Events & News
Departmental Awards
Each year the Computer Science Department awards a number of students, staff, and faculty who have done notable things in the previous year.2009-2010
Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award: Alex Henniges
Alex Henniges has worked on two projects, both of which represent significant accomplishments in undergraduate research. For an independent study he realized a complex approach for performing operations on temporally-indeterminate data, such as figuring out whether an event that happened sometime between Monday and Thursday with a normal distribution occurred before another event that happened sometime between Tuesday and Sunday with a uniform distribution, to a plausibility of 60%. This required a sophisticated partitioning of the algorithm. Alex also worked on the tXSchema project for his Honors Thesis. He refactored the extensive code for the tXMLLint validator to handle multiple representations of time-varying documents, even when the schema, as well as schemas that were included, were also time-varying.
Outstanding Senior Award (Fall): Loren Chea
Loren Chea started as a political science major, but discovered that he enjoyed computer science even more. A member of the Honors College since his admission to the U of A, Loren volunteered with several youth groups and also worked at IBM as a co-op student. Loren enjoyed his time in the CS department so much that he's decided to stay: he started in the graduate degree program in CS in the spring of 2010.
Outstanding Senior Award (Spring): Jonathan Nation
Jonathan Nation is an outstanding senior who excels at more than just academics. Beyond his nearly-flawless work in the classroom, Jonathan has accumulated a variety of experiences, including an internship in X-ray optics at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and the development of software and hardware for multiple research projects in the UA College of Optical Sciences that led to co-authorship of a conference paper. He also found time to compete on a three-student team in the regional ACM programming contest that earned fourth place.
Graduate Student Research Award: Barry Routree
Barry Rountreewas, in the words of Prof. Dave Lowenthal, "the top graduate student in the country" in the area of high-performance, power-aware computing. One of Barry's more noteworthy achievements is the Adagio runtime system for determining bounds on energy savings.
Graduate Teaching Assistant Award: Rui Zhang
In the fall of 2009, Rui Zhang served at the teaching assistant for the CSc 460 (Database Design) class. In this role, Rui was responsible for grading all of the class assignments for the nearly 40 students. He took it upon himself to design and write the capstone team project, and also served as the back-up camera operator for the on-line students.
Graduate Student Outstanding Service Award: Wesley Kerr
Wesley Kerr organized the department's inaugural Graduate Student Research Symposium. A common event in many departments, Wes led our first symposium in the Fall of 2009. He solicited the submissions, organized the reviewers, arranged the presentation of the ten submissions, and coordinated the awards ceremony. Wes' nominator deemed his service to be "indefatigable."
COSSAC Outstanding Service Award: Tom Lowry
Tom Lowry has been a one-man show in the last year. He has weathered not one, but two significant staffing loses in Lab: John C and Shanna L. In both cases he has exerted himself to temporarily pick up duties that those folks' vacancies left behind. All this and he has maintained his old job functions as well! Tom's knowledge of networking is essential to the department's research functions and productivity.
Tom presently mentors our newest staff member, Eneida Lima. Without such mentoring, Eneida would never have considered taking on Shanna's old position. Tom is truly a Renaissance man when it comes to CS IT.
Tom is always incredibly responsive to requests from faculty, staff, and students. He often provides extra information in his answers that help educate us. He's extremely friendly, personable, positive, and cooperative.
Faculty Outstanding Impact Award: Chris Gniady
Chris Gniady had an amazing year: he received a CAREER award, had six conference papers accepted or submitted (all with his students), submitted four grant proposals, and worked with seven graduate students include Igor Crk, who graduated this spring and who was awarded the Departmental Graduate Galileo Circle Award.
Faculty Outstanding Service Award: David Lowenthal
David Lowenthal joined our department only last January (2009), but has been actively involved from the very start. Over the past year he chaired the Graduate Affairs committee which included revamping the PhD course requirements and instituting the portfolio system, as well running graduate admissions. Dave also chaired the Faculty Advisory Committee.
2008-2009
Faculty Teaching Award: Lester McCann
Lester McCann has consistently been rated by students well above his peers in the university, over many dimensions, including course effectiveness, course quality, amount learned, and effectiveness of the instructor. it is clear that students respect Lester as a teacher and appreciate the care taken with and quality of his instruction. Lester is innovative in his courses, pioneering implementation of podcast and video lectures and the use of a tablet PC to mark up slides that he later distributes. The department and its students are both fortunate to have Lester as a role model.
Faculty Outstanding Service Award: Saumya Debray
Saumya Debray has, in all of his numerous service roles, stepped up to the plate when leadership was needed, and in each case provided calm, insightful, responsive direction and guidance. While on the P&T committee, he created the scripts to produce the html pages presenting data on course evaluations in a very useful format, thereby regularizing this part of the evaluation. As chair of the advisory committee last year, during a tumultuous time, his was a calm yet knowledgeable and thoughtful voice. While as chair of the department head committee, he played a central role in ensuring that we attracted the best possible next department head.
