Pirated microchips -- chips stolen from legitimate factories or made from stolen blueprints -- account for billions of dollars in annual losses to chipmakers.

We are looking for some creative input and ideas for a logo for the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology.

Although the United States is one of the world's most

VietNamNet Bridge Vietnam OpenCourseWare (OCW) was officially made available yesterday, making web-based educational materials easily accessible to all Vietnamese students. The project was officially kicked off in November 2005 and it has received support from MIT OCW, Rice Connexions and the OCW Consortium. The goal is to help Vietnamese students access a full spectrum of educational resources and use them both effectively and free of charge.

Rice's Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) has been renamed in honor of its founder and Rice alumnus, Ken Kennedy '67, who died Feb. 7, 2007.

The new name -- the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology -- was announced December 7, 2007, at a campus workshop celebrating Kennedy's life and accomplishments.

Robotics engineers at Rice University are teaming with doctors from Memorial Hermann|TIRR to develop a PC-based system for physical rehabilitation.

"It can take months of physical therapy for stroke patients to regain the use of their limbs," said system architect Marcia O'Malley, director of Rice's Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces Laboratory (MAHI). "We hope to refine our system to allow patients to recover faster and to allow therapists to more precisely monitor patients' recovery."

The content published in Connexions attracts over 600,000 users a month, ranging from K-12 children to university-level engineering students. Fifty percent of its traffic comes from outside the United States, with 30-40 percent coming from the developing world. And as the site grows, Baraniuk is seeing a rise in the number of people using its modules, especially in the arts and humanities, for informal learning.

Intel ethnographer Genevieve Bell sometimes lives with families for days or weeks to find out how they use technology. That's because the answers to the questions she's interested in -- such as "How is the use of technology influenced by culture?" -- aren't immediately obvious.

Software enabled machines interact with the physical world every day, said Rice computer scientist Walid Taha. Some of these systems are complex, including entire robotic assembly lines. Other well-known examples include NASA's Mars rovers and the military's use of unmanned flying drones.

The Rice University Press, which was eliminated in 1996, was revived last year with the idea that it would publish online only, using low-cost print-on-demand for those who want to hold what they are reading. Since the announcement that the press was coming back ¿ and using a unique model by not publishing in traditional book form ¿ many in academic publishing have wondered how Rice would shift to a new format for publishing while maintaining the rigor associated with a university press.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the study of biomolecular interactions. One area of increasing interest and importance explores the interactions that occur when a ligand attaches itself to the docking site of another molecule known as a receptor. (  

Technology Review select CITI researchers as developers of today's most significant emerging technologies. Richard Baraniuk and Kevin Kelly believe compressive sensing could help devices such as cameras and medical scanners capture images more efficiently. (more)

Ken Kennedy, founder of Rice University's nationally ranked computer science program and one of the world's foremost experts on high-performance computing, died Feb. 7 at a Houston hospital after a long battle with cancer. He was 61.

"Rice has lost one of its great intellectual leaders and a great human being," Rice President David Leebron said. (more)

HOUSTON - Ken Kennedy, the founder of Rice University's nationally ranked computer science program and one of the world's foremost experts on high-performance computing, died Feb. 7 at a Houston hospital after a long battle with cancer. He was 61.

Fluid-structure interaction modeling could lead to better diagnoses and prognoses of cerebral aneurysms.

An interview with Anthony Brandt on KUHF about ¿Sound Reasoning¿ a course offered for free in Connexions.

"The impetus was provided by high-performance computing, and the time was right," said Ken Kennedy, University Professor, the John and Ann Doerr Professor in Computational Engineering in Computer Science and professor in electrical and computer engineering (more).

The Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) celebrate its 20th anniversary with a day long technical symposium on challenges in the fields of computation and information technology. You are invited to join us for this special open and free symposium. Please follow the link and register for the event. (more)

The Department of Energy has awarded Rice University three major computer science research grants, including one for a $10 million multi-university initiative to design and build the software that scientists need to harness the power of emerging supercomputers. (More)

Moshe Y. Vardi, Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering, will be awarded the Test-of-Time Award from the IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (LICS) for co-authoring a paper 20 years ago that still carries influence today.

