Awards 2006-2007

Undergraduate & Graduate Student Awards

Undergraduate Student Research and Outstanding Senior 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.

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 Awards

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 Awards

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.