COSSAC Outstanding Service Award: Gregg Townsend
Gregg Townsend has applied valued technical leadership in reorganizing the department's web site and in adapting it to the stylistic conventions developed by the Web Committee. Gregg developed a novel and highly effective technical approach that involved sophisticated software that would produce, from the existing web site files and several configuration files, a test web site every night for further refinement and improvement. Everyone and every aspect of the department benefits from our new web presence. As but one example, a recent survey of graduate applicants to our department indicated that our web site is our most prominent recruiting tool.
STAR Outstanding Service Award: Rhonda Leiva
This year, Rhonda Levia took over management of Academic Services. She had very big shoes to fill and Rhonda stepped in and indeed has doing a wonderful job. Rhonda had to learn about the undergraduate program while continuing to handle graduate advising. She also had to assume management responsibilities. In all respects, Rhonda has done a superb job with a seamless transition. The Academic Services group has been functioning as a thoroughly integrated team under Rhonda's leadership. Throughout this transition, Rhonda has kept in clear focus the needs of students, while also making due with fewer resources. This group remains strong and effective.
Graduate Student Research Award: Igor Crk
Igor Crk had five publications in the past year, two of which he presented at the top conferences in his area of research. He was also the assistant guest editor of the Journal of Information Technology Research. One of Igor's papers "Leveraging Knowledge Reuse and System Agility in the Outsourcing Era" was one of the top 10 downloaded papers on Social Science Research Network (SSRN).
Graduate Teaching Assistant Award: Jordan Marshall
Jordan Marshall was recognized as being thorough and fair with his grading. He returned each assignment back in a timely fashion, prepared detailed answer sheets to homework assignments that included explanations of common mistakes. Jordan answered many student questions by email and newsgroup postings (in addition to office hours), often during evenings and weekends when the students are actually working on programs. His communications struck just the right balance of being helpful without giving too much help. In the words of his nominator, “Jordan is one of the best TAs I have worked with in the past 35 years”.
Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award: Justin Samuel
Justin Samuel worked with Professor John Hartman on the Stork research project for two years. Justin contributed to Stork in numerous ways, mostly related to its security aspects. Justin was second author of a paper published in the highly competitive ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference. Justin also worked with John on a distributed resource management project called Backs. Justin was instrumental in the design of the system and wrote a prototype of several of its components.
Outstanding Senior Award (Fall): Tasneem Kaochar
Tasneem Kaochar is truly an outstanding senior in scholarship, research, and outreach. She has been a Science Ambassador, she participated in the department's Women in Computer Science (WISC) group, she served as a mentor to middle school students, and she was the leader of a computer science outreach group. Tasneem worked with Professor Saumya Debray for two years on the implementation of pointer alias analysis, with the ultimate goals of reducing the code size of the Linux operating system and of assisting in the analysis of computer malware.
Outstanding Senior Award (Spring): Justin Samuel
Justin Samuel is simply an outstanding student in his courses, an exceptional researcher (see above), and a wonderfully helpful person in the department (see below).
Spring 2009 Undergraduate Student Outstanding Service Award: Justin Samuel
With five years industry experience, Justin Samuel taught Secure Web Application Development with PHP and MySQL. The lab filled to the maximum capacity of 31. Using a great deal of preparation and enthusiasm, Justin provided our students the opportunity to learn about Web Development and security issues. Justin also started and led two student clubs: 1) Security Club and 2) Software Development Club providing students with opportunities to consider important issues in our field.
Graduate Student Outstanding Service Award: Ranjini Swaminathan
Ranjini Swaminathan has made a significant impact on the outreach and mentoring activities of the Computer Vision group, as well as the Computer Science department as a whole. She has played an important role in the Integration of Science and Computing ISC summer camp for middle school students, and has lead a related "notebook exchange" outreach activity where Computing Science students maintain a connection with camp graduates and other students. In the 08/09 academic year, Ranjini has also organized a seminar for undergraduates interested in research. On a department level, Ranjini has mentored incoming grad students and has contributed to the goals of the Women in Computing Science (WICS) group.
Fall Undergraduate Student Outstanding Service Award: Tasneem Kaochar
Tasneem Kaochar graduated with honors with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Spanish and Portuguese in fall 2008. She has won numerous awards and recognition during her time here and has been working on research with Professor Saumya Debray over the last 2 1/2 years. Tasneem represented the department as a College of Science Ambassador and has volunteered her time to outreach efforts. As a result of her research involvement and accomplishments, Tasneem was selected as one of the Undergraduate Scholars in Integrated Sciences and as a Galileo Circle Scholar by the College of Science. Tasneem plans to continue her studies by pursuing a doctoral degree in Computer Science.
