A GIS is a computer-based system for handling and analyzing spatially structured information, with facilities for processing, retrieval and display (including maps, imagery and other graphics). The disciplines of automated cartography, remote sensing and computer graphics are closely linked in the study of GIS. UAlbany’s GIS program provides students in various disciplines, and continuing students who work for government and private agencies, with professional and technical training in GIS and in associated techniques of spatial analysis.

The GIS certificate has been very popular with state office workers from the departments of Transportation, Health and Education, as well as from social service agencies. Non profits, such as the Environmental Clearinghouse and the Audubon Society, have also shown interest in the program.

Students already enrolled in the graduate geography program have also found the certificate beneficial. “They want to have this other piece of paper that essentially tells employers that they really know geographic information systems and they are prepared for work or management positions in this area,” said James Mower, associate professor of geography and planning and co-director of the GIS and Remote Sensing Laboratory. Mower added that the program teaches everything from how to buy, set up, and use GIS equipment to how to get a program off the ground.

“We have more job openings for our graduates than we can fill right now,” Mower said. “This is a great area for them because of the GIS firms in the Capital District as well as all the state agencies here with both a need and a budget for GIS employees.”

Floyd Henderson, professor of geography and planning and co-director of the GIS and Remote Sensing Laboratory, added, “Their tickets are open. The experience they are able to bring to a position is well-received and we now have our former students teaching the new generation of GIS students.”

Graduates of the program have gone into a variety of fields, including public service. Many have joined software companies such as MapInfo, which is involved in everything from GIS design work to data development and customer support. Founded in 1986, MapInfo is the market leader in location-based business intelligence, offering consulting services and support for businesses to better find, serve, and develop their own customers.

Others take a slightly different path. Former students Patrick Grady and Dingqiang Zhong, MRP ’94, founded Millennium International Technologies, Inc., (MIT) in upstate New York. They met while students at the University. In addition to providing high quality consulting work, their major products, called EZ-Plot and EZ-Map, are very popular.

Timothy Daly (BA ’95, MA ’99), works as a geographic information systems programmer/analyst at the New York State Department of Environmental Conser-vation in Albany. “The University’s program had a strong focus on the fundamentals and concepts of GIS and image analysis, both of which are frequently relevant to my current position,” Daly said.

Robert Chasan, who is originally from New City, N.Y., earned a master’s degree in geography with a concentration in GIS in 1998. Chasan is the geographer/urban planning specialist for the City of Scottsdale, Ariz. As part of his position, he provides a wide variety of services, including making maps for city departments, administering aerial photo contracts and airborne multi-spectral remote sensing image processing, and assisting city staffers in their desktop GIS projects. “My remote sensing research assistantship in Professor Henderson’s lab gave me an unparalleled opportunity to do remote sensing research on an intensive, professional level,” Chasan said.

There are approximately 40 students in the GIS certificate program. They have worked as summer interns all over the country, at organizations such as Environmental Systems Research Institute in California and the New York State Department of State Coastal Management Program.

Over the years, several students have worked with the Coastal Management program to create a land cover map, using satellite imagery, for all of Long Island. They also helped the program develop a change analysis of the land cover of Long Island over a 10-year period, and created a spatial model using the imagery incorporating soil and elevation information to generate a non-point-source water pollution model. This allows interested parties to go to this model and find out about water quality and wetland management. Therefore, if someone wanted to develop a parcel, he or she could click on an area and see what effect changing the parcel from agricultural land to a shopping center would have on water quality. Currently, some of UAlbany’s interns are expanding on this model to make it more detailed and complex by increasing the detail of land cover, and looking at aspects such as potential fertilizer use.

Because the Long Island shore land is constantly changing, other students, using maps first developed in the 1880s, are working to develop a chronology to digitize what is happening to the shore over time and how it has changed.

