VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: October-December 2019

1. Jake Thebault-Spieker, Sukrit Venkatagiri, and Kurt Luther received the Best Poster/Demo Award at AAAI HCOMP 2019.
2. Louis G. Michael IV, James Donohue, James C. Davis, Dongyoon Lee, and Francisco Servant recieved an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ASE 2019 for their paper "Regexes are Hard: Decision-making, Difficulties, and Risks in Programming Regular Expressions"
3. Papers accepted in top conferences:
   • Cho, BigData 2019
   • Servant, ASE 2019
   • Servant, ICSE 2020
   • Hicks & Jian, ASPLOS 2020
   • Nikolopoulos, ASPLOS 2020
   • Hicks, IEEE S&P 2020
   • Kelliher, CHI 2020 (2 papers)
   • Lee, CHI 2020
   • McCrickard, CHI 2020 (2 papers)
   • Tatar & Harrison, CHI 2020
   • McCrickard, GROUP 2020
   • Huang, AAAI 2020
   • Reddy, AAAI 2020
   • Reddy, WSDM 2020
   • Wenskovitch & North, IUI 2020
   • Tatar, SIGCSE 2020
   • Barnette, Back, Ribbens, SIGCSE 2020
   • Yao, IPDPS 2020
   • Karpatne, SDM 2020
   • Karpatne & Ramakrishnan, SDM 2020
4. Papers accepted in top journals:
   • Murali, Nature Methods
   • Kelliher, ACM Trans. on Computer-Human Interaction
   • Raghvendra, ACM Trans. on Algorithms
   • Reddy, IEEE Trans on Knowledge and Data Engineering
   • Reddy & Lu, ACM Trans. on Knowledge Discovery from Data
   • Cho, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials
   • Luther, ACM Trans. on Interactive Intelligent Systems
   • Wenskovitch, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
   • Karpatne, Water Resources Research

New External Funding (with CS PI)

1. Kelliher, NIH, "Sensor Technology Applied to Rehabilitation in Stroke - STARS,” $349,208.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

1. Ali Butt and Chandan Reddy were recognized as Distinguished Members by the ACM.
2. Aisling Kelliher will serve as Technical Program Chair for ACM IMX 2020.
3. Kurt Luther will serve as general co-chair of AAAI HCOMP 2021.
4. Daphne Yao has been named Steering Committee Chair for IEEE SecDev.
5. Francisco Servant will serve as Co-chair for the Demonstrations track at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2021.
6. John Wenskovitch led the organizing committee for the Workshop on Machine Learning from User Interaction IEEE VIS. Michelle Dowling and Chris North were also part of the organizing committee.
7. Anuj Karpatne will serve as co-editor of SIGAI AI Matters quarterly newsletter.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

1. Kenneth Edmison, "Turning Up the Heat!: Using Fault-Localizing Heat Maps to Help Students Improve Their Code," Edwards (chair)
2. Sarunya Pumma, "Scalability Analysis and Optimization for Large-Scale Deep Learning," Feng (chair)
3. Tong Zhang, "Designing Practical Software Bug Detectors Using Commodity Hardware and Common Programming Patterns," Lee and Jung (co-chairs)
4. Javier Tibau, "Exploring and Promoting Family Connections at a Distance Through FamilySong," Tatar (chair)
5. Shuangfei Fan, " Deep Representation Learning on Labeled Graphs," Huang (chair)
6. Mahesh Narayanamurthi, "Advanced time integration methods with applications to simulation, inverse problems, and uncertainty quantification," Sandu (chair)

Other Notables

1. With significant leadership from the department, the first Blocksburg Summit was held November 10-12.
2. The department again helped host a site for the Mid-Atlantic Region of the ICPC programming competition. Nine teams from VT participated, including the first place team at the Blacksburg site. The Programming Team also put on its annual high school programming competition. This distributed competition attracted 102 teams from 31 high schools.