I lews' i Notes
Spring 2009 4 Issue Forty-three CompSci @ Carolina
Dear Friends,
The academic year is drawing to a close. Soon we will award degrees to another set of graduates and send
them on their way into a challenging economy. We have also recently extended our graduate admissions
deadline for fall 2009 to May SI. It is our hope that this will give Triangle locals in the technology industry
the option of getting an advanced degree should they find themselves out of work.
The number of undergraduate students we are teaching is growing rapidly, up 30 per cent over the last
three years. This comes at a time when we’re losing faculty to retirement, making it challenging to meet
our undergraduate teaching demands. We said farewell to Jeannie Walsh, Senior Lecturer and Director of
General Studies, at the end of the fall 2008 semester.
This spring we welcomed Assistant Professor Ron Alterovitz to the department. Ron is part of our expanding robotics group
and joins us from UC Berkely and the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center where he was an Nil I Postdoctoral Research Fellow.
You can read more about Ron on page 2, and more about our robotics research below.
We were very proud to learn that our own Michael Reiter had been named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery
last fall. Mike was recognized for his innovations in the field of computer security.
In this issue of News & Notes, we’re introducing a new feature - an extended alumni profile. Be sure to check out the story about
B.S. alum Aaron Fulkerson on page 4. Interested in being the subject of the alumni profile in a future News & Notes? Send an
email to pubs@cs.unc.edu.
On a final note, this is the last edition of News & Notes for me as department chairman. I am happy to announce that Anselmo
Lastra will be named chairman effective July 1, 2009. Many great things have happened in the past five years and it has been a
pleasure to serve the department as chair. I know that Anselmo will do a fine job leading the department.
I lave a great summer!
The Rise of Robotics
Robot algorithms have been studied in the
Computer Science Department for a de¬
cade, but they’ve developed a higher pro¬
file recently. “We’ve been paying more at¬
tention to robotics in the last three to four
years,” says Dr. Dinesh Manocha. The triad
of Dr. Ming Lin, Dr. Ron Alterovitz and
Manocha form the core of the Robotics re¬
search group.
“Robot Algorithms refer to a broad set of
computational methods that has been de¬
signed for physical objects in the real world.
They primarily deal with issues related to
spatial arrangement of objects, task plan¬
ning, and geometric reasoning, and they’re
characterized by their physical complexi¬
ty,” he explains. “We’ve worked on collision
checking, motion planning, robotic simula¬
tion, and multi-robot coordination. We’re
also working in multi-agent and crowd
simulations and now traffic simulation,
which are emerging applications of robot
algorithms. Along with a postdoc, Jur van
den Berg, many graduate students, and the
addition of Ron, we have reached a critical
mass to start a new robotics lab for both
research and educational purposes.” Many
graduate students, including Liangjun
Zhang and Russell Gayle, have developed
new robot motion-planning algorithms as
part of their PhD dissertations.
Alterovitz, whose work is focused on link¬
ing medical image analysis to medical ro¬
bots, is setting up a work station in the
western half of the Sitterson graphics lab,
as the new robotics lab will he shared by
multiple faculty members. The remaining
area is being freshly deployed as a large
area for multiple-robot coordination, which
will include several cameras mounted for
tracking their movements. Graduate stu-
continued on page 2
In this issue
1 The Rise of Robotics
2 Meet Ron Alterovitz
3 LITMUSrt
4 Alumni Profile - Aaron
Fulkerson, B.S. 2004
5 Alumni News
6 Recent Publications
7 Department News
