VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: 4th Quarter 2017

Notable Publications and Scholarship
  1. A paper authored by Rachel Kohler (MS graduate), John Purviance (BS graduate), and Kurt Luther received the Notable Paper Award at AAAI HCOMP 2017. The paper is entitled “Supporting Image Geolocation with Diagramming and Crowdsourcing.”
  2. PhD student Elaheh Raisi was lead author on a paper recognized with a best paper award at the workshop on Learning with Limited Labeled Data, held in conjunction with the 31st Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2017). The paper, "Co-trained Ensemble Models for Weakly Supervised Cyberbullying Detection," was co-authored with her advisor, Bert Huang.
  3. Daphne Yao is lead author on a new book published by Morgan & Claypool, "Anomaly Detection as a Service: Challenges, Advances, and Opportunities,". The book is co-authored by Yao's students Xiaokui Shu and Long Cheng, and Salvatore Stolfo (Columbia U.).
  4. PhD student Sajal Dash was lead author on a paper selected as a Best Paper Finalist at the 19th IEEE International Conference on High-Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC 2017). The paper, "Portable Parallel Design of Weighted Multi-Dimensional Scaling for Real-Time Data Analysis," was co-authored with Anshuman Verma, Chris North, and Wu Feng.
  5. PhD student Yao Zhang was lead author on a paper selected as a Best Paper Finalist at the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2017). The paper, "Data-Driven Immunization," was co-authored with Arvind Ramanathan, Anil Vullikanti, Laura Pullum, and Aditya Prakash.
  6. PhD student Aditya Pratapa was the top performer in the "Multiple Myeloma DREAM challenge", a competition to analyze datasets to categorize patients into different risk categories in order to improve treatment options. Pratapa is advised by T.M. Murali.
  7. Wenjing Lou gave keynote talks at the IEEE MASS and IEEE IPCCC conferences.
  8. Papers accepted in top tier conferences and journals:

New Funding

  1. Yao, DARPA, "Automatic Generation of Anti-Specifications from Exploits for Scalable Program Hardening" $399,997.
  2. Feng, VCOM, "Identifying the multi-hit combinations of inherited and somatic mutations in childhood cancers," $32,295.
  3. Ramakrishnan, DARPA, "Casual Exploration of Complex Operational Environments," $900,000.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. Ed Fox was named an ACM Fellow.
  2. Ed Fox was received the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who's Who.
  3. Kirk Cameron was recognized as a Distinguished Member by the ACM.
  4. Chandan Reddy joined the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (TKDD).
  5. Wenjing Lou will serve as Program Committee chair for IEEE INFOCOM 2019. She is also serving on the steering committee for the IEEE INFOCOM conference series.
  6. Barbara Ryder served as co-Chair of the Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop at SPLASH 2017.
  7. Chandan Reddy will serve as Program Committee chair for the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2018).
  8. Kurt Luther will serve as Papers Co-Chair for ACM Creativity & Cognition 2019.
  9. Wu Feng serves as a member of the HPC Technical Computing Advisory Panel for Hyperion Research (formerly IDC HPC).
  10. Wu Feng will be serving on the Futures Commission to advise the Southern University System (SUS).

PhD Students Completing

  1. Jose Cadena, "Finding Interesting Subgraphs with Guarantees," Anil Vullikanti (chair)
  2. Ting Hua, "Topics, Events, Stories in Social Media," C-T Lu (chair)

Factoid: under the leadership of Godmar Back, a team from Virginia Tech qualified for the fifth straight year for the ACM-ICPC (programming competition) World Finals.

Highlights from previous quarters