News of Note From Pitt

• Information Sciences Professor Peter Brusilovsky Wins Army Research Award

• Professor of Law Arthur D. Hellman Testifies Before U.S. House Judiciary Committee 

• Research Paper Coauthored by Professor Alex Jones Named One of the Top 25 Most Influential Papers in Programmable and Custom Computing Machines Field 

PITTSBURGH—Behind the larger stories about the University of Pittsburgh are other stories of faculty, staff, and student achievement as well as information on Pitt programs reaching new levels of success. The following is a compilation of some of those stories.

Information Sciences Professor Peter Brusilovsky Wins Army Research Award

Peter Brusilovsky, chair of the graduate information science and technology program and professor within Pitt’s School of Information Sciences, has been awarded a $623,005 contract from the U.S. Army Contracting Command to study technological architecture, algorithms, and interfaces that support a new Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative project exploring a variety of approaches that enable educational software to adapt to the goals, knowledge, and personal traits of individual learners. This initiative provides state-of-the-art education and training for workforce members in the U.S. Department of Defense and other units of the federal government.

The three-year-contract will support Brusilovsky’s work with the initiative’s “Personal Assistant for Learning,” an architecture model for personalized learning to be used across platforms and devices, including mobile phones. Brusilovsky will help to build the software needed to improve the ways in which computers support humans. 

Professor of Law Arthur D. Hellman Testifies Before U.S. House Judiciary Committee

Arthur D. Hellman, Pitt’s Sally Ann Semenko Endowed Chair and professor of law, was invited to testify at a hearing before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet. The subject of the spring hearing was “An Examination of the Judicial Conduct and Disability System.”

Hellman testified that the system of decentralized self-regulation that Congress established in 1980 “is sound and does not require fundamental restructuring. At the same time,” he said, “the experience of the past few years has revealed gaps and deficiencies in the regulatory regime that warrant attention.” He suggested statutory amendments dealing with three aspects of the system—transparency and disclosure, disqualification of judges, and review of orders issued by chief judges and judicial councils. Click here to read Hellman’s complete statement.

Hellman has achieved a national reputation as a scholar of the federal courts. He is one of the leading academic commentators on issues of federal judicial ethics, and his unique series of empirical studies on the operation of precedent in the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. courts of appeals have been used as a basis for policy decisions at both the federal and state levels.

Research Paper Coauthored by Professor Alex Jones Named One of the Top 25 Most Influential Papers in Programmable and Custom Computing Machines Field

Alex Jones, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the computer engineering program within Pitt’s Swanson School of Engineering, has been recognized for writing one of the top 25 most influential papers in the history of the annual Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines. The international symposium, hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, celebrated its 20th anniversary in April. Jones’ paper, “A MATLAB Compiler for Distributed, Heterogeneous, Reconfigurable Computing Systems,” was published in 2000 and examines how to simplify the process of reconfigurable computer coding using MATLAB software, which is employed by engineers, scientists, and other users to analyze data, create algorithms, and produce models and applications.

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6/14/13/mab/cjhm

Written by Melissa Carlson