UTCS Welcomes New Faculty

Dana Ballard

Dana Ballard's main research interest is in computational theories of the brain with emphasis on human vision. In 1985 Chris Brown and he led a team that designed and built a high speed binocular camera control system capable of simulating human eye movements. The system was mounted on a robotic arm that allowed it to move at one meter per second in a two meter radius workspace. This system has led to an increased understanding of the role of behavior in vision. The theoretical aspects of that system were summarized in "Animate Vision,'' which received the Best Paper Award at the 1989 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Currently he is interested in pursuing this research by using model humans in virtual reality environments. Under an NCRR funded grant with Mary Hayhoe, he installed the first eye-tracker in a head-mounted display. In addition he is working on models of the brain that relate to detailed neural codes. He is the author of the text "Natural Computation" and co-author with Chris Brown of "Computer Vision."

Kristen Grauman, Assistant Professor

Kristen Grauman will be joining the department in January, 2007. Kristen will hold the Luce Professorship. She received her Ph.D. and S.M. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a B.A. from Boston College. Her research in computer vision focuses on computationally-efficient approaches to object recognition and content-based image retrieval. She is a recipient of the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, the MIT EECS Morris Joseph Levin award for best master’s thesis presentation and the MIT Emerson Music Scholarship for piano performance. Read about her research.

Keshav Pingali, holder of the W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Jr. Chair in Distributed and Grid Computing

Keshav Pingali received the Bachelor of Technology degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India in 1978, and the S.M., E.E., and Sc.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986. From 1986 to 2006, he was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, where he was the India Chair of Computer Science. In 2006, he moved to the University of Texas, Austin where he holds the W.A."Tex" Montcrief Chair in Grid and Distributed Computing.

Keshav Pingali's research is focused on programming languages and compiler technology for program understanding, restructuring, and optimization. His group is known for its contributions to memory-hierarchy optimization; some of these have been patented. Algorithms and tools developed by his projects are used in many commercial compilers from leading computer manufacturers. In his current research, he is working on language based fault-tolerance, and compiler and runtime systems for multicore processors.

Keshav Pingali has published more than 100 papers in conferences and journals. Among other awards, Pingali has won the following awards:

• The President's Gold Medal at I.I.T.- Kanpur (1978)
• IBM Faculty Development Award (1986-87)
• NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989-94)
• Ip-Lee Teaching Award of the College of Engineering at Cornell (1997)
• The Russell teaching award of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell (1998)

Current research topics:

• Programming languages and compilers
• Multicore processors
• Language-based fault-tolerance
• Scientific computing