Female graduate students and postdocs who will be actively searching for a faculty position are invited to apply online by the August 15, 2006 deadline. Please visit the Workshop website for more details: http://www.advance.rice.edu/negotiatingtheidealfacultyposition/

Taking a clean slate approach to the design of high performance wireless networks requires an extraordinary multi-disciplinary collaboration among computer architects, communication theorists, network protocol designers, hardware and RF engineers.

Based on advances in computer algorithms for modeling complex fluid mechanics problems, scientists today are able to simulate, in three dimensions, the flow of blood and the interaction between blood and the arterial wall.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded Moshe Y. Vardi, Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering, and three of his colleagues the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for 2005.

Scott Rixner, assistant professor of computer science, has received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER Award for his work in network server architecture.

Researchers in the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice have created a new rice-shaped nanoparticle that could improve chemical sensing and biological imaging.

The Sky.NET Simulation Project¿a project focused on building applications to model political, social, and economic scenarios¿will receive the Virginia and Griff Lawhon Digital Education Award for 2006. Sky.NET is a system designed and built in an undergraduate Computer Science course to run simulations and games.

A study released on February 23rd by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) shows a robust information technology industry in the United States, despite the offshoring of IT jobs around the world.

February 10, 2006
Rice's largest computer system, a Cray XD1 Supercomputer, is hooked up and humming at an off-campus data center near downtown Houston.

The Cray XD1 Cluster with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron processors was acquired with a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation and additional funds from AMD.

The Rice Computational Research Cluster has arrived at its new home in the Rice Data Center and technicians are now installing the Cray XD1(TM) supercomputer. CITI researchers will soon have use of the new research cluster, which has Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors.

An abstract for the talk and speaker's bio can be found  

Richard Tapia, Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics has been named University Professor, the first mathematician to receive the honor.

The Gulf Coast Center for Computational Cancer Research (GC4R) just announced a seed funding opportunity for developing research collaborations in Biomedical Computing.

The goal of the C-ABC program is to to encourage and support new projects bridging information technology research at Rice and biomedical research in the Texas Medical Center, with a particular emphasis on computational cancer. The program is funded by the John & Ann & Doerr Fund for Computational Biomedicine.

Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science, will be associate director of an effort that teams experts from Rice, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Iowa, and SRI International in bolstering security and trust in e-voting.

Hot Hires is a series highlighting new faculty at American colleges and universities at the beginning of the new semester.

CITI researchers will soon have use of a new research cluster, a Cray XD1 supercomputer with Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors. The new cluster will support compute-intensive research across science and engineering, including computer science, biophysics, computational mathematics, earth sciences, and cognitive neuroscience.

Three engineering faculty have been invited to the National Academy of Engineering's Frontiers of Engineering Symposium.

Rice University's Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) has been awarded a highly competitive, five-year, $3 million federal grant for a program to prepare students in the design and fabrication of nanoscale optical components and their applications in emerging technologies.

Sallie Keller-McNulty, former group leader for the Statistical Sciences Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, joined Rice University's George R. Brown School of Engineering as dean July 1.

For the third summer, Javier Rojo, professor of statistics, has brought undergraduate students to Rice for an intensive introduction to statistics research.

Ken Kennedy has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's foremost scholarly honors. Kennedy, University Professor and the John and Ann Doerr Professor of Computational Engineering in the Department of Computer Science, is among 196 new fellows of the academy. New fellows were nominated and elected by members through a highly competitive process on the basis of pre-eminent contributions to their disciplines.

Three Rice faculty members are among this year's recipients of prestigious Guggeneheim Fellowships. Among them is Moshe Y. Vardi, Karen Ostrum George Professor of Computational Engineering and director of the Computer and Information Technology Institute.

