GOVERNMENT
Carnegie Mellon Professors Earn Prestigious HP Innovation Research Awards
Carnegie Mellon University's Greg Ganger and Noah Smith were among 60 recipients worldwide to receive awards as part of HP's 2009 Innovation Research Program, which is designed to create opportunities for colleges, universities and research institutes around the world to conduct breakthrough collaborative research with HP.Ganger, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Parallel Data Labat Carnegie Mellon, will collaborate with HP Labs on a research initiative focused on data storage infrastructure issues. Ganger, author of the winning proposal "Toward Scalable Self-Storage," will lead the collaboration.
"As enterprise storage demands continue to grow and diversify, we need scalable storage that supports the new industry demands with lower administrative costs," said Ganger, who received an HP Innovation Research Award in 2008 as well.
Smith, assistant professor of language technologies and machine learning in the School of Computer Science, received
his HP Innovation Research Award for research in using probabilistic models to analyze political blogs. His research involves Ph.D. student Tae Yano and William Cohen, associate professor of machine learning."This award will provide needed support for our research group’s efforts to apply computational models of language to understanding the social and political word," Smith said. "Language is used not just to communicate facts, but to change what others think and how they act. Ultimately, we want to develop tools that let computers understand that too."
"Our goal with this program is to collaborate with the brightest minds from around the world to tackle industry’s most complex problems and push the frontiers of fundamental science," said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs. "Carnegie Mellon has demonstrated outstanding achievement and a vision that will help inspire technological innovation and address the most complex challenges and opportunities facing the industry in the next decade."
"This award recognizes the ongoing innovative and cutting-edge work that Carnegie Mellon professors bring to all collaborative research efforts," said Mark S. Kamlet, Carnegie Mellon provost and senior vice president. "We are proud of their accomplishments and the vital impact their research will have for a variety of industry sectors."
HP reviewed nearly 300 proposals from more than 140 universities in 29 countries on a range of topics within the eight high-impact research themes at HP Labs — analytics, cloud computing, content transformation, digital commercial print, immersive interaction, information management, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability. More details about the HP Labs Innovation Research Program and award recipients are available athttp://hpl.hp.com/open_innovation/irp/2009_results.html.