Computer science’s Taha garners NSF award

Computer science’s Taha garners NSF award

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

Walid Taha, assistant professor of computer science, has received a prestigious Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation.

WALID TAHA

CAREER grants support research and education development plans of junior faculty and are among the most competitive grants awarded by the NSF, which annually gives about 400 across all disciplines. The five-year grants range from $400,000 to $500,000 and are designed to support transformative research activities of scholars likely to become academic leaders in their field.

Taha’s research focuses on multi-stage programming (MSP), which he describes as ”a unifying approach that captures the disciplined essence of program generation.”

”Early work on MSP,” he said, ”focused on purely functional languages. My goal is to put what we know about MSP to work in the context of mainstream languages, such as Java and C#. We’ll do this by means of carefully designed minimal extensions that provide an expressive, statically checked mechanism for effectively eliminating the interpretive overhead.”

As part of the educational component of his CAREER Award, Taha is involved in planning the restructuring of curriculum in the Department of Computer Science, including formation of a new introductory class, Computer Science 211.

”We need to be able to explain to students why research in computer science is so important,” he said.

Taha received his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from Oregon Graduate Institute in 1999. He joined the Rice faculty in 2002.