Another student GIS project involves the New York Rural Water Association, which represents some of the smaller communities. Through this project students map the watershed and create the same type of digitized map of changes in geology, soil, census tracks, zoning, and current land cover. Leon Scott, a graduate student from Whitehall, N.Y., works as an intern for the association. “We help them in mapping so they can do analyses of where to develop,” Scott said. “I decided on the GIS program here at the University at Albany because it encompasses my interests in both environmental issues and working with computers,” he said.

Some UAlbany interns are working with the Department of Environmental Conservation and its many sub-divisions (public lands, fish, and wildlife) to address a variety of issues. One just completed a map of forest trails in New York State, for use in brochures of every district. A few years ago, students helped to convert topographic maps showing elevations in New York State to a digital format. According to Mower, New York is one of only a few states that make this information available to the public online.

“We are trying to get our students ready not only for the current generation of mapping but for the next generation, which will probably be more Internet-based,” Mower said. “We still emphasize good cartography skills, but we also try to get people to think about GIS not always from a consumer’s point of view but also from a producer’s point of view.”

According to Mower, one of the up-and-coming fields in the GIS arena is microfarming, which uses remote sensing data to determine aspects such as when and where to apply fertilizer. Ray Bromley, chair of the Department of Geography and Planning, says another potential growth area is target marketing. “Many marketing firms are paying big salaries to GIS people to tell them about things such as demographics, business expansion, distribution routes, sales territories, and buying patterns,” Bromley said.

Faculty-Staff Contributions to Annual Fund Surge Upward
Members of the University’s faculty and staff contributed more than $33,000 to the University’s Annual Fund in 1999-2000 - nearly doubling their support from the previous year. The $33,170 from 172 faculty and staff members compares with $18,649 for the previous year.

“This is an impressive jump, and signals what I believe is the faculty’s clear recognition of the importance of private support to the University,” said Michael Boots, UAlbany’s director of development for Annual Giving. He said donors earmarked their contributions for more than 50 areas of interest, including schools, colleges and departments, as well as scholarships, athletics and endowments.

The number of supporters in each category was also up at every giving level, including the President’s Club ($1,000 and above), the Minerva Club ($500 to $999), the Carillon Club ($250 to $499) the Albany Club (100 to $249), and at lower levels.

Regardless of the amount, each donation is important, said Christine McKnight of the University Relations Office, who is co-chairing the faculty-staff Annual Fund effort for 2000-2001 with Professor Salvatore Belardo of the School of Business. The goal for faculty-staff donations to the Annual Fund for 2000-2001 is $50,000. McKnight noted that a Middle States evaluation team concluded last spring that the University “needs to achieve higher levels of giving by a number of constituencies,” including faculty and staff.

“They said that the University will be in a much better position to attract outside gifts when we can talk about a demonstrated record of giving on the campus,” she said. “The faculty and staff do recognize that, I believe, as evidenced by the dramatic increase in support which we are seeing. We can all feel extremely proud.”

Belardo noted that the state provides only about 25 percent of the University’s operating budget these days. “As we become less dependent on the state, private gifts are becoming more and more important,” he said.

Both McKnight and Belardo said they were deeply grateful for the dramatic increase in private giving by faculty and staff members and hope the upward trend will continue for the 2000-2001 year. The University’s overall Annual Fund goal for the year is $2.2 million.

University employees may give to the Annual Fund through payroll deduction. Letters seeking contributions to the Annual Fund will go out early next year.

The University would like to extend a sincere thanks to the faculty and staff members who contributed to the 1999-2000 Annual Fund campaign. Their generous gifts provided vital, unrestricted funds that directly support student aid, instruction, research and numerous intellectual, cultural and social programs. While each gift is important, it is not possible, due to space limits, to list the many contributors below the $100 level. Please be assured, nevertheless, that the University is grateful for gifts of all amounts.

