VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: January-March 2023

Publications, Scholarship, and Research Recognitions
  1. Sam Noh was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering of Korea (NAEK).
  2. Matthew Hicks is co-author on a paper that received a "Top Picks in Hardware and Embedded Security" award from the IEEE Hardware Security and Trust Technical Committee (HSTCC). The paper "A2: Analog Malicious Hardware" appeared originally in IEEE S&P 2016 where it received a distinguished paper award. An expanded version will appear soon in a special journal issue as part of this recognition.
  3. Huaicheng Li is lead author on a paper at ASPLOS 2023 that received a Distinguished Paper Award. The paper "Pond: CXL-Based Memory Pooling Systems for Cloud Platforms," was a collaboration with researchers at Microsoft.
  4. Scott McCrickard's paper with alum Lindah Kotut received an Honorable Mention Best Paper Award for their GROUP 2023 paper "The TL;DR Charter".
  5. Kurt Luther was invited as a Distinguished Speaker by the University of North Dakota
  6. PhD student Vikram Mohanty received an honorable mention recognition for his CHI 2023 paper "Save A Tree or 6 kg of CO2? Understanding Effective Carbon Footprint Interventions for Eco-Friendly Vehicular Choices." Vikram is advised by Kurt Luther. This work resulted from a collaboration with Toyota Research Institute that began with an internship.
  7. PhD students Zhengjie Ji, Jianan Nie, Osama Bajaber, and Matthew Corbet received 2023 CCI SWVA Cyber Innovation scholarships. Zhengjie and Jianan are advised by Peng Gao, Matthew is advised by Bo Ji, Osama is co-advised by Bo Ji and Peng Gao.
  8. PhD students Aravind Cheruvu and Matt Wilchek were been accepted to participate in the CCI SWVA Cyber Innovation Scholar Program. Aravind is advised by Bimal Viswanath and Matt is co-advised by Kurt Luther.
  9. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  10. Papers accepted in top journals:

New External Funding (with CS PI)

  1. Bowman, LLNL, "Virtual Inspection of Advanced Manufacturing via Process-Sale Digital Twins," $453,046.
  2. Bowman, ONR (through UCSB), "Multi-Input Control for Mobile Augmented Reality," $741,423.
  3. David-John, 4-VA, "Personalizing machine-learning guided navigation interfaces in virtual and augmented reality," $15,000.
  4. Feng, LLNL, "Transparently Managing Disaggregated Storage," $50,958.
  5. Gao, 4-VA, "Enabling high-fidelity cyber threat knowledge acquisition from open-source cyber threat intelligence" $15,000.
  6. Heath, NSF, "Unraveling the origin of vegetative desiccation tolerance in vascular plants," $370,704.
  7. Hoang, 4-VA, "Privacy-preserving and trustworthy AI for smart transportation" $15,000.
  8. Huang, NSF, "CAREER: Towards Open World Event Knowledge Extraction with Weak Supervision," $593,456.
  9. Ji, CCI, "Protecting Bystander Visual Data Privacy in Augmented Reality Systems," $50,000.
  10. Li, Samsung, "Characterization Driven Data Placement Optimizations for CXL Memory," $60,000.
  11. Lou, NSF, "CISE CAREER Proposal Writing Workshop," $449,999.
  12. Lourentzou, Amazon, "Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2 Competition," $250,000.
  13. Murali, NSF, "BeeHive: A Cross‐Problem Benchmarking Framework for Network Biology," $705,880.
  14. Nikolopoulos, Sony, "WASML: Enabling Scalable Serverless Computer Vision," $100,000.
  15. Ramakrishnan, Boeing, "Knowledge Capture and Generation using Intelligent Cognitive Agents," $180,000.
  16. Sikora, Fujitsu, "Computational speed-ups on NISQ quantum computers and beyond," $73,916.
  17. Viswanath, NSF, "Systematic Threat Characterization and Prevention in Open-Domain Dialog Systems," $600,000.
  18. Williams, NSF, "CAREER: Taming the size, complexity and longevity of OS kernels via enhanced OS kernel extensions," $602,686.
  19. Yao, CCI, "Scalable Continuous Monitoring Solutions for Enterprise Security," $50,000.
  20. Zhou, Cisco, "Combating Insider Threat: Identification, Monitoring, and Data Augmentation," $99,545.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. Ali Butt is serving as General Chair of ACM HPDC 2023.
  2. Jin-Hee Cho served as a Program Co-Chair for the 1st AAAI Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning and Quantification in Decision Making (UDM-AAAI-23), co-located with AAAI-23.
  3. Jin-Hee Cho served on the program committee for IEEE ICDCS 2023 and ACM AsiaCCS 2023.
  4. Brendan David-John will serve as the 2023-2024 Faculty Fellow for the VT American Indian & Indigenous Community Center.
  5. Hoda Eldardiry is serving as a panelist on Healthcare Technology Governance at the +Policy Symposium on Governance of New and Emerging Technologies.
  6. Sally Hamouda is serving on the Senior Program Committee for ICER 2023.
  7. Lifu Huang is serving as a Senior Area Chair for ACL 23 and as a member of the Senior Program Committee for IJCAI 23.
  8. Huaicheng Li servied on the ASPLOS 23, SYSTOR 23, and NVMW 23 program committees; he will also serve on PCs for NSDI 24 and ASPLOS 24.
  9. Ismini Lourentzou is serving as Workshop Co-Chair for NeurIPS 2023, as Vice Program Chair for IEEE BigData 2023, as an Area Chair for MICCAI 2023, and as Section Editor for the PLOS Digital Health Journal.
  10. Dimitrios Nikolopoulos is serving as as Program Co-Chair for the ACM International Conference on Supercomputing (ICS23).
  11. Sam Noh is serving on the program committee for Eurosys 2023, Systor 2023, and SOSP 2023; he will also serve on the PCs for ASPLOS 24 and FAST 24.
  12. Mohammed Seyam served on the program committee for SIGCSE 2023.
  13. Bimal Viswanath is serving on the program committee for CCS 2023.
  14. Yalong Yang will serve as Online Experience Chair for ISMAR 2023.
  15. Yalong Yang is serving on the program committee for IEEE VIS 2023.
  16. Dawei Zhou joined the editorial board for Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.
  17. Dawei Zhou is serving as the Vice Program Chair for 2023 IEEE Big Data; he is also serving on the program committees for SIGKDD 23, IJCAI 23, ICML 23, SIGIR 23, ICLR 23, WWW 23, NeurIPS 23.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Hadeel Albahar (ECE), "Optimizing Systems for Deep Learning Applications," Butt (chair).
  2. Jie Bu, "Achieving More with Less: Learning Generalizable Neural Networks With Less Labeled Data and Computational Overheads," Karpatne (chair).

Other Notables

  1. The widely used csrankings site has recently added CS education research as a category. Virginia Tech ranks #1 in this category, based on publications in the premier CS education research conference since the field's inception.
  2. CS faculty were involved in three of the Destination Area 2.0 planning grants, including one on pandemic prediction and prevention led by T.M. Murali.
  3. On the hiring front, in recent months the department welcomed staff members Kacy Robinson, Amy Jordan, and Joe Morgan; A/P faculty member Patricia-Marie Harley; and T&R faculty Yan Chen, Sam Noh, and Xuan Wang.
Highlights from previous quarters