October 30, 2003

Faculty honors

Ken Alder, professor of history, has been named the Milton H. Wilson Professor in the Humanities.

Alder, the Harold and Virginia Anderson Outstanding Teaching Professor from 1999-2003, is director of the Science in Human Culture Program. His research focuses on the history of science and technology in the context of social and political change.

Alder’s first book, “Engineering the Revolution,” was awarded the 1998 Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology as the best scholarly book published in the field. The book takes up the history of the gun to explore how technological transformation is rooted in political and cultural forces.

“The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error that Transformed the World” (2002) received the Watson Davis Prize from the History of Science Society and has been translated into 13 languages.

Alder is working on a history of the lie detector in the U.S. and a history of the forensic sciences in France and America.

Peter Dinda, assistant professor of computer science, has been named the Lisa Wissner-Slivka and Benjamin Slivka Professor of Computer Science.

Dinda’s research interests are in distributed systems; distributed interactive applications; networking; resource demand and availability prediction; performance analysis, and statistical analysis and prediction.

He currently is working on the Virtuoso project, which explores resource management and prediction for distributed virtual machine computing, as well as URGIS (Unified Relational Approach to Grid Information Services); Clairvoyance resource measurement and prediction for distributed interactive applications, and Tsunami wavelet-based approaches to resource measurement and prediction.

Dinda has received substantial research funding from the National Science Foundation, including a 2001-06 CAREER Award. He came to Northwest-ern in 2000 from Carnegie-Mellon University where he earned his doctorate in computer science.

Prem Kumar, professor of electrical and computer engineering and of physics and astronomy, has been named the SBC Professor of Information Technology.

He also is director of the Center for Photonic Communication and Computing.

Kumar, who has published more than 300 papers, is widely recognized for his research on the development of novel fiber-optic devices for ultrahigh-speed optical and quantum communication networks. He is credited with advancing the state of the art in noise measurement, management and reduction in optical systems such as fiber optics, signal processing and imaging. His research has now extended to quantum cryptography over fiber lines.

Kumar’s projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Army Research Office and the Office of Naval Research.