CS News Briefs

Yixin Sun, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has published research to help communication network managers strengthen security and privacy-preserving systems.Sun, who holds a joint appointment as the Anita Jones Career Enhancement assistant professor of computer science, collaborated with colleagues at Princeton, Purdue and ETH Zurich to identify risks of routing attacks.

Fourth year computer science student Hasan Mukati and computer science assistant professor Panagiotis Apostolellis are developing a mobile app called ImpaKarma as part of an independent study. The digital platform allows groups of friends or community members to join forces around a common actionable cause.

On Wednesday, December 8, 2021, the CS Graduate Student Group held a Research Symposium in Rice Hall. The event included keynote speakers, faculty talks, and a poster session during which 18 students presented their research. Attendees of the symposium voted on posters and the results are in! Congratulations to the winners of the student poster session! 

Best Poster Presentation: 

• Felipe Toledo 
• Ashley Gao 
• Josephine Lamp 

Best Poster Design: 

Congratulations to Hongning Wang, associate professor of computer science, on winning a prestigious National Science Foundation award for his research on online learning to rank, a modern machine learning technique that adaptively improves result rankings during its interactions with end users. Learn more about the grant.

Christopher L. Barrett, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been elected as a member of the Virginia Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine. Barrett is the UVA Biocomplexity Institute executive director and a Distinguished Professor in Biocomplexity.

Haifeng Xu, Alan Batson Career Enhancement Assistant Professor of Computer Science, has been awarded a Computing and Communication Foundations grant from the National Science Foundation: AF: SMALL: ALGORITHMIC PERSUASION: RE-CREATING THE SUCCESS OF MECHANISM DESIGN. The research project studies methods for using information to "regulate" an adversary's attack choices in order to thwart the attack and create enhanced security.

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.

Aidong Zhang, William Wulf Faculty Fellow and interim chair of The Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop novel machine learning models that better analyze cancer data for targeted therapeutics.Zhang serves as principal investigator. Co-investigators are Stefan Bekiranov, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics in the UVA School of Medicine; and, Chongzhi Zang, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics and public health sciences in the UVA School of Medicine.

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.

Felix Lin, associate professor of computer science, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant: Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: Understanding and Strengthening Memory Security for Non-Volatile Memory. Persistent memory is one of promising post-Moore's Law technology that is expected to get into mainstream computing, from internet of things devices all the way to the cloud.