Dr. Butt and Dr. Wang Receive NSF Funding

Dr. Butt
Dr. Butt

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.”

Dr. Wang
Dr. Wang

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).

 

 

 

 

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Dr. Fox Featured in The Collegiate Times

Dr. Fox
Dr. Fox

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

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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).

 

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

Dr. Lou
Dr. Lou

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.

 

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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.

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Dr. Lavender & Dr. Pyla Honored at COE Academic of Engineering Excellence Awards

Lavender_Benson_Ryder Dr. Pardha Pyla, Department of Computer Science Ph.D. graduate (2007), was recognized with the Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering pyla award shotOutstanding 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.

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

Dr. Yao
Dr. Yao

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

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Balaji Subramaniam, Select Member of U.S. Delegation for the Second Heidelberg Laureate Forum

Balaji Subramaniam, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, attended the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) ​as a representative of the United States in a 20-person delegation of students and postdoctoral researchers. The forum took place September 21-26 in Heidelberg, Germany. The U.S. delegation was sponsored by Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Every year, HLF brings together 100 (undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral) researchers from mathematics and computer science who have won the Fields Medal, Turing Award, Abel Prize, or Nevanlinna Prize. It serves as an ideal platform for young researchers to interact with established scientists in their field.

Balaji conducts research in the area of high-performance and distributed computing systems with an emphasis on energy efficiency. His current research interests include the modeling and prediction of performance under a power budget, hardware- and software-controlled power management, and benchmarking.​ Balaji is a member of the Synergy lab and advised by Wu-chun Feng.

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum is the result of a joint initiative of the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies and the Klaus Tschira Stiftung. Visit the Heidelberg Laureate Forum website for more information.

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Dr. Yao Received Young Investigator Award

Danfeng (Daphne) Yao
Dr. Yao

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.”

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