SCHOOL OF COMPUTINGThe University of Utah

FALL 2011

TheUTAH TEAPOT

In this Issue

SoC WelcomesNew Faculty

Alumni Profile:ERIC MUEHLE

Video Game HelpsKids with Cancer

School of ComputingScholarships

Student SummerInternships

After a rigorous recruiting season the School of Computing welcomes five new faculty members to its ranks, bringing the school’s faculty numbers to 34 tenure-track faculty members. The five new faculty who join the SoC this year have expertise in databases, robotics, systems, scientific visualization and algorithms. “We are excited to welcome this new group of faculty members to the School of Computing, their expertise will build upon our growing strengths in these research areas”, said Al Davis, SoC Director.

Feifei Li, Assistant ProfessorBefore joining Utah Feifei was an assistant professor at the

Computer Science Department, Florida State University, from August 2007 to July 2011. Prior to that, he obtained his B.S. in computer engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2002 and PhD in computer science from Boston University in 2007. His research focuses on large-scale data management, such as query processing, indexing, and query optimization in databases. He also works on probabilistic data, text/string processing, semantic web/graph data (e.g.,

RDF), data-processing using MapReduce, as well as security and privacy issues in data management. His research has been actively supported by NSF, HP Labs and the Florida Department of Revenue. He has won NSF career award in 2011, HP Labs Innovation Research Award in 2011, the best presenter award in IBM T.J. Watson research center’s summer Intern lecture series in 2006, and the IEEE ICDE best paper award in 2004.

Besides work, he enjoys playing badminton, hiking, traveling, and reading.

Miriah Meyer, Assistant ProfessorMiriah is a USTAR assistant professor in the School of

Computing at the University of Utah and a faculty member in the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute. Her research focuses on the design of visualization systems for helping scientists make sense of heterogeneous data. She obtained her bachelors degree in astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, and earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Utah. Prior to joining the faculty at Utah Miriah was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University and a visiting scientist at

the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.In 2011 Miriah was named to the TR35, a list compiled by MIT Technology Review

recognizing 35 innovators under 35. She is a recipient of a 2009 and 2010 NSF/CRA

School of Computing Welcomes 5 New Faculty

Miriah Meyer continued on next page

FALL 2011

Computing Innovation Fellow award, as well as a 2006 AAAS Mass Media Fellowship that landed her a stint as a science writer for the Chicago Tribune. Miriah is on the organizing committee for the inaugural IEEE Symposium on Biological Data Visualization.

When she’s not graphing data, Miriah enjoys cycling, baking, and trying to get through a New Yorker in a week. Her guilty pleasure is lounging around on a rainy day with her husband and their cat, Voxel.

Jeff Phillips, Assistant ProfessorJeff Phillips has a BS in Computer Science and BA in Math from

Rice University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University where he was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Jeff is a recipient of a 2009 and 2010 NSF/CRA Computing Innovations Postdoctoral Fellow award. His interests span the areas of algorithms, data mining, machine learning, databases, and computational statistics, specifically those areas relevant to processing and understanding uncertainty in large scientific data sets.

Outside of work, Jeff enjoys hiking, yard work, watching sports, and arguing about things he has no control over.

Zvonimir Rakamaric , Assistant ProfessorZvonimir Rakamaric was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon

University in Silicon Valley, where he was also working closely with researchers from the Robust Software Engineering Group at NASA Ames Research Center. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. from the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, where his supervisor was Alan Hu. Zvonimir grew up and did his undergrad in Croatia.

The main focus of Zvonimir’s research is developing practical methods, techniques, and tools for improving reliability and correctness

of complex systems. Currently, his emphasis is on highly automatic and scalable analysis techniques for software, in particular for concurrent software. He is interested in any technique that supports those goals, such as extended static checking, automated theorem proving, model checking, and runtime verification.

Outside of work, Zvonimir enjoys the outdoors (hiking, skiing, sailing), traveling, basketball, reading, watching movies, and spending quality time with family and friends.

Jur van den Berg, Assistant ProfessorJur van den Berg is assistant professor with the School of Computing

at the University of Utah. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science at Utrecht University, the Netherlands in 2007, and has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2007-2009, 2010), and at the University of California, Berkeley (2009-2010). Jur’s research interests lie in algorithmic robotics, with a particular focus on robot collision avoidance, planning, and control in application domains such as aerial robotics, medical robotics, crowd simulation, virtual environments and computer games, autonomous transportation, and

personal robotics.Besides work, Jur likes to speed-skate, and is excited about Salt Lake City having a rink at the

Olympic Oval. He is also always in the mood to go for a beer.

