Garud Iyengar	Hoe I. Ling	Jason Nieh
Jay Sethuraman	Rastislav Levicky	William Noble Grundy

Six Columbia engineering faculty have received 2001 Presidential Early Career Awards for their research sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers who are in the early stages of establishing their research careers.

The six assistant professors at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science are: computer scientists William Noble Grundy and Jason Nieh; chemical engineer Rastislav Levicky; civil engineer Hoe I. Ling and Garud Iyengar, and Jay Sethuraman of the department of industrial engineering and operations research.

The awards were established in 1996 by President Clinton to recognize demonstrated excellence by some of the nation's finest junior scientists and engineers and the potential for eventual leadership in their fields.

"We are exceptionally proud of these six young researchers," said Zvi Galil, dean of the school. "Their work demonstrates our commitment to excellence and the broad brush of our research."

Grundy's research spans the fields of machine learning and computational biology. "My primary goal is to develop and teach computational methods for inferring and reasoning about gene function," he said. "As the Human Genome Project nears completion, the need for functional genomic analyses grows. The techniques I'm working on place genes into discrete functional categories. This classification paradigm simplifies the complexity of gene function, thereby rendering the problem of inferring gene function from genomic data more tractable."

Grundy's research is expected to improve understanding of the ability of various machine-learning techniques to recognize different types of gene functional classes. "The result will be improved machine learning techniques as well as important insights into gene function," Grundy said.

Ling, who was educated in Japan, focuses on earthquake engineering, working with colleagues worldwide in earthquake-prone regions. Specifically, he is researching the viability of reinforced soil structures—those that combine polymeric geosynthetic materials with natural soil—in reducing or preventing earthquake damage. Several recent major earthquakes have brought him into intensive collaborations with colleagues in Japan, Taiwan and Turkey. He led an international workshop focusing on the behavior of reinforced soils at Columbia last October.

Ling is also working with researchers at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory on potential earthquake hazards in Singapore and with colleagues at the National Center for Infrastructure Studies in the department of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia. He will look at the impact of possible earthquakes on the infrastructure of New York City.

Levicky is working to apply engineering methods to control the organization of polymer molecules on surfaces, with an emphasis on DNA, the carrier of genetic information.

"Fundamental knowledge from these studies is expected to advance tools for classification of diseases, deciphering of information gathered under the Human Genome Project, and identification of optimal medical treatments in an individual-specific way," Levicky said. He is collaborating with the Columbia Genome Center, Gene Logic Inc. and, as part of an outreach program, the teaching staff from George Washington High School in Manhattan."

Iyengar's research involves constrained optimization problems— those encountered in engineering or applied sciences where limited resources are to be distributed among competing alternatives to maximize the return.

"As an example, consider the problem of investing in the stock market," Iyengar explains. "To choose the optimal investment portfolio one must first estimate the returns on the assets and then solve an appropriate optimization problem. Errors in estimating the returns could lead the optimization problem to generate a portfolio that is very different from the true optimal, resulting in serious investment losses." Iyengar's goal is to develop formulations for optimization problems that maximize situations involving uncertain parameters.

Sethuraman is addressing optimal resource allocation in his research. His objective is to design mechanisms for a variety of problems in which several classes of jobs compete for a limited number of shared resources.

"Examples include shared computer systems, manufacturing systems that produce different types of products, and telecommunication systems where heterogeneous traffic types, such as email, file transfers and video, share common resources," Sethuraman said. "The techniques developed in this project, and the algorithms derived from them, will have the potential to improve the practical performance of several real-life systems," he explained.

Sethuraman's research will address a variety of questions, such as: How should a resource optimally allocate its effort to competing jobs? How do the presence of additional physical and technological constraints affect system performance? What effect does the uncertainty of the system parameters have on the best resource allocation policy? "The results will provide insight into how scheduling interacts with other operational and strategic decisions, such as due-date setting, pricing, etc," Sethuraman said.

Nieh is working to develop technologies that would allow computing services to be provided by a public utility, in much the same way that telephone service is provided by telephone companies today. Nieh is creating new advanced remote display technologies and scalable server resource management technologies to make this vision a reality.

"These technologies will enable computing service providers to offer users ubiquitous access to virtualized desktop computing environments, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, from any Internet-enabled device," Nieh said.

Nieh explained that users will be able to access these computing services from simpler, more reliable low-cost Internet-enabled devices that free them from the endless cycle of installing and upgrading obsolete hardware and software.

"Rather than creating a society of information 'haves' and 'have-nots,' these computing service technologies offer a better way to bridge the information gap and provide access to computing as widely as possible," Nieh said.