Graduate student receives $25,000 Purdom fellowship

George H.L. Fletcher received the first annual $25,000 Paul W. Purdom Fellowship in Informatics. \nFletcher, a computer science graduate student, said receiving the award was a complete surprise.\n"There are many outstanding students in computer science at IU, and I was very shocked and flattered to be chosen for the fellowship," he said. \nThe $25,000 will be Fletcher's primary salary for the 2006-07 school year. It will be used to cover things like living expenses and to help him achieve his academic goals at IU and career goals as a young computer scientist.\nA faculty committee in the computer science department was responsible for selecting the fellowship recipient. According to the award letter, Fletcher was chosen because he exemplifies high standards of scholarship and shows great promise in computer science.\nFletcher completed undergraduate degrees in both mathematics and liberal studies in language, computation and cognition at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Fla.\n"I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science after realizing that this fascinating, high-impact field of research was at the intersection of my broad theoretical interests in language and mathematics," he said.\nAt IU, Fletcher is a member of the database group in the computer science department and has been researching database integration. He said a database is a large collection of data, such as financial records at a bank or patient records in a hospital. His focus is the process of bringing together independent databases, so they can be accessed and used in a uniform way.\nCathy Wyss, assistant professor of computer science and Informatics, serves as Fletcher's adviser. Wyss said the idea for Fletcher's paper, "Data \nMapping as Search," came up one day while the two brainstormed over a barbecue lunch.\n"George picked up on that and ran with the idea," Wyss said. "And boy, did he run. 'Data Mapping as Search' really honed his talents and enabled him to make new connections between implementation and theory."\nFletcher said the paper summarized part of the research he has been doing during his Ph.D. and focuses on how computer scientists can automate the mapping of data from one database to another database. His solution uses a search technique to determine a good mapping between databases.\n"I feel like a proud mother," Wyss said. "I should drive around with a bumper sticker: 'My graduate student won the Paul W. Purdom fellowship at IU!'"\nLast month, Fletcher presented his paper in Munich, Germany at the International Conference on Extending Database Technology. He said computer science conferences are the main way for scientists to publish and present research results to other scientists in one's specific area of research.\nThe fellowship was established by IU alumnus Chin-Cheng Wu, founder and chairman of Acopia Networks, in honor of Paul W. Purdom Jr., a professor and former chair of the Department of Computer Science. Purdom's concentration is in algorithmic applications and computational biology.\n"I personally think Paul Purdom is one of the most underestimated instructors in IU computer science by students," Wyss said. She said Purdom is not only good at explaining the important points in algorithmic theory but also why those things are important. Purdom served on her thesis committee for her Ph.D.