Who's afraid of Alex Halderman?

Princeton University's newest musical ensemble is more likely to tickle the keys of a QWERTY than any set of ivories.

The Visit Days for admitted prospective graduate students are Sunday March 26 and Monday March 27.

At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Bernard Chazelle, professor of computer science at Princeton University, plans to issue a call to arms for his profession, challenging his colleagues to grab society by the lapels and evangelize the importance of studying computer science.

Konstantin Makarychev has been awarded an IBM Fellowship for the 2006-07 academic year. He is working in the area of approximation algorithms and metric embeddings, and is particularly interested in algorithms for constraint satisfaction problems.

The National Science Foundation has granted CAREER awards, its most prestigious grants for scientists early in their careers, to three Princeton faculty members, Craig Arnold, Benjamin Sudakov and Olga Troyanskaya.

David Blei joined the Computer Science Department as Assistant Professor on January 1st.

Frances Spalding has been awarded a two year Microsoft Research Fellowship beginning in Fall 2006. Her research area is programming language design and verification and her recent work is on development of a high-level assertion language for specifying and automatically checking properties of data structures.

EXCELLENCE IN TEACHING’ AWARDS

Forging ties between technologists and public policy experts, Princeton is creating a research center to address societal issues, such as privacy and security.

Congratulations to the 15 students who participated in the 30th ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest on November 20.

This year's winner of the Accenture Award is Joseph K. Bradley, a BSE student in the class of 2006. Joseph's independent work has involved theoretical analysis of a new machine learning algorithm designed for handling datasets so large that they cannot fit into the memory of an ordinary computer, and an experimental study to determine how well it works in practice.