CS News Briefs

Congratulations to the winners of the 2019-2020 annual Computer Science Department Awards!
*These students are part of the graduating class of (May) 2020!UNDERGRADUATE AWARDS

Louis T. Rader Service Award
Jake Smith*
Madison Flynn
Sanjana Hajela*

Louis T. Rader Teaching Award
Alex Lehmann
Cameron Lloyd*
Jason Ashley
Michael Ferguson
Nadia Hassan
Sarah Meng*
Sean Gatewood*
Simranjit Bhatia
V Layne Berry
Winston Liu*

Congratulations to UVA Engineering's cyber defense team!UVA Engineering's cyber defense team won the 2020 Mid-Atlantic Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Wild Card Round. Yonghwi Kwon, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, leads the team.

Josephine Lamp, a 2nd year PhD student in Computer Science, has been selected for an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.The title of her research statement for the application was “Privacy-Preserving Learning for Logic-Based Decision Support Systems.” Josie Lamp is working with Assistant Professor Lu Feng who holds joint appointments in Computer Science and Engineering Systems and Environment. Josie is a Steering Committee Member of the Computer Science Graduate Student Group serving as Chair and Diversity Rep.

Computer Science Assistant Professor, Academic General Faculty, Panagiotis Apostolellis has been selected by the Mead Endowment as the Henry Kinnier Award winner for 2020-21.The Kinnier Award was created to recognize and encourage interactions between faculty and students in engineering, and give them the opportunity to pursue a “Dream Idea” to create a positive relationship with students beyond what is afforded by normal classroom/advisor roles.

UVA Engineering's Center for Research in Intelligent Storage and Processing in Memory, or CRISP, researchers have received their first patent.Named on the patent are Kevin Skadron chair of the Department of Computer Science; Mircea R. Stan, professor of electrical and computer engineering; Elaheh Sadredini, postdoctoral research associate in computer science; and, Gholamreza Rahimi, a doctoral student in computer engineering.

Assistant Professors Hongning Wang and Haifeng Xu have both received Google Research Awards.Hongning Wang and Haifeng Xu have both received Google Research Awards. These awards provide funding intended to support one graduate student for one year. The Award also comes with some credits for Google's cloud service. This funding program has become extraordinarily competitive with just 15% of applicants receiving funding!

V. Layne Berry, a third-year Computer Science student, has been named one of CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Honorable Mention recipients.The Computing Research Association (CRA) award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

Elaheh Sadredini won a Best Presentation award for her work on "A Scalable and Efficient In-Memory Interconnect Architecture for Automata Processing" at SRC's TECHCON in Austin, Texas.Elaheh Sadredini, a postdoc in Kevin Skadron's research group and part of the CRISP center, won the best presentation award at SRC TECHCON for her work on “A Scalable and Efficient In-Memory Interconnect Architecture for Automata Processing.” This is joint work with Reza Rahimi, Vaibhav Verma, Mircea Stan, and Kevin Skadron.

UVA has won a $2.5M NSF MRI award, led by Ron Hutchins, VP of IT and a member of the Computer Science Department. This is a partnership between the UVA Main Campus and UVA Wise, with Wise formally taking the lead.The University of Virginia at Wise (UVA-Wise) and the University of Virginia Main Campus are collaborating with ten other public universities in Virginia to develop ACCORD, an innovative research-computing cyberinstrument to support the storage, access, and usage of sensitive data. ACCORD is accessible to researchers at participating institutions across the State.

Hongning Wang and his group of four students earned the Best Paper Award at the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference.The 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval was held July 21 to 25, 2019 in Paris, France.
Professor Hongning Wang and his group Huazheng Wang (PhD student), Sonwoo Kim (Masters student), Eric McCord-Snook (recent BSCS grad), and Qingyun Wu (PhD student) won the Best Paper award for their paper “Variance Reduction in Gradient Exploration for Online Learning to Rank”.