2007-2008
Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award: Juhani Torkkola
Juhani (Jay) Torkkola has made excellent research contributions as an undergraduate researcher. He has been instrumental in the SLIC (Semantic Linking of Instructional Content) project that improves access to educational video. Here Jay contributed substantively to three aspects of the project: 1) the web interface; 2) a method for accurately inserting high resolution slide images into the educational videos; and 3) correcting the color of the inserted slides to match the camera used for capturing the presentation.
Student Outstanding Service Award: Drew Davidson
Drew Davidson has provided exemplary service to the Computer Science Department over the past three years. He served as president of our student chapter of the ACM. He helped organize programming contests held by our department including two competitions this year. Drew served as the student representative for our current external department head search and on the faculty recruitment committee where he organized the many undergraduate meetings with candidates while providing written feedback to the department.
Outstanding Senior Award (Fall): Andrew Winslow
The Outstanding Senior Award recognizes Service, Research, and Scholarship. Andrew Winslow was an excellent student who made a great impression in many courses, but he really excelled in his contribution to the SLIC (Semantically Linked Instructional Content) project. Andrew's role in the project was to develop and implement algorithms for automatically identify areas that could be emphasized in slides appearing in videos of lectures, as a means to enhance user's understandability of the lecture. In order of taking advantage of the spectrum of clues given by the lecturer, Andrew has developed an algorithm with solid mathematical foundations, analyzing differences and correlations between different frames of the video. In addition, Andrew has demonstrated excellent programming abilities in handling some of the more challenging implementation tasks of this project.
Outstanding Senior Award (Spring): Drew Davidson
As an undergraduate, Drew Davidson performed research with graduate students and graduate faculty. For service, see above. Drew has "... no parallel to him in the department as a student. He is diligent, responsible, and he cares about his alma mater and the department." He is the "hardest working undergraduate student I have ever met."
Graduate Student Award for Service: Justin Cappos
Justin Cappos always had a very active interest in the general environment of the department. He was active in the graduate student committee for several years and started the mentor program to help new grad students adapt. Justin worked to get undergraduates involved in computer science research, which is service to not only our students but also to our research faculty.
Graduate Student Research Award: Joseph Schlecht
Joseph Schlecht was lead author of "Inferring Grammar-based Structure Models in 3D Microscopy Data," in the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. He presented it as a talk at that conference. The acceptance rate for talks at one of the key vision venues is very low; in 2007 the acceptance rate was 5%. Joseph developed the complex inference software that solves this problem and wrote most of the paper.
Graduate Teaching Assistant Award: Alex Balderrama
Alex Balderrama has been the Graduate Student Council chair as he helped grad students get acclimated to the department, making life at the department better.
Staff Outstanding Service Award: Ana Rodriguez
Ana Rodriguez represents the Computer Science Department on many university committees such as the Staff Advisory Council (SAC), the College of Science Staff Advisory Council (CoSSAC), and currently Strategic Planning and Budget Advisory Committee (SPBAC). She planned and organized meetings to further enhance the functionality of UMS, a new financial reporting system being tested. Ana does handles many different requests, getting them all done on time and with a cheerful attitude. Ana tackles each challenge with passion as she while setting an example for all to follow.
Faculty Impact Award: Kobus Barnard
Kobus Barnard satisfies at least two of the criteria listed for the award: (1) he had two papers published in CVPR, one of the top conferences in computer vision, and (2) he had an NSF CAREER Award funded and contributed to the recently funded iPlant grant.
Faculty Outstanding Service Award: Greg Andrews
Just when he planned to wind down into retirement, Greg Andrews stepped in as interim department head during a challenging period, providing strong leadership to help move the department in a positive direction of growth and research activity.
Faculty Teaching Award: John Hartman
John Hartman meets two of the stated criteria for the award: (1) he achieved a TCE1 score in C Sc 552 in Fall 2007 of 5.0, which is stellar, and (2) he has had major positive impact on the Department's education mission by directing undergraduate research and supervising multiple independent study students in 2007.
2006-2007
Undergraduate Student Research Award: Ekaterina Spriggs
Ekaterina Spriggs graduated in spring 2007 with outstanding records in academics, research, and service. In addition to these departmental and College of Science awards, she was a finalist in the nation wide Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Awards Program. Throughout her undergraduate degree, Kate contributed greatly to the activities of the computer vision lab. Her research accomplishments include creating a modeling tool for filamentous fungus in the genus Alternaria, contributing to the departmental 3D visualization lab, and modeling the statistics of psychophysiological data in emotional conversions. As a result Kate is author on three scientific abstracts and a computer vision paper in a prestigious venue. Kate also initiated a number of outreach activities focused on encouraging students to go to college, study math and computer science, and become involved in research.