The President’s Club ($1,000 & Above) Robert Ashton Bruce Bailey Salvatore Belardo, Ph.D. ’71 Christopher F. D’Elia Vicki J. Biss Dillon ’74 Kenneth T. Doran ’39 Sue R. Faerman, Ph.D. ’87 Ronald Forbes, Ph.D. Robert M. Ford Karen R. Hitchcock, Ph.D. Alice H. Murphy ’40 George Richardson, Ph.D. Sandor P. Schuman, Ph.D. ’79 Susan S. Smith ’35 Paul T. Stec, CPA, M.B.A. ’81
Minerva Club ($500 - $999) Vincent J. Aceto ’53 Karl K. Barbir, Ph.D. Kendall A. Birr, Ph.D. Michael Boots Christine A. Bouchard ’73 Dorothy E. Christiansen James B. Ebenhoch Richard J. Farrell, Jr. ’71 Vesna Gjaja ’72 Richard H. Hall, Ph.D. Henry G. Kirchner ’67 Paul A. Leonard, Ph.D. ’75 Christine H. McKnight Michael J. Sattinger, Ph.D.
Carillon Club ($250 - $499) Margaret H. Aldrich ’85 David F. Andersen, Ph.D. Stephen J. Beditz ’71 Deborah A. Bourassa Shai L. Brown ’93 Seth D. Chaiken, Ph.D. Lindsay N. Childs, Ph.D. Stephen DeLong, Ph.D. Mina A. Devadas Julia M. Filippone ’92 Vincent P. Idone, Ph.D.’77 Karen Kirtley Kajal Lahiri, Ph.D. Timothy L. Lance Cecilia A. Lauenstein Maria Livolsi ’95 Brian S. MacHerone James M. Mancuso ’89 Lana Neveu Leo F. Neveu Noreen Normile ’93 Theresa Pardo ’82 Marjorie L. Pryse, Ph.D.’88 Gregory J. Rickes ’72 Louis W. Roberts, Ph.D. Kanzellar Sprague ’96 Bonnie Steinbock, Ph.D. David S. Strogatz, Ph.D. John R. Tibbetts ’42 Kevin Wilcox
Albany Club ($100 - $249) Jennifer Jakuboski Anderson ’94 Judith Baskin, Ph.D. Leslie M. Bassett Nancy Belowich-Negron Penelope L. Benson-Wright ’69 Thomas A. Birkland Barbara J. Bodner ’73 Abraham Bolgatz Lance F. Bosart, Ph.D. Diane M. Bouchard Bonita I. Bryant Carol F. Bullard, Ph.D. Diane Cardone ’00 Sorrell E. Chesin, Ph.D. Regina T. Conboy Michael Condon Paul A. Cummings, Ph.D.’87 Gail L. Cummings-Danson Sharon S. Dawes, Ph.D.’91 Frederick L. Dembowski Helen R. Desfosses, Ph.D. Diane M. Dewar, Ph.D.’82 Valerie DiRocco-Ruskin Dawn Du Bois Mark V. Durand, Ph.D. Cecilia M. Falbe, Ph.D. Lianne C. Fenn Sally C. Goodall Janice A. Green Albina Y. Bourgeois Grignon ’71 Sophia R. Hammett Francis J. Hartigan ’80 Brenda L. Hazard Gary M. Hoffmann ’80 Stephen Howe Megan D. Hyland ’92 Kenneth Jones Kenneth Karlin Dennis J. Kennedy Gary S. Kleppel Jason N. Ladouceur Marilyn N. Lucarelli Lynne M. David Macko ’95 Susan Spencer Maloney ’84 Carl G. Martin ’71 David F. Mason Roderick W. Mason ’71 Elmer Mathews ’41 Deborah C. May Eugene McLaren ’48 Candace A. Fuoco Merbler ’79 Marsha Mortimore Mary E. Nelligan-Goodman Susan Palmer Thomas Palmer Diana Paton Carol A. Perrin Eileen M. Pfeiffer Louis J. Pietrocarlo Larry D. Preston ’75 Joseph E. Purcell ’57 Sekharipura S. Ravi, Ph.D. G. William Reynolds, Jr. ’51 Eliot H. Rich Estela M. Rivero, Ph.D. Charles A. Rogers ’85 Charity Mace Roth ’35 Marybeth Piccirilli Salmon ’77 Eileen Scanlan ’90 Mary L. Schimley Christina Sebastian Kathleen Slusher Constance A. Spohn Helga Straif-Taylor, Ph.D.’72 Harriet V. Temps ’91 Frank J. Thompson, Ph.D. Sylvia M. Case Ulion ’75 James N. Walser ’73 J. Paul Ward, Ph.D. ’53 Dona Marie Whitfield-Owens Sharon Kaplan Whiting ’73 James F. Wiley Nancy J. Wilson

