CS News Briefs

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.

About Josie:

About Anastasia:
I am originally from Jakarta, Indonesia. I went to UNC-Chapel Hill for my undergraduate degree and worked as a software developer for three years before joining UVA. My area of research is Human-Computer Interaction, specifically haptics and accessibility. Some of my hobbies include music, photography, aerial arts, and traveling. A fun fact about me is that I have been studying abroad ever since I was eleven years old.

About Trey:
I'm currently a 2nd-year Ph.D. student at UVA. My research at UVA includes thermal modeling and, more recently, acceleration and emulation using FPGAs. I received my undergraduate degree from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Computer Engineering. While there, I worked on the RaPID prototyping project in which we researched re-purposing Blu-ray drives to be photolithography prototyping tools.

About Huazheng:
I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Virginia, supervised by Prof. Hongning Wang. My current research focuses on multi-armed bandit algorithms with application to online recommendation and information retrieval systems.
What has kept Huazheng motivated:
While I spend most of the time in my room, I try to talk a walk outdoor every day. Breathing fresh air helps me to keep positive!

About Qingyun:

About Saeed:
I am a Ph.D. candidate at Computer Science Department of the University of Virginia. My research interest is in security and privacy of machine learning and their interplay with Cryptography. Before coming to UVA, I obtained my Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. I also spent Summer of 2019 interning at Microsoft Research, Redmond.