Outstanding Senior Award (Spring): Ekaterina Spriggs
See above.
Student Outstanding Service Award: Scott Baker
Scott Baker volunteered to teach the department's first workshop course C Sc 397A: Advanced C++. He prepared the syllabus, all lecture material, and the programming projects in addition to presenting lecture each week. Despite his lack of pay, he came to each lecture fully prepared and ready to teach. His lectures are well planned and he has plenty of code examples. His main goal seems to be that we understand C++, and he makes sure that happens with his lectures, quick e-mail contact, and helpful attitude.
Graduate Student Research Award: Sriraman Tallam
Sriraman Tallam developed a novel system for efficiently monitoring the execution of long running multithreaded server applications. Through an innovative integration of fine-grained tracing with a logging and replay system, Sriraman enabled the scaling of monitoring so that it could be applied to long running multithreaded applications. He then demonstrated the usefulness of the system for automating debugging and fault avoidance in multithreaded applications. Sriraman published his research results in premier venues including SIGPLAN PLDI, SIGPLAN-SIGACT POPL, SIGSOFT FSE, and SIGSOFT ISSTA conferences as well as ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO).
Graduate Student Research Award: Praveen R. Rao
Praveen R. Rao did groundbreaking work on the PRIX system, introducing the idea of tree sequencing for the purpose of XML indexing and query processing. This idea was truly novel and innovative, given that most of the existing work on XML indexing and query processing had relied on a form of labeling scheme and shredding XML data. This work was published in the ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS). He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Graduate Teaching Assistant Award: Joe Fowler
Joe Fowler did an outstanding job as a TA for CSc 473 (Introduction to Automata, Grammars, and Languages), and as a grader for CSc 573 (Theory of Computation).
Staff Outstanding Service Award: John Cropper
John Cropper is the behind-the-scenes guy who is always making contributions to the department by providing his service, knowledge, and expertise on everything from computer accounts, disk quota for class projects, printer problems, help with the project turnin, copy machines, and architecting existing space for maximum efficiency.
Staff Outstanding Service Award: John Luiten
John Luiten provides critical leadership of the Lab staff, ensuring that the systems run smoothly in sometimes-challenging circumstances. In leading the lab staff, he selflessly works in a very principled way, always trying to find a way to meet departmental needs while following often vague guidelines from the University. He has shown great creativity during these times of tight budgets. He serves on several University-level committees, bringing substantial expertise and insight to important enterprise decisions. John is, perhaps more than anyone else, responsible for the department moving towards its configuration of specialized servers for critical services in the department, significantly increasing reliability while simultaneously decreasing maintenance overhead.
Faculty Impact Award: Rajiv Gupta
Rajiv Gupta was appointed to the Technical Advisory Group, a national-level appointment, as general chair of PLDI 2008, as steering committee chair for LCTES 2007, and program co-chair of HiPEAC 2008. In additional, he published 11 papers in top journal and conference venues last calendar year, received three new grants, and graduated three doctoral students.
Faculty Impact Award: Stephen Kobourov
Stephen Kobourov received a highly-selective NSF CAREER grant and a prestigious Fulbright award. In addition, he published five papers in top journal and conference venues last calendar year.
Faculty Outstanding Service Award: John Hartman
John Hartman served as an elected member of the new advisory committee and contributed to the self-study document. John took the initiative for coming up with the By-laws and then worked tirelessly to prepare them. He held meetings to get feedback from the faculty and spent a great deal of effort incorporating the feedback from the faculty into this document. Two years in the making, these bylaws were recently approved unanimously.
Faculty Teaching Award: Saumya Debray
Saumya Debray received stellar student evaluations, including an astounding 4.9 in CSc 553 (the historical mean is 4.2 and the standard deviation is 0.4). Additionally, three of Saumya's undergraduate students received awards last year.
2005-2006
Outstanding Senior Award (Fall): Jonathon Trimble
Jonathon Trimble served three semesters as an undergraduate teaching assistant (section leader), contributed to two research projects (JMusic and SOLAR), and developed a lecture series as part of his participation in Voices Against War, Racism and Oppression.
Graduate Student Research Award: Xiangyu Zhang
Xiangyu Zhang has an outstanding record of research while a graduate student, with notable papers appearing in top venues: the journal Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), and the Proceeding of the Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI) Conference.
Faculty Impact Award: Rajiv Gupta
Rajiv Gupta, in recognition of outstanding research and professional service at a level that brings recognition and honor to the Department.
Faculty Teaching Award: John Hartman
John Hartman, in recognition of his innovations in teaching, and for the highest student evaluations among all faculty.
Outstanding Service Award: Rick Snodgrass
Rick Snodgrass, for leadership and vision in guiding the growth of the Department strategic plan, as well as for outstanding service to the profession.