VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: July-September 2022

Publications, Scholarship, and Research Recognitions
  1. Chris Brown is a co-author on a paper that will be recognized with an ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper award at FSE 2022. The paper, "Asynchronous Technical Interviews: Reducing the Effect of Supervised Think-Aloud on Communication Ability" is a collaboration with colleaugues at IBM and NCSU.
  2. PhD student Karim Youssef (advised by Wu Feng) is lead author on two papers that were recognized with Outstanding Student Paper Awards at the 2022 IEEE High Performance Extreme Computing Conference. The papers are entitled "Optimizing Performance and Storage of Memory-Mapped Persistent Data Structures" and "AUTOPAGER: Auto-tuning Memory-Mapped I/O Parameters in Userspace" (MS student Niteya Shah was also co-author on this paper).
  3. PhD student Fengjiao Li (advised by Bo Ji) is lead author on a paper recognized with the Best Student Paper award at the 20th International Symposium on Modeling and Optimization in Mobile, Ad hoc, and Wireless Networks. The paper is entitled "Differentially Private Linear Bandits with Partial Distributed Feedback."
  4. Hoda Eldardiry had one patent granted ("System and method using augmented reality for efficient collection of training data for machine learning") and one patent published ("System and method for performing collaborative learning of machine representations for a target concept."
  5. Hoda Eldardiry gave the opening keynote at the Women in Data Science Blacksburg conference.
  6. Ed Fox published a patent ("Extensible information systems and methods").
  7. Yalong Yang is a co-author on a paper that received an honorable mention best paper award at VIS 2022. The paper is entitled "The Quest for Omnioculars: Embedded Visualization for Augmenting Basketball Game Viewing Experiences."
  8. Yan Chen is a co-author on a paper that will recieve an honorable mention best paper award at UIST 2022. The paper is entitled "SemanticOn: Specifying Content-Based Semantic Conditions for Web Automation Programs."
  9. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  10. Papers accepted in top journals:

New External Funding (with CS PI)

  1. Eldardiry, Adobe, "Robust Real-time Resource Forecasting for Pricing Scheme Design," $30,000.
  2. Eldardiry, NIH (iTHRIV), "Reducing Operating Room Waste by Monitoring Single-use Sterile Surgical Supplies with Computer Vision," $10,000.
  3. Feng, DOE, "SciDAC: Femtoscale Imaging of Nuclei using Exascale Platforms," $1,346,998.
  4. Hoang, CCI, "New Cryptographic Audit Tools for Effective Data Integrity Attestation in Large-scale Storage-as-a-service Infrastructure," $20,000.
  5. Hooshangi, MS Pathways to Computing Consortium (Northearstern University), "CS@VT Readiness Bridge," $65,000.
  6. Hooshangi, NSF, "Understanding the Barriers that Contribute to the Gender Gap in Computing in Higher Education," $336,869.
  7. Huang, DARPA (through Systems & Technology Research), "Information, Context and Expertise Preservation for Task-Oriented Recommendations (INCEPTOR)," $552,640.
  8. Karpatne, NSF, "Advancing process understanding of lake water quality to macrosystem scales with knowledge-guided machine learning," $567,340.
  9. Lou, NSF, "A Networking Perspective of Blockchain Security: Modeling, Analysis, and Defense," $600,000.
  10. Lu, Barron Associates Inc (US Army SBIR), "Graph Neural Networks for UxS Collaborative Agent Control," $75,000.
  11. Murali, NSF, "PIPP Phase I: Community Informed Computational Prevention of Pandemics, $1,000,000.
  12. Ramakrishnan, ODNI, "Forecasting migration patterns and land border encounters," $350,000.
  13. Shaffer, NSF, "An Infrastructure for Sutainable Innovation and Research in Computer Science Education," $404,180.
  14. Tilevich, NSF, "Investigating the Feasibility and Scope of Automated Refactoring for Distributed Software," $150,000.

Professional Service & Recognition, Outreach, etc.

  1. Bo Ji will serve as PC Co-Chair of ACM MobiHoc 2023.
  2. Bo Ji will serve as Publicity Co-Chair of ACM e-Energy 2023.
  3. Dimitris Nikolopoulos will continue as the Steering Committee Chair for the IEEE ISPASS Conference, and as a member of the Scientific Advisory Team on Research Infrastructure for United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI).
  4. Dimitris Nikolopoulos will serve as Keynotes Chair for ACM e-Energy 2023, as PC Area Chair for EuroPar’22, and as a member for the PC for IPDPS’23 and PACT’22.
  5. Lifu Huang is serving as Area Chair for COLING’2022, member of the Senior Program Committee for AAAI’2023, and as Publication Committee Co-Chair for ACL’2023.
  6. Lifu Huang gave a tutorial on “New Frontiers of Information Extraction” at NAACL’2022
  7. Lifu Huang organized a workshop on "Weak Indirect and Self Supervision for Knowledge Extraction” at AKBC’2022.
  8. Hoda Eldardiry will serve as an area chair for AAAI 2023.
  9. Yalong Yang will serve on the PC for CHI 2023 and VR 2023; Yalong will also serve on the organizing committee for the "Immersive Analytics" workshop at ACM ISS 2022, and is editing a special issue of Frontiers of Virtual Reality on "Immersive Analytics."
  10. Dawei Zhou is co-organizing a workshop on "Trustworthy Learning on Graphs (TrustLOG)" at CIKM 2022.
  11. Isminia Lourentzou is co-organizing a workshop on "Gaze Meets ML" at NeurIPS 2022.
  12. Brendan David-John is serving as a Sponsors Chair for ACM ETRA 2023.
  13. Sally Hamouda was a member off the Senior Program Committee for ICER 2022.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Neelma Bhatti, "Technology and International Student Parenting: Implications for Research and Design of Digital Childcare Technologies,” McCrickard (chair), Kelliher (co-chair).
  2. Nikhil Muralidhar, "Science Guided Machine Learning: Incorporating Scientific Domain Knowledge for Learning Under Data Paucity & Noisy Contexts," Ramakrishnan (chair), Karpatne (co-chair).
  3. Andrey Popov, "Combining Data-driven and Theory-guided Models in Ensemble Data Assimilation," Sandu (chair).
  4. Jiameng Pu, "Defending Against Misuse of Synthetic Media: Characterizing Real-world Challenges and Building Robust Defenses," Viswanath (chair).
  5. Ya Xiao, "Neural Network based Methodologies and Comparisons for Securing Cryptography Code," Yao (chair).
  6. Sukrit Venkatagiri, "Supporting and Transforming High-Stakes Investigations with Expert-Led Crowdsourcing," Luther (chair).
  7. Reem Aldaihani, "Identifying The Structure Of Genomic Islands In Prokaryotes," Heath (advisor).
  8. Jingoo Han, "Towards a Resource Efficient Framework for Distributed Deep Learning Applications," Butt (chair).

Other Notables

  1. The most recent USN&WR undergrad CS program rankings listed VT at 29th, moving up from 31st last time.
  2. Catching up on recent hiring news, in the last six months the department welcomed staff members Cole Tankersley, Suzanne Boone, and Joline Plunkett; administrative faculty members Alexis Snyder, Barbara Parker, and Molly Austin; and T&R faculty Siwei Cao, Brendan David-John, Sally Hamouda, Heath Hillman, Reza Jafari, Huaicheng Li, Tessema Mengistu, and Chris Thomas.
Highlights from previous quarters