VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: January-March 2020

1. Aisling Kelliher, along with co-authors Laura Devendorf and Kristina Andersend, received a CHI 2020 honorable mention paper award for their paper "Making Design Memoirs: Understanding and Honoring Difficult Experiences."
2. Dimitrios Nikolopoulos is co-author on the paper "DEFCON: Generating and Detecting Failure-prone Instruction Sequences via Stochastic Search," which was recognized as the Best Paper in the Test and Dependability Track at DATE 2020.
3. Daphne Yao's paper "Enterprise data breach: causes, challenges, prevention, and future directions" was the top downloaded paper in 2019 at WIREs Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.
4. Wu Feng's paper "Differentiating between cancer and normal tissue samples using multi-hit combinations of genetic mutations" was recognized as one of the top 100 downloaded cancer papers for Scientific Reports in 2019.
5. Papers accepted in top conferences:
   • Viswanath, IEEE S&P 2020
   • Viswanath and Reddy, IEEE EuroS&P 2020
   • Reddy, WWW 2020 (2 papers)
   • Tilevich, WWW 2020
   • Tilevich, ICDCS 2020
   • Meng, ICSE 2020
   • Butt, CCGrid 2020 (2 papers)
   • Yao, CCS 2020
   • Mitra, CHI 2020
   • Mitra, CSCW 2020
   • Mitra, ICWSM 2020
   • Feng, IPDPS 2020
   • Wenskovitch, EuroVis 2020
6. Papers accepted in top journals:
   • Butt, IEEE Trans. on Parallel & Distributed Computing (2 papers)
   • Raghvendra, Journal of the ACM
   • Heath, Nucleic Acids Research
   • Heath & Zhang, Bioinformatics
   • Eldardiry, Journal of Machine Learning Research
   • Yao, IEEE Trans. on Mobile Computing
   • Yao, IEEE Trans. on Dependable and Secure Computing
   • Murali, Systems Biology and Applications
   • Chen, IEEE Trans. on Reliability
   • Chen and Cho, IEEE Access
   • Feng, Scientific Reports
   • Watson, ACM Trans. Math. Software
   • Watson, IEEE Trans. Inform. Forensics Security (2 papers)
   • Cameron and Watson, Jnl. Parallel Distrib. Comput.
   • Watson and Cao, Jnl. Chem. Phys.
   • Wenskovitch, IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications

New Funding (with CS PI)

1. Bowman, ONR (through UCSB) "Facilitating Mixed Reality Decision-Support Tools: Modeling, Collaborative Interaction, and Information Display," $564,001.
2. Mitra, Charles Koch Foundation, "Promoting Tolerance & Civility in Online Discourse through Re-Designing Button Labels,” $156,042.
3. Yao, NSF, "iMentor Workshop at the ACM CCS Conference 2020-2022," $150,000.
4. Reddy, ORNL, "Modeling Clinical Pathways from Electronic Health Records using Machine Learning," $200,531.
5. Reddy, PNNL, "Patient Health Care Recommendation and Reasoning using Deep Learning and Knowledge Graphs," $380,830.
6. Jian, LANL, "Exploring System-level Techniques to Exploit HPC Systems' Underutilized Memory to Boost Performance," $99,998.
7. Jian, NSF, "CAREER: MemMax: Maximizing Cyberinfrastructure Memory Utilization via Hardware Acceleration for OS-level Memory Utilization Management," $517,101
8. Mayer, SRNL, "Early Detection System Development using Open Source Indicators," $706,588.
9. Mayer, Ford, "Conditional Unstructured Vehicle Data Collection", $204,851
10. Ramakrishnan, Good Ventures Foundation (through Georgetown University), "New Algorithms for Information Extraction and Understanding from Scholarly Literature," $279,999.
11. Feng, VCOM, "Identifying the multi-hit combinations of inherited and somatic mutations in childhood cancers," $6,100.
12. North, Microsoft, "Evaluating Physical and Virtual Large Displays for Windows Productivity Beyond the Desktop," $40,000.
13. Mitra, DOD Minerva, "Understanding Chinese influence operations through the lens of social movement theory," $233,495.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

1. Hoda Eldardiry was recognized by Purdue University with the Distinguished Science Early Career Award for the Department of Computer Science.
2. Dimitrios Nikolopoulos received a 2020 IEEE TPDS Award for Editorial Excellence, which recognizes exceptional contributions by members of the TPDS Editorial Board.
3. Ali Butt served as a Program Vice-Chair for the 40th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS’20).
4. Daphne Yao served as Organizer of the 2020 Women in Cybersecurity Research Workshop (CyberW).
5. Daphne Yao is lead program chair for the 2020 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC).
6. Tanu Mitra was invited to join the Advisory Board of the Social Data Inititive, a project of the Social Science Research Council.
7. John Wenskovitch co-organized a workshop on "Machine Learning and Data Visualization Frontiers for Astronomy" at the 235th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

1. Liuqing Li, "Event-related Collections Understanding and Services," Fox (chair)
2. Ayaan Kazerouni, "Measuring the Software Development Process to Enable Formative Feedback," Shaffer (chair)
3. Michelle Dowling, "Semantic Interaction for Symmetrical Analysis and Automated Foraging of Documents and Terms," North (chair)