VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: January-March 2021

1. Anuj Karpatne gave invited talks at the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) Annual Meeting and the University of Idaho. Dr. Karpatne also gave a lecture series at the Geilo Winter School 2021 (Norway).
2. Papers accepted in top conferences:
   • Hicks, ISCA 2021
   • Jian, ISCA 2021
   • Kafura, Meng, ITiCSE 2021
   • Ellis, Edwards, ITiCSE 2021
   • Reddy, WWW 2021 (2 papers)
3. Papers accepted in top journals:
   • Raghvendra, Journal of Computational Geometry
   • Karpatne, ACM Trans on Data Science
   • Nikolopoulos, IEEE Trans on Computers
   • Lourentzou, Nature Scientific Data
   • Yao, Computing Surveys
   • Kelliher, Soft Robotics
   • Ji, IEEE/ACM Trans on Networking

New Funding (with CS PI)

1. Hicks, NSF, "CAREER: Designing and Defending Novel Ultra-stealthy and Controllable Design-time Analog-domain Hardware Trojans," $547,672.
2. Servant, NSF, "CAREER: Autonomous Targeted Software Verification," $470,374.
3. Ramakrishnan, DOE-Svannah River, "Application of Machine Learning Techniques to Meteorological Forecasting," $120,000.
4. Kelliher, "Broadening participation support for ACM IMX 2021 conference," ACM SIGCHI, $10,000.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

1. Ed Fox was part of the inauguaral class of inductees into the Academy of the ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retreival (SIGIR).
2. Barbara Ryder received the Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award from NCWIT.
3. PhD student Mostafa Mohammed received the GTA-Instructor of Record Excellence award from the Graduate School.
4. Jin-Hee Cho will serve as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Service Computing.
5. Bo Ji will serve as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering
6. Ismini Lourentzou will serve as Associate Chair of the 14th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA 2021).
7. Anuj Karpatne co-organized a symposium on “Combining Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with Physics Sciences” (MLPS) as part of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series 2021.
8. Anuj Karpatne served as poster co-chair for IEEE Big Data 2020.
9. Sang Won Lee will serve as Technology Chair for the International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) 2021, as Online Experience Chair for the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR) 2021, and as Technology Chair for the AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) 2021.
10. Aisling Kelliher will serve as Diversity & Inclusion Chair for ACM IMX 2021.
11. Lifu Huang will serve as an area chair for EMNLP 2021.
12. Bo Ji will serve as general co-chair for WiOpt 2021.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

1. Sathappan Muthiah, "A Hybrid Micro-Tasking Framework to Event Coding," Ramakrishnan (chair).
2. Breno Dantas Cruz, "Promoting Systematic Software Design and Development Practices for Edge Computing via Middleware Abstractions and Performance Estimation," Tilevich (chair).

Other Notables

1. A team of three students (Yibo Huang, Calvin Godfrey, and Joseph Dyer) took 4th out of 89 teams at the 2020 ICPC Regionals. They now advance to the North American Division Championships (Apr 22) where they will compete for a slot at the North American Championships.
2. Paige Johnson was hired as the department's first Director of Undergraduate Programs
3. The naming gift for the Sanghani Center for AI and Data Analytics was announced.
4. Two new graduate fellowships, in honor of Dennis Kafura and Dick Nance, were announced.
5. A new undergraduate scholarship, in honor of Terry Arthur, was announced.