Five young faculty members have been recognized for their outstanding research potential through the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development awards, or CAREER awards. The highly sought NSF CAREER awards are the foundation's most prestigious honor for junior faculty. Established in 1995, the program helps top scientists and engineers who, early in their professional careers, simultaneously develop their contributions and commitment to research and education.

Each award will be spread over a three- to five-year period with much of the money going toward hiring graduate student assistants, developing courses and curricula, and writing textbooks.

Florin Balasa has been on the UIC faculty since January 2000. He is developing new tools and techniques—based on the data-flow analysis of behavioral specifications—for the memory management of real-time multimedia processing systems.

"In such applications, memory is perhaps the most important resource," said Balasa. "You need a lot of memory, and optimizing its amount and use is most important in these kinds of circuits. The project also addresses the problem of deriving multilevel memory architecture optimized for area and/or power, subject to performance constraints."

Barbara Di Eugenio researches natural language processing with the goal of getting computers to interact someday with students much like a human tutor.

"We want to make computers able to communicate with humans using human language," said Di Eugenio. Di Eugenio is using part of her grant money to organize workshops and activities to encourage young women to enter the computer science field.

Piotr Gmytrasiewicz is part of UIC's Artificial Intelligence Lab and its Multiagent Systems Group whose mission is to contribute to the fields of distributed artificial intelligence and multiagent systems by creating an artificial agent that is competent in its interactions with other intelligent agents. Gmytrasiewicz's CAREER award funds his current work on understanding the role, usefulness, and emergence of commonality among autonomous interacting agents, such as rules of behavior, social laws, and communication languages.

Jie Liang is developing tools using computational geometry to discover similar protein surface patterns and provide a database for use by other researchers.

"In living cells, protein molecules carry out all the tasks, from breaking down enzymes and digesting food to processing signals that enable the human brain to see things," said Liang. "We're interested in the interaction of the surface patterns on many tens of thousands of protein structures, their relationships, and functions. This could help lead to more effective drug treatments with fewer side effects."

Jan Verschelde is developing a software platform called NLApack, where NLA stands for numerical algebraic geometry, using a symbolic and numeric approach. It will serve engineers, mathematicians, and scientists in a broad range of research work.

"My research tries to integrate numeric and symbolic computations, where input data is known only approximately," Verschelde said. "New computing technology provides the ability to spit out not only numbers but also equations that point out relations among several quantities. Dealing with approximate input data is something that's part of a novel research trend in symbolic computations."