Newsmakers FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE March 12, 2003 Contact: Robin Micket (860) 548-7894 Rensselaer at Hartford Faculty Member Awarded $50,000 Grant HARTFORD, CONN – Houman Younessi, Ph.D., Clinical Associate Professor, Department of Engineering and Science, Rensselaer at Hartford, was awarded a seed grant coordinated through the Office of Research at the Troy campus. His proposal entitled, "Towards the Development of a Robust but Highly Efficient Software Process for the Internet Age," is funded at a level of $50,000. Only twelve proposals were funded from a total of 53 applications, with an emphasis on funding graduate students for developing new ideas and generating preliminary data in pursuit of external funding. He will be collaborating on the project with David R. Musser, Ph.D., Professor of Computer Science, Rensselaer. Dr. Younessi (www.ewp.rpi.edu/hartford/~houman/) explained the significance of the research project saying, "A robust software development process, suited to object-oriented development in a fast time-to-market environment currently prevailing through the advent of Internet and web-based systems, is in need of development. This project aims to identify the principles, techniques, and artifacts needed to develop such a robust yet efficient object-oriented software development process and ultimately a process led computer-assisted software engineering environment underpinning and providing automation throughout the said process." The Research Seed Funding Program of the Office of Research seeks to support innovative and interdisciplinary projects that have a high probability of attracting major extramural funding. These projects also fall into areas of strategic interest as outlined in the Rensselaer Plan (www.rpi.edu/web/President/Plan/index.html). According to Wolf von Maltzahn, Ph.D., Associate Vice President for Research, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, "The Seed Funding Program is working. It supports interesting and diverse research projects throughout Rensselaer while at the same time leveraging the Institute’s investment and helping to build innovative new research programs at Rensselaer." # # # BACK to News and Events