Congratulations to Tristan Sloughter for being selected as one of the 2008-2009 ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) - Chicago Chapter Fellowships recipients.
	Congratulations to Dongmei Jia for defending her Ph.D. on August 25, 2008! Good luck at Amazon!
	Congratulations to Jay Urbain for defending his Ph.D. on August 11, 2008! Good luck at MSOE!
	Congratulations to Wai Gen Yee and his collaborators for their "Best Paper Award" in the ACM/ICST 3rd International Conference on Scalable Information Systems (INFOSCALE). The paper is entitled: W. G. Yee, L. Nguyen, D. Jia, and O. Frieder, "Efficient Query Routing by Improved Peer Description in P2P Networks"
	The Spring 2008 IPRO 328, entitled "Testing and Improving a New Text for Teaching Computer Science", taught by David Grossman and assisted by Yacin Nadji won: 1st in Track #1 1st in overall Poster Presentation 1st in overall Project Management 4th in overall Presentation Likewise, the Spring 2008 IPRO 313, entitled "Ultra High Speed Market Data Ticker System" taught by Wai Gen Yee won: Tied for 1st overall Website 2nd in Track #2 Congratulations to all involved!
	Congratulations to Tayo Obafemi-Ajayi for winning the 2008 SPIE Document Recognition and Retrieval XV Best Student Paper Award for her paper: T. Obafemi-Ajayi, G. Agam, and O. Frieder, "Ensemble LUT Classification for Degraded Document Enhancement", 2008 SPIE Document Recognition and Retrieval XV, San Jose, CA, January 2008.
	Congratulations to Nazli Goharian for winning the IIT Computer Science Department 2007 Teacher of the Year Award!
	Congratulations to Yacin Nadji for winning the IIT Computer Science Department 2007 Teaching Assistant of the Year Award!
	Congratulations to Yue Yu for winning the IIT Computer Science Department 2007 Best Student Research Paper of the Year Award for the following paper: Y. Yu, S. Ren, and O. Frieder, "Interval-Based Timing Constraints: Their Satisfactions and Applications," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 57, no. 3, March 2008. Congratulations Yue Yu!
	The second edition of the Grossman & Frieder information retrieval book is finally out, and it is actually selling for only $38 at Springer-online (under $30 if you adopt it for a course)! For more information, please contact: Robbert van Berckelaer D. Grossman and O. Frieder, Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics, Second Edition 2004, Springer Publishers, ISBN 1-4020-3003-7 (hardcover), 1-4020-3004-5 (paperback). You can view the slides that follow the book for lectures here.