Jacobs School, CSE Honor Recently Appointed Endowed Chair Holders

May 1, 2017May 1, 2017 cnsmember

CSE Prof. Stefan Savage (left) now holds the Jacobs Chair in
Information and Computer Science. CSE Prof. Tajana Rosing (right) now holds the Fratamico Chair.

CSE and the Jacobs School of Engineering are celebrating two CSE professors who were awarded endowed chairs in the past year. The appointments of professors Tajana Rosing and Stefan Savage, both of whom are affiliated with the Center for Networked Systems (CNS), were previously announced, but now they will be honored at separate invitation-only receptions scheduled for May and June.

John J. and Susan M. Fratamico Endowed Chair

On Thursday, May 18 from 5:30-7:30PM, Jacobs School Dean Albert P. Pisano and CSE Chair Dean Tullsen will host a program and reception to celebrate CSE professor Tajana Rosing’s appointment to the John J. and Susan M. Fratamico Endowed Chair in the Jacobs School.

Rosing, who earned her Ph.D. from Stanford in 2001 while working at HP Labs, is the inaugural holder of the Fratamico chair, which was established in 2012. When the appointment was originally announced in September 2016, CSE’s Tullsen noted Rosing’s “creativity and approach to research [that] have had a deep impact on innovation in computer engineering.”

The computer engineering professor joined the CSE faculty in 2005. There, she established the System Energy Efficiency Lab (SEELab), which focuses on energy efficiency at many scales — from sensor nodes to data centers and from transport networks to power grids. Rosing’s research interests include embedded systems hardware and software design and the design of approximate and highly-efficient architectures. Currently Rosing works on efficient and distributed data collection, aggregation and processing in the context of Internet of Things applications, smart cities, wireless healthcare and the distributed Smart Grid for electricity.

Among her achievements, Rosing was able to optimize the design and operation of embedded systems to achieve 1,000 times more energy efficiency at the cost of a 10 percent inaccuracy (i.e., 10 percent error in computation). The real-world impact of her research has also stretched the battery life of smartphones and other electronic devices — and her work maximizes the quality of service in ‘smart’ servers while minimizing power consumption.

Irwin Mark and Joan Klein Jacobs Chair in Information and Computer Science

On Wednesday, June 7 from 5:30-7:30PM, Jacobs School Dean Pisano and CSE Chair Tullsen will host a reception to honor Savage, who holds the Irwin Mark and Joan Klein Jacobs Chair.in Information and Computer Science. The reception marks the first anniversary of Savage’s appointment to the chair in June 2016. The chair was newly empty following the retirement of CSE professor Ronald Graham, the previous holder of the Jacobs Chair.

The computer scientist – who co-directs CNS – joined the CSE faculty in 2000 in an acting capacity until he defended his dissertation at the University of Washington in 2002.

Much of Savage’s early research focused on operating systems. Already a Fellow of the ACM, he was honored again by ACM with its SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award in 2013. The award cited his “creativity and innovation in operating systems research.” The CSE professors other honors include the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award (2016) and a faculty research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2004).

Over time Savage expanded from operating systems and network security to cybersecurity, and he co-founded three research centers in the field: the Collaborative Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defense; the Center for Evidence-based Security Research; and the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems (to focus on security in the increasingly automated automotive sector).

Both programs and receptions will take place at the Calit2 Auditorium in Atkinson Hall. In addition to being CNS members, both Rosing and Savage are academic participants in Calit2’s Qualcomm Institute.