Alumni Rob Capra and Dong Li receive 2016 early career awards

January 28, 2016January 28, 2016 laurie

Recent CS@VT alumni Rob Capra and Dong Li have received prestigious early career awards.

Rob Capra, an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science (SILS), received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2016 to support his research for the next five years on a project titled “Knowledge Representation and Re-Use for Exploratory and Collaborative Search.” Capra graduated with his Ph.D. in computer science in 2006 under the guidance of professor Manuel Perez. Read More

Dong Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Merced, also received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2016. Dong’s research focuses on high performance computing (HPC), and maintains a strong relevance to computer systems. Dong completed his Ph.D. in 2011 under the guidance of professor Kirk Cameron. Read More

Capra and Li join two other recent Ph.D. graduates of the department who have received prestigious early career awards.

Rong Ge, an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at Clemson University, received the NSF CAREER Award in 2015. Her research interests include parallel and distributed systems, energy-efficient computing, high performance computing, data intensive computing, and performance analysis and modeling. Rong graduated in 2007, also under the guidance of professor Kirk Cameron. Read More

Emil Constantinescu, an assistant computational mathematician in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, received a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Early Career Research Program Award in 2014. His research focuses on predictive modeling of complex systems such as climate and the power grid. Emil completed his Ph.D. in 2008 under the guidance of professor Adrian Sandu. Read More

Virginia Tech’s FutureHAUS unveils new bathroom in Las Vegas

January 19, 2016February 11, 2016 laurie

Denis Gracanin, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, is co-leading the FutureHAUS bathroom project. Gracanin and professor Joseph Wheeler (Architecture) were part of the team behind the LumenHAUS, which won the International Solar Decathlon competition in Madrid, Spain, and received a 2012 National AIA Honor Award for Excellence in Architecture. They are also partnering with Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology and the Macromolecules and Interfaces Institute as they pursue research in integrated technology and new materials for buildings of the future.

FutureHAUS bathroom: Faculty and students from the FutureHAUS team in Las Vegas, from left to right: Mohamed Handosa, Brandon Lingenfelser, Joseph Wheeler, Andrew Ciambrone, Denis Gracanin, Clive Vorster, Kelsey Werner, Miles Navid-Oster, Kimberly Jusczak, Thanhthao Le, and Marquis Reynolds.

Anomaly Detectors Catch Zero-Day Hackers

January 14, 2016 laurie

Danfeng (Daphne) Yao and collaborator Naren Ramakrishnan, both professors in the department of computer science , think they have devised a technique by which any program can be protected from even the slyest hacker “by observing a program’s execution traces and/or analyzing executables.” Yao explained, “In our work entitled “Unearthing Stealthy Program Attacks Buried in Extremely Long Execution Paths” presented at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security [CCS 2015, held in October in Denver], we constructed such a behavioral model through data mining and learning methods on function- and system-call traces.”