Miriah Meyer continued

FALL 2011

Alumni Profile

From unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) to unmanned combat air vehicles, Eric Muehle continues to build on the experience he received while at the University of Utah. The Teapot catches up with Eric Muehle, a Technical Fellow at the Boeing Company in Seattle.

Utah Teapot: Why computer science?

Eric Muehle: When I was younger I enjoyed playing strategy board games and I wanted to write a program that could play a strategy game better than me.  That’s what first got me interested in learning to program. Once I got into writing code, I was hooked.

UT: When did you graduate?

EM: I completed my bachelor’s degree in 1985, and went on to complete my Masters in 1987.

UT: What was your education like at the University?EM: I worked long hours as an undergraduate. I remember our

undergraduate class was very competitive on everything. When I was a grad student I spent even more time at school. I learned a lot of programming languages. There was one class where we learned a different language every 2 weeks. That was a good thing, as I learned how to learn other languages.

I had a number of great classes while at the U, but there were a few that have helped throughout my career: an artificial intelligence course taught by Tom Henderson, a LISP class taught by Bob Kessler and a computer vision course.

UT: What memories do you have of your experience here?EM: There was a yearly rover contest where the students

would program their planetary exploration rovers to move out across a simulated landscape, explore, and collect valuable objects and rocks. A central server provided the simulated environment and everyone would upload their program/rules into the system. The simulation would put 4 rovers on a planet surface and calculate a game score based on what was explored, collected, and brought back to the rover base. My rover had an aggressive exploration strategy that would use the built in rover laser against anything that was too heavy to pick up. The idea was to break a large object into smaller objects that could then be collected for score. When my rover would enter the same location as another rover it would eventually try to pick it up, but since it

was too heavy, it would fire the laser at it and would destroy the other rover. This was an unpublished feature in the simulation. My rover literally destroyed all the other competition.

UT: Since graduating has your career path been what you expected?

EM: Not at all. I didn’t really know what to expect. Along my career I worked at aerospace companies and had the opportunity to launch a couple of startup companies. Launching a successful startup is like completing a “just in time” MBA at the same time one is developing a product. I learned a lot during those efforts. Many software design and development principles that I was taught in school were

solidified during this time. If you have the chance to work in a startup you should do it, especially early in your career. What you learn there will last a lifetime.

UT: What changes in industry have impacted your job?EM: A significant change is the globalization and distributed

worldwide development that it entails. It is very difficult to bridge cultural differences and spoken/written languages when expressing the requirements for a complex software system. When problems occur, the cleanup and resolution of the issues can be problematic and difficult to navigate through.

UT: What are you working on at Boeing?EM: I currently am working on the Airborne Early Warning

and Control (AEW&C) training and mission planning software in addition to the X-45 unmanned air vehicle efforts.

UT: Tell us about your family?EM: I have been married for 28 years and we have 4 children.

My oldest is in law school and a Utah grad, 2 others currently attending Utah, and my youngest is a senior in high school. My son Alex currently plays for the University of Utah Rugby team.

When not busy at Boeing, Eric enjoys traveling, playing sports and when time permits writing the occasional app for fun.

Eric Muehle

If you are interested in making contact with Eric send mail to emuehle@comcast.net

Muehle family

FALL 2011

Sept. 26, 2011 – Even super heroes need a chance to get better, especially if they’ve been fighting their arch-nemesis and a robotic crab that just won’t go away. At least, that’s the premise behind a video game developed at the University of Utah to help children with cancer during their treatment.

In an exciting collaboration between the University of Utah’s Entertainment Arts and  Engineering (EAE) program, the university’s departments of pediatrics and medicinal chemistry and Primary Children’s Medical Center, a team of professors and graduate students have created a game that is expected to increase patients’ physical strength and give them a sense of empowerment to help their mental state while fighting their disease. On Friday, Sept. 23, the game was unveiled for use at Primary Children’s Medical Center.

EMPOWERING PATIENTSIt started when Grzegorz Bulaj, an associate professor of

medicinal chemistry at the University of Utah, met Charlie (name has been changed), an eight-year-old boy with an extraordinary spirit who has been diagnosed with a brain tumor. During hospital visits, Bulaj noticed a contraption called an incentive spirometer, a plastic tube in which a patient exhales and raises a ball (the incentive) as high as he can in order to encourage deep breaths and guard against pneumonia.

