doctorate from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Dexter Kozen is the Class of 1960 Scholar, Williams College.
Juris Hartmanis receives the CRA Distinguished Service Award for his service in the areas of government affairs, professional societies, publications, conferences, and leadership which has a major impact on computing research.
Greg Morrisett and students Steve Zdancewic and Dan Grossman receive the best paper award in the European Association for Programming Languages and Systems Conference on Principles, Logics, and Implementation of High-Level Programming Languages.
Keshav Pingali and his students receive the best paper award at the International Conference of Supercomputing.
Eva Tardos receives a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Bill Arms becomes Series Editor of the MIT Press series on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing.
Johannes Gehrke publishes the second edition of Database Management Systems (McGraw Hill), with Ragu Ramakrishnan.
David Schwartz publishes Introduction to UNIX and Introduction to Maple (Prentice Hall).
Bart Selman's work on phase transitions and complexity is featured in The New York Times.
Former students John Belizaire and Julian Pelenur sell their company, Theory Center, Inc. The one-year-old company, a leading provider of Java Beans, was sold to BEA Systems for $100 million.
The '00s
2000
Ramin Zabih receives a joint appointment with the Cornell Medical School, the first of its kind at Cornell.
The Intelligent Information Systems Institute (IISI) is established, with Carla Gomes as Director.
The US Air Force Research Laboratory /Cornell Information Assurance Institute (IAI) is founded with a $1 million dollar yearly grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), with Fred Schneider as Principal Investigator.
Juris Hartmanis receives the Lielo Medal from the Latvian Academy of Sciences for his outstanding creative contributions.
Jon Kleinberg receives the award for best paper at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems.
Bart Selman is elected Fellow of the AAAI.
Eva Tardos is elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Fred Schneider chairs the International Review of UK Computer Science Research.
Bill Arms publishes Digital Libraries (MIT Press).
Former undergrads Greg Pass and Frank Wood sell their company, ToFish, to AOL. Greg is now Chief Technology Officer at Twitter.
2001
The national organization Engineers for a Sustainable World is started at Cornell under the direction of Regina Clewlow, CS ’01. There are now chapters in 21 universities.
Jon Kleinberg receives the 2001 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award for Initiatives in Research. Jon was cited for "his development of deep and innovative algorithms to solve fundamental problems in network, information extraction, and discrete optimization".
Greg Morrisett wins an Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence, given by Carnegie Mellon University.
Andrew Myers and students Steve Zdancewic, Lantian Zhen, and Nathaniel Nystrom receive the best paper award at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) 2001.
2002
Fred Schneider chairs the NSF Information Technology Research Program Review.
Undergraduate Allegra Angus receives the CRA Outstanding Female Undergraduate Award.
Graeme Bailey is among the first four winners of the Cornell University Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award.
Researcher Donna Bergmark receives the best paper award for Collection Synthesis at the ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Joe Halpern receives a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Researcher Carl Lagoze, with three others, defines the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The work has led to renewed interest in shared metadata and increased ability to locate relevant digital assets regardless of geographical location.
Tim Roughgarden receives honorable mention in the ACM PhD thesis competition and receives the MPS Tucker Prize. His advisor was is Eva Tardos.
Student Tim Roughgarden wins the Danny Lewin Best Student Paper Award at the Symposium on the Theory of Computing 2002.
PhD student Ioannis Vetsikas and his software "whitebear" wins first place in the Trading Agent Competition.
PhD '92 Daniela Rus and BA '93 Sendhil Mullainathan win the MacArthur Genius Award.
Ramin Zabih and student Vladimir Kolmogorov receive the best paper award at the European Conference on Computer Vision.
2003
David Gries becomes Associate Dean of Engineering.
CS offers an undergrad Information Science major in the Arts & Sciences.
The Cornell Game Design Initiative is formed under the direction of Dave Schwartz.
Bob Constable is elected to the CRA Board.
Fred Schneider co-chairs the Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Academic Advisory Board.
The CS Programming Team wins honorable mention in the world finals at the ACM meeting in the Czech Republic.
