"We are very excited about the opportunity to formalize our ongoing relationship with IBM", Kirk Cameron stated. "This award will enable us to exploit the high-performance characteristics of IBM hardware to answer important open questions in plant phylogeny. In collaboration with postdoctoral fellow Xizhou Feng, Kirk Cameron plans to use the funds to collaborate with IBM researchers Carlos Sosa and Brian Smith.

"The computational power of the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer and the Cell Broadband Engine will enable faster, more accurate identification of relationships between organisms", Kirk Cameron stated. "For example, these types of techniques can be used to quickly identify the ancestry of viruses like SARS, where timely isolation of a virus' origin can help defend it and ultimately save lives."

"I'm honoured to have received an IBM Faculty Award", stated Wu-Chun Feng. "I hope to create a self-adapting computing environment that will enable rural regions and secondary schools to access customizable computing resources anytime, anywhere, and anyhow. Hopefully, this will contribute to the notion that computer science is not just about 'programming' but more about problem solving, like the computer science that went into Google, Wii, or iPhone."

According to Wu-Chun Feng, it is alarming that probable majors in computer science have dropped by 70 percent in the United States from 2000 to 2005, even though the job openings in science and engineering are expected to soar in the years to come. "We need to reshape the misconceptions of CS and project it as a problem-solving discipline, one that will open the doors to tomorrow."

Dimitrios Nikolopoulos will use the IBM Faculty Award to address problems that disrupt software productivity on emerging computing platforms.

"There is a looming crisis in software productivity due to the ubiquitous use of multi-core processors in computer systems", stated Dimitrios Nikolopoulos. "Software can no longer be accelerated by new microprocessors, unless it is restructured and decomposed to run efficiently on multiple cores. We are exploring tools that get software to run efficiently on multiple cores with minimum human involvement. Our collaboration with IBM will help us deploy these tools on cutting-edge IBM hardware, including the Cell Broadband Engine, and put our tools to test with commercial-strength network security software."