As primitive as it may seem, Bulaj realized this spirometer is nothing more than a game that encourages activity to help healing. He contacted a colleague, hematologist-oncologist Carol Bruggers, who works in pediatric oncology at Primary Children’s Medical Center, located next to the university and its teaching and research hospital.

Bruggers and Bulaj discussed the merits of developing another type of game for patients like Charlie.

“After talking to Carol,” Bulaj explains, “the idea was defined like this: We activate the circuits in the brain that connect the part responsible for keeping us highly motivated to the part that contains motor activity.” Through associating physical activity with motivational stimuli, Bulaj says, “a new circuit of positive impulses would then be developed that would make patients feel stronger as they fight an illness. Possibly more important, they’ll have fun doing it.”

Bruggers next did some research on the concept of “patient empowerment,” which psychologists describe as a “locus of control” from within. It is the idea that a patient feels they can change the seemingly impossible. She found statistics in which stroke patients made significant progress in physical therapy focused on patient empowerment techniques.

“Patients who are more empowered are presumably more likely to be willing to fight their disease and maintain their treatment for a longer period of time,” Bruggers explains.

She notes that when treating cancer patients, hope is a major factor. She is optimistic that this project will stave off that sense of hopelessness she sees all too often in her daily interactions with patients.

“You know, this project was very exciting for me,” says Bruggers, “because I have a chance to be part of making something useful

and fun for kids that will potentially help a lot of people.”

ENTER, EAEIn a moment that now seems serendipitous, Bruggers read

about EAE, a nationally ranked program jointly owned by the Department of Film and Media Arts and the School of Computing, that teaches students how to make video games at the University of Utah.

“EAE is designed to challenge students and present them with real-world opportunities. This project fit the bill perfectly,” says Roger Altizer of what is now being called the PE Interactive Video Game. PE stands for patient empowerment, and also connotes the physical aspect of the game’s design. Altizer, who came up with the game design, is the director of game design and production for the EAE program.

Altizer, with other EAE faculty Robert Kessler and Craig Caldwell, gathered a team of five graduate students to develop the game. Bruggers requested specific criteria for the project catering to the needs of children undergoing cancer treatment.

Bruggers’ criteria may have seemed unusual, or even incongruous, for a video game. Among them was the requirement that the player must be able to battle and grow stronger without experiencing any violence, killing, death or gory graphics.

“The students did an amazing job of reconciling battle with healing, and fighting with positivity,” Bruggers says.

The graduate students – Laura Warner, Kurt Coppersmith, Brandon Davies, Wade Paterson and Jordan Wilcken – worked over the summer to create a five-level multi-player game. It comes complete with original music, characters and graphics and is portable so it can be used in a hospital room.

Created with Microsoft XNA and played using Move Controllers on the Sony PlayStation 3, the game utilizes motion-control technology, but does not require a lot of space to do so. EAE was given access to the beta version of Sony’s Move.me program to develop the game. In addition, the system does not interfere with the frequency of hospital monitors as some motion-controlled

New Video Game to Help Kids with Cancer

“Charlie,” a little boy who inspired the PE Game project, plays the game with student developers and his family at his home for the first time. photo credit: Grzegorz Bulaj

FALL 2011

his home. “He’s a special boy,” says Bulaj, “I wanted him to be the first patient to play it since he’s the reason we started down this path.”

A SMALL STEP TOWARD BIG REWARDSAll of the parties involved in the game’s development expect

only bigger and better things to come from this first small step.Bruggers, Bulaj, Altizer, Caldwell and Kessler have elicited

the help of another University of Utah entity to help future development of the game.

The Pierre Lassonde Entrepreneur Center has assigned this project to a team of graduate students who will research and create a strategy for putting the PE Game into the hands of other hospitals and caregivers. That could be through a number of different market opportunities, including a non-profit unit associated with the university.

Lassonde Center director Troy d’Ambrosio is confident that the best model for this project will come out of his students’ creativity and thorough examination. “This is another great learning experience for university students, and a great example of the practical application our program enables. This is a creative and tangible exercise that challenges our students.”

Much like EAE, the Lassonde Center has found a way for students to work on real-world challenges presented by this project. D’Ambrosio notes, “This is not a simple equation to solve, but most things in the world are complicated.”

