9/15/2010
Narayana Aluru and Dan Roth were among six Urbana campus faculty members recently recognized as University Scholars. The program recognizes excellence while helping to identify and retain the university’s most talented teachers, scholars and researchers.
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Narayana Aluru and Dan Roth were among six Urbana campus faculty members recently recognized as University Scholars. The program recognizes excellence while helping to identify and retain the university’s most talented teachers, scholars and researchers.
The Kritzer Professor in Mechanical Science and Engineering, Aluru has made important research contributions across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines, including mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering as well as materials science. His pioneering work in nanofluidics has set the stage for solving many real-world problems including water purification, drug delivery and nano-manufacturing.
His work in the area of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) revealed previously unknown nonlinear dynamic phenomena, such as complex oscillations, period doubling bifurcation to chaos, and U-sequence. These insights led him to perform fundamental studies on thermoelastic damping in MEMS and to develop a new model to predict thermoelastic damping for complex nonlinear oscillations encountered in NEMS.
In addition to his appointment in Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Aluru is a faculty member at the Beckman Institute, and an affiliate faculty member of the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Department of Bioengineering.
Roth is a professor of computer science who has made major conceptual and theoretical advances in artificial intelligence that have changed how computer scientists develop algorithms and programs for natural language understanding and how they think about computational modeling of learning and reasoning.
In his research, Roth has pursued several interrelated lines of work that span multiple aspects of this problem - from fundamental questions in learning and inference and how they interact, to the study of a range of natural language processing (NLP) problems, including multiple disambiguation problems, shallow parsing, semantic role labeling, co-reference, question answering and textual entailment, to large scale Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction system development - resulting in a number of software packages for NLP tools.
He is the director of the Department of Homeland Security Institute of Discrete Science Center for Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis Research at Illinois. Last year, Roth was elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the premier AI professional society, “for significant contributions to the foundations of machine learning and inference and to developing learning-centered solutions to natural language problems.”
Other faculty scholars in this year's class include: Gustavo Caetano-Anolles, crop sciences; Lauren M.E. Goodlad, English; Kristin Hoganson, history; and, Andrew Suarez, entomology.Begun in 1985, the program provides $10,000 to each scholar for each of three years to use to enhance his or her academic career. The money may be used for travel, equipment, research assistants, books or other purposes.
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Writer: Jeff Unger, UI News Bureau, 217/333-1085.
Photos: L. Brian Stauffer
If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor.