Two faculty members in the Department of Computer Science have recently been named to endowed chairs.

John E. Hopcroft, former dean of the college, has been elected the IBM Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics.

The IBM chair was established at Cornell in 1962 with a grant specifying it be given to an eminent faculty member in the College of Engineering. It was the first corporate-sponsored chair at Cornell.

Hopcroft’s research centers on theoretical aspects of computing, especially analysis of algorithms, automata theory, and graph algorithms. He has co-authored four seminal textbooks with Jeffrey D. Ullman and Alfred V. Aho. His most recent work is in the area of information capture and access.

Hopcroft was previously the Joseph C. Ford Professor of Computer Science from 1985 to 1994 and the Joseph Silbert Dean of Engineering from 1994 to 2001.

Keshav K. Pingali, professor in the Department of Computer Science with joint appointments in the Faculty of Computing and Information Science and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been elected as the India Professor of Computer Science.

He is the first person to hold the chair, which has been endowed by an anonymous benefactor of Cornell in India. The donor requested that the chair be given to a full professor in early or mid career and that the holder travel periodically to India to lecture on computer science.

Pingali’s research focuses on the improvement of compilers, the software that turns code written by programmers into machine language that can be executed by a computer. He and his research group work to create compilers that “optimize” the output so that programs run as fast as possible. Advances the group has made have been incorporated into software products from Intel, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics, and Digital Equipment Corp., among other companies.

—Cornell News Service