Both Bruggers and Bulaj express their delight at how far their “simple” idea has come over a span of less than a year.

“I can’t believe we started talking about this in January, and by September we were able to actually deliver the product to Charlie and patients of Primary Children’s Medical Center to play,” Bulaj says. “This is the kind of difference we can make at a world-class research university. It has been a perfect example of the university’s three-pronged mission of research, education and service.”

Plus, he says, it’s been a lot of fun.

systems have been found to do.In creating the game, it was important that the students

understand the needs of pediatric cancer patients. They spent an extensive amount of time with Bruggers and Bulaj, as well as with a physical therapist and social workers from Primary Children’s Medical Center. From these meetings, the students were able to discern characteristics that would be important to the healing process.

“Something subtle, yet extremely important to the game is the use of metaphor and imagery,” notes Altizer. He says that the main character – a super hero who is exhausted from fighting his arch nemesis – gets more vibrant and bigger as he progresses through the levels of the game.

“It is our goal that the patient will relate to the super hero, as they play more, he gets stronger,” Altizer says. He also notes that no living thing in the game is hurt or killed. The super hero always wins and the characters he fights are robotic, not even meant to represent real crabs or whales.

Metaphors abound in the game, and Bruggers and Bulaj are especially fond of a level where a retaining wall must be built to guard inhabitants of an island from a tsunami. All players in the game use movement controllers to spread mortar and stack bricks together. The wall is designed to represent a patient working with their team of caregivers to build their immune system.

The physical activity of the game gets progressively more challenging as the player advances through levels. While the student developers were mindful that cancer patients can be weak and/or have limited mobility, it was important to progress in order to increase endurance and physical characteristics like heart rate and oxygen intake.

Bruggers expects to be able to watch how patients and their families interact with the game and collect data on patients’ progress.

As for Charlie, the little boy who inspired this all, “he played the game for hours and was happily exhausted when done,” Bulaj says. Bulaj made arrangements to play with Charlie at a private session in

Grzegorz BulajAssociate Professor, Medicinal ChemistryOffice Phone: 801-581-4629Email: bulaj@pharm.utah.edu

Roger AltizerAdjunct Associate Professor , Film and Media Arts, the University of UtahOffice Phone: 801-581-5127Email: roger.altizer@utah.edu

Kate FerebeePublic Relations Specialist, the University of UtahOffice Phone: 801-587-9183Email address: kate.ferebee@utah.edu

Graduate students who developed the PE Game included many metaphors for a healing patient. Pictured here, they demonstrate building a wall with fellow players to guard against a tsunami. The wall is designed to represent a patient woking with their team of caregivers to build their immune system.photo credit: Lawrence Boye

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For more information on the EAE program go to www.eae.utah.edu

FALL 2011

FACULTYSTUDENTS

News

Shane Robison Scholarship

Arianna M. LaLonde Scholarship for Women of Excellence in Computer Science

Alison and Paul Mayfield Undergraduate Scholarship

Dave Hanscom Scholarship

The Howard and Joan de St. Germain Scholarship

Kiri Wagstaff AI/ML Scholarship

Worsencraft/McEnvoy Family Undergraduate Scholarship

Lee and Audrey Hollar Undergraduate Scholarship

Scholarship for Women in CS

Kessler Family Scholarship

Disney Scholarship

Sosic Scholarship

2011-2012 SCHOLARSHIPS

Joseph Peterson, Nicholas Rasband, James See & Mohamed Zarook

Wendy Chidester, Sarah Hong, Charmaine Keck, Dore Weber & Theresa Krause

Alex Bigelow

Andrzej Forys

Kathryn Rodgers

Alex Clemmer

Hushel Roberts

Elias Bagley

Esmeralda Bess

Mavin Martin

Luke Hartvigsen

Mavin Martin

RECIPIENTS

Congratulations to Weibin Sun selected as a 2011 NVIDIA Graduate Fellow. Weibin, a second-year PhD student in the Flux Research Group, was selected for this highly competitive award for his work on “Augmenting Operating Systems With The GPU.”

Andrew Cobb, an undergraduate student in CS won $10K in a local programming competition. Instructure, a local tech company in Salt Lake, sponsored the competition. Andrew beat out over 180 other competitors. Congratulations Andrew!

Parasaran Raman (PhD student) along with faculty members Jeff Phillips and Suresh Venkatasubramanian won the Best Paper Award with their paper titled “Generating A Diverse Set Of High-Quality Clusterings” at the 2011 MultiClust Workshop in Athens, Greece.

