URCS 25th Anniversary Gala Dinner Program

Music: The Al Biles Virtual Quintet

John A. Biles is Professor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator in the Information Technology Department at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The Al Biles Virtual Quintet is a unique application of Information Technology to a decidedly human pursuit--jazz improvisation. The Virtual Quintet features a rhythm trio and two front-line soloists: Al Biles (the human one) on trumpet and flugelhorn, and GenJam (an interactive genetic algorithm written by Al Biles) on sax, flute, English Horn, etc. GenJam evolves populations of melodic ideas under the guidance of a human mentor from which it constructs full-chorus solos. GenJam also interacts in real time when ``trading fours'' with a human. It listens to the human's four-bar phrase via a pitch-to-MIDI converter, maps what it hears the human play to the chromosome structure it uses to represent four-bar phrases, applies its mutation operators to develop the human's phrase, and plays the mutated result as its response. The Virtual Quintet has performed in concert on three continents but prefers gigs like 25th birthday parties for computer science departments.

Welcome

Thomas J. LeBlanc joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department in 1983 and currently holds the rank of professor. He was chair of the department from 1990 through 1996, after which he was named Acting Vice Provost and Dean of the College Faculty (1996-97), Vice Provost and Dean of the College Faculty (1997-present), and Robert L. and Mary L. Sproull Dean of the College Faculty (1999-present). LeBlanc earned his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1982. His research interests include programming models, languages, and runtime library packages for parallel programming, parallel programming methodology, multiprocessor operating systems, and debugging and performance analysis of parallel programs.

Reminiscences and Remarks

Robert L. Sproull came to the University of Rochester in 1968 as vice president and provost. He was appointed president in 1970 and served alongside Chancellor W. Allen Wallis until 1975 when Wallis stepped down and Sproull became chief executive officer, a position he held until 1984. During his tenure as president, Sproull was heavily involved in initiating the Computer Science Department. An internationally known physicist, Sproull began his academic career at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, and then became vice president at Cornell University before coming to Rochester. Sproull is president emeritus and a life trustee, and currently retains an emeritus faculty appointment in the Department of Physics.

Jerome A. Feldman founded the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester in 1974 and was Professor and Chair from 1974 to 1981 and John H. Dessauer Professor from 1981 to 1988. He also served the University as Vice-Provost for Computing from 1977 to 1979. Feldman also spent his undergraduate years at Rochester (studying physics), after which he obtained an M.A. in Mathematics from Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon. Before returning to Rochester he spent two years as a staff member at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and twelve years on the computer science faculty at Stanford. During the 1970-71 academic year he was Visiting Professor of Mathematics at Hebrew University. After leaving Rochester, he held the positions of Director of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley (until 1998) and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Richard F. Rashid was a member of the Computer Science Department's first class of graduate students in the Fall of 1974 (along with Ilya Gertner, Keith Lantz, Joe Maleson, Jonathan Shopiro, and Graeme Williams) and completed his doctorate in 1977 in the field of computer vision and operating systems. Prior to coming to Rochester, Rashid graduated from Stanford University with honors in mathematics and comparative literature. In 1977 he joined the computer science faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, and in 1991 he joined Microsoft Corporation, where he is now senior vice president for advanced technology and research. While a graduate student, Rashid co-developed one of the world's first networked computer games, Alto Trek. An updated version of the game was released last spring by Microsoft under the name Allegiance.

Dana H. Ballard joined the faculty of the department in 1975 (the department's second year), where he currently holds the rank of professor with joint appointments in the Center for Visual Science and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California at Irvine in 1974. During 1974-1975 he held a post-doctoral appointment at the Laboratorio Tecnologie Biomediche in Rome, Italy. He is the co-author with Professor Christopher M. Brown of Computer Vision (Prentice-Hall, 1982), a standard text, and also wrote An Introduction to Natural Computation (MIT Press, 1997), which is a general advanced introduction to mathematical models of the brain. Ballard is the principal investigator in the National Institute of Health's Research Resource at Rochester, a set of multidisciplinary laboratories focusing on neural models of behavior.

Herbert B. Voelcker was a member of the electrical engineering faculty at Rochester for twenty-four years, where he founded the Production Automation Project in 1972 and served as its director until 1985. He also served on the committee that recommended the establishment of computer science as an academic discipline at the University of Rochester. He moved to Cornell in 1986, after spending a year at the National Science Foundation helping to organize a new engineering division and a new computing directorate. At Cornell, Voelcker directed the Manufacturing Engineering and Productivity Program from 1987 to 1991 and led the Cornell Programmable Automation research team from 1986 to 1998. He retired in December of 1999 but continues to do research and occasional teaching and advising. [Prof. Voelcker unfortunately could not be with us for the anniversary.]


Last change: 7 Nov 2000 by ferguson