Programming Team advances to World Finals in Morocco

December 8, 2014 csblog Leave a comment

(pictured left to right, Eric Woods, IBM Representative (and VT grad); Miraziz Yusupov, Nick Sharp, Scott Pruett and Coach Dr. Godmar Back)

December 2, 2014 — The VT team has advanced to the 2015 ACM-ICPC World Finals to be held May 16 – May 21 in Marrakech, Morocco.

On Nov 1st, the Virginia Tech ACM Programming Team competed in the 2014 Regional ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC). Virginia Tech fielded eight teams of three students each, who competed among 188 teams from universities and colleges across the Mid-Atlantic region for a coveted spot at the ACM ICPC World Finals, which will be held in Marrakech, Morocco in May 2015. The Mid-Atlantic region comprises universities and colleges in the states of Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, D.C., East Pennsylvania and South New Jersey.

The ACM ICPC contest fosters creativity, teamwork, and innovation in building new software programs, and enables students to test their ability to perform under pressure. It is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious programming contest in the world.

All participating students were CS majors, ranging from sophomores who competed for the first time to seniors who participated for the 2nd or 3rd year. Virginia Tech's top-scoring team, which consisted of CS students Nicholas Sharp, Scott Pruett, and Miraziz Yusupov, finished first at the Radford University site, and placed overall 3rd place. With this result, it is one of only 22 teams from North America to qualify for a spot at the World Finals.

Overall, our teams placed as follows:

#3 The Traveling Salesmen:

Scott Pruett, Nick Sharp, Miraziz Yusupov

#11 Trie Hards:

Brendan Avent, Tucker Noia, Saurav Sharma

#15 The Canonical Backtrackers:

Hassan Almas, Andriy Katkov, Nathaniel Lahn

#16 The Breadth-First Searchers:

Harrison Fang, Daniel Gil, Luke Wolff

#48 Ternary Search Party:

Nate Craun, Michael Zamani, Loran Steinberger

Honorable mention:

The Multinomials:

Larissa Perara, Aarathi Raghuraman, Monica Wei

Recursive Descendants:

Carlos Folgar, Brannon Mason, Elliace Zargarpur

The Naive Backtrackers:

Patrick Easter, Edward McEnrue, Reid Thomas

Our teams prepared in weekly practices and multiple 5-hour mock contests held on the weekends leading up to the regional contest.

The ACM Programming Team is open to all undergraduate students and to graduate students who have not completed more than 5 years of post-K12 education. See here for complete eligibility requirements.

Students interested in participating in the team should contact Team Coach Dr. Godmar Back (gback@vt.edu), or visit the team web page at https://icpc.cs.vt.edu/

All CS@VT teams pictured below:

Dr. Yao’s Research Feautred in ACM Tech News

November 13, 2014December 5, 2014 csblog Leave a comment

Dr. Daphne Yao’s (http://www.cs.vt.edu/user/yao) research was featured in an article in ACM Tech News on October 17, 2014. This research focuses on the development of algorithms that “can alert companies when an employee might be acting maliciously on their network.” The article, entitled Researcher Builds System to Protect Against Malicious Insiders, can be found here: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2825952/researcher-builds-system-to-protect-against-malicious-insiders.html

Dr. Kafura Featured in The Roanoke Times

November 13, 2014December 5, 2014 csblog Leave a comment

Dr. Dennis Kafura (http://www.cs.vt.edu/user/kafura) and CS grad student Cory Bart were featured in an article in the Roanoke Times on October 25, 2014. The article, entitled Students Test New Ways of Teaching and Learning in Virginia Tech, describes a new course in computational thinking offered to non-CS majors by Dr. Kafura this semester. (http://www.roanoke.com/news/education/higher_education/virginia_tech/students-test-new-ways-of-teaching-and-learning-at-virginia/article_dca00832-1328-5e74-9ba5-c0bbf62fb0fb.html).

Dr. Edwards Recognized as an ACM Distinguished Educator

November 13, 2014December 5, 2014 csblog Leave a comment

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

November 13, 2014 csblog Leave a comment

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

November 11, 2014December 5, 2014 csblog Leave a comment

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

November 11, 2014December 5, 2014 csblog Leave a comment

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

Dr. Lou and Dr. Hou Awarded Multi-Institutional NSF Research Grants

November 11, 2014December 5, 2014 csblog Leave a comment

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.

Dr. Danfeng Yao Named L-3 Communications Cyber Faculty Fellow of Computer Science

November 11, 2014December 5, 2014 csblog Leave a comment

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

Dr. Yao Received Young Investigator Award

October 7, 2014December 5, 2014 csblog

Dr. Daphne Yao received a prestigious Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Award. Dr. Yao says, in describing her research: “The project aims to develop new security model and data analytic techniques that enable accurate large-scale causality reasoning for detecting anomalies that are caused by system compromises and malicious insiders. The research will be focused on inferring high-level human events and actions based on low-level machine events. If successful, designing such a semantic-aware and mission-aware probabilistic model to capture and analyze human events related to accessing critical resources can be useful for detecting insider attacks — a problem long known to be notorious to solve.”