Marcelo Cataldo from Panasas Receives Allen Newell Award

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Marcelo Cataldo

Marcelo Cataldo

This week Panasas announced that the company’s Marcelo Cataldo has been recognized with the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. The Award for Research is given annually to recognize a lifelong body of outstanding research both within and external to the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science.

This award is certainly a great honor for Marcelo and Panasas, because it not only recognizes the academic contributions of his body of work, but also the pragmatic impact of it,” said Garth Gibson, Panasas founder and chief scientist, who received an Allen Newell Award in 1999 for his pioneering research on RAID. “Allen Newell believed ‘good science responds to real phenomena or real problems.’ Marcelo’s research embodies this as his analytics are applicable in a real-world project setting, while backed with a sound methodological approach.”

Cataldo’s research has focused on developing and evaluating an analytical framework to assess how compatible the structure of a software development organization is with the technical architecture of the product being developed. The framework also identifies technical and organizational dependencies that may be detrimental to product quality and productivity and assesses how they can be reduced or eliminated.

Allen Newell, the award’s namesake, had a long and rich scientific career that included pioneering work in the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology as well as significant contributions to many sub-disciplines in computer science. He pursued each individual endeavor with a characteristic research style that was described as engaging and amazing in its clarity, breadth, and commitment to real answers and first-class science.