VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: October-December 2020

Publications, Scholarship, and Research Recognitions
  1. Matt Hicks recieved an R&D World R&D 100 award for his work on "Defensive Wire Routing for Untrusted Integrated Circuit Fabrication."
  2. PhD students Subhodip Biswas, Fanglan Chen, and Zhiquan Chen, along with their advisors C.T. Lu and Naren Ramarkrishnan, received the best paper award at the 28th ACM Intl Conf on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL 2020), for their paper "Incorporating domain knowledge into memetic algorithms: a spatial case study."
  3. Masters student Yanshen Sun and her advisor, Nicholas Polys, were awarded the best paper award at the 25th International Conference on 3D Web Technology, sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH, for their paper "Scalability of X3D4 PointProperties: Benchmarks on WWW Performance."
  4. Faculty and students from the Discovery Analytics Center (DAC) led COVID-related projects that were recognized in recent competitions. The work, "DeepOutbreak: A Framework for Forecasting Dynamics of COVID-19 and Co-Evolving Diseases", involved team members Nikhil Muralidhar, Alexander Rodriguez, Naren Ramakrishnan, Bijaya Adhikari, and B. Aditya Prakash. The team won first place in the Facebook COVID-19 Symptom Data Challenge and second place in the C3.ai COVID-19 Grand Challenge.
  5. PhD student Subhodip Biswas received a 2021 Journeyman Fellowship from the Army Research Lab (ARL) to support his work on regionalization algorithms and modeling uncertainty in machine learning applications.
  6. Hoda Eldardiry is a co-holder on three recently granted patents and two recently published patents.
  7. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  8. Papers accepted in top journals:

New Funding (with CS PI)

  1. Yao, CCI, "Enhancing the Privacy and Reliability of Massive-scale Bluetooth Low Energy Contact Tracing," $200,000.
  2. Cho, CCI, "Backdoor Detection and Mitigation in Deep Neural Networks," $50,000.
  3. Eldardiry, CCI, "Determination of safety limits against cyber threats in neuromodulation devices using machine learning, brain phantoms, and neural pathways," $65,000.
  4. Hoang, Bosch, "Oblivious Distributed File Systems for Critical Infrastructures," $50,000.
  5. Hicks, DARPA I2O, "EPIC SWaPD: Energy-Preserving IoT Cryptography for Small Weight and Power Devices," $1,548,244.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. Steve Edwards will be the recipient of the 2021 SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education.
  2. Kirk Cameron was named an IEEE Fellow.
  3. Aisling Kelliher was recognized as a Senior Member of the ACM.
  4. John Wenskovitch led the organizing committee for the Workshop on Machine Learning from User Interaction at IEEE VIS.
  5. Anuj Karpatne co-organized a symposium on "Physics-guided AI" at AAAI 2020.
  6. Kurt Luther will serve as Demos co-chair for CSCW 2021.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Xuewen Cui, "Directive-Based Data Partitioning and Pipelining and Auto-Tuning for High-Performance GPU Computing ," Feng (chair)
  2. Saurabh Chakravarty, "Summarizing Legal Depositions," Fox (chair)
  3. Rongrong Tao, "Anomalous Information Detection in Social Media," Ramakrishnan (chair)

Other Notables

  1. Trey Mayo was hired as the department's first Director of Graduate Programs
Highlights from previous quarters