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Berger wins Microsoft award for tool that finds mistakes in spreadsheets

Associate professor Emery Berger of the School of Computer Science has won a Software Engineering Innovation Foundation (SEIF) award, which includes a $25,000 grant, for his work on a system to automatically find errors in spreadsheets.
 
Berger’s CheckCell program, one of only 16 projects selected worldwide for Microsoft’s SEIF award, makes it possible for users of Microsoft Excel to find mistakes in spreadsheet data.
 
Because spreadsheets are widely used in businesses, Berger says, the impact of errors can be dramatic.

Castañeda is featured speaker at Faculty Women of Color in the Academy conference

Mari Castañeda, associate professor of Communication, was a featured speaker at the inaugural Faculty Women of Color in the Academy (FWCA) conference held April 3-5 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
 
She spoke on a panel that discussed "The Economics of Being a Faculty Woman of Color: Being Prepared and Planning Ahead."
 
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Byg, DEFA Foundation director speak at Chicago film series

Professor Barton Byg, founding director of the campus’s DEFA Film Library, and Ralf Schenk, director of the DEFA Foundation in Berlin, were featured “In Conversation” on March 7 at the Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago.
 
The event, “Flashbacks: East German Films on Cold War Screens,” culminated a three-month series of DEFA film screeningshosted by Spertus, the Goethe Institute Chicago and the Gene Siskel Film Center.
 
After his visit to Chicago, Schenk visited UMass Amherst, where he presented a talk on “Spies and Secret Agents in East German Film” on March 12.

Fisette, NRC panel advise Defense Department on green buildings

New recommendations by a National Research Council (NRC) expert panel on green and sustainable building performance could lead to a revolution in building science by creating the first large building performance database, says panel member Paul Fisette, a nationally recognized sustainable building expert in the Environmental Conservation Department.
 
Fisette and six other NRC panel members were asked to consider whether nearly 500,000 structures owned by the U.S.

Wier's new poetry collection published

English professor Dara Wier’s new poetry collection, “You Good Thing,” was published April 2 by Wave Books.
 
A review in the Jan. 21 issue of Publishers Weekly said, “Opening with a sketched map and quote—“by the longest possible route”—from Fernando Pessoa, Wier’s 11th collection delights in its turnings and tangents, line to line, poem to poem. These loose sonnets—in some respects traditional lyrics addressing a illusive Other—echo Pessoa’s experiments with how the self writes and is written.”
 
Writing in Heavy Feather Review, Jordan Sanderson said, “In the collection, imagination and

Auer wins British Ecological Society prize

Evolutionary ecologist Sonya Auer of the Environmental Conservation Department has won the Elton Prize, one of only five British Ecological Society (BES) young investigator awards given each year to recognize the best research papers published in the society’s journals by early-career scientists.
 
Auer won for the best paper of 2012 in the Journal of Animal Ecology for her research and writing on the effects of variation in food availability across life stages on growth rates in wild Trinidadian guppies.

Berger presents AutoMan computing platform at Rome conference

Emery Berger, associate professor of Computer Science, delivered an invited talk on “Programming with People: Integrating Human-Based and Digital Computation” at the European Joint Conferences on Theory & Practice of Software (ETAPS) held March 22 in Rome.
 
Berger discussed AutoMan, the first fully automatic crowdprogramming system, which makes it possible to write programs that rely on people to perform computations that are difficult or impossible for computers to do.
 
AutoMan integrates human-based computations into a standard programming language as ordinary function calls, which can be

Obituary: George H. Reed Jr., retired head of Environmental Health Services

George H. Reed Jr., 82, of Mansfield, retired head of Environmental Health Services at Environmental Health and Safety, died March 26 at Southeast Rehabilitation Center in North Easton.

Born in Wilmington, Del., he received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Delaware and a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He joined EH&S in 1966 and retired in 1998.

He leaves his children, Dawn Leifer and David Reed, and five grandchildren.

Funeral services will be Friday, March 29 at 11 a.m. at the Douglass Funeral Service, Amherst.

Reich working on $2.5m project to study dengue fever in Thailand

Biostatistician Nicholas Reich of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences, an expert in statistical modeling of infectious disease data, is part of a team that recently won a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop and extend statistical and modeling methodologies to correct for biases in surveillance data. Specifically, he and colleagues will collaborate with Thailand’s Ministry of Health to study patterns of dengue fever there. Reich will receive about $700,000 of the total grant.
 
Dengue fever, a viral infection

Krauthamer discusses new book at UN, Smithsonian

Barbara Krauthamer, assistant professor of History, gave a talk about her new book, “Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery,” on March 21 at the United Nations.
 
She also spoke March 25 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
 
Jan. 1 marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Krauthamer’s new book features more than 150 historical photographs and examines the ways black Americans used photography to document and preserve the history of slavery, emancipation and freedom from the 1850s through the 1930s.

The

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