Virginia Tech researchers earn grant to study big data sharing and reuse

June 6, 2016 laurie

Every moment data is created. When a member of the Flint Water Study team tests and records results from a drop of water. When a student steps into Goodwin Hall, activating sensors to track usability and traffic patterns. But data, especially big data that has to be analyzed computationally, sometimes creates as many questions as it answers. Where does it all go? How do we store it? Who pays to store it? What kind of computer do we need to process the data? And how can we make sure that people years from now will still be able to access and reuse it?

University Libraries, in partnership with Virginia Tech researchers working with big data, is exploring these questions and more with the support of a $308,175 National Leadership Grant for Libraries from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The project team includes: Zhiwu Xie, technology development librarian in the University Libraries; Tyler Walters, dean and professor, University Libraries; Edward Fox, professor of computer science in the College of Engineering; and Pablo Tarazaga, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering. Jiangping Chen, associate professor in the Department of Library and Information Sciences at the University of North Texas, will also help evaluate and review the project.

CS alumnus and extraordinary employee: Damian Salas serves at work and in the community

June 6, 2016 laurie

In the fall of 1994, a 17-year-old Damian Salas left his home in Poquoson, Virginia, and moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, to begin this freshman year at Virginia Tech. It wasn’t long before he became immersed in the university community and found himself searching for Hokie sports information that didn’t seem to exist in any one place. For the computer science major, the need for a website dedicated to the university’s athletic teams was a no-brainer. His skills and passion, combined with the emerging World Wide Web, created the perfect opportunity for Salas to “Invent the Future.”

Today, Salas, the senior director and webmaster of hokiesports.com, embarks on a 3,785-mile bike trip across the U.S. to raise awareness and funds for multiple sclerosis research.

Virginia Tech Presenting Smartphone Security Work at Top Security Conference

June 6, 2016June 21, 2016 laurie

Smartphone security has become a topic of paramount importance in both academic and commercial communities. Currently, the most widely used processors in mobile devices are the ARM processors. ARM processors employ TrustZone, a hardware security extension, to protect sensitive code and data in a privilege and isolated execution environment. Although TrustZone design is effective against many malicious software-based attacks, smartphones may be lost or stolen. Once in the possession of unfriendly hands, sensitive information in a smartphone may be retrieved through physical memory disclosure attacks such as cold boot attack, in which an attacker can bypass all software protection and gain unrestricted access to the contents in the dynamic random access memory.

Ning Zhang, a CS Ph.D. candidate, under the supervision of Prof. Wenjing Lou, presented his work on how to protect smartphones against physical-level memory disclosure attacks in a paper at the 37^th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, the top security conference in the field. In the paper, Zhang, Lou and their co-authors presented a novel system that combines hardware-assisted security protection of TrustZone and unique cache features in ARM. The system offers an isolated execution environment that can protect sensitive tasks against both malicious software and hardware memory disclosure attack. The system uses the on-chip cache as the program execution environment and applies cryptography to protect the sensitive program context that is stored in the physical memory. Through experimentation on a prototype, the new system was found to be effective and is capable of providing unprecedented protection with little performance impact.

Since 1980, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy has been the premier forum for presenting developments in computer security and electronic privacy, and for bringing together researchers and practitioners in the field. The 2016 Symposium marks the 37th annual meeting of this flagship conference. Among over 400 submissions, only 55 papers were accepted for presentation at this year’s symposium.

Wenjing Lou story submission for June 2016 newsletter

Free open access publishing opens doors for Virginia Tech research

June 6, 2016 laurie

PeerJ is an award-winning, leading peer-reviewed open access scholarly journal for biological and medical sciences. PeerJ is a great option for other Virginia Tech researchers, too, especially considering all university faculty, staff, and students can now publish at no cost if their submission passes peer review. Free open access publishing is also available to Virginia Tech researchers in PeerJ’s counterparts, PeerJ Computer Science and PeerJ Preprints.

Edward Fox, a professor of computer science in the College of Engineering, was invited to be one of the editors on the board of PeerJ Computer Science. When research in his area of expertise is awaiting review, he receives a notification. He says the process is quick, and PeerJ is transparent about who is editing the work. Studies show there are very few observable differences between research publications that have appeared in an open access journals versus comparable works that appear in subscription journals. And several studies indicate a citation advantage for open access articles. “This suggests that there’s actually not a whole lot of difference between things that appear in a journal that has charges and considerable expense associated versus things that appear in an open literature repository,” Fox said. “One would expect that PeerJ, with even more editorial involvement than if something was just in a repository, would release quite comparable works to what appear in very expensive journals.”