For stories posted before March 3, 2005, see the archived CITI News Archive

Two agencies within the National Institutes of Health have awarded more than $1.1 million in grants to the Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning. The funds will support the creation of web adventures to teach middle school students about the biology of alcohol use and abuse and to expand an extant program that focuses on infectious diseases and the microbes that cause them.

Rice University bioengineer Rebekah Drezek has been awarded the 2005 Becton-Dickinson Career Achievement Award by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI).

The image at left shows nanoshell bioconjugates engineered to image (top row) and destroy (middle row) cells based on the presence of a specific biomarker of breast cancer. Bottom row: Dark color indicates presence of nanoshells. Read more

The deadline for proposals is May 23 at 5 p.m.

The image at left shows nanoshell bioconjugates engineered to image (top row) and destroy (middle row) cells based on the presence of a specific biomarker of breast cancer. Bottom row: Dark color indicates presence of nanoshells. Read more

The proposal deadline is May 23, 2005 at 5 P.M. See the link above for submission form.

Engineering faculty may request support from the Brown Undergraduate Research Internship Program for Summer 2005. Details at the link above.

Marcia K. O'Malley, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science has won the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Yehia Massoud, assistant professor of electrial and computer engineering, has received the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Rational drug design is just one of the areas of research in which the Rice Terascale Cluster is now playing a role. Lydia Kavraki, professor of comptuer science and bioengineering, and her Physical and Biological Computing Group are using the cluster to help decrease the time it takes to design new drugs.

Moshe Y. Vardi, George Professor of Computational Engineering, and colleagues recently launched a unique open-access electronic journal.

CITI's Enriching Rice through Information Technology (ERIT) funding program is in its second year, and the results are looking good. The Sheafor/Lindsay Innovation Fund, which fuels ERIT, was established in 2001 with a generous gift from Rice alumni Steve Sheafor '72 and Cindy Lindsay '73.

Pol D. Spanos, Lewis B. Ryon Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering, has been named to the National Academy of Engineering.

Krishna Palem thinks a little uncertainty in chips could extend battery life in mobile devices--and maybe the duration of Moore's Law, too.

Computing researchers at Rice have joined electronics specialists at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to form a new $2.6-million Institute for Sustainable Nanoelectronics (ISNE). The joint research initiative, valued at 4 million Singapore dollars, aims to slash design and production costs for embedded microchips -- special-purpose computer chips that power everything from cell phones and digital cameras to jet airplanes and MRI machines.

Vivek Sarkar is moving from his position as Senior Manager of Programming Technologies at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center to join the Computer Science Department at Rice University, in Houston. Effective July 1, he will be the E.D. Butcher Professor of Computer Science at Rice.

On December 7-8, 2006, the Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) at Rice University celebrated its 20th anniversary with a technical symposium that attracted a stellar collection of experts in the world of supercomputing. (more)

A room's design helps define how people interact inside it, and it's much the same in the molecular world. The atomic layout of molecular spaces can provoke very different reactions from chemicals that meet there, in much the way that an intimate bistro and a bustling cafeteria might evoke different interactions among diners.

The Tech Museum of Innovation recently named Rice University's Connexions website, which was developed with the support of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, as one of five winners in the Education category of its annual awards to recognize the use of technology to benefit humanity. ...

The digital camera you used to take spectacular photos during your last vacation is a woefully wasteful machine. ...

A recent study released by the Association for Computing Machinery shows a robust IT industry in the U.S., despite IT jobs being moved to workers in other countries, also called offshoring.

Moshe Vardi, the Karen Ostrum George Professor in Computational Engineering and director of the Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology, has received one of the inaugural 2008 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Awards for a paper he co-authored in 1998.

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Dan Wallach, associate professor of computer science and a specialist in computer voting security, has been named by Computer World magazine to its annual "40 Under 40" list. The honor highlights the work of young researchers.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation offers more than $75,000 for inventions by undergraduate and graduate students. The deadline for entering is June 1, 2006. See the link above for more information.