Two CS Alumni Named Microsoft New Faculty Fellows

University of Illinois computer science alumni Luis Ceze and Svetlana Lazebnik have been selected to receive the 2009 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Award.

Ceze and Lazebnik were chosen from 100 nominees and represent the University of Illinois as two of the five recipients of the award.

The objective of the New Faculty Fellowship Award is to “stimulate and support creative research undertaken by promising researchers.” An additional goal of the award is to support up-and-coming researchers in the field of computer science who, despite showing the promise of furthering the field in unique and innovative ways, lack the distinction required “to attract the financial support necessary for substantial research programs.”

Luis Ceze is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington.  His research focuses on improving programmability and reliability of multicore systems. His research spans computer architecture, compilers, operating systems, and programming languages. One of his group's key projects is to completely remove nondeterminism from multiprocessor systems, potentially changing the way we debug, test, and deploy multithreaded code. In addition, his group is designing systems that automatically avoid software bugs in the field, and is rethinking the role of memory in modern computer systems to better match programmability and scalability challenges.

Svetlana Lazebnik is an assistant professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on computer vision and visual recognition. Her goal is to create a new generation of recognition systems that canmake sense of the "open universe" of large-scale, complex, evolving image collections such as those found on the Internet. Automated recognition technologies can change the way that users interact with ever-growing and ubiquitous collections of digital photos, and lead to new ways of accessing information through pictures.

Recipients of the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Award receive a gift of $200,000 to be “applied to a wide variety of uses to pursue novel research.”  Award-winners are also granted other resources provided by Microsoft, including software and invitations to engagements and conferences, in order to provide them with the means to plan the focus of their specific area of research.
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Contact: Jennifer La Montagne, associate director of communications, Department of Computer Science, 217/333-4049.
Writer: Tom Hord

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