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Dr. Mitsuru Nagasawa, the founding President of the Toyota Institute of Technology at Chicago (TTIC), will retire this year. With his leadership, TTIC has developed active research and education programs in computer science, has become accredited to grant PhD degrees, and is active in the recruitment of graduate students and outstanding faculty. The Board of Trustees has appointed a committee of the Board, the Presidential Search Committee, to accept and review nominations and applications for the position of president, and to make a recommendation to the Board for an appointment. Inquiries can be sent to Stuart Rice at sarice@ttic.edu.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $408,305 to the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago for support of the project entitled "Algorithm and Web Server for Low-homology Protein Threading", under the direction of Dr. Jinbo Xu.

This award is effective July 1 , 2010 and expires June 30, 2013.

This grant is awarded pursuant to the authority of the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, as amended (42 U.S.C. 1861-75).

David McAllester has won the 2010 AAAI Classic Paper award for the paper “Systematic Nonlinear Planning" with David Rosenblitt, which appeared in the AAAI conference in 1991.

The AAAI Classic Paper award honors the author(s) of paper(s) deemed most influential, chosen from a specific conference year. Each year, the time period considered will advance by one year. The 2010 award is being given to the most influential paper(s) from the Ninth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held in 1991 in Anaheim, California, and will be presented to Dr. McAllister at the AAAI – 10 conference in Atlanta, Georgia on July 11 - 15.

The papers are judged on the basis of impact, for example:

- Started a new research (sub)area
- Led to important applications
- Answered a long-standing question/issue or clarified what had been murky
- Made a major advance that figures in the history of the subarea
- Has been picked up as important and used by other areas within (or outside of) AI
- Has been very heavily cited

This award will be posted on the AAAI website soon. There was no award given in 2009.

Jinbo Xu was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Health effective May 14, 2010, and the project title is New Computational Methods for Data-driven Protein Structure Prediction. The budget for the first year is $268,555 and the project period is from the start date noted above to April 30, 2015.

The project described was supported by Award Number R01GM089753 from the National Institute Of General Medical Sciences. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences or the National Institutes of Health.

Karen Livescu hosted a regional speech research meeting, the 2nd Illinois Speech Day, on May 10, 2010. About fifty people from Illinois and farther away participated. Among the institutions represented, in addition to TTIC, were the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, University of Washington, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon University. The program can be found here.

TTIC congratulates Jian Peng, a TTIC third-year Ph.D. student who was awarded the prestigious Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship this month (February 2010). The Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship is a two-year fellowship program for outstanding Ph.D. students, and supports men and women in their third and fourth years of Ph.D. graduate studies.

The fellowship award will cover 100 percent of recipient’s tuition and fees for two academic years (2010 and 2011), provide a stipend to cover living expenses while in school, a travel allowance for recipients to attend professional conferences or seminars, and offers recipients the opportunity to complete one salaried internship over the duration of the year following the award.

Jian works with TTIC’s professor Jinbo Xu on mathematical modellings in computational biology. His other research interests include machine learning and algorithms. For more information about Jian, check out his webpage.

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Programming Experience Requirement

Ph.D. students must have or acquire experience in computer programming with a general purpose programming language. Before their candidacy exam students must demonstrate that they have designed and implemented some substantial software system, either from scratch or as a significant extension to existing software.

The student must be responsible for the design of the software or the extension. The software does not have to be "industrial strength", i.e., it does not have to be polished to the point where it is ready to be released to a user community. A simple demonstration of some algorithm or idea is sufficient. However, the problem should be large enough that significant systems engineering issues are addressed. Some examples are given below.

This requirement can be satisfied through a summer programming job, programming experience as an undergraduate, or by independently writing software, provided that the above criteria are satisfied.

TTIC has appointed a member of the faculty as "Programming Experience Czar". Students should consult with this faculty member to make sure that whatever project they embark on or have embarked on is substantial enough to provide actual "programming experience".

By the time of their candidacy exam, students must have submitted their code together with a paper (10-15 pages in, e.g., standard LaTeX 10pt, single-column article style) explaining the problem, known approaches to solving it, and the actual approach taken. The write up must also contain a discussion of key aspects of the actual code and technical difficulties that were encountered together with their solutions. If the project consists of an evaluation of an algorithm or an implementation technique, then the paper should report quantitative results. Finally, students must give a presentation on their project before faculty and other students.

Examples: