Raghav Rao, associate professor of management science and systems, has been named to the selection panel for the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards. The CAREER award is the NSF's most prestigious honor for junior faculty members. Awards range in amount from $200,000 to $500,000, and in duration from four to five years.

Kathryn A. Foster, associate professor of planning and director of research at the Institute for Local Governance and Regional Growth, is serving as a visiting fellow at the Taubman Center for State and Local Government in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The Taubman Center focuses on public policy and management in the U.S. federal system. Its research program deals with a range of specific policy areas, including urban development and land use, transportation, environmental protection, education, labor-management relations and public finance. The center also is concerned with issues of governance, political and institutional leadership, innovation and applications of information and telecommunications technology to public management problems.

Shambu Upadhyaya, associate professor of computer science and engineering and director of the Electronic Test Design Automation Lab, moderated a panel entitled "Integrating Fault Tolerance and Security in Distributed Information Systems" at the 19th Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, held recently in Nuremberg, Germany.

Debra T. Burhans, doctoral candidate and lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, won first place in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) International Graduate Research Competition, held in Austin, Texas. Her winning entry described research that is part of her dissertation titled "A Characterization of Questions and Answers in Rule-Based Systems."