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Thank You Dr. Sean Arthur

May 18, 2016 laurie

The Department sends its thanks and best wishes to Dr. Sean Arthur! Although Sean transitioned to emeritus status in 2011, he has continued to teach a section of CS 3304, Comparative Languages, every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 8:00 a.m. Most students report that this class has been the highlight of their day (“Isn’t that right, class?!”). But now Sean claims there are just too many fish that need catching, so after more than 30 years as part of the Computer Science Department, he offered his last lecture on Tuesday, May 3. Department Head Cal Ribbens stopped by to congratulate Sean on his many years of service, and to offer the classic Blacksburg token of appreciation, Carol Lee donuts.

Cal Ribbens (left) and Sean Arthur (right)

CS faculty receive 2016 dean’s awards for excellence

May 11, 2016May 11, 2016 laurie

At the nineteenth annual Virginia Tech College of Engineering faculty reception, awards were presented to engineering professors for teaching innovation, research, service, and outreach for 2016.

T. M. Murali of computer science is a recipient of one of the College of Engineering’s research in excellence awards. T. M. ’s overall research goal is founded in computational systems biology – to build phenomenological and predictive models of interaction networks that govern living cells functionality. Most recently, with colleagues, T. M. has developed PathLinker, a network based algorithm that reconstructs signaling pathways. He has been published in top journals such as Bionformatics and Molecular Biology of the Cell. T.M. co-directs the ICTAS Center for Systems Biology of Engineered Tissues and under his leadership the center’s faculty have received grants exceeding $11 million. He is also the associate program director of the Computational Tissue Engineering Interdisciplinary Graduate Education program – a program that was renewed last year based on student accomplishments and overall research productivity.

Chang-Tien Lu of computer science is a College of Engineering faculty fellow recipient, which carries an annual $5,000 account for the next three fiscal years to support his research. He is the Associate Director of the Discovery Analytics Center. In 2015 Chang-Tien was one of 49 researchers in the world to be named Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery. His research on data management is to fulfill emerging requirements for storing, analyzing, and visualizing spatial data. His ongoing projects range from explorations of fundamental access and retrieval issues to practical applications that deal with data analysis and knowledge discovery tasks. These projects have led to the publication of numerous high-quality research papers and the production of innovative prototype systems. They are also helping professionals in many fields to react quickly and make effective decisions in time-sensitive applications. His major contributions include efficient mining algorithms and sophisticated storage structures that can be scaled up to process large scale data, as well as the formalization of spatial patterns and trends. Chang-Tien has published over 112 articles, which have been featured in top rated journals and conference proceedings. According to the Google scholar index, his papers have been cited 2,630 times and have an h-index of 25. He has received 33 grants — 23 he serves as the P.I. for, with funding over $33 million and his share, almost $4 million. Chang-Tien has graduated 6 PhD students and 31 masters’ students and currently supervising 13 PhD students.

One of the college’s certificate of teaching award goes to Tom Martin of electrical and computer engineering. Tom also has courtesy appointments in the School of Architecture and Design and the Department of Computer Science. He is also the associate director of the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the co-director of the E-textiles Lab. His research and teaching interests include wearable computing, electronic textiles, and interdisciplinary design teams for pervasive computing. In 2006 he was selected for the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for his research in e-textile-based wearable computing. Over the past few years Tom’s research has lead to the development of the InZone Alert Vest that includes radio sensors that construction workers can wear on or inside vests with connected vehicle technology that allows cars to “talk” to one another, roadside infrastructure, and personal electronics such as mobile phones.

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Alumnus Ryan McMahan receives NSF CAREER Development Award

May 10, 2016 laurie

Dr. Ryan McMahan, CS@VT alum and assistant professor in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communications, recently was awarded a $544,000, five-year grant to pursue a novel approach to workplace training using virtual reality (VR) technologies. The NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program provides support for junior faculty who have demonstrated outstanding research and teaching skills. McMahan graduated with his Ph.D. in computer science in 2011 under the guidance of professor Doug Bowman.

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4th Annual Spring Awards Banquet

May 10, 2016June 21, 2016 laurie

The Department of Computer Science hosted its 4th annual Spring Awards Banquet on Wednesday, April 27 at the Inn at Virginia Tech. A complete list of recognitions and award recipients is below.

