Prof. Thiab Taha has been selected to be a "Member of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Mathematics and Computers in Simulation (IMACS)", starting Aug. 2005.

Graduate student Chunmei Liu will take a position of Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Howard University beginning August, 2006. Chunmei is completing her Ph.D study under the supervision of Dr. Liming Cai with a dissertation titled "Tree Decomposable Models for Efficient Bioinformatics Algorithms".

Ananda Chowdhury, doctoral candidate in Computer Science, has been invited to participate in the NIH National Graduate Student Research Festival held on October 12 and 13, 2006 on the NIH campus, Bethesda, MD. The invitees were selected based on a nation-wide competition amongst senior doctoral students in the final year of their degree program.

Rachel Sparrow Lowenthal was born on July 25, 2005 to Jennie Sparrow and Professor David Lowenthal. Rachel weighed 5 lbs. 4 oz. at birth.

Dr. Julia Couto joins us as an Instructor. Dr. Couto arrives from James Madison University where she served as an Assistant Professor. Previously, she received her PhD in Computer Science from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid.

Prashant Doshi and Lakshmish Ramaswamy will be joining the Computer Science Department at UGA as Assistant Professors, in August, 2005.

Prof. Liming Cai and his wife Dr. Ying Gao had a new baby girl, Lillian Yuan Cai, weighted 7 lbs & 14 ozs, & 21.5 inches long, on 9:52am November 25, 2005. Everyone in the family is doing great!

LSDIS lab has a collaboration with Athens Heart Center (AHC), the largest cardiology practice in Athens, GA. Building upon LSDIS's experitse in the Semantic Web, the collaboration has lead to the development and deployement of an Active Semantic Electronic Patient Record system. This system is also entering continuous usage in the AHC practice, and is one of the earliest Semantic Web applications developed and used that exploit multiple ontologies, semantic and lexical annotation and rule processing.

LSDIS lab's collaboration with IBM resulted in a member submission "Web Services Semantics: WSDL-S" to the World Wide Web consortium (W3C). On March 21, W3C launched "Semantic Annotations for WSDL Working Group" which recognizes UGA-IBM submissions on WSDL-S as the input.

Researchers in the adversarial modeling group of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory use Prof. Doshi's research on decision making in multiagent settings toward countering money laundering.