News

DIMACS is pleased to announce an upcoming Special Focus on Bridging Continuous and Discrete Optimization as part of a broader partnership with the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. The new DIMACS/Simons Collaboration on Bridging Continuous and Discrete Optimization features activities at both DIMACS and the Simons Institute that are devoted to advancing capabilities in optimization by promoting collaborations and methods that bridge continuous and discrete optimization.

Three long-running DIMACS special focus (SF) programs drew to a close with the end of the summer. Each DIMACS SF is a multi-year program of coordinated activities addressing a broad topic and comprising activities such as workshops, research working groups, tutorials, and research visitors.

DIMACS joins the Douglass Residential College, School of Arts and Sciences, and Department of Computer Science in welcoming the second cohort of students to the Douglass-SAS-DIMACS Computer Science Living-Learning Community for Women, or CS LLC for short. The incoming CS LLC class consists of 20 first-year women who elected to join the LLC. Among them are 17 students from around NJ, one student from NY state, and two students from China.

Rutgers computer science graduate student Betül Durak recently helped to uncover an attack on the FF3 encryption method recommended by NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) for securing information in databases. FF3 is a “format-preserving” encryption (FPE) method, Durak-homepage-dmac.jpgwhich means that the output of the encryption (called the ciphertext) has the same format as the input. FPE makes it possible to encrypt data in legacy business applications built on structured data models to add security in a relatively seamless way.

In January 2017, DIMACS hosted the E+M=C2 workshop celebrating the 60th birthdays of Rutgers faculty members Eric Allender (Computer Science) and Mike Saks (Mathematics). Workshop presentations blended research with reminiscences about Allender and Saks and their many contributions to complexity theory and to combinatorics.

For over 20 years, the DIMACS Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program has brought students in computer science, mathematics, and related disciplines to spend their summer doing research at Rutgers. The Fall/Winter 2016 edition of the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences Access Newsletter includes an article on the experiences of some of the students who participated in the 2016 program.

Mathematician Felix Browder led a storied life that included a Ph.D. at age 20, McCarthy-era career setbacks, the National Medal of Science in 2000, and over thirty years on the Rutgers faculty. Browder’s personal history is remembered in memorials in the New Yorker and the Washington Post, while some of his contributions to the field of mathematics are highlighted in his 1997 nomination for president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

DIMACS Director Rebecca Wright has been named an IEEE Fellow in recognition of her contributions to applied cryptography and privacy. Earlier this year, she was also named a Distinguished Member of the ACM for her scientific contributions to computing.

AS/DIMACS postdoctoral fellow Noga Ron-Zewi and her collaborators Swastik Kopparty and Shubhangi Saraf, both faculty members in Computer Science and Mathematics at Rutgers,Noga Ron-Zewi graduate students Sivakanth Gopi and Rafael Oliveira of Princeton University, and Or Meir of the University of Haifa have made several recent breakthroughs in the study of local codes.

On September 28, the National Science Foundation (NSF) issued a press release announcing awards to establish ten new “Big Data Spokes” that will coordinate interdisciplinary collaborations addressing some of our most pressing data challenges. In the same press release, NSF announced award of ten planning grants also associated with the BD Spokes program.

We are sad to report that András Hajnal, who served as Director of DIMACS from 1994 to 1995, passed away on July 30 at the age of 85.

Hajnal came to DIMACS after a 40-year career at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and remained at Rutgers as a professor in the Department of Mathematics until his retirement in 2004 when he returned to Hungary.

Rutgers graduate student Jake Baron and his advisor Jeff Kahn have provided a construction [1] that shows that a bound on the size of minimum triangle edge cover of a graph G conjectured by Zsolt Tuza [2] in 1981 is, in fact, asymptotically tight for an infinite family of dense graphs. This disproves a more recent conjecture to the contrary by Raphael Yuster [3].

DIMACS Director Rebecca Wright was a panelist in the congressional Diversity in Tech Caucus hosted by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) on June 22, 2016.

She and the other panelists discussed why efforts to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM fields, particularly computing, are worthy of continued Federal support.

The March 2016 workshop on “Modeling of Infectious Diseases with a Focus on Ebola” was the tenth workshop that DIMACS has organized and held in Africa over nearly a decade of engagement with researchers in Africa. The workshop was held in Senegal, close to the areas of West Africa hardest hit by the 2014 Ebola outbreak but itself largely untouched by Ebola.

Research conducted at CCICADA, the homeland security center based at DIMACS, is featured in an article in the April 2016 issue of the Star-Ledger's Inside Jersey magazine.

A related article also appears on the CCICADA website. A PDF version of the Inside Jersey story is available here.

By any estimation, David Johnson’s influence on the field of computer science was profound. Since his death on March 8, colleagues and friends have reflected on the role that David played in shaping the field, particularly related to theoretical and experimental analysis of algorithms.

David’s influence on DIMACS was no less profound. He was instrumental in the development and evolution of DIMACS as an NSF Science and Technology Center from its earliest days.

Over its lifetime DIMACS has run a great many workshops, but December 15, 2015 marked a new milestone. It was the first time that three DIMACS workshops ran concurrently. The workshop on “Network Coding: the Next 15 Years” was held at DIMACS, the workshop on “Cryptography for Big Data” ran at the Data Science Institute at Columbia University, and the “MPE 2013+ International Workshop on Citizen Science” took place at the University of Paris-Dauphine.

A group of twenty modules linking mathematics and biology for use in high school classrooms is now available for free download from the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP). The modules were developed in two DIMACS-led projects with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Publication of the modules is the culmination of a decade-long effort, involving many researchers and teachers responsible for writing and reviewing the modules, as well as teachers from across the country tasked with testing the modules in their classrooms.

DIMACS will partner with the Department of Computer Science and Douglass Residential College to establish living, learning community for women in computer science at Rutgers. The program, open by application to female first-year students interested in majoring in computer science, aims to launch in 2016.