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
Outstanding Senior Award (Fall): Loren Chea
2008-2009
Faculty Teaching Award: Lester McCann
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 TBA
Outstanding Senior Award:
Fall: Tasneem KaocharSpring: Justin Samuel
Spring 09 Undergrad 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.
Grad 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 08 Undergrad 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 (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 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
Andrew Winslow (Fall 2007) The Outstanding Senior Award recognizes Service, Research, and Scholarship. Andrew 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.
Drew Davidson (Spring 2008) As an undergraduate, Drew 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
Ekaterina Spriggs (Spring 2007) See above.
Student Outstanding Service Award
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 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 usefullness 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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
Jonathon Trimble (Fall 2006)
Graduate Student Research Award
Xiangyu Zhang, for his outstanding record of research while a graduate student, and his 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, in recognition of outstanding research and professional service at a level that brings recognition and honor to the Department.
Faculty Teaching Award
John Hartman, in recognition of his innovations in teaching, and for the highest student evaluations among all faculty.
Outstanding Service Award
Rick Snodgrass, for leadership and vision in guiding the growth of the Department strategic plan, as well as for outstanding service to the profession.