1. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Singapore’s Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) have named Prof Marianne Winslett the new Director of the Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC) in Singapore. Prof Winslett, a professor of computer science and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory and Information Trust Institute at Illinois, assumed duties at ADSC on 1 Nov 2009.
2. Prof Winslett will lead ADSC’s signature programme, the Human Sixth Sense Programme (HSSP), funded by A*STAR. HSSP, which aims to seamlessly integrate human and machine interactions and develop breakthrough innovations, will have two initial thrusts: Health Monitoring and Intelligent Transportation. These will leverage on the synergy of Illinois and A*STAR’s strengths in real-time data mining, speech technology and cryptography. HSSP will be one of the ways A*STAR supports Interactive Digital Media research, which is one of the key strategic thrusts of Singapore’s R&D efforts.
3. In Health Monitoring, researchers will design a scalable, trustworthy cyber-physical infrastructure for continuous health monitoring, which has sensors that can unobtrusively monitor body temperature, blood pressure, and other vital signals, while at the same time, transfer captured readings via external monitors to facilitate remote monitoring and tracking. In Intelligent Transportation, researchers will develop scalable transportation solutions to provide real-time information for traffic and road navigation that will introduce a paradigm shift in one’s driving experience.
4. In addition, Prof Winslett will also oversee ADSC’s educational focus. Several workshops have already been planned for 2010, including the first of a series of courses on multimodal information access and synthesis, co-organized with A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R). In the summer of 2010, Illinois experts will travel to Fusionopolis in Singapore to conduct a multicore programming course and discuss breakthroughs in parallel computing research, in an event co-organized by A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC).
5. Said Prof Chong Tow Chong, Executive Director of the Science and Engineering Research Council of A*STAR, “I am happy to welcome Marianne into the research community at Fusionopolis in her new role as Director of ADSC. I believe that Marianne, with her vision of excellence and wealth of experience in program building, is well-poised to drive development of future collaborations between ADSC and A*STAR. We look forward to working together with the Illinois faculty and students at ADSC to develop cutting-edge science, and generate activities that add to the vibrancy and diversity of local digital sciences and media technologies.”
6. “I'm very excited about this opportunity for us to carry out an exciting new research program while building bridges to researchers and industry in Asia,” said Prof Winslett.
7. “With her strong background in data security and scientific databases, Marianne is uniquely equipped to lead the Center into its next phase,” said Prof Ilesanmi Adesida, Dean of the College of Engineering at Illinois and Willett Professor. “She has strong technical expertise, is a visionary, and drives innovation.”
8. Prof Winslett holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University. She joined Illinois in 1987, subsequently receiving a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation and being named an ACM Fellow. In addition, she currently serves on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security and the Very Large Data Bases Journal. Her research interests focus on information security and the management of scientific data. Most recently, she was the co-leader of the TrustBuilder project that resulted in the development of new approaches to access control and authentication for use in open computing environments.
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN & AGENCY FOR SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND RESEARCH
Enclosed: Annex – Curriculum Vitae of Professor Marianne Winslett
For media enquiries, please contact:
Ms Kim Gudeman
Coordinated Science Laboratory
1308 W. Main Street
Urbana, IL 61801
DID +1 217 333 9735
Email kgudeman@illinois.edu
Ms Tan Le-Shon
Assistant Head, Corporate Communications
Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
1 Fusionopolis Way, #20-10, Connexis North
Singapore 138632
DID +65 68266 144
Email Tan_Le-Shon@a-star.edu.sg
About the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Illinois)
Founded in 1867, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus has a total enrollment of 31,181 undergraduate students and more than 10,711 graduate students. The campus has 2,200 faculty members and is among the top five universities that award doctorates annually. Illinois faculty members win the most prestigious national and international awards, including Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, Guggenheim Fellowships, Tony Awards, and National Medals of Science and Technology. In addition, Illinois’s engineering program is consistently ranked in the top five of all U.S. universities.
About the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) is the lead agency for fostering world-class scientific research and talent for a vibrant knowledge-based and innovation-driven Singapore. A*STAR oversees 14 biomedical sciences, and physical sciences and engineering research institutes, and seven consortia & centre, which are located in Biopolis and Fusionopolis, as well as their immediate vicinity.
A*STAR supports Singapore's key economic clusters by providing intellectual, human and industrial capital to its partners in industry. It also supports extramural research in the universities, hospitals, research centres, and with other local and international partners.
About the Advanced Digital Sciences Center (ADSC)
The ADSC is Illinois’ first research centre opened outside the United States. It draws on the collective strength of the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois, with expert faculty in medical devices, embedded and real-time systems, hardware/software co-design, networking and distributed systems, information trust and security, cloud computing, and computer vision.
ANNEX
Professor Marianne Winslett
Professor Marianne Winslett received her doctorate in computer science from Stanford University in 1987, and has been a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois since then.
Professor Winslett's distinguished career contributions to IT research and education have been recognized by numerous awards and her election to Fellow standing in the Association for Computing Machinery, the premier worldwide society of computer scientists. She also earned the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation in 1989. She is on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on Information and System Security and The Very Large Databases Journal, and has served on the editorial boards of ACM Transactions on the Web. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. In addition, she was SIGMOD vice chair from 2001-2005.
Her research interests lie in information security and in the management of scientific data.
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