Pay Scale, an online company that provides information about salary, benefits, and compensation in industry, ranked the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, seventh among universities for mid-career pay for CS graduates. More information can be found here: http://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report-2014/best-schools-by-major/computer-science
Author: csblog
Dr. Edwards Recognized as an ACM Distinguished Educator
Dr. Stephen Edwards (http://www.cs.vt.edu/user/edwards) has been recognized as an ACM Distinguished Educator (http://awards.acm.org/grades-of-membership.cfm#distinguished). This recognition is awarded to “members with at least 15 years of professional experience and 5 years of continuous Professional Membership who have achieved significant accomplishments or have made a significant impact on the computing field.” In addition, “Candidates in the educator category should have significant educational achievements.” The Department of Computer Science congratulates Dr. Edwards on this recognition.
Dr. Butt and Dr. Wang Receive NSF Funding
Dr. Ali Butt (http://www.cs.vt.edu/user/butt) and Dr. Chao Wang (http://www.ece.vt.edu/faculty/chaowang.php) received new NSF funding for a proposal entitled Pythia: An Application Analysis and Online Modeling Based Prediction Framework for Scalable Resource Management. Dr. Butt describes his research as: “Advanced computing systems for running data-intensive scientific and enterprise applications often boast of different types of resources, e.g., a conventional computer processor running alongside specialized GPUs/FPGAs. Such heterogeneity presents major resource management challenges, especially at large scale. Having a better understanding of the applications behavior on the emerging hardware is key to sustaining these systems. To this end, the project designs and develops Pythia, software that uses application classifiers and simulations to model and predict how workloads would behave on given hardware. This information is then used to better utilize the resources, and achieve scalable and high performance computing systems.”
The grant was featured on the front page of the College Of Engineering web site on October 21, 2014. (http://eng.vt.edu/news/ali-butt-and-chao-wang-receive-nsf-grant-develop-pythia-solve-problems-big-data-processing ). The research was also recognized on the front page of VT News on October 31, 2014).
Dr. Luther Gives Talk
Dr. Kurt Luther (http://people.cs.vt.edu/~kluther/) was hosted by Virginia Center for Civil War Studies to gave a talk entitled Using Social Computing to Solve Historical Mysteries on October 23, 2014. For information about the center, please visit http://www.civilwar.vt.edu/wordpress/
Dr. Fox Featured in The Collegiate Times
Dr. Edward Fox (http://www.cs.vt.edu/user/fox) was featured in an article in The Collegiate Times on October 21, 2014. The article describes Dr. Fox involvement in the technical side of research on addiction recovery through social interaction. The Addiction Recovery Research Center received a $1.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for this research, led by PI Dr. Warren Bickel (research.vtc.vt.edu/employees/warren-k-bickel), Virginia Tech Carillion Research Institute (VTCRI) professor, and director of the Center (http://research.vtc.vt.edu). The full article from the Collegiate Times, can be found at http://m.collegiatetimes.com/news/virginia_tech/article_99ed3692-58b7-11e4-baa1-0017a43b2370.html?mode=jqm
Frisina’s Work Featured on NPR
Department of Computer Science Graduate student Chris Frisina’s work on The Sound of Fractions ( http://thirdlab.cs.vt.edu/education-and-technology/sound-of-fractions/ ) was featured on NPR on October 2, 2014. The Sound of Fractions is a project to help middle school students learn Math concepts. The project was presented at the Virginia Science Festival. For the NPR piece, please visit wvtf.org/post/virginia-science-festival-party-where-science-guest-honor. Chris Frisina’s advisor is CS professor, Dr. Deborah Tatar (http://www.cs.vt.edu/user/tatar).
Dr. Lou and Dr. Hou Awarded Multi-Institutional NSF Research Grants
Dr. Wenjing Lou (CS) and Dr. Tom Hou (ECE) were awarded two new multi-institutional NSF research grants. The first, is entitled NSF CPS: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Cognitive Green Building: A Holistic Cyber-Physical Analytic Paradigm for Energy Sustainability. It aims to develop a unified analytical approach for green building design that comprehensively manages energy sustainability by taking into account the complex interactions between these systems of systems, providing a high degree of security, agility and robust to extreme events. This is a collaborative project between Profs. Ness Shroff and Qian Chen from Ohio State University, and Profs. Tom Hou (PI) and Wenjing Lou, from Virginia Tech.
The second award is entitled NSF CNS Collaborative Research: A Multi-Layer Approach Towards Reliable Cognitive Radio Networks. The objective behind this project’s research activities is to develop technological solutions that ensure that cognitive radios operate in trustworthy manner, in spite of potential security threats. It is a collaborative project between Profs. Wenjing Lou (PI) and Tom Hou from VT, and Profs. Wade Trappe and Yanyong Zhang from Rutgers University; with VT being the lead institution for this project.
Team from Department of Computer Science Awarded Honorary Mention at The ACM-ICPC World Finals
A programming team composed of three students from the Department of Computer Science, lead by Dr. Godmar Back, received an honorary mention at the ACM-ICPC World Finals, held in May 2014. The team members were Matthew Dallmeyer, Michael O’Beirne, and Nicholas Sharp. Overall the team finished #92 out of 122; or #16 out of 21 teams within North America. St. Petersburg State won the championship, and NYU was the best among the US universities.
This competition, a great experience for the students, was held in Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth-largest city. Ural Federal University hosted the event, which was broadcasted sports-entertainment style by the same company who worked in Sochi for the Olympic games. Next year, the ACM-ICPC competition will be held in Morocco.
More information about this competition can be found at http://icpc.baylor.edu/. And the full list of results for the 2014 competition can be seen at http://icpc.baylor.edu/worldfinals/results.
Dr. Lavender & Dr. Pyla Honored at COE Academic of Engineering Excellence Awards
Dr. Pardha Pyla, Department of Computer Science Ph.D. graduate (2007), was recognized with the Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering 
Outstanding Young Alumnus Award for 2014. Dr. Pyla is currently working at Bloomberg, “the leading informatics company in the world”, where he is the team leader of the senior interaction design group.
Dr. Greg Lavender, Department of Computer Science Ph.D. graduate (1993), was inducted into the Virginia Tech College of Engineering Academy of Engineering Excellence in spring 2014. He is one of an elite group of 126 individuals that have been inducted as a recognition for their contributions to engineering throughout their career.
Dr. Danfeng Yao Named L-3 Communications Cyber Faculty Fellow of Computer Science
The VT Board of Visitors recently named Dr. Danfeng Yao as an L-3 Communications Cyber Faculty Fellow of Computer Science. Dr. Yao is one of two Associate Professors to receive this distinction, the other one being Dr. Charles Clancy (ECE). The full write-up from VT News is accessible at: http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2014/10/100614-engineering-yaoprofessorship.html