VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: January-March 2019

Publications, Scholarship, and Research Recognition
  1. A 2004 paper by Steve Edwards, "Using software testing to move students from trial-and-error to reflection-in-action,” was ranked 7th among the top 10 CS education research papers of the last 50 years, as recognized by SIGCSE. Also, Steve Edwards is tied for #5, and Cliff Shaffer is tied for #7, for most publications appearing at the SIGCSE Technical Symposium in its 50-year history.
  2. PhD student Ayaan Kazerouni was lead author on the paper "Assessing Incremental Testing Practices and Their Impact on Project Outcomes," which was recognized as 2nd best paper in the CS Education Research Track at SIGCSE 2019. Ayaan's co-authors are Cliff Shaffer, Steve Edwards, and Francisco Servant.
  3. Vikram Mohanty (lead author), Sneha Mehta, David Thames, and Kurt Luther were recognized with the best paper award at the ACM Intelligent User Interfaces Conference (ACM IUI 2019). Their paper is entitled "Photo Sleuth: Combining Human Expertise and Face Recognition to Identify Historical Portraits"
  4. Whitney Bortz, Aakash Gautam, Kemper Lipscomb (UT Austin), and Deborah Tatar where recognized with the best paper award at the 2019 American Society for Engineering Education SE Section Annual Conference. The paper is entitled "Integrating Computational Thinking into Middle School Science: A Search for Synergistic Pedagogy."
  5. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  6. Papers accepted in top journals:

New Funding

  1. Jian, NSF, "Pointer‐aware Memory: Boosting Cybersecurity by Making Strong Memory Protection Affordable for Irregular Applications," $175,000
  2. Mitra, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), "Characterizing Mainstream and Non-mainstream Online News Sources in Social Media," $49,572
  3. Huang, Amazon, "Measuring and Mitigating Intersectional Unfairness of Recommendation," $65,048

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. Daphne Yao is program co-chair for the 2019 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC).
  2. Ali Butt is program co-chair for the International Symposium on High-Performance Parallel and Distributed Computing (ACM HPDC 2019)
  3. Ali Butt co-organized an NSF-sponsored workshop on "Data Storage Research Vision 2025," including co-authoring the final report.
  4. Wu Feng is a program track chair for the International Conference on Green and Sustainable Computing (IGSC 2019).
  5. Wu Feng is a program track chair for SC19
  6. Steve Harrison is conference co-chair of ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2019).
  7. Deborah Tatar is program committee co-chair for ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2019).

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Gustavo Arango, "Computational Tools for Annotating Antibiotic Resistance in Metagenomic Data," Zhang (Chair)
  2. Elaheh Raisi, "Weakly Supervised Machine Learning for Cyberbullying Detection," Huang (Chair)
  3. Xuchao Zhang, "Scalable Robust Models Under Adversarial Data Corruption," Lu (Chair)
  4. Yufeng Ma, "Going Deeper with Images and Natural Language," Fan (Chair)

Other Notables

  1. Blockchain Bootcamp (1/26/19). Nearly 300 students spent the day learning about blockchain technologies in this event organized the Computer Science with support from block.one. A semester-long Blockchain Challenge was announced as well.
  2. NCWIT Aspirations Event (3/2/19). Computer Science organized and hosted the 8th annual recognition event for high school women in technology. 150 students were recognized in all, with over 250 students, family members, and teachers in attendance.
Highlights from previous quarters