The CUAUV (CU Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) team, advised by Grame Bailey and other Engineering faculty, wins the top prize in the Annual International ROBOSUB competition.
Omar Khan receives the CRA Outstanding Male Undergraduate Award.
Undergrad Eugene Lee takes first place in a national Intel Student Research Contest. Lee's project, supervised by Kavita Bala, tackles the challenge of producing high-quality, interactive rendering of sophisticated graphics, such as those used in movies or computer games.
Jon Kleinberg, Eva Tardos, and student David Kempe receive the Best Research Paper Award in the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
Steve Marschner shares a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science with Henrik Jensen and Pat Hanrahan. Their model of subsurface scattering of light in translucent materials was most famously to create the character of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Fred Schneider receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
Eva Tardos becomes editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Computing.
Bill Arms becomes series editor of the MIT Press Series on Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing.
Kavita Bala publishes Advanced Global Illumination (AK Peters) with Philippe Bekaert, and Phil Dutre.
Lillian Lee's work with postdoctoral student Regina Barzilay on a system that learns to paraphrase is featured in The New York Times.
Joe Halpern publishes Reasoning About Uncertainty (MIT Press).
2004
Juris Hartmanis becomes Senior Associate Dean of CIS.
CS offers an undergrad degree in Information Science, Systems, and Technology in Engineering, jointly with Operations Research & Industrial Engineering.
The PhD program in Information Science is approved.
The new Cornell Library Collaborative Learning Computer Lab (CL3), designed by David Schwartz, is inaugurated.
Dick Conway is honored by the scholarly journal Management Science for his seminal research in computer simulation which "established the research agenda for the simulation field for decades".
Johannes Gehrke receives a Cornell University Provost's Award for Distinguished Scholarship.
Carla Gomes and Bart Selman receive the Distinguished Paper Award at the Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming.
Researcher Carl Lagoze receives the Frederick G. Kilgour Award from the Library Information Technology Association (LITA). Lagoze's research, the citation says, "has led to significant achievements in the areas of distributed digital collections, the harvesting of metadata, and the establishment of open standards."
Lillian Lee shares the best paper award at the Human Language Technology Conference, with Regina Barzilay.
Once again, PhD student Ioannis Vetsikas and his software "whitebear" win first place in the Trading Agent Competition. From 2001 to 2005, his worst finish is third.
David Gries publishes Multimedia Introduction to Programming Using Java (Springer-Verlag), with his son, Paul.
2005
Fred Schneider is named chief scientist of TRUST (Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technologies), a new five-university NSF Science and Technology Center.
In its annual review of " Technology Research Advances of 2004", Technology Research News magazine includes work by two CS groups. Jon Aizen, Dan Huttenlocher, Jon Kleinberg, and Tony Novak devised a way to measure users' reactions to an item description; and Lillian Lee and Regina Barzilay developed software that picks up the topic structure of whole documents to generate more accurate automatic summaries.
Student Thomas Finley receives a Distinguished Student Paper Award at the International Conference for Machine Learning (ICML).
John Hopcroft receives the 2005 IEEE Harry Goode Memorial Award for "fundamental contributions to the study of algorithms and their applications in information processing".
Doug James is listed among Popular Science magazine’s Annual Brilliant Ten, which is awarded to the most impressive scientists in the US.
Thorsten Joachims receives a best paper award at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
Jon Kleinberg receives a MacArthur Genius Award.
Jon Kleinberg, Jure Leskovec, and Christos Faloutsos receive the Best Research Paper Award at the 11th Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
Student Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil receives a Distinguished Student Paper Award at ICML.
Student Filip Radlinski receives the Best Student Paper Award at the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD) Conference.
Kavita Bala and Phil Dutre edit the book, Rendering Techniques. (Springer Verlag.)
Jon Kleinberg and Eva Tardos publish Algorithm Design. (Addison-Wesley.)
2006
Eva Tardos becomes Department Chair.
Carla Gomes, Ashish Sabharwal, and Bart Selman win the Best Paper Award at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI).
