VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: April-June 2023

1. Mohannad Elhamod received the university's Graduate Student of the Year Award.
2. Haider Ali received the university's Outstanding Master's Thesis Award.
3. MS student Meghana Holla received Paul E. Torgersen Research Excellence Award. PhD student Md Momen Bhuiyan received a 3rd place award as well, in the poster/oral presentation category.
4. Zhiyang Xu, Ying Shen, and Lifu Huang authored a paper that recieved an Outstanding Paper Award at The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023).
5. Shaddi Hasan led a paper that was recognized with the Community Award at NSDI 2023.
6. Matthew Hicks is co-author on a paper that was recognized as one of the most impactful papers over the last 25 years to appear in the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA).
7. A paper co-authorted by Ing-Ray Chen and Jin-Hee Cho received the 2023 IEEE ComSoc Network Operations & Management (CNOM) Test of Time Paper Award.
8. A paper co-authored by Dayoung Kim, Qin Zhu and Hoda Eldardiry received a best paper honorable mention award at IEEE Ethics 2023 for their paper "Exploring Approaches to Artificial Intelligence Governance: From Ethics to Policy."
9. Ed Fox, Bill Ingram, and co-authors received the best short paper award at the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL).
10. The following PhD students were awarded partial summer fellowships by the department: Vikram Mohanty, Zhengjia Ji, Arka Daw, Myles Frantz Wenjia Song, Shawal Khalid, Shanghao Shi, Amun Kharel, Matthew Corbett, Ying Zhang, Md Abduallah Maruf, Molly Domino,
11. Papers accepted in top conferences:
    • Y. Chen, ACM UIST 2023
    • Y. Chen, IEEE VL/HCC 2023 (2 papers)
    • Cho, IEEE ICWS 2023
    • Chung, USENIX Security 2023
    • Eldardiry, IEEE Ethics 2023
    • Gao, RAID 2023
    • Gulzar, FSE 2023
    • Hicks, USENIX Security 2023
    • Hicks, Yao, USENIX Security 2023
    • Huang, ACL (5 papers)
    • Ji, ICML 2023
    • Lee, IEEE VL/HCC 2023
    • Lou, USENIX Security 2023 (2 papers)
    • Luther, ACM DIS 2023.
    • Zhou, ICML 2023
    • Zhou, KDD 2023
12. Papers accepted in top journals:
    • I. Chen, Cho, IEEE Internet of Things
    • Ji, IEEE Trans on Information Forensics and Security
    • Luther, ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
    • Luther, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence
    • Meng, Viswanath, Yao, ACM Trans on Software Engineering & Methodology
    • Onufriev, Epigenetics and Chromatin

New External Funding (with CS PI)

1. Y. Chen, 4VA, "Visualizing Live Code Changes to Understand Students' Mental Models in Programming Education at Scale," $30,000.
2. Cho, CCI, "Trustworthy services for autonomous mission computing systems," $20,000.
3. Chung, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (Korea), "A Study on Key Management Structure for Multi-Metaverse Avatar Authentication and Anonymization Assurance," $225,000.
4. Chung, NSF, "Cryptographic accumulators and revocation of credentials," $240,000.
5. David-John, CCI, "Proposal Team Building and Privacy Expert Recruitment for a Workshop on Bystander Obscuration in Wearable Augmented Reality Displays," $20,000.
6. Gao, CCI, "Distributed in-network authentication for zero-trust security enabled by programmable switches," $20,000.
7. Lou, NSF, "An Anti-tracking and Robocall-free Architecture for Next-G Mobile Networks," $600,000.
8. Li, Samsung, "Characterization Driven Data Placement Optimizations for CXL Memory," $60,000.
9. Li, Samsung, "Exploring Acceleration Opportunities for CXL Memory to Reduce Memory Management Tax," $270,151.
10. Meng, CCI, "SmartGuide: Revolutionizing the Depth and Dependability of Vision-Impaired Navigation," $20,000.
11. Viswanath, CCI, "Securing the Interactions with AI-based Question-Answering Dialog Systems,” $30,000.
12. Viswanath, 4VA, "Secure and Trustworthy Data and Technology: Evolution to a New Era,” $30,000.
13. Wang, CCI, "Trustworthy multimodal machine learning in healthcare: aligning model attention with human attention," $20,000.
14. Zhou, CCI, "Towards open knowledge network construction, adaptation, and deployment," $20,000.
15. Zhou, Deloitte, "Transferable Cyber Threat Detection for Dynamic Environments," $90,000.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

1. Rich Charles received the President's Award for Excellence
2. Bo Ji was recognized by the College as a Faculty Fellow.
3. Na Meng was recognized by the College as a Faculty Fellow.
4. Ismini Lourentzou received a College Award for Outstanding New Assistant Professor.
5. Dave McPherson received the Department Outstanding Contributions in Teaching Award.
6. Margaret Ellis received the Department Outstanding Contributions in Faculty Service Award.
7. Michael Davis received the Department Outstanding Contributions in Administrative Service Award.
8. Joan Watson received the Department Outstanding Contributions in Administrative Service Award.
9. Lifu Huang received the Department Rising Star Faculty Award.
10. Ed Fox recived a Commercialization Champions Award from OVPRI and LINK+LICENSE+LAUNCH.
11. Dennis Kafura was honored with professor emeritus status by the BOV.
12. Ali Butt served as General Chair for ACM High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 2023).
13. Jin-Hee Cho served on the program committee for ACSAC 2024, IEEE MILCOM 2023, IEEE Big Data 2023, and IEEE CogSima 2023.
14. Md Ali Gulzar and Na Meng are serving on the program committee for ICSE 2024.
15. Sam Noh will serve as Program Co-Chair for ACM Systor 2024.
16. Kurt Luther will serve as an associate chair for ACM CHI 2024.
17. Lifu Huang will serve as an area chair for EMNLP 2023 and on the program committee of NeurIPS 2023.
18. Dawei Zhou will serve on the senior program committees for CIKM 2023 and AAAI 2024.
19. Yan Chen will serve as an associate chair for CHI 2024 and CSCW 2024.
20. Sang Won Lee will serve as an associate chair for CHI 2024.
21. Bimal Viswanath will participate in the Al Technology Initiative organized by the Bipartisan Virginia Technology and Innovation Legislative Caucus.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

1. Zhen Guo, Cho (chair)
2. Mohannad Elhamod, Karpatne (chair)
3. Da Zhang, Jian (chair)
4. Nurendra Choudhary, Reddy (chair)
5. Feiyu Lu, Bowman (chair)
6. Aman Ahuja, Fox (chair)
7. MD Momen Bhuiyan, Lee (chair)
8. Ming Zhu, Lourentzou (chair)

Other Notables

1. Associate Professors Debswapna Bhattacharya and Jin-Hee Cho were granted tenure, and Assistant Professor Anuj Karpatne was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.
2. The department welcomed Tonia Moxley as Communications Manager.
3. The most recent USN&WR CS graduate program rankings have VT at 35th, moving up from 38th last time.