|
This page highlights achievements of the CIS graduate students during the period February-March 2007. Awards Samuel MoeliusSam got the best student paper award at the Twentieth Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2007), a premier conference in the area of computational learning theory. The paper, co-authored with Professor Case, is titled "U-Shaped, Iterative, and Iterative-with-Counter Learning". We are doubly proud of Sam since this paper won two awards: the best student paper award from the Machine Learning journal and the Mark Fulk (MF) award for best student paper granted by the Mark Fulk Foundation. Congratulations, Sam.
Dissertation Fellows We have been notified that Ben Breech and Mani Thomas have received the dissertation fellows award (for the 2007-2008 year) given by the Office of the Provost and Office of Graduate Studies. This award is given to students in their final year of dissertation studies, allowing them to focus on completing their dissertation. Each department is only allowed to nominate two students. We are thrilled that both of our nominees were then chosen at the University level to receive this prestigious award. We are proud of their achievements and expect them to complete excellent dissertations soon.  Ben BreechIf you think doing a PhD is tough and you are frustrated, then don't go to Ben Breech for sympathy. Ben decided he is going to complete two of them (Physics and Computer Science) simultaneously!!! And he is doing a great job at that. He has 7 and 8 publications arising out of his Physics and CS dissertation research already. Ben was a recipient of the NASA space grant fellow award for 2 years and a University graduate fellow previously. He has also served as a coach for the UD ACM programming team and has been the president of the GSA.
 Mani ThomasMani Thomas's research is interdiscplinary and concerns segmentation and motion analysis of non rigid ice data. Mani has been a co-author in 8 conference papers and 2 journal articles based on his MS and PhD work. His work played a crucial part of a large interdisciplinary NSF proposal that received $1.7M award. Mani is a recipient of the University graduate fellow award this academic year.
University Graduate Fellows Xiaofeng Han and Songjie Wei have been awarded the University Graduate Fellow Award for the 2007-2008 year. Again, each dept is allowed to nominate upto two students for this award. We are pleased to have nominated such excellent students and are not surprised that the University committee decided that both of them richly deserved this award.  Xiaofeng HanXiaofeng Han's research area covers wireless network. He is tackling some combinatorial optimization problems to improve the coverage and connectivity of sensor networks. Xiaofeng is also looking at applying swarming behavior of animal groups to control the movement of robots in attack avoidance etc. So the next time you see a flock of birds flying, stop and look. You might learn something that assists your CS research. Xiaofeng is a co-author of 3 papers in the past 2 years.
 Songjie WeiFor his PhD dissertation, Songjie Wei plans to develop an internet-wide client reputation system. The system will assign a credit score for each internet client summarizing its past legitimate and anamolous activity. The key intuition underlying this approach is that a given host tends to be well-administered or poorly-administered over time, and this information may help predict future behavior. His preliminary results suggets that this approach shows promise in detecting internet-wide events such as worm spreads. Songjie has co-authored 5 papers in the 3 years he has been with us.
