VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: July-September 2023

Publications, Scholarship, and Research Recognitions
  1. Finda Williams received the 2023 Gary M. Olson Outstanding Ph.D. Student Award from the School of Information (University of Michigan).
  2. Kurt Luther gave invited keynote presentations at the American Battlefield Trust's 2023 Virtual Teacher Institute, and at the Military Archives Section (MARS) of the Society of American Archivists' 2023 Annual Meeting.
  3. PhD student Frank Wanye and his advisor Wu Feng received a Champion award from the IEEE HPEC 2023 Graph Challenge for their paper "An Integrated Approach to Accelerating Stochastic Block Partitioning."
  4. ECE PhD student Atharva M Gondhalekar and his advisor Wu Feng received and Outstanding Student Paper Award from HPEC 2023 for their paper "On the Three P’s of Parallel Programming for Heterogeneous Computing: Performance, Productivity, and Portability."
  5. PhD students Barry Menglong Yao and Aditya Shah, and faculty members Jin-Hee Cho and Lifu Huang, received a best paper honorable mention award at SIGIR 2023.
  6. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  7. Papers accepted in top journals:

New External Funding (with CS PI)

  1. Cho, CCI, "Using Intelligent Conversational Agents to Empower Adolescents to be Resilient Against Cybergrooming," $75,000.
  2. Chung, NSF, "Tools for Measuring Route Origin Validation in Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) at Scale" $599,997.
  3. Feng, LANL, "Research in Performance Improvement of Single Particle Imaging Data Analysis," $47,057.
  4. Gao, CCI, "In-Network Information Flow Control for Lightning-Fast Cross-Host Attack Prevention Enabled by Programmable Switches,” $50,000.
  5. Hicks, NSF, "Circuit Support for Maintaining the Continuous-power Abstraction in Energy Harvesting Systems," $450,000.
  6. Hoang, CCI, "Privacy-Aware Federated Learning in Heterogeneous IoT," $75,000.
  7. Hoang, 4-VA, "Privacy-preserving and trustworthy AI for smart transportation," $30,000.
  8. Ji, Nokia, "Robust AI/ML workflows for networking," €30,000.
  9. Ji, NSF, "Black-box Optimization of White-box Networks: Online Learning for Autonomous Resource Management in NextG Wireless Networks," $300,000.
  10. Jian, NSF, "A Cross-stack Approach to Reduce Memory Carbon in Cloud Data Centers," $1,000,000.
  11. Karpatne, NSF, "CAREER: Unifying Scientific Knowledge with Machine Learning for Forward, Inverse, and Hybrid Modeling of Scientific Systems," $595,738.
  12. Lou, CCI, "Building a High-performance Intrusion Detection System for Virginia Tech's IPv4 and IPv6 Networks," $75,000.
  13. Lou, NSF, "Robust Sensing and Learning for Autonomous Driving Against Perceptual Illusion," $500,000.
  14. Lourentzou, DARPA, "Symbiotic Curriculum-based Human-aided OnLine Agent (SCHOLA)," $938,460.
  15. Lu, Barron Associates Inc (US Army SBIR), "GNN for UxS Collaborative Agent Control," $276,068.
  16. Nikolopoulos, NSF, "SWEET: Hardware and Software for Sustainable Wearable Edge Intelligence," $600,000.
  17. Ramakrishnan, NSF, "Machine Learning to Improve Detection and Traceability of Forest Products using Stable Isotope Ratio Analysis (SIRA)," $625,764.
  18. Viswanath, CCI, "Robust Classification of Adversarial Images from Generative AI Models," $37,500.
  19. Y. Yao, NSF, "Supporting Unbiased and Safe Disability Representation in Social Virtual Reality," $299,783.
  20. Zhang, NSF, "URoL:ASC: Using the Rules of Antibiotic Resistance Development to Inform Wastewater Mitigation Strategies," $650,000.
  21. Zhou, Deloitte, "Multi-modal Predictive Maintenance via Graph Neural Networks," $100,000.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. Deb Bhattacharya will serve as a study section member of an NIH Member Conflicts Special Emphasis Panel on Bioengineering, Biodata, and Biomodeling Technologies.
  2. Jin-Hee Cho will serve on the program committee for ACM AsiaCCS 2024.
  3. Peng Gao will serve on the program committee for Euro S&P 2024.
  4. Sally Hamouda served on the senior program committee for ICER 2023.
  5. Ismini Lourentzou will serve as Associate Co-Chair for ACM PETRA 2024.
  6. Wu Feng is Steering Committee Chair for the International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP).

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Brian Keith Norambuena, "Narrative Maps: A Computational Model to Support Analysts in Narrative Sensemaking," North (chair).
  2. Karim Youssef, "Scalable and Productive Data Management for High-Performance Analytics," Feng (chair).
  3. Vikram Mohanty, "Designing Human-AI Collaborative Systems for Historical Photo Identification," Luther (chair).
  4. Khadijah Ahmad Alsafwan, "Towered Better Understanding and Documentation of Rationale of Code Changes," Servant (chair).
  5. Tung Dao, "Toward More Practical Fault Localization with Instant Localization and Triggering Modes: An Empirical Approach," Meng (chair).
  6. Shuo Lei, "Learning with Limited Labeled Data: Techniques and Applications," Lu (chair).
  7. Ying Zhang, "Secure Code Practice in Java: Automatic Detection, Repair, and Testing of Vulnerabilities Related to API Insecure Usage," Meng (chair).

Other Notables

  1. TM Murali leads the team that was selected as one of two new Virginia Tech Destination Areas: "Pandemic Prediction and Prevention." Deb Bhattacharya, Anuj Karpatne, and Naren Ramakrishnin are part of the team as well.
  2. The department's undergraduate program was ranked 27th by USN&WR, up from 29th last year.
  3. The department welcomed new academic advisors Ben Cheng, Jasmine Coles, and Amy Jordan; assistant professors Atul Mantri, Krish Sundararajah, Finda Williams, Pinar Yanardag, and Yaxing Yao; instructors Allyson Senger and Patrick Sullivan; and collegiate faculty members Melissa Cameron, Sehrish Basir Nizamani, and Erika Olimpiew.
Highlights from previous quarters