CS News Briefs
Read the latest news briefs from and about students and faculty in the UVA Computer Science Department.
Read the latest news briefs from and about students and faculty in the UVA Computer Science Department.
Congratulations to Professor Sebastian Elbaum for being elevated to ACM Fellow!
Associate professor of computer science Felix Xiaozhu Lin and his co-author, Hongyu Miao, a former Ph.D. advisee at Purdue University, won the best paper award at the Seventh ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing in Seattle last month.
Lin and Miao’s paper, “Towards Out-of-core Neural Networks on Microcontrollers,” addresses constraints imposed by memory size on microcontroller units to run large neural networks. The team demonstrated a technique to enable microcontroller units to run large neural networks with acceptable cost-benefit tradeoffs.
Their findings mean microcontroller units, previously thought unsuitable for many important use cases, can be deployed for these functions such, as analyzing traffic patterns from city cameras, understanding speech in smart homes and smart spaces, and detecting anomalies in manufacturing environments.
Hongning Wang is UVA Engineering’s new Copenhaver Associate Professor of Computer Science. Wang was nominated by the Department of Computer Science and appointed by the School of Engineering for a three-year period to the professorship, which is supported by the Copenhaver Faculty Excellence Fund for Student Research, established by a bequest from 1966 civil engineering alumnus Edwin Copenhaver III. The fund supports Copenhaver Associate Professors in their work with graduate students.
Yue Cheng, an assistant professor of computer science, recently received two prestigious research awards.
Cheng is one of three 2022 recipients of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society Technical Community on High Performance Computing Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing.
He also has won a Meta Research Award for AI Systems Hardware/Software Codesign for his proposal, “Serverless and scalable GNN training with disaggregated compute and storage.”
John A. “Jack” Stankovic, BP America Professor of computer science at the University of Virginia, has been elected as a member of the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine. Stankovic, long known as a visionary and influential leader in computer science education and research, was named to the academy for “foundational contributions to the theory and application of both real-time systems and resource-constrained, distributed systems.”
Stankovic is most recently known for his work in cyber-physical systems, which combine sensors – examples of “resource-constrained, distributed” computing devices – used to collect data about physical things, such as people, cars and the built environment, with computing. Cyber-physical systems benefit people in myriad ways, including making products and infrastructure safer and more efficient, conserving natural resources and improving health care.
In addition to Stankovic’s own research in urban infrastructure and smart health, he was an early advocate for research and education in cyber-physical systems, which build on foundational technologies that he also helped pioneer earlier in his career.
William & Mary professor and UVA computer science alumnus Gang Zhou has been elevated to IEEE fellow effective in January 2023. The distinction recognizes his “contributions to sensor networks and low-power wireless networks.”
Once a year, the Computer Science Graduate Student Group comes together to share research and generally get to know each other. In a big, diverse department the CSGSG Research Symposium is an opportunity to network, exchange ideas and deepen the department’s sense of community.
The 2022 symposium, held Oct. 3 in Rice Hall, featured numerous faculty presentations on varying topics and two poster sessions in which graduate students explained their work and took questions from peers and faculty members. Poster slots weren’t just reserved for seasoned researchers honing their speaking skills.
“The goal of this years’ symposium was to be more inclusive of new students, as well as provide all the benefits of a research symposium to more senior students,” said Carl Hildebrandt, a Ph.D. student in Sebastian Elbaum’s lab and part of the LESS Lab, who organized the event.
“We encouraged new students to present posters even on partial ideas, so that they can start collaborating and discussing their ideas with faculty who might be interested in working with them,” Hildebrandt said.
Nearly 30 students took advantage of the opportunity, showcasing research with titles ranging from “An Empirical Study on Readers’ Intuition of the Political Stances in News Headlines” to “Low-power Passive Sensing of On-screen Activities.”
The Computer Science Graduate Student Group held the 2022 Research Symposium Monday, Oct. 3, in Rice Hall. The event included keynote speakers, faculty talks, and two poster sessions in which nearly 30 students presented their research. Awards were given in the categories below.
Congratulations to the winners!
Jundong Li joins research effort funded by National Science Foundation's Strengthening American Infrastructure Program.
The Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia has been awarded a large Principles and Practice of Scalable Systems grant from the National Science Foundation for collaborative research.
As the lead institution, UVA will receive $3 million of the total $4,999,995 award. The partner institutions, the University of Pittsburgh and Saint Louis University, will receive $1.8 million and $199,995 respectively.
Aidong Zhang, the William Wulf Faculty Fellow and professor of computer science, biomedical engineering and data science, is the principal investigator on the project, Co-designing Hardware, Software and Algorithms to Enable Extreme-Scale Machine Learning Systems. Zhang leads a team that includes four co-PIs and two senior personnel from the UVA Department of Computer Science.
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