CS News Briefs

Shahriar Nirjon, assistant professor of computer science at UNC-Chapel Hill and director of the UNC Embedded Intelligence Lab, has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.The five-year, $561,000 grant, titled “CAREER: Toward Embedding Perpetual Intelligence into Ultra-Low-Power Sensing and Inference Systems,” will support his continued research on making small, portable, resource-constrained, embedded systems capable of sensing, learning, adapting, and evolving over an extended period of time.
More details on this award can be found on the NSF website.

Chenyang Lu, the Fullgraf Professor in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, has been named editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems for a three-year term that began on March 1, 2021.ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems is the flagship journal in the field of cyber-physical systems (CPS), publishes papers that advance sciences and technologies at the interactions of information processing, networking and physical processes.

Asif Salekin, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Syracuse University won the 'IAAI Deployed Application Award,' for his paper “Preclinical Stage Alzheimer's Disease Detection Using Magnetic Resonance Image Scans.” The Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, or IAAI, is a leading conference for highly innovative realizations of AI technology.Salekin leads the Laboratory for Ubiquitous and Intelligent Sensing at Syracuse University.

Professor Anil Vullikanti and Alan Batson Career Enhancement Assistant Professor Haifeng Xu, both with appointments in the UVA Engineering Department of Computer Science, have been awarded an Inequity in Infections Diseases program grant by the UVA Global Infectious Diseases Institute. Vullikanti is also a researcher with UVA's Biocomplexity Institute.UVA Global Infectious Diseases Institute brings UVA researchers together who are invested in combating infectious diseases worldwide.

William Wulf Career Enhancement Assistant Professor of computer science Ashish Venkat and his two collaborators have been honored as a 2020 Top Pick in Hardware and Embedded Security for their paper “Context-Sensitive Fencing: Securing Speculative Execution via Microcode Customization.”Featured at the 2020 International Conference on Computer Aided Design, the paper was selected among hardware security conference papers that have appeared in the last five years in leading architecture, security, and very large-scale integration design conferences.

Computer science Ph.D. student Sihang Liu has been awarded a 2020 Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Systems and Networking, based on his research on “Holistic Support for Persistent Memory Systems.” Liu is advised by assistant professor of computer science Samira Kahn.Google created the PhD Fellowship Program in 2009 to recognize and support outstanding graduate students who seek to influence the future of technology by pursuing exceptional research in computer science and related fields.

Congratulations to Mary Lou Soffa, Owens R. Cheatham Professor of Sciences, on being awarded the School of Engineering and Applied Science Distinguished Faculty Award in recognition of excellence in teaching, research and service. She has published over 175 articles and has directed 32 Ph.D.

Dr. Hridesh Rajan, a UVA Engineering alumnus, has been appointed chair of the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University.Rajan, the Kingland Professor of Data Analytics, is Professor-in-Charge of Iowa State's Data Science program. He helped co-lead the effort to establish a new undergraduate data science degree, minor and certificate. In 2016, he founded the Midwest Big Data Summer School to deliver broadly accessible data science curricula to early career researchers from across the nation.

The Computer Science Department Graduate Student Group hosted the Summer Virtual Research Symposium 2020 on June 5 with six awardees for Best Presentations at the end of the event.Kevin Skadron, Harry Douglas Forsyth Professor and chair of computer science, opened the symposium by sharing that the objective of the forum was to learn more about what other researchers are doing and to identify opportunities for collaborating.

About Jack:
My research interests include sequence representation learning, and in particular learning the language of DNA and proteins.
What has kept Jack motivated:
I enjoy reading and walking around UVA.