Engineering’s surprising election connections

Prince­ton Engi­neer­ing has a num­ber of sur­pris­ing elec­tion con­nec­tions — most recently, accord­ing to a report by the Orlando Sen­tinel, alum­nus Dan Barry has signed up as one of the “Oba­ma­nauts,” a group of for­mer astro­nauts who has endorsed the can­di­dacy of Barack Obama.

Com­puter sci­ence pro­fes­sor Andrew Appel — who this fall is teach­ing a fresh­man sem­i­nar on elec­tion tech­nol­ogy — has been in the media spot­light for the past cou­ple of weeks fol­low­ing his report to the New Jer­sey Supe­rior Court on vul­ner­a­bil­ity of vot­ing machines to nefar­i­ous hack­ing. Appel’s work has been fea­tured by CNN, Newjersey.com, ABC Eye­wit­ness News, and the New York Times.

Speak­ing of elec­tronic vot­ing, Mother Jones fea­tured the Hack-a-Vote project at Rice Uni­ver­sity, which is mas­ter­minded by alum­nus Dan Wal­lach, a pro­tege of Ed Fel­ten, direc­tor of Princeton’s Cen­ter for Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy Pol­icy. Fel­ten is rumored by Busi­ness­Week and Wash­ing­ton­ian mag­a­zine to be on Barack Obama’s short list of can­di­dates for national tech­nol­ogy tsar. Yes­ter­day PCWorld pub­lished a Q&A with Fel­ten on the secu­rity of E-voting.

In other news, Robert Van­der­bei, chair­man of the Depart­ment of Oper­a­tions Research and Finan­cial Engi­neer­ing, is mash­ing 2008 elec­tion data with his famous pur­ple Amer­ica map. And Juan Melli, who in Sep­tem­ber fin­ished his dis­ser­ta­tion on “A Hier­ar­chy of Mod­els for the Con­trol of Fish-Like Loco­mo­tion,” has been named asso­ciate edi­tor of politicker.com.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/153187/ed_felten_on_evoting_what_can_go_wrong.html