Rice Math Major Named Outstanding Male Undergrad

A lot of students scramble to make their mark. Third-year math major Adam Stubblefield unscrambles.

Stubblefield, whose degree was awarded in May, specializes in research in computer security and applied cryptography. He was part of the Rice/Princeton University team that unscrambled the Secure Digital Music Initiative codes—digital watermarks developed by the recording industry to prevent and/or allow the playing and copying of digital music. And this past summer, he demonstrated a major flaw in a common wireless computing standard, the Wired Equivalent Privacy protocol.

His work has been noticed by the Computing Research Association (CRA), which will present him the Outstanding Male Undergraduate Award for 2002 at a national computing-research conference this year. The award, which includes a cash prize of $1,000, recognizes exceptional potential in computing research.

“Adam has done some really great work over the past two years,” says his adviser, Dan Wallach, assistant professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering. “I’m very proud to see that he has gained this important and well-deserved recognition from the research community.”

The CRA comprises more than 190 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields; laboratories and centers in industry, government, and academia involved in basic computing research; and affiliated societies. The association’s outstanding undergraduate awards for 2002 were sponsored by Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs.

—B. J. Almond