The big news this fall is that the design of the new CS Building is done, the contracts have been awarded (we came in only 1 percent over budget), and the ground breaking ceremony will be September 21. Actually, by September 21 there should already be a hole where the building will be and perhaps even a foundation. The ceremony will be September 21 because President Penley wanted to schedule the event after the beginning of classes and after the semester was underway.

I thought I would share some events of note from over the summer. Ph.D. student Lakshmi Renganarayana won the 2007 Programming Language Design and Implementation Conference (PLDI) student research competition. And Ph.D. students James Knight and Monte Lunacek received a best paper award for research on “Evolution Strategies” at the 2007 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO).

In terms of faculty activity, Adele Howe co-chaired the AAAI 2007 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the premier conference on artificial intelligence in the US. And I was elected Chair of ACM Sigevo; this includes a seat on the ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) Governing Board. Sigevo is a new SIG within ACM focused on Evolutionary Computation and is now the main organization worldwide representing evolutionary computation researchers.