University News
$10 Million Gift Will Benefit U-M Business Undergrads
Thomas C. Jones, a University of Michigan (U-M) business school alumnus, has given $10 million to the U-M's Stephen M. Ross School of Business to make it possible for undergraduates to experience many of the programs usually provided only to MBA students.
Jones, retired president of CIGNA Retirement & Investment Services, was the Ross School's first executive-in-residence and director of its bachelor of business administration degree program in 2003-04. He says his gift will help make a highly rated undergraduate business program even better.
The gift will establish the Thomas C. Jones Center for BBA Education, which will offer more opportunities for students to apply classroom theory to real business situations, incorporate liberal arts into the business curriculum and develop leadership skills.
It also will provide the necessary resources to develop a series of "capstone" action-based learning courses that integrate interdisciplinary skills needed to solve complex business problems. For example, the school will be able to offer more undergraduate courses like "Strategic Management of Knowledge in Professional Services Firms," in which students participate in a business case competition before an actual company's executives, and "The Corporation in Society," in which students visit companies and other organizations in foreign countries to study business issues.
Jones previously gave $1.5 million to the Ross School for the Jane M. and Chester R. Jones Undergraduate Scholarship in memory of his parents and for the Dean's Innovation Fund, which helps finance innovative faculty and student projects and programs.
Jones retired in 2002 as president of CIGNA's Retirement & Investment Services Division, one of the nation's leading asset management and retirement services firms with assets of more than $80 billion. After joining CIGNA in 1994, he also served as president of several of its other divisions, including property and casualty reinsurance, individual insurance and investment management.
Prior to joining CIGNA, Jones was executive vice president and chief operating officer of NAC Re Corp. (1985-94), where he became a founding member of the company's board of directors. Earlier, he held several senior management positions at General Re Corp. (1980-85) and served as Michigan's Commissioner of Insurance (1975-79). He also worked in an executive capacity with the Michigan Department of Commerce and as an executive adviser in the office of former Michigan Gov. William Milliken in the early 1970s.
Jones currently serves on the board of directors at CUNA Mutual Group, a leading financial services provider to credit unions and their members. He also is a member of the Ross School's Visiting Committee, former member of its Alumni Society Board of Governors and a fellow at Northwestern Michigan College, where he earned an associate's degree in 1966. He also participated in Harvard University's Advanced Management Program in 1988.
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Penn Robotics Lab Receives $5 Million Grant to Develop Robot Swarms from MARS
Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have received a $5 million grant from the Department of Defense to develop large-scale "swarms" of robots that could work together to thoroughly search large areas from the ground and sky.
The Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors or the Swarms Project, as it is known takes organizational cues from the natural world where tens or even hundreds of small, independent robots work together to accomplish specific tasks, such as finding a bomb in a crowded city.
Penn's General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception Laboratory will receive the five-year grant from the federal government under the Defense Department's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program. The Swarms project is based upon the success of the GRASP Lab's smaller-scale Multiple Autonomous Robotics project, which managed the movement and behavior of about a dozen robots.
While MARS demonstrated the feasibility of such a program, the Swarms Project will take the complexity involved to a new level. To get a better grasp of swarming behavior, Vijay Kumar -- director of the GRASP Lab at Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science and principal investigator of the Swarms Project -- and his colleagues are looking to the natural world for inspiration.
In biology, swarming behaviors arise whenever there are large numbers of individuals that lack either the communication or computational capabilities required for centralized control. The Swarms Project brings together a cross-disciplinary team of researchers with expertise in artificial intelligence, control theory, robotics, systems engineering and biology. They will take cues from the sort of group behaviors that appear in beehives, ant colonies, wolf packs, bird flocks and fish schools. But the GRASP researchers are also working with molecular and cell biologists interested in the complicated signaling processes and group behaviors that go on inside and among cells.
While the GRASP engineers are not attempting to recreate biology, they are striving to understand what general principals in biological behavior that might be useful in getting robots to think as a group. Eventually, Kumar and his colleagues will demonstrate their biologically-inspired algorithms on practical vehicle platforms, such as the robot blimps, unmanned aerial vehicles and the small "clodbuster" four-wheeled robots already in use at GRASP.
[ Friday FYI index ]
New NUS College In Stockholm
National University of Singapore has gained foothold in Europe with the establishment of the NUS College in Stockholm. A collaboration with the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), this is the fourth college located in leading entrepreneurial hubs around the world. Sweden was ranked the world's number one IT nation for four consecutive years from 2000 to 2003 by the 2003 IDC/World Times Information Society Index.
The MOU was signed on May 17 in Sweden by NUS President Professor Shih Choon Fong and KTH President Professor Anders Flodstrom, witnessed by Dr Tony Tan, Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister in-charge of Universities.
Specially selected students will work at startup companies in Stockholm while studying entrepreneurship and technology-related courses conducted by KTH and the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, a joint initiative of several Swedish institutions including KTH, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm School of Economics and the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design. Established companies like Nokia, Ericsson and Sun Microsystems will provide NUS undergraduates there with valuable opportunities to network.
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Caltech Neuroscientist Receives Grant to Study How Autistic Patients Process Facial Information
Ralph Adolphs, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology, has been awarded a $120,000 grant from the Cure Autism Now foundation to study the way that autistic patients process information about other people's facial expressions.
The award will supplement Adolphs's ongoing work to understand the role of a brain structure, known as the amygdala, in certain disorders that make it difficult for sufferers to interpret other people's emotions. Adolphs is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Caltech and holds a joint appointment at the University of Iowa College of Medicine.
According to Adolphs, the grant will lead to progress in understanding how the amygdala may be involved in autism, and also to possible ways for people with autism to improve their social functioning.
Earlier studies have shown that persons with autism have a hard time looking with sufficient attention at the faces of other people to read emotions. Yet, there is tantalizing evidence that the problem may not be entirely an inability to read facial expressions, but rather the lack of ability to focus attention on faces so that expressions can even be processed. Therefore, better knowledge of how people with autism look at faces could result in intervention strategies where they could be coached to focus their attention on facial expressions, even though they have no natural inclination to do so.
The pilot research award will be earmarked for a two-year period. Adolphs says that the first year of funding will involve a close study of how subjects view faces, followed in the second year with fMRI studies using Caltech's new scanners.
Founded in 1995, the Cure Autism Now foundation is an organization of parents, clinicians, and leading scientists committed to accelerating the pace of biomedical research in autism through research, education, and outreach.
Since its founding, the organization has committed over $23 million in research, the establishment of and ongoing support for the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange, and numerous outreach and awareness activities aimed at families, physicians, governmental officials, and the general public.
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Dr. Larry D. Terry Named UTD's Interim Vice President for Business Affairs
Dr. Larry D. Terry, executive vice provost for academic affairs at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) and a member of the faculty of UTD's School of Social Sciences, will take on the added role of interim vice president for business affairs on May 31, when Robert L. Lovitt leaves the university after nearly two decades of service.
Terry was asked to take on the assignment by Dr. David E. Daniel, who will assume the UTD presidency on June 1 as successor to retiring President Dr. Franklyn G. Jenifer. Daniel said that a nationwide search would be launched for Lovitt's replacement that would aim to identify candidates with specific university financial management experience who can "help UTD continue to advance among the ranks of the nation's top research universities."
The university has an operating budget for the current fiscal year of more than $230 million.
Terry, who joined UTD in 2001, is currently responsible for faculty affairs, staff appointments and oversight of endowments. He also supervises the university's Center for U.S./Mexico Studies, the Office of International Education and the UTD Web Services group. Terry is also a professor of public administration and serves as editor of the prestigious scholarly journal Public Administration Review, which is based at UTD.
In addition to fulfilling his current responsibilities, beginning in June Terry will direct the efforts of UTD's Office of Business Affairs until a replacement for Lovitt is hired – a process that likely will take several months.
Lovitt, who has headed business affairs at UTD since 1985, has accepted the position of executive vice president for finance and administration at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. He will begin June 1.
Terry is an international authority in the field of public administration and an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration. Later this month, he will address the United Nations' 6th Global Forum on Reinventing Government to be held in Seoul, Korea, which is expected to draw 5,000 attendees from around the world.
Terry is a member of the United States Government Accountability Office's Educator's Advisory Panel, which helps identify current and emerging issues in higher education and alerts the agency about the changing interests and needs of students relative to employment with the federal government.
This past spring, Terry was named to the advisory board of the International Public Management Training Center at the City University of Hong Kong. The center was established earlier this year to provide high-quality training to officials in Mainland China.
Terry earned a Ph.D. degree from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and an M.S. degree from the University of Missouri – Columbia.