This list reflects gifts and pledges received between July 1, 1999 and June 30, 2000. We apologize for any misspellings or omissions. Please contact the Stewardship Office at 437-4798 to inform us of any errors so that we may correct them.

UAlbany Promotes Region as a Plus for Chip-Fab Firms
By Carol Olechowski
In keeping with its commitment to the economic vitality of the Capital Region, the University at Albany is involved in a region-wide effort to attract firms that manufacture computer chips.

Last year, a plan to pre-approve a site for a computer chip manufacturing plant in North Greenbush fell through. The University is part of an initiative to attract a chip-fabrication business to the region. And the effort has an excellent chance of succeeding, UAlbany President Karen R. Hitchcock believes.

Hitchcock serves on the Capital Region Semiconductor Task Force and co-chairs its Research, Education, and Training Subcommittee. The task force, formed about two years ago, includes business, government, and education leaders. “It was convened,” said Hitchcock, “to advance the Capital Region as an ideal setting for this industry.”

Task force members “address such issues as potential sites for the manufacturing facilities, and workforce availability and preparation. We also educate the public regarding the industry and market the advantages of the region.” According to Hitchcock, the Capital Region has a lot to offer, including “a very highly educated workforce, an outstanding quality of life, excellent schools, affordable housing, and an ideal location as a transportation and communications hub. In addition, New York State’s tax structure is good for business. And, of course, the research going on at the University’s Institute for Materials, and at related research centers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is a major attraction for this industry.”

What, in turn, will the location of a semiconductor plant mean for the Capital Region? For one thing, “a tremendous opportunity for us to keep our best and brightest citizens in the area. Approximately 70 percent of the jobs at such a plant require staff with at least associate’s-level degrees. And those jobs pay very well. There’s also the ‘leverage factor’ - the possibility that a chip-fab plant will attract equipment suppliers and other related companies to the area, resulting in the creation of even more jobs. That would mean a terrific boost for our economy,” Hitchcock noted.

UAlbany Institute for Materials Director of Business Development LaMar Hill and representatives from the Center for Economic Growth and Niagara Mohawk returned recently from one of many trips to present the Capital Region’s case, in person, to semiconductor company executives. Hitchcock is optimistic that the region will succeed in attracting chip-manufacturing plants: “IBM’s decision to move to East Fishkill has greatly increased the possibility of our drawing this industry to the Capital Region. I’m very pleased that LaMar and other members of the UAlbany Institute for Materials have been part of this effort, and that they’re publicizing the wonderful resources of our University and its research programs.”

Master Plan
Fall Progress
By Christine McKnight

New Administration Building: Guethmay Seigel and Associates, a Manhattan architectural firm, has been hired to oversee construction of the University’s new administration building. The location of the 52,000-gross-square-foot building is expected to be on the east side of Collins Circle, just to the north of the Fine Arts Building. The project, now in the “program verification stage,” during which University officials are thinking through the building’s uses, is tentatively expected to be on-line by the summer of 2003. University architect Dave Lacomb is managing the project.

Roof Replacement: Contractors are doing the last of the gravel stop work as they conclude installation of new roofs on the Campus Center and the Education Building. Other buildings on the podium will get new roofs next summer.

Elevator Cylinder Project: In a capital fund project, the University is replacing hydraulic cylinders in 23 elevators in the Campus Center, the Physical Education building, and the academic buildings on the podium. The cylinders, which sit in a shaft in a vertical hole in the ground, have been subject to possible corrosion since they were installed in the late 1960s.

