VT Department of Computer Science
Highlights: January-March 2024

Publications, Scholarship, and Teaching and Research Recognitions
  1. Margaret Ellis received the 2024 IEEE Computer Society Mary Kenneth Keller Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award.
  2. Huaicheng Li and his student Juinshu Liu had a paper selected for an IEEE MICRO Top Picks 2024 Honorable Mention award.
  3. Steve Edwards and Bob Edmison were co-authors on a SIGCSE 2024 paper that was selected best paper in the Position and Curricula Initiatives track.
  4. Tijay Chung was selected to give a talk at The North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG'90) in Charlotte, NC.
  5. Dimitris Nikolopoulos was invited as a panelist by the German Research Foundation.
  6. Ed Fox was part of the team that was granted a patent for "Methods and systems for generating declarative statements given documents with questions and answers."
  7. Papers accepted in top conferences:
  8. Papers accepted in top journals:

New External Funding (with CS PI)

  1. Brown, CCI, "Understanding How Software Developers Secure User Interfaces in Rapid Release Environments," $10,000.
  2. Cho, NSF, "Using Intelligent Conversational Agents to Empower Adolescents to be Resilient Against Cybergrooming," $855,127.
  3. Chung, NSF, "CAREER: Securing and Evolving Internet Security Protocols for Naming and Routing," $691,258.
  4. Ji, CCI, "Enabling On-Device Live Captioning in Mixed Reality Systems," $10,000.
  5. Ji, CCI, "Federated Edge Intelligence with Multi-modal Learning," $10,000.
  6. Li, NSF, "CAREER: Rethinking System Stack for the Load-Store I/O Era," $676,549.
  7. Ramakrishnan, Washington Post, "The Use of LLMs to enhance Reader Experience,” $133,865.
  8. Sandu, ORNL, "Multirate time integration for power system DAEs,” $30,743.
  9. Sikora, CCI, "Approximate Floquet quantum error correcting codes,” $9,866.
  10. Sikora, Fujitsu, "Hybrid quantum algorithms for computationally hard problems,” $38,000.

Professional Service, Recognition, and Outreach

  1. Wenjing Lou was named an ACM Fellow.
  2. Layne Watson was named a SIAM Fellow.
  3. Dimitris Nikolopoulos was selected as an IEEE Distinguished Visitor
  4. Kurt Luther will receive the Dean's Award for Excellence in Outreach
  5. Chris North will receive the Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching
  6. Wenjing Lou will receive the Dean's Award for Excellence in Research
  7. Kirk Cameron will receive the Dean's Award for Excellence in Service
  8. Tijay Chung will be recognized by the college as an Outstanding New Assistant Professor.
  9. Lifu Huang will be recognized by the college as an Outstanding New Assistant Professor.
  10. Matthew Hicks will be recognized by the college as a Faculty Fellow.
  11. Ed Fox will recieve the college's W.S. "Pete" White Award for Innovation in Engineering Education.
  12. Debbie Zier will receive the colleges's Administrative Award for Staff.
  13. Sam Noh was appointed co-editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems.
  14. Sam Noh is serving on the program committee for ASPLOS 2025 and Eurosys 2025.
  15. Lifu Huang served as program chair for SouthNLP 2024.
  16. Lifu Huang is serving as publication committee chair for NAACL 2024.
  17. Lifu Huang is serving as as a senior area chair for EMNLP 2024.
  18. Lifu Huang is organizing an AI4Research workshop at IJCAI 2024
  19. Huaicheng Li is serving on the program committee for ASPLOS 2025 and NSDI 2025.
  20. Huaicheng Li co-organized a FAST 2024 Bird-of-Feather Session on Reproducibility.
  21. Ali Butt was invited to participate in in a CRA CCC Interdisciplinary Best Practices Roundtable.
  22. Kurt Luther will serve on the program committee for AAAI HCOMP 2024.
  23. Kurt Luther joined the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems.
  24. Kurt Luther was lead organizer of a workshop on “human-AI interaction for digital history and cultural heritage” at ACM IUI 2024.
  25. Kurt Luther led a VT team that hosted the inaugural Senior Military College Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Capture the Flag competition, with teams competing from VT, VMI, Texas A&M, The Citadel, and Norwich University.
  26. Dawei Zhou will serve as proceedings chair for ADM SIGKDD 2024.
  27. Dawei Zhou as joined the editorial board of the journal "Big Data Research."
  28. Finda Williams is serving as an associate chair on the program committees for CHI 2024 and DIS 2024.
  29. Dimitrios Nikolopoulos will serve on the program committee for HPDC 2004 and MICRO 2024.
  30. Jin-Hee Cho will serve as program co-chair for the 3rd Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning and Quantification in Decision Making, co-located with ACM SIGKDD.
  31. Jin-Hee Cho will serve on the program committees for ACIACCS 2024, ICDCS 2024, CogSima 2024, and SVCC 2024.
  32. Peng Gao will serve on the program committee for ACSAC 2024.
  33. Peng Gao is co-organazing the 1st DMV Security Workshop.
  34. Sally Hamouda is serving on the senior program committee for ICER 2024.
  35. Sally Hamouda is part of the ITiCSE 2024 working group on Computing Education in Africa.
  36. Bo Ji was selected as a Ewha Global Fellow at by Womans University, South Korea.
  37. Bo Ji and Wenjing Lou are co-organizing the NSF CISE CAREER Workshop 2024.
  38. Barbara Parker will present a paper at the NACADA National Conference.
  39. Jennifer Bradley and Tonisha Montgomery were nominated for the 2024 Virginia Tech Annual Academic Advising Award.
  40. Amy Jordon has completed the requirements to become a Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) under the International Association for Accessibility Professionals (IAAP).

PhD Students Successfully Defending

  1. Virginia Andreea Sistrunk, " Designing Human-Centered Collaborative Systems for School Redistricting," Ramakrishnan (chair).
  2. Lulway AlKulaib, "Analyzing Networks with Hypergraphs: Detection, Classification, and Prediction," Lu (chair).
  3. Hongjie Chen, " Graph-based Time-series Forecasting in Deep Learning," Eldardiry (chair).
  4. Matthew Corbett, " Enhancing Security and Privacy in Head-Mounted Augmented Reality Systems Using Eye Gaze," Ji (chair).

Other Notables

  1. The department welcomed new full professor Steve Flammia.
  2. The department also welcomed several new members to the administative team: Klaudia Escobar, Makayla Welch, Sara Coulson, Rebecca Stevenson, Kaitlyn Hoelzle and Claire Shirkey.
Highlights from previous quarters