Graduate Student Awards

Sanchit Chadha— Outstanding MS Award

Saurav Ghosh — Co-Author w/Naren Ramakrishnan (advisor) and others on Best Paper Award at SDM 2015
Mahdi Nabiyouni — Co-author w/Doug Bowman (advisor) on Best Paper Award at ICAT-EGVE 2015
Xiaokiu Shu —PhD Candidate, Outstanding PhD Award
Zheng Song — 2nd place in ACM Student Research Competition at MobileSoft 2015
Xiaodong Yu—Outstanding GTA Award

Undergraduate Student Awards

Melvin Amos—George Gorsline Award

Julia Binger—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Mary Carome—Junior Scholar Award
Peter Steele — ICPC Programming Team

Lance Chao—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Harrison Fang—Outstanding UTA Award

Matthew Favero—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Luciano Gonzalez—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Sean Goodrich—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Nicholas Greer—Junior Scholar Award

Marina Kiseleva—Undergraduate Service Award

Hangxin Liu—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Stu Harvey — ACM President

Noah Luther—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate, Outstanding Senior

Danh Nguyen—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate
Dustin Pho — ICPC Programming Team

Jayanth Prathipati—Outstanding UTA Award

Benjamin Pruett—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate, Outstanding UTA Award

Jishnu Renugopal—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Steven Roberts—Senior Scholar Award, Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Joseph Sebastian—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Andrew Sorrels—Senior Scholar Award, Phi Beta Kappa Candidate
Peter Steele — ICPC Programming Team

Melanie Trammell—Junior Scholar Award

Mitchell Wagner—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Tandy Walker—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Sebastian Welsh—Phi Beta Kappa Candidate

Joshua Willard—Junior Scholar Award

Eric Williamson—Sophomore Scholar Award

Chris Wu —ICPC Programming Team

CS Ambssadors

Michelle Becerra	Derek Messer
Brian Clarke	Sowmya Ranga
Emily Croeber	Joseph Sebastian
Joe Fletcher	Caroline Stewart
Christie Goddard	James Taylor
Latika Gulati	Jacob Teves
Xack Hinson	Hanna Vess
Marina Kiseleva	Amy Vogrig
Emma Manchester	Victor Weiss

2016 Phi Beta Kappa Inductees

Julia Binger	Benjamin Pruett
Lance Chao	Jishnu Renugopal
Matthew Favero	Steven Roberts
Luciano Gonzalez	Joseph Sebastian
Sean Goodrich	Andrew Sorrels
Hangxin Liu	Mitchell Wagner
Noah Luther	Tandy Walker
Danh Nguyen	Sebastian Welsh

Faculty and Staff Recognitions

Osman Balci — ACM SIGSIM Distinguished Contributions Award
Ing-Ray Chen — 2015 IEEE Communications Society William R. Bennett Prize in Communications Networking
Ginger Clayton —VT Staff Career Achievement Award
Debbie Cole —UOPD Administrative Professional Development Certificate
Barbara Ryder — COE Diversity Committee Award for Contributions to Diversity

Ed Fox — 2016 XCaliber Award

Dennis Kafura — 2016 XCaliber Award

C.T. Lu — 2016 COE Faculty Fellow and ACM Distinguished Scientist

Madhav Marathe — VT Scholar of the Week
T.M. Murali — 2016 COE Dean’s Excellence in Research Award

Barbara Ryder — COE Diversity Committee Award for Contributions to Diversity
Barbara Ryder, Libby Bradford, Greg Farris, Scott McCrickard — 2nd Place NCWIT NEXT Award
Cliff Shaffer — ACM Distinguished Educator
Adrian Sandu — ACM Distinguished Scientist
Anil Vulikanti — VT Scholar of the Week
Layne Watson — IEEE Life Fellow Award

New graduate certificate in data analytics gives students competitive edge in growing field

May 5, 2016 laurie

Beginning fall 2016, graduate students at Virginia Tech will be able to earn a graduate certificate in data analytics to better prepare them for careers in one of the nation’s fastest growing fields.

The 12 credit program — open to students both in Blacksburg and in the National Capital Region — is offered collaboratively by Virginia Tech’s computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and statistics departments and will be administered through the Discovery Analytics Center.

“With increasing demand for deeply technical expertise in data analytics and data science, Virginia Tech wants its students to have an edge when they compete for jobs in this field,” said Chris North, professor of computer science and associate director of the Discovery Analytics Center.

