Takeo Igarashi, a postdoc in the Graphics Group here working with John Hughes, hit the worldwide news today. The BBC News Online, no less (http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1606000/1606175.stm), picked up a system he's to present at the ACM UIST (User Interface Software and Technology) conference in Orlando next month. What's more, slashdot.org (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/18/1245232&;mode=thread), which calls itself ``News for Nerds'' and is read, John Bazik says, by ``millions of geeks like me,'' just grabbed the story and featured it ...

NSF has awarded three more Information Technology Research (ITR) grants to researchers in this department.

First, Michael Black was granted $446K over three years for ``The Computer Science of Biologically Embedded Systems'', work done in conjunction with John Donoghue (Biomed-Neuroscience) and Lucien Bienenstock (Division of Applied Mathematics). Michael's abstract states, `` Biologically embedded systems that directly couple artificial computational devices with neural systems are emerging as a new area of information technology research. The physical structure and adaptability of the human brain make these biologically embedded systems quite different from computational systems typically studied in Computer Science.

``Fundamentally, biologically embedded ...