CS@VT team wins NCWIT’s 2016 NEXT Award

NCWIT

 

Virginia Tech’s Department of Computer Science (CS) has been honored with a 2016 National Center for Women and Information Technology Extension Services Transformation (NCWIT NEXT) award in recognition of their progress and continuing commitment to increase the participation of women in STEM education and careers.

“We are currently engaged in a visioning initiative to guide the university into the future, considering how we will prepare our students to solve complex problems, address global issues, and live and work in an increasingly diverse and interdependent world,” said Tim Sands, president of Virginia Tech, in his nomination support letter for the team. “Increasing the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM fields such as computer science will be critical to meeting those challenges.”

The collaborative Virginia Tech CS team tied for second place with University of Texas at Austin and includes members: Libby Bradford, director of undergraduate studies; Greg Farris, academic and career advisor; Scott McCrickard, associate professor; and Barbara Ryder; the J. Byron Maupin Professor of Engineering; and Cathy Brawner, extension services consultant.

Funded by Google, the award program commends past and present extension services for undergraduate programs for excellence in recruiting and retaining women in computing, as having the most significant impact on the long-term goal of increasing the number of women in information technology and other computing-related fields. Awards will be presented at the NCWIT Summit on May 17, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Under Barbara Ryder’s leadership as former CS department head (2008-2015), CS increased the percentage of female CS majors from 4.2 percent in 2007 to 16.7 percent in 2015 and doubled the 2-year average percentage of female CS graduates since 2011 from 5.2 percent to 10.3 percent. In addition, from 2008-2015, the CS faculty has diversified from 10 percent female tenure-track professors to 21 percent. Ryder joined the Virginia Tech community in August 2008 and within one year, the department had established a diversity committee to coordinate and intensify recruiting strategies. “We are commited to diversify our CS student body and faculty,” said Ryder. “By partnering with NCWIT in various recruiting/retention activities with sister CS departments across the country and concerned IT industry representatives, we have been able to achieve progress towards our goal.  I am proud of the participation of CS faculty, staff, and students in this effort.”

In November 2009, the program began working with Brawner, who assisted in formulation of goals and metrics for recruitment of female CS students and became an inaugural member of NCWIT Pacesetters. Partnerships were formed three years later with the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the CoE Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED), to participate in the NCWIT Expanding the Pool grant to support joint recruiting of female students by both departments.  Bradford, Leslie Pendleton, ECE director of student services, and Susan Arnold-Christian, associate director of CEED, led the program to broaden institutional participation at Virginia Tech in order to recruit more women in computing disciplines.

As part of their 2015 strategic plan, the department remains committed to addressing issues of diversity in faculty and student body. Through their proactive efforts in strengthening retention practices, especially for female students given the propensity for attrition seen elsewhere, they achieved comparable retention rates for males at 94 percent and females at 93.5 percent. The program seeks to expand with aggressive and realistic goals over the next three years, as outlined as follows:

  • to strengthen student women’s groups;
  • to support student travel to diversity in computing conferences;
  • to promote student self-efficacy through curriculum/pedagogy changes;
  • and to build a sense of community among female computing students.

Research confirms that self-efficacy of underrepresented groups in computing can be encouraged through experiences in key areas including the opportunity to watch, interact, and learn from viable role models in the field.

Allison Collier and Kara Vaillancourt, both juniors in computer science with minors in meteorology and mathematics respectively, are student ambassadors for CS and attend STEM events throughout the state of Virginia in anticipation of engaging potential students to stimulate pursuit of a computer science education. “Being a part of the department is truly inclusive,” said Vaillancourt. “Last year I spoke 200 high schools students in northern Virginia about studying computer science at Virginia Tech and the positive impact it has had on my life. I also attended an exciting outreach event called Women in Computing Day, put on by the Association for Women in Computing chapter at Virginia Tech, which encourages middle school girls to get involved with technology.” Vaillancourt and Collier each won a National Award for Aspirations in Computing in 2013. As stated by NCWIT, “Award recipients are selected based on their aptitude and aspirations in technology and computing; leadership ability; academic history; and plans for post-secondary education.”

Future plans for the CS department include increasing interaction between their alumni and enrolled students, forming more alliances across the College of Engineering to include the Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, and widening their focus to target recruitment of minority students as well as increased percentages of women.

 

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Barbara Ryder (front), Scott McCrickard (left), Greg Farris (middle), Libby Bradford (right)
Barbara Ryder (front), Scott McCrickard (left), Greg Farris (middle), Libby Bradford (right)

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Dennis Kafura receives XCaliber Award

Dennis Kafura, professor in the Department of Computer Science, has received the university’s 2016 XCaliber Award for an individual making extraordinary contributions to technology enriched active learning.

