2013 News

Iota Book Awards ceremony honors sophomore

December 2, 2013

Sophomore Dan Hassin was honored with 15 other students as a recipient of the Iota Book Award.  The reception took place December 2, 2013 in the Wells Brown Room in Rush Rhees Library.  Hassin was nominated by the Computer Science Faculty for his outstanding academic achievements, his leadership as a teaching assistant, and his participation in research.  To view other recipients and learn more about it, please go to the Iota Book Award page.

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Two teams selected for Cornell Cup

November 13, 2013

Two teams from the University of Rochester, including four students and two faculty advisors from Computer Science, are finalists in the Cornell Cup this year. The engineering competition, sponsored by Intel, involves embedded computation, and culminates in a two-day "summit event" at Disney World next spring, where winners will be announced.

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Systems Researchers Enjoy High Success Rate in Grants

October 21, 2013

In light of the current restraints on federal funding, the Systems Research Group in the Department of Computer Science scored something of a coup this fall.  The group, with five core faculty members, was awarded four National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, totaling nearly $1.6 million.   “Our success rate was 50 percent, which is pretty remarkable,” said Michael Scott, Professor of Computer Science, who is PI or co-PI for two of the awards.

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Dr. Piotr Faliszewski Wins the Prestigious 2013 Polityka Research Prize in Technical Sciences

October 20, 2013

On October 20, 2013, Polityka—one of Poland's two largest-distribution weekly newsmagazines—awarded one researcher each from the five areas of science a coveted Polityka Research Prize. Among the selected researchers is Dr. Piotr Faliszewski of Krakow's AGH University of Science and Technology, who in 2009 received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester under the supervision of Prof. Lane A. Hemaspaandra. The prizes are awarded in five categories: humanities, life sciences, exact sciences, technical sciences, and social sciences. Dr. Faliszewski was named the 2013 winner in the field of technical sciences for his work on the complexity of and algorithms for election-related problems.

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ACM Teams win 1st and 5th place at SUNY Oswego

October 14, 2013

At the ACM sub-regional contest held in SUNY Oswego on Oct 12th, U of R Team Yellowjackets #1 secured first place.  The winning team comprised of Doug Miller, Shuopeng Deng and Zhenyang Dai, solved all six problems with more than thirty minutes to spare. The next best team managed to solve only four problems by the end of the contest. Our second team, Yellowjackets #2, comprised of freshman Daniel Rubery, sophomore Victor Liu and junior Xing Yan solved 3 problems and were placed 5th. The final results are listed here. The winning team will represent U of R in the ACM Northeast North America Regional contest which will be held in early November at RIT.  The team has been practicing strategies and previous competition problems under the guidance of faculty member Muthu Venkitasubramaniam in preparation for the event. 

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Hemaspaandra's recognized for years of service to the ACM SIGACT

June 20, 2013

Lane Hemaspaandra has been awarded the ACM Special Interest Group for Algorithms and Computation Theory Distinguished Service Prize for 2013.  This is given each year "to an individual who has made substantial service contributions to the Theoretical Computer Science community... The prize can be awarded to an individual for a single contribution or for a series of contributions over a career."  He received the prize at the STOC conference this month in Palo Alto, and the citation printed on the certificate reads "The 2013 SIGACT Distinguished Service Prize is awarded to Lane Hemaspaandra for his service to the theoretical computer science community through his SIGACT News Complexity Theory Column, his articles for Computing Reviews and Mathematical Reviews and for his role as Computational Complexity Moderator for the ACM Computing Research Repository." For more information, see ACM SIGACT: Prizes

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Wisniewski (PhD 1996) named to new post at Intel

April 16, 2013

Bob Wisniewski (Ph.D. 1996) has been named Senior Principal Engineer and Chief Software Architect for Exascale Computing at Intel Corporation.  While at UR, Bob was an advisee of Chris Brown, and did his thesis on system support for AI applications of robotics.  After completing his PhD at UR he went to Silicon Graphics, then moved to IBM Research where he worked on the team developing the K42 operating system.  He eventually rose to the position of Chief Software Architect for the Blue Gene series of supercomputers.  In 2011, he was named ACM Distinguished Scientist.  In the summer of 2012, Bob moved to Intel.

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Lasecki wins prestigious MSR Graduate Fellowship

January 31, 2013

Microsoft Research has announced this year's recipients of the very competitive MSR PhD Fellowships.  Our own Walter Lasecki is one of twelve chosen for this prestigious award.  This fellowship will cover 100% of the tuition and fees for two academic years, as well as a stipend, conference and travel allowance and a salaried internship.

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NACLO 2013 at University of Rochester

January 18, 2013

University of Rochester is hosting a site for the 2013 North American Olympiad in Computational Linguistics (NACLO). NACLO is a competition for middle-school and high-school students which involves solving problems about language and computational linguistics. It consists of two rounds: the Open Round (January 31, 2013), open to all interested students,  and the Invitational Round (March 19), for students who have advanced from the first round. The winners of the Invitational Competition will be invited to participate in the International Linguistics Olympiad. This event is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and a select group of universities across the country are participating, including Brandeis, CMU, Columbia,  University of Michigan and University of Rochester.

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