Downtown Campus Projects: A women’s bathroom on the second floor of Richardson Hall has been enlarged and made handicapped accessible. In Waterbury Hall, bathrooms have been cosmetically upgraded, with bathtubs removed and showers and new tiling installed. The University is also preparing a design for reconstruction of a deteriorated set of stairs between Sayles and Brubacher halls that lead from the interior quadrangle up to the street level.

Spinal Cord Research Shows Promise at School of Public Health
By Carol Olechowski
An innovative technology developed at the University at Albany’s East Campus has the potential to make the School of Public Health a leader in spinal cord research - and in developing medications that might prevent or lessen the possibility of spinal cord injury.

Nobuaki Hori, Ph.D., a researcher who has retired to the University from his position in the Department of Physiology at Kyushu Uni-versity School of Dentistry in Fukuoka, Japan, has devised a method that allows him to prepare slices of rodent spinal cord in which the motor nerve cells are alive and functioning. Professor of Biomedical Sciences David O. Carpenter, M.D., who collaborates with Hori in this research, calls his associate “a marvel” for accomplishing that feat.

“While use of brain slices has been common for many years,” Carpenter explains, “no one has previously been able to keep the motor neurons alive. It is difficult to remove the spinal cord from an animal; it’s enclosed in a bony case, and the motor neurons are very sensitive to lack of oxygen. In the past, many people have made spinal cord slices, and they could keep the other small neurons alive, but not the large motor neurons. This is probably because the motor neurons are unusually sensitive to lack of oxygen, and also because the stretching of nerves leaving the spinal cord may damage the motor neurons. We’ve developed a method of removing the spinal cord quickly and keeping it oxygenated. This technique minimizes the trauma.”

For the researchers, “one very interesting question is why the motor neurons are so sensitive to injury. This is the major question we’re trying to answer,” Carpenter notes.

In part, Hori and Carpenter are focusing on the connection between spinal cord motor neuron cells and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS, Carpenter explains, “is a disease where the motor neurons cease functioning. The person remains alive but eventually becomes paralyzed. It’s different from Alzheimer’s, which is responsible for loss of memory and intelligence. The ALS patient loses motor neurons and dies by paralysis, and it’s horrible because he or she is perfectly aware all the time,” explains Carpenter. [Noted British physicist Stephen Hawking - a popular lecturer and author - has ALS.]

“The study of the spinal cord is relatively new for us, but because we have a technique nobody else has, we can do many exciting things with it,” Carpenter says. “In spinal cord injury, some of the major problems result from death of the fibers that go between the spinal cord and the brain in both directions. If we can identify the properties that make these cells particularly vulnerable to injuries and death, that would enable us to try to find drugs and chemicals that will reduce that vulnerability. It would be wonderful if we could develop a pharmaceutical method of treating spinal cord injury, and we certainly hope to find ways of treating and reducing the damage from ALS.”

To that end, Hori and Carpenter have written grant applications to obtain additional funding, and are preparing a paper describing their method and the initial results. They have already found that even healthy motor neurons are more vulnerable to lack of oxygen than other kinds of nerve cells in the spinal cord slices.

McKeown to Speak at Research Colloquium Nov. 21 at CESTM
By Carol Olechowski
UAlbany’s Division for Research will continue its Computational & Applied Sciences Colloquium Series on Tuesday, Nov. 21, with a talk in the CESTM auditorium by Kathleen R. McKeown, professor and chair of computer science at Columbia University. The title of her talk is Language Generation and Summari-zation. The program is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

McKeown, whose research interests include text summarization, natural language generation, and multimedia explanation, will explore the topic Language Generation and Summarization: Moving Away from Sentence Extraction. During the colloquium, she will present a body of work completed at Columbia that applies language generation techniques to the problem of summarization.

To date, most work on summarization has relied on extracting key sentences within a document and forming a summary from them. For single-document summarization, this approach can be misleading; it is even less appropriate for multiple-document summarization. More recently, the application of language generation techniques to the problem of summarization has integrated statistical extraction methods, information fusion, and language generation that combines extracted phrases in meaningful and novel ways. This integration technique is particularly useful for domain-independent generation of summaries of multiple documents.

