The Center is collaboration between the departments of electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton, Rutgers, and New Jersey Institute of Technology.

"Just as the PC transformed both business and personal life in the 1990s, a new generation of information appliances will transform both the workplace and the home in the next decade," Professor Wolf said. "These new systems will be much more powerful than today's systems: They will blur the distinction between computation and communication by both transmitting data and by transforming it."

In addition, Professor Wolf predicts that the systems of the future will be much more portable *They will use multiple modes of information: text, audio, and video.

*They will process those inputs to recognize important features.

*They will make use of distributed computing, which will require careful design of both the communication and computation elements of the system.

*They will integrate information from many sources in order to make smart decisions and simplify the life of the user.

*They will require careful user-centric design to ensure that these complex systems are in fact usable by real people.

The New Jersey Center for Pervasive Information Systems will develop core technologies that will enable the development of next- and next-next-generation pervasive-information systems. The Center will also serve as a resource center for New Jersey industry by providing an interdisciplinary team: few, if any, companies today have the resources to build expertise ranging from user requirements through device architectures and networking; our team can help member companies understand how their future business will be influenced by developments in related areas.

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Members of the interdisciplinary team include: Roxanne Hiltz and Jerry Fjermestad (NJIT), who are well-known for their studies of computer-supported collaborative work; Perry Cook (Princeton), who is an expert in human/computer interfacing, computer music, and audio processing; Haym Hirsh (Rutgers), who is an expert in artificial intelligence and active agents for information systems; Bede Liu (Princeton), who has a long-standing reputation in video and image processing; Vincent Poor *77 (Princeton), who is a leading expert in wireless communications; and Professor Wolf.

Electrical Engineering Professor Wayne Wolf is director for the new New Jersey Center for Pervasive Information Systems.

Awards and honors

Richard Miles, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, received the Aerodynamic Measurement Technology Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Professor Miles was recognized for "outstanding and innovative contributions to the invention and development of advanced concepts in aerosynamic measurement technology, and for significant educational and leadership contributions to the field."

James Sturm '79, professor of electrical engineering, was elected a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his "contributions to novel silicon-based semiconductor devices, large-area electronics, and engineering education."

Edgar Choueiri *91, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, was elected chairman of the Electric Propulsion Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Turing Award goes to Professor Yao

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, the William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science, has received the 2000 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

This award, considered the Nobel Prize of Computing, was presented "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory of computation, including the complexity-based theory of pseudorandom number generation, cryptography, and communication complexity."

Professor Yao has helped shape the theory of computation. He established new paradigms and effective techniques in many areas, including computational geometry, constant-depth Boolean circuit complexity, analysis of data structures, and quantum communication.

He initiated the field of communication complexity, which measures the minimum amount of interaction two or more parties must have in order to jointly carry out some computation. Professor Yao thus captured the essence of communication cost for distributed computation.

Before Professor Yao, the quality of a pseudorandom number generator was an empirical opinion. He gave the first convincing definition of a pseudorandom number generator, namely that its output sequences are not distinguishable from those of a truly random number generator by any polynomial-time test.

He showed that any generator satisfying the specific "next-bit test" developed by Blum and Micali actually meets his general definition. He showed that the discovery of any one-way function would lead to such a pseudorandom number generator. This has great import for cryptography.

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Professor Yao, an alumnus of the National Taiwan University, earned a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois. He is a fellow of the ACM and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Academia Sinica.

Professor Yao was recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the SIAM George Polya Prize, and the ACM SIGACT-IEEE TCMFCS Donald E. Knuth Prize.

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao received the 2000 A.M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.

Professor Shayegan gets Humboldt Research Award

Mansour Shayegan, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, received a Humboldt Research Award for Senior U.S. Scientists.

Professor Shayegan specializes in the physics of semiconductors, with an emphasis on their electronic properties. His work involves the growth of GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures by molecular beam epitaxy, and studies of ballistic and quantum transport in them. Of particular interest are the many-body phenomena observed in these low-dimensional structures at low temperatures and high magnetic fields.

