VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: April-June 2021

Publications, Scholarship, and Research Recognitions
  1. Daphne Yao received the Lasting Research Award from the ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY). Daphne also gave a keynote talk at the ACM CODASPY 2021 conference.
  2. Matthew Hicks received the DARPA Director's Fellowship Award
  3. A team of Virginia Tech CS graduate and undergraduate students took home first place in the 2021 IEEE Virtual Reality 3DUI Contest. The team was led by PhD student Lei Zhang.
  4. Wu Feng gave a keynote talk at the 21st IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing.
  5. PhD student Kijin An and his advisor, Eli Tilevich, received the Best Paper Award at the 21st International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2021) for their paper "Communicating Web Vessels: Improving the Responsiveness of Mobile Web Apps with Adaptive Redistribution."
  6. Na Meng is co-author on a paper recognized at ICSE 2021 with a Distinguished Paper Award. The paper, "Hero: On the Chaos When PATH Meets Modules," is joint work with colleagues at Northeastern University in China.
  7. PhD student Neelma Bhatti received an honorable mention recognition for her short paper "Designing Mobile Applications to Minimize Disorientation in Informal Learning Environments" at ACM IDC 2021. The paper was co-authored by Morva Saaty and Scott McCrickard.
  8. MS student Ioannis Papakis received the Paul Torgersen Research Excellence Award for posters.
  9. PhD student Sazzadur Rahaman was a finalist for the COE Paul Torgersen Research Excellence Award.
  10. Bimal Viswanath gave an invited talk at the University of Iowa. Bimal was also an invited panelist for a panel on "Security in the Age of Intelligent and Resourceful Adversaries" at ACM SACMAT'21.
  11. Dimitrios Nikolopoulos gave an invited talk at the Workshop on Approximate and Transprecision Computing on Emergina Technoloties, which was part of ISC21.
  12. Daphne Yao authored an article for the Communications of the ACM on "Depth and Persistence: What Researchers Need to Know About Impostor Syndrome".
  13. Daphne Yao filed a utility patent on "Probabilistic Evidence Based Insider Threat Detection and Reasoning".
  14. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  15. Papers accepted in top journals:

New External Funding (with CS PI)

  1. Luther, CCI, "Exploring the Impact of Human-AI Collaboration on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Investigations of Social Media Disinformation," $65,000
  2. Butt, NSF, "HardLambda: A new FaaS Abstraction for Cross-Stack Resource Management in Disaggregated Datacenters," $420,000.
  3. Yao, CCI, Innovation Bridge Funding, $50,000.
  4. Cho, ARO, "Uncertainty-Aware Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Defense for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems," $240,000.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. C.T. Lu received a College of Engineering Dean's Award for Excellence in Research.
  2. Cliff Shaffer received a College of Engineering Dean's Award for Excellence in Service.
  3. Matthew Hicks received a College Award for Outstanding New Assistant Professor.
  4. Kurt Luther was recognized by the College as a Faculty Fellow.
  5. Greg Kulczycki received the Department Outstanding Contribution in Teaching Award.
  6. Layne Watson received the Department Outstanding Contribution in Faculty Service Award.
  7. Melanie Darden received the Department Outstanding Contribution in Administrative Service Award.
  8. Anuj Karpatne received the Department Rising Star Faculty Award.
  9. Roxanne Paul received the College's Virginia Louise “Jenny” Frank Award.
  10. The Urban Computing group --- which includes Naren Ramakrishnan, Layne Watson, Wanawsha Shalaby and others --- was recognized with the university's Alumni Award for Excellence in Outreach.
  11. Hoda Eldardiry will serve as Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
  12. Hoda Eldardiry will serve as guest editor for a special issue of the International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks (IJDSN). The theme is on Emerging Trends in Data Science and Cybersecurity in the IoT.
  13. Dimitrios Nikolopoulos was appointed to the Scientific Advisory Board of the Institute of Computer Science of the Greek Foundation for Research and Technology
  14. Daphne Yao was elected vice chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC).

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Lindah Kotut, "Amplifying the Griot: Technology for Preserving, Retelling, and Supporting Underrepresented Stories," McCrickard (chair).
  2. Kijin An, "The Client Insourcing Refactoring to Facilitate the Re-engineering of Web-Based Applications", Tilevich (chair).
  3. Prashant Chandrasekar, "Continuously Extensible Information Systems: Extending the 5S Framework by Integrating UX and Workflows", Fox (chair).
  4. Mai Dahshan, "Visual Analytics for High Dimensional Simulation Ensembles", Polys, North (co-chairs).
  5. Yin Liu, "Methodologies, Techniques, and Tools for Understanding and Managing Sensitive Program Information", Tilevich (chair).
  6. Yen-Cheng Lu, "Relational Outlier Detection: Techniques and Applications", Lu (chair).
  7. Min Oh, "Deep Learning for Enhancing Precision Medicine", Zhang (chair).
  8. Sirui Yao, "Evaluating, Understanding, and Mitigating Unfairness in Recommender Systems", Huang, Ramakrishnan (co-chairs) .

Other Notables

  1. Joan Watson was hired as the department's first Director of Administrative Operations.
  2. The department completed another strong hiring season, with offers being accepted by two collegiate faculty members (Oneyeka Emebo and Mohammed Fargalley) and seven tenure-track faculty members (Deb Bhattacharya, Chris Brown, Peng Gao, Liting Hu, Dan Williams, Yalong Yang, and Dawie Zhou).
  3. Ben Bradner was hired to join our technical staff as a DevOps Specialist.
Highlights from previous quarters