Lorenzo Alvisi, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award provides support for him to spend up to a year at the institute, where he will work with Peter Druschel and other MPI-SWS researchers on fault-tolerant computing for multi-core servers.

This is the second year that an MPI-SWS visiting professor has received a Humboldt Award. Johannes Gehrke was a 2010 Humboldt Research Award recipient.

The Humboldt Research Award is granted "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future."

We are pleased to announce that two new faculty will join MPI-SWS.



Allen Clement obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. Allen's research aims at designing and building systems that continue to work despite the myriad of things that go 'wrong' in deployed systems, including broken components, malicious adversaries, and benign race conditions. His research builds on techniques from distributed systems, security, fault tolerance, and game theory.



Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil is joining us from Cornell University, where he obtained his PhD in computer science. Cristian's research aims at developing computational frameworks that can lead to a better understanding of human social behavior, by unlocking the unprecedented potential of the large amounts of natural language data generated online. His work tackles problems related to conversational behavior, opinion mining, computational semantics and computational advertising.