McKeown, who also has expertise with concept-to-speech generation and natural language interfaces, supervised the development of Columbia’s Functional Unification Formalism. Her work in sentence generation and multimedia explanation brought her a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and an NSF Faculty Award for women in 1990. An American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow since 1995, McKeown serves as chair of Columbia’s Research Committee for the Center for Research on Information Access. She has also assumed leadership roles in a number of professional organizations, and has been a reviewer for numerous NSF proposals and professional journals.

The colloquium series began in October with a presentation by Dartmouth College Associate Professor of Computer Science Thomas H. Cormen on the topic Everything You Always Wanted to Know about FFTs [Fast Fourier Transforms], But Were Afraid to Ask. Transforms are used throughout the applied sciences. Cormen is co-author, with Charles E. Leiserson and Ronald L. Rivest, of the textbook Introduction to Algorithms. This text is used internationally in computer science curricula.

The next colloquium will be held Dec. 14. Dr. Marc Snir, senior manager at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research, will discuss IBM’s five-year, $100 million research project aimed at developing a petaflop computer to be used for research in computational biology. The title of the talk is The IBM Blue Gene Project.

Students Left Homeless in Fires
By Lisa James Goldsberry
Two separate fires in downtown Albany have displaced a total of 13 UAlbany students. Eight students were burned out after a fire on Oct. 24 at 554 Hudson Ave. An early morning fire at 435 Hudson Ave. on Nov. 1 left five UAlbany students without a home and damaged the residence next door, where eight other University students lived.

According to the Albany Police Department, three unknown men set fire to a mattress on the porch of the house at 435 Hudson Ave., in what may have been a Halloween prank. So far, there have been no arrests.

“We are cognizant of the trauma one typically experiences when displaced by a fire,” said James P. Doellefeld, vice president for Student Affairs. “The 13 students who were burned out of their home have been offered two weeks of free housing and meals on campus as well as short-term monetary emergency loans through the Financial Aid Office. Also, Barnes and Noble bookstore will loan them textbooks to replace any that were destroyed.” Doellefeld added that the professors of all the students have been notified of the situation, and the University Counseling Center is available to help, as well.

Albany’s Committee on University and Community Relations Celebrates 10th Anniversary with Awards Presentation

The University at Albany’s Committee on University and Community Relations, founded in 1990 to improve relations between college students off-campus and their long-term neighbors, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. Included in the celebration was an awards ceremony on Wednesday, Nov. 8, at 7 p.m. in the Campus Center Patroon Room on the University’s Uptown Campus.

Since its founding, the goals of the committee have been expanded to include improving safety off campus, as well as to develop alcohol and other drug prevention and education programs off campus. “The committee has been an excellent forum for open and honest interactions among all those attending who are often not seated at the same table,” said Thomas Gebhardt, chair of the committee.

The committee is currently composed of student leaders and professional staff from the University at Albany and other local colleges. Those who participate are the College of Saint Rose, the Albany College of Pharmacy, the Albany Medical College and the Junior College of Albany/The Sage Colleges. Officials from the Albany Police and Fire Departments and the Albany Common Council are on the committee, as well. There are also neighborhood association representatives, community leaders, tavernowners, landowners, representatives from the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association, the Albany and Rensselaer County Restaurant & Tavern Association, and the New York State Division of Alcohol Beverage Control. Membership is open to anybody who wishes to join.

From the left: Scott Wexler of the Empire State Restaurant and Tavern Association receiving an award in recognition of his Outstanding Service at the Business Community Level; Robert Benedetto from the New York State Division of Alcohol Beverage Control receiving an award for Outstanding Service at the State Level; and Officer Fred Aliberti from the Albany Police Department receiving an award for Outstanding Service at the City Level. Photo by L. L. Lieman

Tom Gebhardt (right) presents an award to Henry M. Madej (BA ’67, MPA ’68) from the Pine Hills Neighborhood Association for Outstanding Service at the Neighborhood Level. Photo by L. L. Lieman

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