News
Biosciences Big Data
Professor Taufer, who has already brought her knowledge of data science to the field of medicine through collaborations with clinicians, is now teaming with ecosystem ecologist Rodrigo Vargas, associate professor in UD’s Department of Plant and Soil Sciences. The two recently received a three-year, $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop cyberinfrastructure tools for precision agriculture in the 21st century.
Faculty Fellows and Scholars
According to Bintong Chen, director of UD’s Institute for Financial Services Analytics (IFSA), “The new scholars are excellent and research-productive faculty members from UD’s College of Engineering (COE). Their research expertise matches the program well, and they are passionate about contributing. Our program and students will benefit tremendously from the interdisciplinary training offered by the fellows and scholars.”
For the Record
A 2007 paper by Lori Pollock, Alumni Distinguished Professor, and Vijay Shanker, professor, both in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, and former students David Shepherd, Zachary Fry and Emily Hill has been recognized as the Most Influential Paper over the past 10 years from the sixth International Conference on Aspect-Oriented Software Development. The paper, “Using Natural Language Program Analysis to Locate and Understand Action-Oriented Concerns,” describes a semi-automated concern location and comprehension tool, Find-Concept. Shepherd is now senior principal scientist at ABB in Raleigh-Durham, NC; Fry is a senior scientist at GrammaTech in Ithaca, NY; and Hill is assistant professor of computer science at Drew University in Madison, NJ.
Summit for Computer Science Education
More than 75 teachers, administrators, business partners and state leaders convened at the University of Delaware on Thursday, March 23, for a daylong conference on computer science education.
Computer Science Honors
ISCB is the leading, largest and longest-standing international society for bioinformatics and computational biology, aiming to advance the understanding of living systems through computation and to communicate scientific advances worldwide. Its board comprises 26 leading international scientists in the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. “It is an honor to be nominated and elected to the board of directors and to have the opportunity to serve the field and to shape its future direction,” Shatkay says.
Shared-Use Superhighway
The project, “Secure Database-Driven Dynamic Spectrum Sharing,” addresses issues of security and privacy surrounding radio spectrum sharing.The five-year, $500,000 grant was awarded through NSF’s Division of Computer and Network Systems.
UDRF Awards Funding
Soil moisture is critical to plant growth and thus food security. Rodrigo Vargas Ramos, assistant professor of plantand soil sciences, using a combination of mathematical models and HPC techniques, will create a global map of soil moisture representing every day from 1980 to 2015. His collaborator and mentor is Michela Taufer, David and Beverly C. Mills Career Development Chair of Computer and Information Sciences.
HPC Leadership
Established in 1988, the annual SC conference has grown in size and impact. Approximately 5,000 people participate in the technical program, with about 11,000 people overall. “This is a well-deserved honor for Prof. Taufer and marks heras one of a few recognized leaders in the field of HPC,” says CIS chair Kathy McCoy.
Highly Cited Researcher
Professor Wu is in the top one percent by citation in Reuters ‘Web of Knowledge. “This is indeed a great honor and an acknowledgement of the impact of our cross-disciplinary team science — research excellence that has been achieved by our entire team of faculty, students and scientific staff at the University of Delaware and our collaborators at partner institutions nationally and internationally,” Wu said.
HPC Star
Professor Sunita Chandrasekaran has won one of three 2016 IEEE-CS TCHPC Awards for Excellence for Early Career Researchers in High Performance Computing. The award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions within five years of receiving their doctoral degrees.
Reproducing Results
Professor Michela Taufer is a co-author on the paper Enhancing Reproducibility for Computational Methods, published online in the journal Science. The paper emerged from the Reproducibility Session at the AAAS Forum on Science and Technology Policy, held in Washington, D.C., on May 1-2, 2014.
CIS Distinguished Lecture Series
Francine Berman is Edward P. Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Senate-appointed member of the National Council on the Humanities. Her lecture, “Got Data? Building a Sustainable Data Ecosystem,” will take place at the Roselle Center for the Arts on Tuesday, Dec. 6, from 2-3:15 p.m.