The university announced the selection of the undergraduate and graduate student representatives to the Board of Visitors. Mohammed Seyam, a doctoral student in computer science, is appointed to serve a one year term as the graduate student representative. The Board of Visitors is the governing body of the university. Seyam is an active student leader and ambassador. Read more here.
A team of six undergraduate and graduate students won, the Caring for the Caregiver Hackathon sponsored by the Lindsay Institute for Innovations in Caregiving. Three members of the team and the faculty advisor came from the Department of Computer Science. The winning design, called CareFood, helps caregivers develop ideas and plans about what to eat, given the burdens of caretaking and the many restrictions on food that people with Alzheimer’s disease may face due to their medication regimes. It relies on location-based crowdsourcing for recommendations.
CS team members Maoyuan Sun, Peng Mi, and Junyang Chen stayed up throughout the night to create a working prototype of the front end. Dr. Deborah Tatar, CS faculty, coached the team. Yujun Liu, from human development, represented the gerontology knowledge and assembled the team. Yong Sue from the Pamplin School developed the required approach to business, and Ross Ritsch, a freshman in International Studies, provided a fresh voice and served as a spokesman during the project presentation. Mary-Margaret Fosmark, a caregiver provided by the sponsors, advised the team about caregiver needs.
Balaji Subramaniam, CS Ph.D. student, was selected as the College of Engineering Outstanding Doctoral Student this year. The award recognizes outstanding scholarship and service and was given out at the Graduate Awards Banquet on March 26, 2015. Join the CS Department in congratulating Balaji and his advisor Wu Feng!
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.
The Virginia Tech Graduate School announced the seven inaugural members of the university’s chapter of the Edward A. Bouchet Graduate Honor Society. Ashley Robinson, CS doctoral candidate, was selected to join. Ashley is a native of Chesapeake, Virginia. She is investigating the attitudes of African-American middle school girls toward computer science and the factors that influence these attitudes.
For more information visit http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2015/03/032415-gradschool-bouchetscholars.html
The Bouchet Society was established in 2005 by Yale and Howard universities and named for the first African-American to earn a doctoral degree in the United States. Bouchet graduated from Yale College in 1874 and earned his doctoral degree in physics from Yale University in 1876. The society’s goal is to create a network of strong scholars and professionals who “serve as examples of scholarship, leadership, character, service, and advocacy for students who have been traditionally underrepresented in the Academy,” according to its webpage. Virginia Tech is among 11 university partners with Bouchet Society chapters.
Dr. Madhav V. Marathe (http://www.vbi.vt.edu/ndssl/people-profile/Madhav-Marathe) has been named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, for contributions to high performance computing algorithms and software environments. Dr. Marathe is the director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (http://www.vbi.vt.edu/ndssl/) in the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (http://vbi.vt.edu/).
Nicholas Sharp, CS undergraduate student, achieved the level of Finalist in the prestigious 2015 National Computing Research Association Undergraduate Research Award competition (http://www.cra.org/awards/undergrad-current/). His faculty research mentors are Drs. T.M. Murali (https://bioinformatics.cs.vt.edu/~murali/) and Shane Ross (ESM).
The CRA annual undergrad research competition distinguishes candidates by gender and by the type of their home department: non-Ph.D.-granting vs Ph.D.-granting. Nick was in the competition in the male, Ph.D.-granting department group. There were one Winner, one Runner-up and four Finalists selected in this category, as well as seven Honorable Mentions. The home universities for the top six researchers included: University of Washington, Seattle; Columbia; UNC, Chapel Hill; Mississippi State; Texas A&M, and Virginia Tech. The Department is proud of all of its winners in this competition; between 2010 and 2015 we have had four Honorable Mentions and two Finalists!
Parang Saraf, CS Ph.D. student, and teammate Patrick Butler, CS graduate, won the 2014 IEEE VAST Grand Challenge Award for Effective Analysis and Presentation in Paris, France. This award was featured on the COE website ribbon, which can be found at: http://vacommunity.org/VAST+Challenge+2014. Parang works on the EMBERS (http://dac.cs.vt.edu/projects/embers) project with Dr. Naren Ramakrishnan (http://cs.vt.edu/˜ramakris). More information about this award can be found on the NCR website: http://ncr.vt.edu/highlights/Highlight-111914.html
Check out the postcard on Wu Feng sent via mail to all Virginia Tech College of Engineering Alumni.
Can’t read this? We can’t either. See text below.
Microsoft has taken particular notice of Virginia Tech computer scientist Wu Feng’s leadership in cutting-edge research that involves computing in the cloud.
The company is using the College of Engineering supercomputing expert’s collaborative ideas in one of its global advertising campaigns, describing Virginia Tech scientists and engineers as “leaders in harnessing supercomputer powers to deliver lifesaving treatments.”
Microsoft ran a full-page ad ran this past summer in the Washington Post, New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Business Week, United Hemispheres, The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, TIME, Popular Mechanics, and Golf Digest, as well as a host of other venues in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. In the winter of 2015, it plans to run a television ad throughout the U.S. and western Europe highlighting Feng’s work on computing the cure for cancer, using the cloud. Virginia Tech researchers Wu Feng and David Mittelman won the first worldwide research award from the NVIDIA Foundation, as part of its “Compute the Cure” program. The award is enabling them to develop a faster genome analysis platform that will make it easier for genomics researchers to identify mutations that are relevant to cancer.
For information on this original grant, click here.
The cloud that is helping cure cancer. Research that once took years now happens in hours. Using Microsoft Azure and HDInsight, scientists and engineers at Virginia Tech harness supercomputing power to analyze vast amounts of DNA sequencing information and help deliver lifesaving treatments. Now the next big breakthrough might not be found in a test tube, but in big data. This cloud makes data make a difference. This is the Microsoft Cloud.