Dr. Kirk Cameron and CS alumnus Joe Turner successfully completed the patent approval process. Dr. Cameron and Mr. Turner are co-founders of a power management software startup company MiserWare. This is a patent that MiserWare licensed from Virginia Tech while conducting research for the university. Dr. Cameron said, “This patent describes methods and techniques to guarantee performance constraints are met when computer power management is enabled. The resulting software is used in laptops, desktops, and data center environments where performance is critical and power management is required for cost-cutting. This technology is at the core of the Granola software that was downloaded more than half a million times from over 160 countries.”
Dr. Kirk Cameron has been selected to participate in the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI) in Washington, DC. The LiSPI selection committee evaluated each nomination based on record of accomplishment, proven ability to communicate, and promise. The mission of LiSPI is to “Develop a next generation of leaders in the computing research community”. According to LiSPI’s website, the policy institute endeavors to educate computing researchers on how science policy in the U.S. is formulated and how our government works. Please visit to learn more. This is the third faculty member from the CS department who has attended the LiSPI. Dr. Naren Ramakrishnan and Dr. Madhav Marathe participated in the past.
Dr. Sharath Raghvendra recently won a NSF CRII Award for his proposal titled “The Geometry Behind Logistics — Approximation Algorithms for Real-Time Delivery”. The CRII Awards are a new program at NSF targeted towards untenured faculty members, in their first 2 years in an academic position, who have not yet served as PI on any NSF support. This is the first year of the program and the CS department is proud to have a recipient. Sharath’s abstract states, “In the era of instant gratification, consumers expect to receive delivery of goods and services on demand. In an effort to address consumer needs, vendors have adopted routing algorithms with little or no provable guarantee. The algorithms available today are often unreliable and yield higher costs than desired. There are two major difficulties finding effective solutions. First, in many cases, routing decisions need to be made with partial or no information on future requests. The second challenge is related to processing speed. In current solutions, even if all required information is available in advance, it could take several hours to compute an efficient route making real-time routing almost impossible. This project investigates a new approach for real-time algorithms applicable in routing applications. The idea is to use “straight-line” distance between locations as a proxy for the actual road travel distance to design high quality approximation and online algorithms”. Click here to read more. Dr. Sharath is an assistant professor in the department.
Dr. Layne Watson, in addition to a team of professors and graduate students, is using the Power Development Cloud to create and test parallel mathematical software for global and stochastic optimization. His research is ongoing and part of IBM”s Power Systems Academic Initiative. According to an IBM press release, “The Power Systems Academic Initiative (PSAI) has achieved a major milestone by enrolling more than 300 colleges and universities around the globe in the program, providing these institutions with access to IBM Power Systems technology and helping to arm students with skills to handle new workloads like Big Data, cloud, mobile and social, that are crucial in today’s job market”. Read more here.
Margaret Ellis is a recipient of the 2015 Engineering Inclusive Teaching (EIT) Educator’s Award. This award is given by the Women in Engineering ProActive Network (WEPAN). The WEPAN helps educators craft inclusive engineering learning environments. Her project titled “Promoting Self-Efficacy in Computer Science” is a collaborative project with CS faculty colleagues Jack Lesko, Manuel Perez-Quinones and Catherine Amelink. Their work looks at what educational practices can be used to improve the self-efficacy of undergraduate students in low-level Computer Science courses. Margaret said, “The project investigates what educational practices can be used to improve the self-efficacy of undergraduate students in Computer Science courses. Adjustments are anticipated to encourage long-term interest in Computer Science among all students but among underrepresented groups in particular. We hope that our findings will yield information that can be used to make changes to other Computer Science courses. We are looking at the impact of special GTA/UTA training sessions, approaches for modeling analytical skills students need to develop, and what type of feedback students need to feel successful and improve understanding of CS concepts”. Visit http://www.wskc.org/eit to read more. Margaret will present the findings of this project at the WEPAN Change Leaders Forum in Colorado in June 2015.
Dr. Ali R. Butt, associate professor of computer science, has received his second NetApp Faculty Fellowship (NFF). The NetApp Faculty Fellowship (NFF) program was established to encourage leading-edge research in storage and data management and to foster relationships between academic researchers and engineers and researchers at NetApp. Ali’s work titled “Designing an In-Memory Object Caching Framework with Adaptive Load Balancing Synopsis” will focus on making access to cloud storage more efficient. Please visit http://www.eng.vt.edu/news/ali-butt-hopes-make-access-cloud-storage-more-efficient to read more about Dr. Butt.
Research conducted by Dr. Naren Ramakrishnan, Dr. Tom Ewing and colleagues across campus was recently featured in a Chronicle of Higher Education article. Their work examined how reporting on the Spanish flu spread in 1918 and featured digital humanities. To read the entire article visit http://chronicle.com/article/Big-Data-Project-on-1918-Flu/190457/. Dr. Ramakrishnan is the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech. He directs the Discovery Analytics Center, a university-wide effort that brings together researchers from computer science, statistics, mathematics, and electrical and computer engineering.