Established in 1996 by the Office of the Provost, the XCaliber Award is presented annually by Technology-enhanced Learning and Online Strategies to recognize individual faculty members or teams of faculty and staff who integrate technology in teaching and learning. The award celebrates innovative, student-centered approaches.

Kafura was a member of the university task force that defined learning objectives in the Pathways General Education area of Quantitative and Computational Thinking. As a result of these new objectives, he created and now teaches CS 1014, an Introduction to Computational Thinking course.

The course provides students with a perspective on the core ideas of computation and the methodology central to the practice of computing. Kafura’s teaching methodology centers around hands-on approaches and student engagement.

Students are actively engaged in setting the parameters of their data sets, posing the questions, and developing the program to answer their questions. To encourage collaboration, students are assigned cohorts of five to six students in which class participation and activities are completed.

CS 1014 is offered as an introductory course open to all majors. After just two offerings of the course in Fall 2014 and Spring 2015, student feedback showed student engagement was successful.

Kafura received his bachelor’s degree from the University of San Francisco and his master’s and doctorate degrees from Purdue University.

 

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Dennis Kafura
Dennis Kafura

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Ed Fox receives XCaliber Award

Edward A. Fox, professor in the Department of Computer Science, has received the university’s 2016 XCaliber Award for making extraordinary contributions to technology enriched active learning.

Established in 1996 by the Office of the Provost, the XCaliber Award is present annually by Technology-enhanced Learning and Online Strategies to recognize individual faculty members or teams of faculty and staff who integrate technology in teaching and learning. The award celebrates innovative, student-centered approaches.

Fox received the award in recognition for his work in developing and enhancing two new computer science courses, CS 4984, Computational Linguistics and CS 5604, Informational Retrieval.

The Computational Linguistics course gives students the opportunity to engage in active learning about how to work with large collections of text. Students engage in problem based learning with the challenge of analyzing content collections automatically, extracting key information, and generating easily readable summaries of important events.

The Information Retrieval course requires graduate students to analyze, index, store, search, retrieve, process, and present information and documents using fully automatic systems.

Both courses are focused on student engagement and mastery of the material. The objectives of the courses provide students with skills that are in great demand.

Fox led the campus to join the Cloudera Academic Partnership in 2015, providing the university with educational resources and support provided by this leading company in the area.

He received his bachelor’s degree from M.I.T. and his master’s degree and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University.

 

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Edward A. Fox
Edward A. Fox

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Dennis Kafura’s Computational Thinking course part of the new Pathways to General Education curriculum

The implementation plan for Virginia Tech’s new general education curriculum, Pathways to General Education, was approved after a vote Monday at University Council. The implementation plan maps out how the new curriculum, which was approved in April 2015 to replace the current Curriculum for Liberal Education, will be phased in at the university.

Pathways to General Education will go into effect for new students entering in fall 2018. In the meantime, with the passage of the implementation plan, faculty will soon be able to propose courses, minors, and alternative pathways for approval. An official call for proposals will go out through Virginia Tech News. Reviews will begin in fall 2016, with some courses beginning as pilots in 2017.

Over the past couple of years, faculty have begun piloting courses that will meet the new Pathways to General Education requirements. Dennis Kafura, CS@VT professor, piloted a computational thinking course, which will expose students from a variety of disciplines to this way of solving problems. “Personally, I had little experience teaching a general education course – let alone developing one – and my career-long teaching was strongly oriented toward a traditional lecture model,” Kafura said. “However, the ‘computational thinking’ course came to include active learning, peer learning, problem-based learning, and a dash of flipping the classroom.”

 

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Dr. Kafura
Dr. Kafura

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Ginger Clayton receives Staff Career Achievement Award

Virginia Clayton, retired business manager in the Department of Computer Science, has received the university’s 2015 Staff Career Achievement Award. Clayton retired from the university in August 2015 after 30 years of service.

Created in 2011 to recognize retiring staff members, the Staff Career Achievement Award is presented annually to as many as five individuals who have distinguished themselves through exemplary performance and service during their university careers. Nominees must have worked a minimum of 10 years at Virginia Tech. Each recipient is awarded $1,000 cash prize.

As business manager for the Department of Computer Science, Clayton used her fiscal expertise to help navigate budget cuts, pay back departmental loans, initiate and design the faculty grant incentives program, as well as to pass both external and internal audits successfully.
The grant incentives program rewards faculty members who received larger research grants, with incentive awards of increasing magnitude for larger grants. As a result, research funding saw an increase from $20 million to $43.4 million in six years. Clayton’s fiscal and facilities responsibilities directly related to her support in an increasingly high caliber of faculty and graduate student research.

Clayton was considered the “go to” person in the department, as well as in the College of Engineering, among other business managers on campus, and the Office of Special Projects. She was known for her ability to solve problems without hesitation.

