VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: October-December 2018

1. PhD student James Davis was lead author on a paper recognized with a best paper award at the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE). The paper, "The Impact of Regular Expression Denial of Service (ReDoS) in Practice: an Empirical Study at the Ecosystem Scale" was co-authored by Christy Coghlan, Francisco Servant, and Dongyoon Lee.
2. Gang Wang is a co-author on a paper that received a best paper award at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). Gang's collaborators are from Penn State, Stevens Institute, Nanjing University, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
3. Deborah Tatar, Steve Harrison and students Aakash Gautam and Chandani Shrestha received a special "Recognition of Contribution to Diversity and Inclusion" award at CSCW 2018.
4. PhD student Negin Forouzesh received 3rd place award in ACM Student Research Competition at the Grace Hopper Celebration.
5. Papers accepted in top conferences:
   • CSCW 2018, Mitra (3 papers)
   • IEEE BigData 2018, Cho
   • IEEE BigData 2018, Karpatne & Ramakrishnan
   • AAAI 2019, Huang (2 papers)
   • AAAI 2019, Wang
   • ICSE 2019, Meng
   • IEEE S&P 2019, Viswanath
   • IEEE S&P 2019, Wang
   • IEEE S&P 2019, Hicks
   • RTAS 2019, Jung
   • ASPLOS 2019, Lee and Jung
   • CHI 2019, Luther
   • IUI 2019, Luther
   • SDM 2019, Prakash
   • SDM 2019, Karpatne (3 papers)
6. Papers accepted in top journals:
   • Proceedings of the ACM in HCI, Luther
   • Proceedings of the ACM in HCI, Luther and North
   • ACM Trans on Computing Education, Edwards and Shaffer
   • ACM Trans on Social Computing, Cho
   • ACM Computing Surveys, Karpatne
   • J. of Computational Biology, Heath
   • IEEE Trans on Services Computing, Chen, Cho, and Lu
   • IEEE Trans on Network and Service Management, Chen
   • IEEE Trans on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Karpatne

New Funding

1. Feng, NSF, "Phase-I IUCRC Virginia Tech: Center for Space, High-performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC)," $600,000.
2. Cameron, NSF, "VarSys: Managing Variability in High-Performance Computing Systems," $1,189,778.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

1. Daphne Yao was recognized as a Distinguished Member by the ACM.
2. Kirk Cameron was appointed to the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Parallel & Distributed Systems.
3. Anuj Karpatne was named a Research Fellow by the IS-GEO Research Coordination Network.
4. Anuj Karpatne will serve as a Workshop Co-chair for the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2019.
5. Changhee Jung will serve as co-chair of the International Workshop on High-Level Parallel Programming Models and Supportive Environments (HIPS 2019).
6. Kurt Luther will serve as Associate Chair (Papers) for AAAI HCOMP 2019.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

1. Bo Li, "Modeling and Runtime Systems for Coordinated Power-Performance Management," Cameron (chair).
2. Luna Xu, "A Workload-aware Resource Management and Scheduling System for Big Data Analysis," Butt (chair).
3. Nai-Ching Wang, "Supporting Historical Research and Education with Crowdsourced Analysis of Primary Sources," Luther (chair).
4. Mohamed Handosa, "Supporting User Interactions with Smart Built Environmentsr," Gracanin (chair).

Other Notables

1. The SIGCSE Technical Symposium is the world's largest conference focused on computing education. Conference metrics show that Virginia Tech is #1 in papers published at SIGCSE over its 50 year history.
2. The 5th VT High School Programming Contest was held on December 8, with 127 teams participating from nine states. The contest was organized and executed by members of the VT programming team under the direction of Dr. Godmar Back.