VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: October-December 2023

Publications, Scholarship, and Research Recognitions
  1. Doug Bowman gave the keynote address at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC).
  2. Dawei Zhou was selected to give a New Faculty Highlight talk at AAAI-24.
  3. The HokieBot team won Third Place in the Scientific Competition for the Amazon Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge 5. The team was guided by Lifu Huang.
  4. Graduate students Vikram Mohanty, Jude Lim, Terryl Dodson and their advisor, Kurt Luther received the Best Poster/Demo Award at AAAI HCOMP 2023, for their contribution "Behind the canvas: A human-AI workflow for tracing 19th-century photographers and studio backdrops."
  5. Recent PhD graduate Aman Ahuja was recognized by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) organization with its annual Innovative Student Thesis Award. Aman's dissertation is titled "Analyzing and Navigating Electronic Theses and Dissertations." His advisor was Dr. Ed Fox.
  6. The work of Chris Thomas and his students was featured in a Columbia University magazine article, "When Trust is a Factor".
  7. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  8. Papers accepted in top journals:

New External Funding (with CS PI)

  1. Chung, Google, "RoVISTA: Understanding the Current Validation Status of RPKI," $30,000.
  2. Huang, Amazon (Amazon-VT Initative), "Semi-Parametric Open Domain Conversation Generation and Evaluation with Multi-dimensional Judgements from Instruction Tuning," $80,000.
  3. Lourentzou, Amazon (Amazon-VT Initative), "Diffusion-based Scene-Graph Enabled Embodied AI Agents," $80,000.
  4. Meng, CCI, " "An Empirical Evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Generating Security Tests to Mitigate Supply Chain Attacks," $50,000.
  5. Ramakrishnan, Stevens Institute (SERC), "Bot Prototypes for Repetitive or Role Contracting Actions,” $122,899.
  6. Ramakrishnan, ICWERX, "AI 'Gaze' Assessment," $225,000.
  7. Sandu, ORNL, "Multirate time integration for power system DAEs,” $30,311.
  8. Wang, Amazon (Amazon-VT Initative), "Fact-Checking in Open-Domain Dialogue Generation through Self-Talk," $65,000.
  9. Y. Yao, Google, "PSS Privacy Research," $75,000.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. C.T. Lu, Dimitris Nikolopoulos, and Naren Ramakrishan were named IEEE Fellows.
  2. Bo Ji will serve as editor of the ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review (PER).
  3. Peng Gao will serve on the programm committees of ACM CCS 2024 and DLSP 2024.
  4. Tessema Mengistu will serve on the program committee of EDGE 2023.
  5. Lifu Huang received the Outstanding Area Chair Award from EMNLP 2023.

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Tung Dao, "Toward More Practical Fault Localization with Instant Localization and Triggering Modes: An Empirical Approach," Meng (chair).
  2. Lei Zhang, "Bilevel Optimization in the Deep Learning Era: Methods and Applications," Lu (chair).
  3. Arka Daw, "Physics-informed Machine Learning with Uncertainty Quantification," Karpatne (chair).
  4. Qisheng Zhang, "Autonomous Cyber Defense for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems," Cho (chair).
  5. Md Hossain Shuvo, "Machine Learning Methods for Protein Model Quality Estimation," Bhattacharya (chair).

Other Notables

  1. The department was awarded two of the new round of VT Presidential Postdocs. Dawie Zhou and Lifu Huang will host one scholar; Bo Ji who will host the second one.
Highlights from previous quarters