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CS@VT team wins NCWIT’s 2016 NEXT Award

April 28, 2016April 29, 2016 laurie

Virginia Tech’s Department of Computer Science (CS) has been honored with a 2016 National Center for Women and Information Technology Extension Services Transformation (NCWIT NEXT) award in recognition of their progress and continuing commitment to increase the participation of women in STEM education and careers.

“We are currently engaged in a visioning initiative to guide the university into the future, considering how we will prepare our students to solve complex problems, address global issues, and live and work in an increasingly diverse and interdependent world,” said Tim Sands, president of Virginia Tech, in his nomination support letter for the team. “Increasing the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in STEM fields such as computer science will be critical to meeting those challenges.”

The collaborative Virginia Tech CS team tied for second place with University of Texas at Austin and includes members: Libby Bradford, director of undergraduate studies; Greg Farris, academic and career advisor; Scott McCrickard, associate professor; and Barbara Ryder; the J. Byron Maupin Professor of Engineering; and Cathy Brawner, extension services consultant.

Funded by Google, the award program commends past and present extension services for undergraduate programs for excellence in recruiting and retaining women in computing, as having the most significant impact on the long-term goal of increasing the number of women in information technology and other computing-related fields. Awards will be presented at the NCWIT Summit on May 17, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Under Barbara Ryder’s leadership as former CS department head (2008-2015), CS increased the percentage of female CS majors from 4.2 percent in 2007 to 16.7 percent in 2015 and doubled the 2-year average percentage of female CS graduates since 2011 from 5.2 percent to 10.3 percent. In addition, from 2008-2015, the CS faculty has diversified from 10 percent female tenure-track professors to 21 percent. Ryder joined the Virginia Tech community in August 2008 and within one year, the department had established a diversity committee to coordinate and intensify recruiting strategies. “We are commited to diversify our CS student body and faculty,” said Ryder. “By partnering with NCWIT in various recruiting/retention activities with sister CS departments across the country and concerned IT industry representatives, we have been able to achieve progress towards our goal. I am proud of the participation of CS faculty, staff, and students in this effort.”

In November 2009, the program began working with Brawner, who assisted in formulation of goals and metrics for recruitment of female CS students and became an inaugural member of NCWIT Pacesetters. Partnerships were formed three years later with the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the CoE Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity (CEED), to participate in the NCWIT Expanding the Pool grant to support joint recruiting of female students by both departments. Bradford, Leslie Pendleton, ECE director of student services, and Susan Arnold-Christian, associate director of CEED, led the program to broaden institutional participation at Virginia Tech in order to recruit more women in computing disciplines.

As part of their 2015 strategic plan, the department remains committed to addressing issues of diversity in faculty and student body. Through their proactive efforts in strengthening retention practices, especially for female students given the propensity for attrition seen elsewhere, they achieved comparable retention rates for males at 94 percent and females at 93.5 percent. The program seeks to expand with aggressive and realistic goals over the next three years, as outlined as follows:

to strengthen student women’s groups;
to support student travel to diversity in computing conferences;
to promote student self-efficacy through curriculum/pedagogy changes;
and to build a sense of community among female computing students.

Research confirms that self-efficacy of underrepresented groups in computing can be encouraged through experiences in key areas including the opportunity to watch, interact, and learn from viable role models in the field.

Allison Collier and Kara Vaillancourt, both juniors in computer science with minors in meteorology and mathematics respectively, are student ambassadors for CS and attend STEM events throughout the state of Virginia in anticipation of engaging potential students to stimulate pursuit of a computer science education. “Being a part of the department is truly inclusive,” said Vaillancourt. “Last year I spoke 200 high schools students in northern Virginia about studying computer science at Virginia Tech and the positive impact it has had on my life. I also attended an exciting outreach event called Women in Computing Day, put on by the Association for Women in Computing chapter at Virginia Tech, which encourages middle school girls to get involved with technology.” Vaillancourt and Collier each won a National Award for Aspirations in Computing in 2013. As stated by NCWIT, “Award recipients are selected based on their aptitude and aspirations in technology and computing; leadership ability; academic history; and plans for post-secondary education.”

Future plans for the CS department include increasing interaction between their alumni and enrolled students, forming more alliances across the College of Engineering to include the Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering, and widening their focus to target recruitment of minority students as well as increased percentages of women.