VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: 4rd Quarter 2016

1. Ing-Ray Chen, along with VT alum Jin-Hee Cho, received a 2016 Army Research Lab (ARL) Publication Award, in recognition of the long-term significance of their 2011 paper "A Survey of Trust Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks," which appeared in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials.
2. The annual Supercomputing conference (SC16) is by far the largest conference in HPC, and one of the most prestigious. This year, out of 442 technical papers submitted, 81 were accepted (18%). Of these, two papers with VT authors were selected as best paper finalists:
   • One of seven nominated for best paper: Maksudul Alam, Maleq Khan, Anil Vullikanti, Madhav Marathe, "An Efficient and Scalable Algorithmic Method for Generating Large-Scale Random Graphs"
   • One of seven nominated for best student paper: Qingrui Liu, Changhee Jung, Dongyoon Lee, Devesh Tiwari, "Compiler-Directed Lightweight Checkpointing for Fine-Grained Guaranteed Soft Error Recovery"

New Funding

1. Butt, NSF, "Scalable Fine‐Grained Cloud Monitoring for Empowering IoT," $516,000.
2. Ramakrishnan, Lockheed Martin, "Narrative Generation from Discrete Event Simulation Traces," $30,000.
3. Lu, Omniscience Corp, "Analysis of Mobile Trajectories for Behavioral Targeting," $74,000.
4. Ramakrishnan et al., DARPA, "Montage: Capturing Collective Behavior with Modeling and Experimentation," $3,000,000.
5. Butt, ORNL, "Improving Scaling and Performance of Big Data Systems using Mini-Apps," $52,000.
6. Sandu, AFOSR, "A Framework for Quantifying Uncertainty in InfoSymbiotic Systems Arising in Atmospheric Environments," $567,336.
7. North et al., General Dynamics, "CHITA: Computer Human Interactive Text Analytics," $299,895.

Professional Service, Recognitions, and Outreach

1. Ed Fox was named an IEEE Fellow
2. Young Cao was named chair of the Organizing Committee for the 2017 International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB), which will be held in Blacksburg.
3. For the 4th straight year, VT's programming team qualified for the prestigious ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals. Not only did the VT team finish first out of the 177 teams entered in the regional contest in November, but we placed four teams in the top 14, and eight in the top 30. Godmar Back leads all of these activities.
4. Under the leadership of Godmar Back and the members of our ICPC team, VT hosted 101 teams of students in the 3rd annual VT High School Programming Contest.

PhD Student Defenses

1. Mohammed Farghally, "Visualizing Algorithm Analysis Topics," Cliff Shaffer (chair).
2. Md Maksudul Alam, "HPC-based Parallel Algorithms for Generating Random Networks and Some Other Network Analysis Problems," Madhav Marathe (chair).
3. Yao Zheng, "Privacy Preservation for Cloud-Based Data Sharing and Data Analytics," Wenjing Lou (chair).
4. Sherif El Meligy Abdelhamid, "Providing High Performance Computing based Models as a Service: Architecture and Services for Modeling Contagions on Large Networked Populations," Madhav Marathe and Chris Kuhlman (co-chairs).
5. Mahdi Nabiyouni, "How Does Interaction Fidelity Influence User Experience in VR Locomotion?," Doug Bowman (chair).
6. Sunshin Lee, "Geo-Locating Tweets with Latent Location Information," Ed Fox (chair).
7. Konstantinos Krommydas, "Towards Enhancing Performance, Programmability, and Portability in Heterogeneous Computing," Wu Feng (chair).