Library Journal has named Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond by Robert Provine, professor of psychology, as one of the best books of 2012.

In the publication’s original review of the book, the reviewer said that the book ” is a delectable presentation for all who love the territory between pop and hardcore science writing.”

Hillol Kargupta, professor of computer science, is the winner of the 2012 10-Year ICDM Highest-Impact Paper Award for the ICDM 2003 paper on “On the Privacy Preserving Properties of Random Data Perturbation Techniques.” Researchers, Souptik Datta (UMBC), Qi Wang (Washington State University), and Krishnamoorthy Sivakumar (Washington State University), were also authors on the paper.

ICDM is the premier international conference on data mining (with an acceptance ratio of approx. 8-12% in the last ten years). The 10-Year ICDM Highest-Impact Paper Award is awarded every year since 2010. The first ICDM was held in 2001.

Ellen Handler Spitz, honors college professor of visual arts, recently reviewed the art show The Event of a Thread by Ann Hamilton, which runs through January 6 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, for the online magazine Artcritical.

Spitz says that “The Gothic Revival Park Avenue Armory… provides a perfect venue for Hamilton’s swings, her 42 pigeons in miniature, stacked dovecotes, and the immense white silken fabric that billows from on high, responsively rising and falling according to the visitors’ velocities as they sway on their swings, pushed often by perfect strangers.”

Relating the exhibition to its title, Spitz says, “by the most gossamer of threads— of silk and of sound—connections proliferate.”

The review, “Gentling The Savage Enormity Of Gargantuan Space: Ann Hamilton at the Armory,” appeared online on December 20.

Josiah Dykstra, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, won the Outstanding Case Study Award for 2012 of the The American Academy of Forensic Sciences, based on his presentation of a paper by Dykstra and his advisor Alan Sherman,
published in the Journal of Network Forensics. Dykstra will accept the award in February at the Academy’s annual meeting.

The fall 2012 edition of The Center for Women in Technology newsletter, CWIT Update, is available on our website. Take a few minutes to read about all of the exciting things happening in the CWIT community.