Two young faculty members, Wim van Dam and Tobias Hollerer, both received the 2007 National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) award. CAREER awards, given to future academic leaders, are the foundation’s most prestigious grants for young teacher-scholars. The awards each provide support for research in the amount of half a million dollars over a five-year period.

Professor Subhash Suri has been elected a Distinguished Scientist by the Association of Computing Machinery, the leading professional society for Computer Science. Prof. Suri is one of the 20 engineers and scientists to receive this award in 2007, which recognizes “significant accomplishments or significant impact on the computing field”. Professor Suri directs the Applied Algorithms research lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

23rd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference 2007 Distinguished Practitioner is Dr. Richard Kemmerer, UC Santa Barbara, speaking on “So You Think You Can Dance?”

Cha Lee, Stephen DiVerdi, and Tobias Höllerer’s recent paper at the ACM Virtual Reality Software and Technology (the premier ACM conference in the field of Virtual Reality) on “An Immaterial Depth-Fused 3D Display” was selected to receive the Best Student Paper Award. The Depth-Fused 3D Effect exploits the fact that strategically coordinated images on transparent surfaces at different depths from the observer can fuse to a true 3D image in the observer’s mind.