Joe Halpern receives a best paper award at the conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR).
Thorsten Joachims receives a best paper award at the ACM SIGKDD conference Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD).
Jon Kleinberg receives the 2006 Rolf Nevanlinna Prize for his “deep, creative, and insightful contributions to the mathematical theory of the global information environment.” He also receives a best paper award at the conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN).
Bart Selman receives a best paper award at the AAAI Conference.
Eva Tardos is elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and wins the George B. Dantzig Prize from SIAM.
Dexter Kozen publishes Theory of Computation (Springer Verlag, Texts in Computer Science series).
2007
Fred Schneider is elected to the Board of Directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA) and becomes Chair of the Government Affairs Committee.
Ed Clarke (PhD 1976) shares the ACM Turing Award with E. Allen Emerson and Joseph Sifakis, “for their role in developing model-checking into a highly effective verification technology that is widely adopted in the hardware and software industries”.
John Hopcroft receives the CRA Distinguished Service Award.
Doug James receives a best paper award at the ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA).
Jon Kleinberg receives a best paper award at the World Wide Web Conference (WWW).
Andrew Myers and co-authors Stephen Chong, Jed Liu, Xin Qi, K. Vikram, Lantian Zheng, and Xin Zheng receive the Best Paper Award at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP).
Fred Schneider receives a SIGOPS award (Special Interest Group on Operating Systems) for the most influential paper on operating systems over the past ten years.
Ashutosh Saxena receives a best paper award at the International Computer Vision conference on 3D Representation for Recognition (ICCV 3dRR).
Gun Sirer is listed among Popular Science’s Annual Brilliant Ten, which is awarded to the most impressive scientists in the US.
Student Daria Sorokina receives a best student paper award at the European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML).
Eva Tardos publishes Algorithmic Game Theory with Noam Nisan, Tim Roughgarden and Vijay Vazirani (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
2008
Under the direction of Lillian Lee, the department drastically changes its undergraduate degree requirements in response to the computing field’s increasingly interdisciplinary nature. The department adopts a "vectors" model, where a vector represents a "line of inquiry" that students may take within CS.
The Institute for Computational Sustainability is founded, with Cornell as its primary campus. The institute, which aims to apply computational techniques to help solve some of the most challenging sustainability problems of our time, is funded by an NSF Expeditions in Computing grant, one of only four such grants awarded in the inaugural year of the Expeditions program.
Joe Halpern wins the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award for fundamental advances in reasoning about knowledge, belief, and uncertainty, and their groundbreaking applications in AI, CS, game theory, economics, and the philosophy of science.
John Hopcroft receives the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award.
John Hopcroft receives an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering from the University of Sydney.
Jon Kleinberg wins the ACM/Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences for his contributions to the science of networks and the World Wide Web.
Jon Kleinberg is among Discover Magazine’s 50 most important, influential, and promising people in science.
Jon Kleinberg receives Smithsonian Magazine's America's Young Innovators Award, given to people under the age of 36 who are shaping the world.
Students Alexandru Niculescu-Mizil and Yogeshwer Sharma receive a best student paper award at the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT).
2009
The CUAUV (CU Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) team, advised by Grame Bailey and other Engineering faculty, wins the top prize in the Annual International ROBOSUB competition.
Ken Birman receives the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing Outstanding Achievement Award.
Joe Halpern is a co-recipient of the annual ACM Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing.
John Hopcroft receives an Honorary Degree from the Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics, & Optics, Russia’s top national research university.
Thorsten Joachims receives a Fraunhofer-Bessel Award from the Humboldt Foundation. He also receives the award for the Most Influential Paper at the ICML.
Jon Kleinberg receives the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize, awarded annually to an individual recognized as an emerging research leader.
Lillian Lee is one of only four Cornell faculty members (out of 1600) to win university's Kendall S. Carpenter Memorial Advising Award.
Andrew Myers receives a “test of time” award for the Most Influential Paper on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL), presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at POPL ten years prior.
