MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Two Faculty Named to Career Development Chairs

June 19, 1998

To: EECS Faculty and Staff

From: Paul Penfield, Jr.

Date: June 19, 1998

Subject: Two Faculty Named to Career Development Chairs

I am pleased to report to you that two of your colleagues, David Karger and Paul Viola, have been awarded career development chairs. David will hold an Edgerton professorship, and Paul will be the next Jamieson Professor.

David is a leading young algorithm designer, who has made important advances in randomized algorithms. He has also done some interesting work in information retrieval; he is seeking tools for people who want to extract useful information from enormously large text databases. He has taught 6.042 and has developed a graduate subject in his area. He recently was awarded a Packard Foundation Fellowship, and is being promoted to Associate Professor this year.

There are four Esther and Harold E. Edgerton career development chairs at MIT. They were established in 1973 to honor Doc Edgerton and his wife. Doc, who died in 1990, was on our faculty for his entire career. Current EECS faculty who have held this chair include Alan Grodzinsky, Gerry Sussman, Randy Davis, Jeff Lang, Marty Schlecht, and Leslie Kolodziejski.

Paul completed his thesis in the MIT AI Laboratory on alignment of multimodal images, such as those used in image-guided surgery, and then spent a year at the Salk Institute working on biologically inspired models of mammalian vision. His long-range goal is to provide visual competence to computers. To do this he plans to use many algorithmic and mathematical approaches. He has taught 6.001 and 6.034, and has begun to develop a new graduate subject in machine learning.

The Jamieson Career Development Professorship was established in 1992. The two chairholders so far have been Anant Agarwal and Frans Kaashoek. J. Burgess Jamieson, after whom the chair is named, is a member of the MIT class of 1952, and currently serves on our department's Visiting Committee. He is active in the venture-capital business.