Alongside her work within the Department of Computer Science, she also served on the Total Quality Management Team and Steering Committee for University Research for more than two years. Clayton was also a member of the Virginia Society of Research Administrators.

 

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Ginger Clayton

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A Sharper Sense of Self: Probabilistic Reasoning of Program Behaviors for Anomaly Detection with Context Sensitivity

Danfeng (Daphne) Yao’s paper was recently accepted to present at the IEEE DSN conference. The 46th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) will take place in Toulouse, France on June, 2016.

The work of Professor Yao, in collaboration with Kui Xu, Ke Tian and Barbara Ryder, presents a security monitoring system for ensuring the normal executions of complex programs and providing early detection of attacks. Their solution is based on hidden Markov model (HMM) and context-sensitive program analysis. This program-aware HMM model is new. It enables them to achieve unprecedented ultra-low false alarm rates in probabilistic program anomaly detection. Experiments show that their system has up to two orders of magnitude improvement of accuracy over state-of-the-art techniques on average. This project is supported by the Office of Naval Research.

Danfeng (Daphne) Yao is an associate professor and L-3 Faculty Fellow in the Department of Computer Science. The first author Kui Xu is a Ph.D. graduate from Dr. Yao’s group and is currently a security engineer at Amazon, Inc. Ke Tian is a third year Ph.D. student in Yao’s group. Ke Tian will intern at Qualcomm this summer researching on mobile malware detection. Barbara Ryder is the J. Byron Maupin Professor of Engineering and former CS department head.

 

Daphne Yao
Daphne Yao

 

CS_Barbara_Ryder
Barbara Ryder

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Faculty Funded Grants and Projects

Congratulations to Na Meng on her newly funded NSF CRII grant, “Analysis and Automation of Global Systematic Changes”.

Na Meng, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science
Dr. Na Meng

 

 

Congratulations to Ali Butt on his newly funded project from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, “I/O Load Balancing in Large-Scale Storage Systems.”

Dr. Ali Butt
Dr. Ali Butt

 

 

Congratulations to Wu Feng on his recent funding from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for a project on “Directive-based Pipelining Extensions to OpenMP for GPU Computing”.

Dr. Wu Feng
Dr. Wu Feng

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AAUW Wytheville branch sponsored STEM Saturday Workshop

The AAUW Wytheville branch sponsored a STEM Saturday Workshop for middle school girls on Saturday, November 7, 2015 at Wytheville Community College. Five members of Virginia Tech’s Association for Women in Computing (AWC) student group participated. Marina Kiseleva, Michelle Becerra, Vanessa Cedeno, Christy Coghlan and Abigail Bartolome led two workshops during the day. The first workshop, entitled “Design Your Own Story & Watch It Go!”, taught the participants how to create a movie or a game. The second workshop, entitled “Algorithms — how to instruct a computer to do things?”, allowed participants to learn how to describe a problem and solve it as a computer would.

 

From L to R: Abigail Bartolome, Vanessa Cedeno, Christy Coghlan, Marina Kiseleva, Michelle Becerra and Barbara Ryder.
From L to R:
Abigail Bartolome, Vanessa Cedeno, Christy Coghlan, Marina Kiseleva, Michelle Becerra and Barbara Ryder.

 

STEM Saturday Workshop pic 1 STEM Saturday Workshop pic 2 STEM Saturday Workshop pic 3 STEM Saturday Workshop pic 4 STEM Saturday Workshop pic 6 STEM Saturday Workshop pic 7

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SeeMore at the USA Science and Engineering Festival

Kirk Cameron, professor and associate department head for Graduate Studies in computer science, will be exhibiting “SeeMore: Kinetic Computer Sculpture” in the NSF booth at the USA Science and Engineering Festival this Friday, April 15 to Sunday, April 17 in Washington, D.C.  The event is the largest science and engineering festival in the nation, with more than 350,000 attendees expected.

 

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“SeeMore: Kinetic Computer Sculpture”
“SeeMore: Kinetic Computer Sculpture”

 

Dr. Kirk Cameron
Dr. Kirk Cameron

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T. M. Murali and Shiv Kale present new method to reconstruct signaling pathways

Understanding the nature of signaling pathways — networks of molecules in a cell that work together to control a cell’s response to its environment — is an increasingly important part of biomedical research and helpful, for example, in enhancing our understanding of how cancer cells live or die.

In a paper, Pathways on demand: automated reconstruction of human signaling networks, published in Systems Biology and Applications, a Nature partner journal, T. M. Murali, professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, in collaboration with Shiv Kale, a research scientist at the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech, present a new computational algorithm called PathLinker that automatically reconstructs signaling pathways from a background network of molecular interactions.

 

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Shiv Kale (left) and T. M. Murali (right)
Shiv Kale (left) and T. M. Murali (right)

 

 

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