Undergraduate Tal Rusak receives the CRA Outstanding Male Undergraduate Award.
Noah Snavely receives honorable mention in the ACM PhD thesis competition.
The 2010's
2010
Joe Halpern becomes Department Chair.
Bill & Melinda Gates Hall, the future home of the CIS departments of CS and IS, is fully funded with no debt before the first shovel hit the ground. Starting with a generous $25 million donation from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, fundraising for the $60 million project concludes in the fall of 2010 with donors from almost every Cornell college.
The CUAUV (CU Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) team, advised by Grame Bailey and other Engineering faculty, wins the top prize in the Annual International ROBOSUB competition for the second year in a row.
Ken Birman receives the IEEE Tsutomu Kanai Award for major contributions to distributed computing systems and their applications.
Student Stefano Ermon receives a best student paper award at the conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP).
Johannes Gehrke receives a Humboldt Research Award.
John Hopcroft receives an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and an Honorary Doctorate from Chongqing University, and is named Einstein Professor at the Chinese Academy of Science. He also receives the IEEE Von Neumann Medal, for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology.
Dan Huttenlocher receives the award for the Most Influential Paper, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), which has made "fundamental contributions to computer vision that have withstood the test of time" over the past ten years.
Bobby Kleinberg receives a best paper award at the ACM conference on Electronic Commerce (EC).
Fred Schneider is a member of the Norges Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi, Noway’s equivalent of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE).
Eva Tardos received the Glover-Klingman Prize, awarded annually for the best paper in Networks.
Tim Teitelbaum and his former student Tom Reps share the ACM SIGSOFT (Special Interest Group in Software Engineering) Retrospective Impact Paper Award for their 1984 paper, The Synthesizer Generator.
Hakim Weatherspoon receives the Black Engineer of the Year Award at the BEYA STEM Conference.
Daisy Fan and Charlie Van Loan publish Insight Through Computing: A Matlab Introduction to Computational Science and Engineering (SIAM).
Jon Kleinberg and David Easley publish Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World (Cambridge University Press).
2011
Gabriel Bender, Johannes Gehrke, Nitin Gupta, Christoph Koch, Lucja Kot, and Sudip Roy receive a best paper award at the Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD) conference.
Johannes Gehrke receives a Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists from the New York Academy of Sciences.
Johannes Gehrke receives the IEEE Technical Achievement Award for outstanding and innovative contributions to the fields of computer and information science, engineering, or computer technology.
Carla Gomes becomes a Radcliffe Fellow. She also receives a best paper award at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML).
Joe Halpern wins the ACM SIGART (Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence) Autonomous Agents Research Award.
John Hopcroft receives an Honorary Doctorate from Beijing Institute of Technology.
Doug James receives a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also receives a best paper award at the ACM SIGGRAPH / Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA).
Fred B. Schneider is elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
Noah Snavely receives a TR35 Award from MIT’s Technology Review, which recognizes him as one of 35 innovators under the age of 35 who are “tackling important problems in transformative ways".
David Steurer receives an honorable mention in the ACM PhD Thesis Competition.
Eva Tardos receives the Van Wijngaarden Ward, given every five years for exceptional contributions to mathematics and computer science.
Ramin Zabih receives the award for Most Influential Paper at the International Conference on Computer Vision.
2012
The CUAUV (CU Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) team, advised by Grame Bailey and other Engineering faculty, wins the top prize in the Annual International ROBOSUB competition for the fourth time since 2003.
The CUAir undergrad team, advised by Ashutosh Saxena, wins first in mission performance and second overall at the Office of Naval Research Student Unmanned Air Systems competition (ONR SUAS).
Undergraduate Justin Cheng receives the CRA Outstanding Male Undergraduate Award. Eunsol Choi (female) and Alec Story (male) receive honorable mentions.
Saikat Guha, PhD '09, receives a TR35 Award from MIT’s Technology Review, which cites him as one of 35 innovators under the age of 35 who are “tackling important problems in transformative ways".
Joe Halpern receives a best paper award at the conference on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR).
