Rice's Deem wins Texas academy's O'Donnell Award
Rice University bioengineer, physicist and K2I member Michael Deem has earned one of Texas' highest scientific honors, the O'Donnell Award from The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (TAMEST).
The O'Donnell Awards are given for excellence in medical, scientific and engineering research. Deem, a computational theorist, is being honored with the engineering award "for fundamental theoretical work that brought new tools and ideas to vaccine design, mathematical biology and nanoporous materials structure."
Kavraki elected IEEE fellowLydia E. Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, professor of bioengineering and Ken Kennedy Institute member, has been named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
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Artificial Intelligence: Past and FutureIn the newest issue of Communications of the ACM, K2I Director Moshe Vardi looks at how chess fans remember many dramatic chess matches in the 20th century. I recall being transfixed by the 1972 interminable match between challenger Bobby Fischer and defending champion Boris Spassky for the World Chess Championship. The most dramatic chess match of the 20th century was, in my opinion, the May 1997 rematch between the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue and world champion Garry Kasparov, which Deep Blue won 3½–2½.
I was invited by IBM to attend the rematch. I few to New York City to watch the first game, which Kasparov won. I was swayed by Kasparov's confidence and decided to go back to Houston, missing the dramatic second game, in which Kasparaov lost—both the game and his confidence.
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Teams from Rice University, Texas Children's Hospital and The Methodist Hospital Research Institute study leukemia, pediatric hearts, lysosomal disorders, harmful bacteria. The awards made possible by the Virginia and L.E. Simmons Family Foundation Collaborative Research Fund, a five-year, $3 million initiative to discover new ways to diagnose and treat diseases. Grants go to teams of collaborators from Rice University, Texas Children's Hospital and The Methodist Hospital Research Institute (TMHRI).
K2I member Jane Grande-Allen in collaboration with Henri Justino and Daniel Harrington received funding from the program in support of their research on developing an artificial valve to repair infant and juvenile hearts that could be inserted within a stent to avoid painful, complicated open-heart surgeries. The researchers claim that pulmonary valve replacement surgery now accounts for 75 percent of all valve replacement surgeries in children. Because of the poor durability of current replacement valves, repeated surgeries are often necessary.
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Two K2I members and Rice professors named AIMBE fellowsK2I members and Rice professors Jianpeng Ma and Kyriacos Zygourakis have been elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
AIMBE fellows are nominated annually by their peers and represent the top 2 percent of the medical and biological engineering community. In addition to medical and biological engineers, AIMBE represents academic institutions, private industry and professional engineering societies. Ma and Zygourakis will be inducted into the 2012 class of fellows during a ceremony at AIMBE’s 21st annual event in Washington, D.C., Feb. 19-21.
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