Congrats to Dr. Kevin Fu --2009 Innovator of the Year, Cyber-security, and the Fall 2009 INFORMS Speaker Series

I have been meaning to write about why UMass Amherst is GREAT! Today, I had some assistance from the UMass Amherst News Office and we have even more reasons to celebrate.

Dr. Kevin Fu of the Computer Science Department, who is an expert on cyber-security (and also an outstanding baker), is the recipient of a 2009 Innovator of the Year Award and will be featured in the September/October issue of MIT's Technology Review. Dr. Fu spoke in our Fall 2008 INFORMS Speaker Series. His presentation was simply outstanding and he discussed medical informatics and even hacking into medical devices and other devices and the associated security issues. He included video clips of surgeries and regaled us with his real-life experiences and the latest research.

UMass Amherst today released a press release on Professor Kevin Fu's award and as the Faculty Advisor to the award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, I would like to heartily congratulate Professor Fu and to thank him, again, for speaking in our series last Fall.

In addition, UMass Amherst issued today the press release on our Fall 2009 Speaker Series in Operations Research and the Management Sciences. We are simply thrilled to have such a distinguished speaker lineup that will include talks on food safety and global supply chains (Dr. Helander of IBM), the financial crisis (Professor Andrew Lo of MIT), lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina (Professor Holquin-Veras of RPI), water reource modeling (Professor Palmer of UMass Amherst), the knowledge economy (Professor Bowles of the Santa Fe Institute and the University of Siena, Italy), and, yes, even a talk on cyber-forensics by a colleague of Professor Fu's - Professor Brian Levine!

Complete titles, talk abstracts, and information about the speakers can be found here.