CS News Briefs

Lu Feng, assistant professor of computer science and engineering systems and environment, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant under the new Designing Accountable Software Systems program: Collaborative Research: DASS: Accountable Software Systems for Safety-Critical Applications. Feng will be collaborating with Bryan H. Choi, who holds joint appointments with the College of Law and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University.

Panagiotis Apostolellis, computer science assistant professor, and Brad Campbell, assistant professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering, have been named co-investigators on an National Science Foundation grant: EAGER: Adaptive Digital Twinning: An Immersive Visualization Framework for Structural Cyber-Physical Systems. Apostolellis and Campbell are teamed with principal investigator Devin K.

Yuan Tian, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science has been awarded a National Science Foundation Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace grant: Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Toward safe, private, and secure home automation: from formal modeling to user evaluation. Tian's research aims to gain a deeper understanding of security and privacy risks from internet of things devices in smart homes and then develop methods to mitigate the threats using formal modeling and automated analysis tools.

Daniel G. Graham, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science, has announced the publication of his book, “Ethical Hacking: A Hands-on Introduction to Breaking In.”“Because so much of our productivity depends on technology, attacks on our technological infrastructure can have grave social and economic consequences. Understanding how to defend this infrastructure is not enough. We need more ethical hackers to help secure it,” Graham wrote in the book's introduction.

On August 17, 2021 Professor Andrew Grimshaw gave a talk in Rice Hall titled "The Role of Computation in Accelerating the Deployment of Renewable Energy Resources".

Jundong Li, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science, has earned research awards from Cisco and JP Morgan Chase.The Cisco award will support his research on developing fairness-aware machine learning algorithms and the JP Morgan Chase award will support his research on causal inference for financial applications.

Congratulations to Qingyun Wu, a 2021 computer science Ph.D. graduate, for receiving a UVA International Studies Office Award for Graduate Academic Excellence. The award recognizes graduating international students who have excelled academically and demonstrated strong leadership in the UVA and Charlottesville community. Her research focus is machine learning with an emphasis on methods that involve online decision-making. Wu was advised by Hongning Wang, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science.

About Mengdi:
I am a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Computer Science supervised by Prof. Aidong Zhang. My research interests broadly are data mining and machine learning, with an emphasis on the aspects of model transparency, security, privacy, and algorithm design.

How Mengdi achieved success this year:
I enjoy solving new problems and challenges using my skillset, which motivates me to work really hard and push myself to achieve new goals.

About Marzieh:
I am a Ph.D. candidate advised by Professor Kevin Skadron. My research explores application characterization, accelerator design for machine learning and big data applications, and mapping and optimization of modern applications on emerging processors and accelerators. I enjoy swimming, hiking, cooking, and writing diaries.

About Tianlu:
I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science. I am fortunate to work with my advisor, Prof. Vicente Ordóñez Román. Before coming to UVA, I obtained my bachelor's degree in computer science from Zhejiang University, China. I received a Best Paper Award at EMNLP 2017. I have a broad interest in exploring topics concerning fairness, robustness, and accountability in machine learning models, especially in computer vision and natural language processing systems.