Dr. Dennis Kafura was named one of the eight Virginia Tech Pathways Faculty Scholars in June 2014. He will be collaborating with a group of faculty from various departments, to formulate new courses that aim to redefine general education at VT. In the Fall 2014, Dr. Kafura’s is teaching a new computational thinking course that is geared to non-science, non-engineering VT students.
On June 2014, the VT BOV approved three promotions in the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Daphne Yao was promoted to tenured Associate Professor. Dr. Chris North was promoted to Full Professor; and Dr. Wenjing Lou was promoted to Full Professor.
VTIP has filed a patent on a technology developed by Dr. Daphne Yao, as part of her NSF CAREER Award research. Dr. Daphne Yao presented a paper about this technology, entitled “Detection of Stealthy Malware Activities with Traffic Causality and Scalable Triggering Relation Discovery” this past June, in Japan. The paper was written in collaboration with Dr. Naren Ramamkrishnan and CS graduate student Han Zhang. A VT News article about this can be found here: https://www.eng.vt.edu/news/new-proactive-approach-unveiled-detect-malicious-software-networked-computers-and-data
Dr. Naren Ramamkrishnan, his collaborators, and students working in the DAC IARPA EMBERS project were featured in a recent news article on the Wall Street Journal. The article can be found here: http://online.wsj.com/articles/u-s-intelligence-community-explores-more-rigorous-ways-to-forecast-events-1409937859
Dr. Kirk Cameron and his ICAT collaborators were mentioned in an article in The Washington Post, for their sculpture depicting various parallel computing algorithms. The sculpture will be displayed at this year’s SIGGRAPH. A smaller version is on the display at the Moss Center gallery, where visitors can experiment with it. The full article can be read online at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/an-inventor-takes-the-helm-at-virginia-tech/2014/05/25/4de12c68-e0e9-11e3-8dcc-d6b7fede081a_story.html
Dr. Naren Ramakrishnan was featured in the Roanoke Times front page article on May 23, 2014. The article highlighted the research conducted in the Discovery Analytics Center (DAC), of which Dr. Ramakrishnan is the Director. In particular, it discusses the IARPA-funded EMBERS project. The full article can be read online at: http://www.roanoke.com/news/nrv/virginia-tech-team-s-computer-program-aims-to-read-the/article_5339830e-e224-11e3-bcc6-001a4bcf6878.html
Dr. Kirk Cameron was awarded a MD Research Faculty Fellowship. This fellowship is a recognition of Dr. Cameron’s research in green computing, and is an honor, not only for Dr. Cameron, but for the CS Department.
Carlo DelMundo, student in ECE Department, was awarded third place in the Grand Finals of the annual 2014 ACM Student Research Competition. This was a competition among previous winners from different areas of CS. Del Mundo placed first at the Student Research Competition last fall at Supercomputing 2013, which lead him to the Grand Finals. Del Mundo, who was also recognized as the Outstanding CE Senior in the Spring 2014, is a part of the Synergy research group, lead by Dr. Wu Feng. For more information on the ACM Student Research Competition, please visit http://src.acm.org/about.html.
Dr. Stephen H. Edwards was featured in the Spring 2014 issue of the VT Magazine. The article focuses on Dr. Edwards’ prominent role in creating educational tools for students. It discusses his involvement in creating “the Web-based Center for Automated Testing, or Web-CAT, a flexible, tailorable, Web-based automated grading system that has been adopted by 75 institutions nationwide and is the most widely used open-source grading tool of its kind in the world.” The online version of the article is available at http://www.vtmag.vt.edu/spring14/professor-profiles.html#edwards.
A CS Department team was awarded the People’s Choice Award at the IEEE Symposium on 3D User Interfaces. The team, composed of Felipe Bacim (team lead), Mahdi Nabiyouni, Cristian Moral Matos, and Dr. Doug Bowman, was also awarded a second place for the judge’s award for their entry “Slice-n-Swipe: A Free Hand Gesture User Interface for 3D Point Cloud Annotation.” In addition, the poster “Designing Effective Travel Techniques with Bare-hand Interaction”, prepared by Mahdi Nabiyouni, Bireswar Laha, and Dr. Doug Bowman, was awarded an honorary mention. This is the fourth time in five years that the VT team has been recognized at the Conference. The work of Dr. Bowman and his research team has been mentioned in ACM News.