VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: April-June 2019

Publications, Scholarship, and Research Recognitions
  1. PhD student Ruide Zhang received the only runner-up distinction in Google's Confidential Computing Challenge (C3).
  2. Denis Gracanin is a co-author on a paper that was recognized with the best short paper award at the 36th International Conference on Computer Graphics. The paper, "Visual Analysis of Bird Moving Patterns," was co-authored with K. Matkovic, M. Beham, R. Splechtna, M. Meyer, and E. Ginina.
  3. Work by Liqing Zhang and her students was featured in an article in The Scientist
  4. T.M. Murali gave a keynote at the International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM 2019).
  5. Wu Feng is co-author of a paper that was named a best paper finalist at the 23rd IEEE High-Performance Extreme Computing Conference.
  6. Wu Feng gave an invited talk at Universitat de Polytèchnica de València in Valencia, Spain
  7. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  8. Papers accepted in top journals:

New Funding

  1. Meng, NSF, "CAREER: Data‐Driven Debugging of Complex Program Changes," $500,000.
  2. Mitra, NSF, "Designing Trustworthy and Transparent Information Platforms," $299,966.
  3. Hicks, DARPA, "Digital Techniques for Exposing and Eliminating Information Hidden in SRAM’s Analog Domain," $900,539.
  4. Raghvendra, NSF, "Algorithms for Fundamental Optimization Problems in Computational Geometry," $450,000.
  5. Feng, ORNL, "Models and Evaluation of Scaling Deep Learning at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing (OLCF)," $61,354.
  6. Feng, NSF/NSA, "Productivity Tools for High-Performance Computing on FPGAs," $240,000.
  7. Feng, NSF/MIT Lincoln Lab, "On the Acceleration of Graph Analytics on Parallel Computing Systems," $40,000.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. Deborah Tatar received the 2019 XCaliber Award for Excellence in Technology Assisted Teaching and Learning, from TLOS.
  2. Chandan Reddy received a College of Engineering Faculty Fellow Award
  3. Alexey Onufriev received a College of Engineering Dean's Award for Excellence in Research
  4. Gang Wang received a College Award for Outstanding New Assistant Professor
  5. Kurt Luther recieved an Outstanding Technology Alumni Award from Purdue Polytechnic Institute.
  6. Dimitris Nikolopoulos was named the John W. Hancock Professor of Engineering
  7. Bill McQuain received the (first) annual Outstanding Department Contributor Award: Teaching.
  8. Lenny Heath received the (first) annual Outstanding Department Contributor Award: Service.
  9. Julia Costello received the (first) annual Outstanding Department Contributor Award: Administration.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Mohammad Shabbir Hasan, "Identifying and analyzing indel variants in the human genome using computational approaches," Zhang (Chair).
  2. Brennon Bortz "Using Music and Emotion to Enable Effective Affective Computing," Knapp (Chair).
  3. Minghan Chen, "Stochastic Modeling and Simulation of Multiscale Biochemical Systems," Cao, Watson (Co-chairs).
  4. Sorour Ekhtiari Amiri, "Task-specific summarization of networks: Optimization and Learning," Prakash (Chair).
  5. Vignesh Adhinarayanan, "Models and Techniques for Green High-Performance Computing," Feng (Chair).
  6. Vanessa Cedeno, "Pipelines for Computational Social Science Experiments and Model Building with Exemplars of Collective Identity and Anagram Games: Mechanistic and Data Driven Modeling," Marathe (Chair).
  7. Yaser Keneshloo, "Addressing Challenges of Modern News Agencies via Predictive Modeling, Deep Learning, and Transfer Learning," Ramakrishnan and Reddy (co-Chairs).

Other Notables

  1. Blockchain Challenge. Over $25,000 in prize money was awarded to the top student teams participating in this semester-long event.
Highlights from previous quarters