As a Humboldt recipient, Professor Shayegan plans to visit the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich in summer 2001, where he will conduct research on the physics of low-dimensional semiconductors.

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables outstanding and internationally recognized scholars not resident in Germany to carry out research projects in Germany for the duration of six to 12 months.

Junior faculty awards honor teachers

Choueiri, Finkelstein, Funkhauser, Kasdin, and Wang recognized

Howard B. Wentz Award

Edgar Choueiri *91 received the Howard B. Wentz, Jr. Junior Faculty Award, which recognizes "promising young faculty members who are good teachers."

He is assistant professor of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department (appointed in 1996); an associated faculty member of the Astrophysical Sciences Department, Program in Plasma Physics; and chief scientist at the Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory where he is the adviser to eight Ph.D. students.

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

He has been chief or principal investigator on more than 20 research contracts or grants from industry, NASA, Air Force and other governmental agencies.

His theoretical and experimental research interests include instabilities and turbulence in collisional plasmas, nonlinear wave-particle interactions in plasmas, fundamental processes in plasma propulsion devices for spacecraft, active space experiments and micro-propulsion.

He has developed new courses at Princeton in astronautics, applied physics, and advanced space propulsion.

Alfred Rheinstein '11 Faculty Award

Randolph Wang, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received the Alfred Rheinstein '11 Faculty Award, which recognizes "young faculty who have shown exceptional promise."

Professor Wang joined the Princeton faculty in February 1999 after earning his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley. He earned his bachelor's degree, also in computer science, from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991.

Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Professor Wang teaches CS 518: Advanced Operating Systems and CS 598: Six Research Ideas in Storage, Mobility, and Networking, among others. He received an E-Council Excellence in Teaching Award for his efforts in COS 126: General Computer Science. He was the first faculty member in the computer science department to receive an E-Council Excellence in Teaching Award for teaching COS 126.

Professor Wang received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program award in 2000.

His research interests are file systems and high- performance networking.

Randolph Wang

Emerson Electric Co. E. Lawrence Keyes '51 Award

Adam Finkelstein, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, Thomas Funkhouser, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, and N. Jeremy Kasdin '85, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, are corecipients of the Emerson Electric Company E. Lawrence Keyes '51 Faculty Advancement Award. This award recognizes faculty members "who distinguish themselves in teaching."

Professor Finkelstein joined Princeton in February 1997. He teaches courses in nonphotorealistic rendering, computer animation, general computer science, and computer graphics. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington. A 1987 graduate of Swarthmore College, he earned his master's degree in 1993 and his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Washington.

His research interests are in computer animation, surface textures, and nonphotorealistic rendering.. In 2000 he received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

Professor Funkhouser has taught a variety of courses ranging from beginning to upper-level computer graphics. He joined the Princeton faculty in February 1998. Previously, he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories for four years.

Adam Finkelstein Thomas Funkhouser N. Jeremy Kasdin '85

Professor Funkhouser received his undergraduate degree from Stanford University in 1983 and his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993.

His research is focused on software tools and systems that use novel ideas in computer graphics, networking, and multimedia databases to facilitate interactive applications in information discovery and communication. In 1999 he received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

Professor Kasdin joined the Princeton faculty in 1999 from Alexis Engineering, a company he founded in 1996 to perform aerospace engineering, system engineering, and management consulting.

Prior to that, he was the chief systems engineer for Gravity Probe B, a NASA satellite to test the General Theory of Relativity. He was responsible for requirements development, subsystem designs, configuration management, design reviews, system analysis, and data analysis. In addition, he has taught space mechanics at Stanford University from 1994 to 1998.

Professor Kasdin's research and teaching interests are satellite design/space systems engineering, spacecraft dynamics and control, space mechanics and astrodynamics, digital control systems, stochastic processes and simulation, estimation theory and system identification, automatic control, nonlinear systems and control, and navigation.

Professor Kasdin earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering, his master's degree in guidance and control (1987) from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. in aeronautical and astronautical sciences (1991), also from Stanford.