Miriah Meyer was recognized by the MIT Technology Review’s top 35 innovators of 2011. The list honors some of the most innovative researchers in the country.

Kris Sikorski was awarded the Special Information-based Complexity Prize for outstanding research achievements on fixed point problems. The Prize carries an award of $3000 and a plaque.Information-based complexity (IBC) is the branch of computational complexity that studies problems for which the information is partial, contaminated, and priced.

If you are interested in donating to any of the School of Computing scholarships or establishing your own please contact Chris Coleman at coleman@cs.utah.edu or call 801-581-8580. For more information on the scholarship go to www.cs.utah.edu/undergraduate/scholarships/

FALL 2011

I spent my summer as an R&D intern at Weta Digital, in Wellington, New Zealand. Weta Digital is known for its work on Avatar and the Lord of The Rings trilogy.

While at Weta I spent my time working in the R&D Simulation group, I worked on interpolation techniques for fluid control methods, which comprised of solving for Steady State Stokes Flow. The best thing about interning at Weta was the unique blend of academia and industry work that was done by the research and development team. The problems we worked on were highly focused on current industry needs. Because of this, employees get to work on interesting and practical problems in an environment very similar to academia. The work atmosphere was a very exciting and fun-filled, my fellow crew members were helpful, friendly, and very open to discussing the problems we were all working on.

The internship program at Weta was well planned. Before arriving my supervisor organized the problems that I was there to work on, this saved me a lot of time. He was very helpful and encouraging.

While working at Weta I was able to view movie clips from “The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn” , “Rise of The Planet of The Apes” and “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” before they were released. Overall, working at Weta was a great experience, it was an awesome place to work and I would surely like to return.

My summer was spent interning at Goldman Sachs & Company here in Salt Lake. I was hired on as an Application Developer for the Credit Risk Management Team. The teams main priorty is to create, maintain and reform software systems within the company. The work we did helped business analysts at Wall Street in determining the credit rating and credit worthiness of potential customer of Goldman Sachs. The internship provided me a great opportunity to interact with some high profile people who have been in the industry for the past 15 - 25 years.

The project I worked on was called the “What-If Analysis”(WIA). WIA is an application that was developed as an extension application, it draws some of the main functionalities from one of the main-stream projects that is yet to be implemented completely for production. The project uses an open source tool called Drools, a Business Rules Management System, which when fed a rule set and the details about the customer it will return the desirable output in the user defined format from which all the required information can be extracted. As the name “What-If” suggests, my project involved creating a platform for the business analysts to tweak the rule set with transient changes to run both the original and modified rule set on the customer(s) and return the impact and change in the result.

Overall, my internship was a great experience. It helped me understand how a big financial firm like Goldman Sachs is driven by technology and the role technology plays in its day-to-day operations.

Summer Internship Reports

by Haimasree BhattacharyaInterned at Weta Digital

by Balaji SoundrarajanInterned at Goldman Sachs & Company

Adam EllisJamie KingSteven WardZhan WangShantharaju JayannaAnshul JoshiCraig JensonDavid LewisChris EarlKshitij Sudan Ashwin KumanCarson BrownleeVishay VanjaniOliver SissonManjunath ShevgorZhisong FuSujin PhillipHarsh BhatiaYang ChenSuchit MaindolaAvishek SahaSriram Nandha PremnathSidharth KumarDan GerszewskiSU

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S Avalanche/Disney InteractiveEA GamesDreamworks AnimationTelenavMicrosoftCymphonix Corp.Hill Air Force BaseEA GamesDisney AnimationSeaMicro Inc.Intel Corp.Lawrence Berkeley National LabsBloombergRapLeafAdvanced Micro DeviceNvidiaLos Alamos National LabsLawrence Livermore National LabsNvidiaGoldman SachsNEC LabsBell LabsArgonne National LabsAvalanche/Disney Interactive

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School of ComputingUniversity of Utah50 S Central Campus Dr, Rm 3190Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9205

Calendar

© 2011 The University of Utah

SCHOOL OF COMPUTINGTHE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

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Comments and suggestions are welcome,

please send email to teapot@cs.utah.edu

EDITOR & DESIGN: CHRIS COLEMAN

December 9, 2011Fall semester ends

December 17 - January 8, 2012Holiday Break

January 8, 2012Spring semester begins

January 16, 2012Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday