A trio of distinguished School of Computer Science faculty members — Christos Faloutsos, Mor Harchol-Balter and Katia Sycara — formally received professorships during a virtual celebration on Thursday, Oct. 22.

"The onset of the pandemic forced us to delay and modify the usual ceremonies that accompany these professorships, but our appreciation for the academic excellence and service to the school of these three faculty members is in no way diminished," said SCS Dean Martial Hebert.

Faloutsos, a professor in the Computer Science Department, received the Fredkin Professorship in Artificial Intelligence. His interests include large-scale data mining with an emphasis on graphs and time sequences, anomaly detection, tensors, and fractals. He came to CMU as visiting faculty in 1997 and joined CSD a year later.

An Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) fellow and an Amazon Scholar, Faloutsos has served on the executive committee of the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD). He has earned numerous research and teaching awards, including the SIGKDD Innovations Award and the Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery Data Mining Distinguished Contributions Award.

Harchol-Balter, a CSD professor, is the recipient of the Bruce J. Nelson Professorship in Computer Science. A faculty member since 1999, her work focuses on designing new resource allocation policies for distributed systems, including those for load balancing, power management and scheduling policies. She is heavily involved in the ACM SIGMETRICS computer systems performance evaluation community and authored a popular textbook on queueing and scheduling, "Performance Analysis and Design of Computer Systems," published by Cambridge University Press.

An ACM and IEEE fellow, Harchol-Balter has earned several teaching awards, including the Herbert A. Simon Award, and dozens of industrial faculty awards from Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook and Intel.

Sycara, a research professor in the Robotics Institute, received the Edward Fredkin Research Professorship. She is internationally recognized for her research in artificial intelligence, particularly in the fields of negotiation, the semantic web, autonomous agents and multiagent systems. In robotics, she is known for her work on robotic swarms. She directs the Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab, where she has led research projects sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, National Science Foundation, NASA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and other government and industrial sponsors.

A fellow of the IEEE and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Sycara has earned two 10-year influential paper awards, the Research Achievement Award from the Institute of Operations Research, and the Management Sciences and the ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence's Autonomous Agents Research Award.