Denis Gracanin (Computer Science), Joseph Wheeler (Architecture) and a team of interdisciplinary researchers from across campus unveiled the innovative future of kitchen design and construction at the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show in Las Vegas in January 2015. The show is North America’s premier annual event dedicated to the kitchen and bath industry. According to the VT Daily News, “The kitchen is the first phase of a three-year plan to construct a two-story FutureHAUS. The next phase of the FutureHAUS design process is the addition of a living room alongside the kitchen that will debut at the American Institute of Architects national convention May 14-16 in Atlanta”. To read the entire story please visit. Denis Gracanin is associate professor in the College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science.Joseph Wheeler is a professor of architecture and co-director of the Center for Design Research and LumenHAUS lead researcher.
ACM’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) has named Professor Barbara G. Ryder as the recipient of its 2015 Influential Educator Award “For significant contributions in software engineering education, graduate student and faculty mentoring and efforts to improve the representation of women.” Dr. Ryder is Head of the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, where she holds the J. Byron Maupin Professorship in Engineering.
The award will be presented on 22 May 2015 at the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015) in Florence, Italy (http://2015.icse-conferences.org/). This award is presented annually to an educator who has made significant contributions to, and impact on, the field of software engineering with his/her accomplishments as a teacher, mentor, researcher (in education or learning), author, and/or policy maker. The award is accompanied by an honorarium and travel support to ICSE.
Professor Barbara G. Ryder has been deeply engaged in education and mentoring in software engineering and programming languages for more than 33 years. She is an exceptional graduate mentor having graduated 15 Ph.D. and 3 M.S. students and supervised 4 postdocs. She is an influential leader in diversity, both nationally through activities with CRA-W and NCWIT and through outreach at both Rutgers University and Virginia Tech. Dr. Ryder’s mentoring extends beyond her own research group. She was awarded Professor of the Year (2003) while at Rutgers, by the Computer Science Graduate Students Society award for excellence in teaching and was the recipient of the Rutgers University Graduate School Teaching Award (2007). As a department head at Virginia Tech, Dr. Ryder established an ongoing formal mentoring program for both assistant and associate professors. Dr. Ryder is an ACM Fellow (1998) and has received the Rutgers’ Presidential Award as a Leader in Diversity (2006) for her activities to increase the diversity of computing. Recently, she was given the 2014 Virginia AAUW Woman of Achievement Award in recognition of her efforts. She was a co-founder of the NCWIT VA/DC Aspirations Awards Affiliate, which celebrated its fourth year of awards in 2015. Read the full story here.
Please join the department in honoring Dr. Ryder’s accomplishment.
Dr. Wenjing Lou (http://people.cs.vt.edu/wjlou), professor of computer science, has been named an IEEE Fellow for contributions to information and network security.
The IEEE Fellow grade is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.
As a co-director of the Complex Networks and Security Research (CNSR) laboratory at Virginia Tech, Lou leads research on cybersecurity and wireless networks. She has an international reputation for high-quality, innovative, and impactful research. For her elevation to IEEE Fellow, she was cited for her work on information security and privacy in cloud computing as well as on wireless and network security.
Lou’s research has been supported by research grants from federal funding agencies and industry. In addition to a 2008 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, she was PI on eight and co-PI on three NSF grants. She received four best paper awards, two of which are from ACM conferences. As of November 2014, her work has been cited more than 9,400 times per Google Scholar and her h-index is 47. Her outstanding performance in research has been recognized by multiple institutional awards, including a Virginia Tech College of Engineering Dean’s Faculty Fellow award in 2014.
Lou has held several leadership positions in the IEEE Communications Society. She was the lead founder of the IEEE Conference on Communication and Network Security, served as the conference’s technical program committee chair in 2013, and is currently the chair of the conference’s steering committee. Lou also serves on the editorial board of multiple prestigious journals, including IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Journal of Computer Security, and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. She chaired technical program committees of a number of conferences, workshops, and symposia.
Lou has graduated seven Ph.D. students, four of whom are currently tenured or tenure-track professors in research universities in the US. Three of them received the prestigious NSF CAREER award.
Since August 2014, Lou has been serving as a program director at NSF under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) assignment. At NSF, her responsibilities include the Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) program, a core program of the Computer and Network Systems (CNS) division within the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), and the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program, a cross-cutting program led by CISE/CNS.
Lou joined the Virginia Tech faculty in 2011 as a tenured associate professor and was promoted to full professor in 2014. Prior to Virginia Tech, she was a faculty at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts for eight years. She received a Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida in 2003.
