VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: 1st Quarter 2017

1. Chandan Reddy was co-author on a paper that received the best student paper award at the IEEE Conference on Data Mining. The paper, "Boosted L-EnsNMF: Local Topic Discovery via Ensemble of Nonnegative Matrix Factorization," was a collaboration with colleagues at Korea University.
2. Virginia Tech played a prominant role at the annual SIGSCE Technical Symposium, sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). Contributions included multiple papers, a demo, and a booth in the exhibit hall. Some highlights:
   • Steve Edwards served as Symposium Co-Chair
   • PhD student Cory Bart was lead author on a paper recognized as best research paper. Co-authors on the paper, "Computing with CORGIS: Diverse, Real-world Datasets for Introductory Computing", included Dennis Kafura, Cliff Shaffer, Eli Tilevich, and CS undergraduate student Ryan Whitcomb.
   • PhD student Mohammed Farghally was lead auther on a paper recognized as an exemplary paper. Co authors on the paper, "Evaluating the Effectiveness of Algorithm Analysis Visualizations", included Cliff Shaffer.
3. Virginia Tech had a large presence at the annual IEEE Virtual Reality conference. Contributions included multiple papers and significant organization roles for both current faculty/students and alumni. Some highlights:
   • The conference included two papers from current VT students, three papers from VT alumni, and 11 posters from VT alumni.
   • PhD alumnus Bireswar Laha was awarded an honorable mention for the best VR dissertation award for 2014-15.
   • Doug Bowman serves on the steering committees of both IEEE VR and the 3D User Interfaces Symposium; he also served on the program committee of IEEE VR, and as a doctoral consortium mentor.
4. Virginia Tech researchers had at least five papers accepted for the upcoming 31st IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium, including four from members of Wu Feng's Synergy Lab. Only 116 of 498 submissions (23.2%) were accepted.
5. Virginia Tech is now tied for 4th nationally in the "Systems: HPC" category at csrankings.org, a site which attempts to rank CS programs based on publications in top tier conferences. Virginia Tech ranks 7th nationally in the "Interdisciplinary Areas: Visualization" category.
6. Lenny Heath was lead editor for a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE on "Bioinformatics of DNA"

New Funding

1. Luther, NSF, "CAREER: Transforming Investigative Science and Practice with Expert-Led Crowdsourcing," $554,628.
2. Feng et al., AFOSR, "A Deep-Learning Approach towards Auto-Tuning CFD Codes", $250,000.
3. Ramakrishnan, Center for Innovative Technology, "Workforce Analytics Study", $37,000.

Professional Service, Recognitions, and Outreach

1. Wu Feng has been named General Co-Chair for the 46th International Conference on Parallel Processing.
2. C.T. Lu has been named General Co-Chair for the 15th Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases.
3. Scott McCrickard organized and hosted a workshop entitled "Technology on the Trail."
4. Danfeng Yao was recognized as VT Scholar of the Week

PhD Student Defenses

1. Austin Cory Bart, "Motivating Introductory Computing with Pedagogical Datasets," Cliff Shaffer and Eli Tilevich (co-chairs).
2. Panagiotis Apostolellis, "Evaluating Group Interaction and Engagement using Virtual Environments and Serious Games for Student Audiences in Informal Learning Settings," Doug Bowman (chair).
3. Nidhi Parikh, "Behavior Modeling and Analytics for Urban Computing: A Synthetic Information-based Approach," Madhav Marathe and Samarth Swarup (co-chairs).

Undergraduate Program Factoid: 87% of CS seniors have had a paid internship