Juris Hartmanis is elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). He also receives CalTech’s Distinguished Alumni Award.
Jon Kleinberg, along with his co-author David Easley, is awarded the annual Lanchester Prize for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English. The prize is in recognition of his book Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World (Cambridge University Press).
Fred B. Schneider receives the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award for his work on cybersecurity.
Eva Tardos is elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and the Hungarian Academy of Science.
Eva Tardos shares the Gödel Prize with former Cornell student Tim Roughgarden for their paper, How Bad Is Selfish Routing?
2013
The CUAUV (CU Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) team, advised by Grame Bailey and other Engineering faculty, wins the top prize in the Annual International ROBOSUB competition for the fourth time in six years.
Ken Birman and Thoms Josephs paper, Exploiting virtual synchrony in distributed systems, receives the Hall of Fame Award at the 11th ACM Symposium.
John Hopcroft receives the Outstanding Research Award of the Web Intelligence Consortium.
Doug James shares a Technical Achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science with Theodore Kim '01, Nils Thuerey, and Markus for wavelet turbulence software, which generates realistic swirling smoke and fiery explosions.
Doug James receives the Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize, awarded annually to an individual recognized as an emerging research leader.
Undergraduate Vera Khovanskaya receives the CRA Outstanding Female Undergraduate Award.
Jon Kleinberg receives the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, a lifetime achievement honor for technical excellence.
PhD student Hema Koppula wins the best student paper award at RSS'13.
Dexter Kozen receives an ACM/IEEE LICS (Logic in Computer Science) Test of Time Award.
Andrew Myers and his student Chinawat Isradisaikul receive the Distinguished Paper Award at the PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation) 2013 conference
Andrew Myers and his student Owen Arden, along with MIT co-authors Alvin Cheung, Sam Madden, and Armando Solar-Lezama, receive the best paper award at the 2103 Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR).
David Shmoys and David Williamson receive the annual Lanchester Prize for the best contribution to operations research and the management sciences published in English, in recognition of their book The Design of Approximation Algorithms. (Cambridge University Press.)
Noah Snavely is one of 102 researchers across all science and engineering disciplines to receive a PECASE (Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers) award.
Ramin Zabih receives the Koenderink Prize for Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision.
Changxi Zheng (PhD 2012) is named one of “30 under 30” innovators in science and healthcare by Forbes Magazine.
2014.
Fred Schneider becomes Department Chair.
Cornell Tech, a graduate campus in NYC, opens.
Gates Hall opens in January, with a dedication ceremony to be held at the CS 50th Anniversary celebration and symposium on October 1.
The Cornell student game APSIS is awarded the “Most Promising Indie” at Casual Connect 2014.
The CUAUV (CU Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) team, advised by Grame Bailey and other Engineering faculty, wins the top prize in the Annual International ROBOSUB competition for the fifth time in six years.
Kavita Bala wins the best paper award at Expressive 2014’s symposium on Computational Aesthetics, with Manohar Srikanth and Fredo Durand of MIT.
Bob Constable receives the Herbrand Award for Distinguished Contributions to Automated Reasoning.
David Gries and the late Wlad Turski are named “Honorary Editors-in-Chief” of IPL for their 40 years of service to the journal.
Juris Hartmanis is a co-recipient of the ACM’s Distinguished Service Award, for his definitive role in establishing CS as a vibrant subject.
David Kempe (PhD ’03), Jon Kleinberg, and Eva Tardos receive the KDD 2014 inaugural Test of Time Award for their paper Maximizing the Spread of Influence through a Social Network.
Bobby Kleinberg and Jon Kleinberg, with co-authors Peter Frazier and David Kempe, receive the Best Paper Award at the ACM Economics and Computation (EC) conference.
Jon Kleinberg wins the Harvey Prize, given each year by the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology for breakthroughs in science.
Ashtosh Saxena wins the Early Career Spotlight Award at the Robotics Science and Systems Conference.
Noah Snavely receives the ACM SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques) Significant New Researcher Award.
Noah Snavely and his student Kevin Matzen win the Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Computer Vision.