VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: January-March 2022

Publications, Scholarship, and Research Recognitions
  1. Doug Bowman was honored as a member of the inaugural class of the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy.
  2. Dimitris Nikolopoulos was honored as a member of the inaugural group recognized by the IEEE Computer Society as a Distinguished Contributor.
  3. A team of Virginia Tech CS graduate and undergraduate students took first place in the 2022 IEEE Virtual Reality 3DUI Contest. The team was led by PhD student Lee Lisle. This is the 2nd win in a row for members of VT's 3DI Group, and 6th overall since the contest began in 2010.
  4. Recent PhD recipient Lindah Kotut received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Graduate School. Lindah was advised by Scott McCrickard.
  5. Recent MS recipient Molly Hickman received the Outstanding Thesis Award from the Graduate School. Molly was advised by Sang Won Lee.
  6. Recent PhD recipient Aakash Gautam received the Outstanding Disseration Award from SIGCHI. Aakash was advised by Deborah Tatar.
  7. Two papers from VT authors received Honorable Mention Best Paper Awards from CHI 2022: "Winds of Change: Seeking, Preserving, and Retelling Indigenous Knowledge Through Self-Organized Online Communities" (Kotut, McCrickard) and "OtherTube: Facilitating Content Discovery and Reflection by Exchanging YouTube Recommendations with Strangers" (Bhuiyan, Isaza, Mitra, Lee).
  8. Ismini Lourentzou will give a keynote presentation at ACM PETRA 2022 in July
  9. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  10. Papers accepted in top journals:

New External Funding (with CS PI)

  1. Bowman, NSF, "CI Fellows Project," $276,134.
  2. Eldardiry, Siemens, "Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Control," $60,737.
  3. Gao, 4-VA, "Towards an AI-Powered Active Phishing Protection Scheme," $25,000.
  4. Huang, Amazon, "Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge Competition," $250,000.
  5. Jian, Google, "Architectural Support to Assist OS Aggressively Save Memory in Cloud while Preserving High Application Performance and Strong Performance Isolation," $60,000.
  6. Karpatne, NSF, "HDR Institute: Imageomics: A New Frontier of Biological Information Powered by Knowledge-Guided Machine Learning," $1,340,645 (VT portion).
  7. Lourtenzou, NSF, "Cost‐sensitive Federated AI for Smart Manufacturing Data‐Sharing," $300,000.
  8. Mayer, SRNL, "Early Detection System Development Using Open-Source Indicators," $252,500.
  9. North, NSF, "CI Fellows: Interactive Semantic Explanations for Deep Learning Visualizations," $280,768.
  10. Onufriev, NIH, "Next generation implicit solvation for atomistic modeling," $1,198,621.
  11. Reddy, ORNL, "Health Informatics Technology in Clinical Pathway," $80,208.
  12. Sikora, Fujitsu, "Algorithms for large and near-term quantum computers," $66,752.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. Bo Ji received a Distinguised Member recognition for his service on the 2022 INFOCOM Technical Program Committee.
  2. Ismini Lourentzou will serve as Expo co-chair for NeurIPS 2022.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Taoran Ji, "On Modeling Dependency Dynamics of Sequential Data: Methods and Applications," Lu (chair).
  2. Xinwei Fu, "Detecting Application-specific Non-volatile Memory Bugs by Inferring Likely-correctness Conditions from Programs," Dongyoon Lee (chair).
  3. Yali Bian, "Human-AI Sensemaking with Semantic Interaction and Deep Learning," North (chair).
  4. Setor Zilevu, "Human Computer Interaction for Complex Machine Learning," Kelliher (chair).
  5. Chidubem Arachie, "Learning with Constraint-Based Weak Supervision," Bert Huang (chair).

Other Notables

  1. Trey Mayo, Director of Graduate Programs, successfully defended his dissertation in the Executive Ed.D. program at William & Mary.
Highlights from previous quarters