Accepted PapersThe following papers were accepted (during the February-March 2007 period) for forthcoming conferences/workshops. James Atlas and Keith Decker. "A Complete Distributed Constraint Optimization Method For Non-Traditional Pseudotree Arrangements" accepted at the sixth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2007. James Atlas and Keith Decker. "Task Scheduling for Uncertainty using Constraint Optimization" accepted at the International workshop on Coordinating Agents' Plans and Schedules, CAPS 2007. S. Kamboj and K. Decker. "Organizational Self-Design in Semi-Dynamic Environments", accepted at the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2007) J. Case and S. Moelius, "Characterizing Programming Systems Allowing Program Self-Reference'', accepted at Computation and Logic in the Real World, CIE'07 J. Case and S. Moelius, ``U-Shaped, Iterative, and Iterative-with-Counter Learning'', accepted at the Twentieth Annual Conference on Learning Theory (COLT 2007). M. Natu and A. S. Sethi, “Intrusion Detection System to Detect Wormhole Using Fault Localization Techniques”. accepted at the “Security and Management (SAM)” track of the WORLDCOMP’O7 Congress (June 25-28, 2007). M. Natu and A.S Sethi, “Using Temporal Correlation for Fault Localization in Dynamically Changing Networks” Accepted at publication in the International Journal of Network Management (IJNM). David Shepherd, Lori Pollock and K. Vijay-Shanker, “Case Study: Supplementing Program Analysis with Natural Language Analysis to Improve a Reverse Engineering Task”, accepted at Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE 2007). D. Shepherd, Z. Fry, E. Gibson, K. Maloor, L. Pollock, K. Vijay-Shanker, "Introducing Natural Language Program Analysis", Group Presentation accepted at Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE 2007). Thomas, M., C.A. Geiger and C. Kambhamettu, “High Resolution Motion Estimations of sea ice using an Implicit Quad-Tree Approach”, accepted at the ISPRS Workshop on High-Resolution Earth Imaging for Geospatial Information, Hannover, Germany Keith Trnka, Debra Yarrington, John McCaw, Kathy McCoy, and Christopher Pennington “The Effects of Word Prediction on Communication Rate for AAC”. Accepted at Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL'07). Conference Presentations and ParticipationDavid Shepherd presented the following paper at the International Conference on Aspect Oriented Software Development held at Vancouver, British Colombia. D. Shepherd, Z. Fry, E. Gibson, L. Pollock, K. Vijay-Shanker, "Using Natural Language Program Analysis to Locate and Understand Aspect-Oriented Concerns", Proceedings of International Conference on Aspect Oriented Software Development, March 2007. Sophie Che and Kanika Thapar took part in the CRA-W Graduate Cohort Workshop held in San Francisco in March 2007. Job Positions AcceptedWe are glad to say goodbye! of course, we are sad that we won't be seeing them regularly but we are also glad that they are ready to leave the nest and take the next step. These students will be graduating in May or August. We wish them luck in their new careers. PhD Students Michael Jochen: Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, starting August '07. David Shepherd: Postdoctoral Fellow, University of British Columbia, starting August 2007. Sara Sprenkle: Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department at Washington and Lee University, starting August 2007. Liang Zhao will join Qualcomm in San Diego, CA MS Students Amit Hetawal: will join the Intra-net Services Group in the Technology Department of JP Morgan & Chase. Naveen Manicka- will join CISCO in San Jose, CA An Atypical CS Research ExperienceMani Thomas and Scott Grauer-Gray have just returned to Fairbanks, Alaska, from a trip to the ice camp in Beaufort Sea (right above Prudhoe Bay, Alaska), without turning into icicles and more importantly without turning into bear food. Mani and Scott flew down to the camp on the 9th of April from Fairbanks on a 10-seater Cessna to collect images of ice ridges and leads for visualization purposes. During the entire 15 day camp and the two special days when our computer scientists were there, there was no polar bears around. Perhaps the polar bears heard about the 4 hour shot gun training that Mani and Scott had undergone and they decided to stay away from these marksmen. The 15-day ice camp was part of the research work for the International Polar Year that is currently underway in order to study the polar ice caps. As part of the remote sensing wing for the entire NSF project, the VIMS lab here at CIS provides for the high computational analysis of satellite imagery (link) to provide real time activity information to the researchers on the ice. The activity could also include the possiblity that the ice might open up right at the camp which might have lead to a mad scramble. This did not happen but was a possiblity that was typically covered in the satellite analysis. On the whole, the trip was a memorable experience to both of them and they hope to be able to contribute in the subsequent data analysis that is going to be taking place through out the following year. You can see some nice pictures on Mani's blog. Did you know?We have students from Colombia (Alvaro Gonzalez), Malaysia (Ben Leong), and Nepal (Pujan Kafle) for the first time. |