2019 News
Zhengyuan Yang wins 2020 Twitch Research Fellowship
Congratulations to Zhengyuan Yang for winning the 2020 Twitch Research Fellowship to support his PhD research on video and language.
CS Students Show Strength at Credit Suisse Coding Challenge
Congratulations to Loc Bui '22 and Vladimir Maksimovski '22 for their excellent showing at the 2019 Credit Suisse Coding Challenge!
Professor Kautz awarded the AAAI Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award
Henry Kautz, Professor of Computer Science and founding Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science, has been selected to receive the AAAI Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Shagun Bose '20 Featured in Campus Times for Research
PhD student Lele Chen and Professor Xu win Best Paper Award at the 17th ACM SIGGRAPH VRCAI
Lele Chen, a second-year PhD student working in Professor Chenliang Xu's group, and collaborators from OPPO US Research Center, win the Best Paper Award at the 17th ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual-Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry.
Professor Pai wins the 2019 IEEE IISWC Best Paper Award
Assistant Professor, Sreepathi Pai, and collaborators, Tyler Sorensen (Princeton University) and Alastair F. Donaldson (Imperial College UK), won the Best Paper award at the IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization.
Professor Hoque weighs in on the impact of AI in society at the Daily Connections by Evan Dawson at WXXI
Will artificial intelligence enhance or replace human activity? Ehsan Hoque, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UR, along with Hadi Hosseini, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at RIT, and independent journalist, Matt Kelly, weigh in on the impact of AI in society at the Daily Connections by Evan Dawson at WXXI. Listen to the show at: https://www.wxxinews.org/post/connections-will-artificial-intelligence-enhance-or-replace-human-activity
Melissa Wen '20 and Jarrod Young '20 Receive Wells Award
Seniors Melissa Wen '20 and Jarrod Young '20 both received Wells Awards this year for excellence in both engineering or computer science and in the humanities.
3 CS Students Honored with O'Brien Book Award
Three CS Students - Jonah Davis '22, Sangwu Lee '22, and Zachary Mustin '22 - were honored with O'Brien Book Prizes.
Professor Bai involved in AR/VR initiative that was awarded a $1.5 million grant
A $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation will provide additional impetus to a University of Rochester initiative applying augmented and virtual reality in health, education, product design, remote communication, entertainment, and other fields.
PhD student Lele Chen featured in IEEE Poster Session
PhD student Lele Chen, advised by Prof. Chenliang Xu, was featured in the IEEE Computer Society news while presenting a poster at the 2019 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).
URCS Alumnus Daniel Sabbah receives 2019 Hajim Distinguished Alumnus Award
URCS alumnus Daniel Sabbah received the 2019 Hajim Distinguished Alumnus Award at the Hajim School Diploma Ceremony. Sabbah received his masters and PhD degrees from the Department of Computer Science as an advisee of Professor Jerome A. Feldman (the founding chair of URCS, now a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley). Sabbah is the former chief technology officer and general manager of the Next Generation Platform at IBM Corporation, where he was responsible for overhauling IBM’s direction for cloud computing and mobility into a coherent architecture and product portfolio. He is now the Principal Consultant at his consulting firm, DSabbah, LLC.
His advice to graduates was to not “go blindly forward in applying what you have learned . . . learn, refine, and apply, but also take into account societal impacts. Don’t blindly think that just because you have a great idea, it will be used that way.”
URCS Alumnus Daniel Sabbah receives 2019 Hajim Distinguished Alumnus Award
URCS alumnus Daniel Sabbah received the 2019 Hajim Distinguished Alumnus Award at the Hajim School Diploma Ceremony. Sabbah received his masters and PhD degrees from the Department of Computer Science as an advisee of Professor Jerome A. Feldman (the founding chair of URCS, now a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley). Sabbah is the former chief technology officer and general manager of the Next Generation Platform at IBM Corporation, where he was responsible for overhauling IBM’s direction for cloud computing and mobility into a coherent architecture and product portfolio. He is now the Principal Consultant at his consulting firm, DSabbah, LLC.
His advice to graduates was to not “go blindly forward in applying what you have learned . . . learn, refine, and apply, but also take into account societal impacts. Don’t blindly think that just because you have a great idea, it will be used that way.”
PhD student Parker Riley awarded Barnard Fellowship
Third-year PhD student Parker Riley (supervised by Professor Daniel Gildea) was awarded the Arts, Sciences and Engineering Donald M. and Janet C. Barnard Fellowship in recognition of his strong research record, as well as his clear commitment to mentoring, outreach, and service to the department and field. Parker Riley is working on the problem of learning translation models between languages for which no parallel text (translated document pairs) are available. His work has already resulted in one journal article in the journal Computational Linguistics, one first-author paper in the proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and another paper currently under review for ACL.
PhD student Andrew Read-McFarland wins Curtis Award
Second-year PhD student Andrew Read-McFarland was selected as one of the winners of the 2019 Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student. Andrew was recognized by faculty and students as consistently going above and beyond the expectations for a graduate TA. Professor Lane Hemaspaandra noted, "Andrew was an exceptional TA. He showed true affinity for the material, and dedication to helping young minds not just learn the material, but also see its beauty and applicability. He was very generous with his time, he truly cared, and as a cherry on top he was strong even on the type of logistics that people think are boring yet actually are an important part of supporting the students."
Graeme McGuire '19 Receives Fulbright Grant
Computer Science and Linguistics dual major Graeme McGuire '19 (Take5) was offered a grant in the prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Grant program. The Fulbright program is designed to promote mutual understanding and peace between the US and other nations through educational and cultural exchange.
George Ferguson Wins Professor of the Year Award
On Friday, April 19th, Computer Science Professor George Ferguson was named the Engineering Professor of the Year at the Students' Association Awards. Ferguson is the Co-Director of the Computer Science Undergraduate Program and teaches "Artificial Intelligence" and "Computation & Formal Systems."
CS Undergraduate Samuel Triest '20 wins Gold Medal in ACM SRC
Undergraduate Computer Science major Samuel Triest '20 was named the Gold Medalist of ACM's Student Research Competition (SRC) at the 24th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS). The SRC is a long-standing tradition of ACM that offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and attendees at well-known ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences.
PhD student Louis Jenkins awarded Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship
First-year Ph.D. student Louis Jenkins has been awarded a US Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, the first such award in the department’s history. Louis is a 2017 graduate of Bloomsburg University (part of the Penn State system) and a part-time consultant for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a specialist for Cray's Chapel programming language. He received honorable mention in the Computing Research Association’s 2017 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher competition, based largely on his work on high-performance concurrent hash maps for the Go programming language. For his doctoral thesis he hopes to exploit emerging persistent memory technologies to enhance productivity and performance of fault-tolerance mechanisms in high performance computing.
Brynn Wilkins wins Department Coordinator & Leader Award
At the 3rd annual Gwennies Awards, hosted by the Gwen M. Greene Center for Career Education and Connections, the Computer Science Undergraduate Program Manager Brynn Wilkins was awarded the Department Coordinator & Leader Award. The Gwennies are awards given by the Gwen M. Greene Center to collaborative partners who exemplify the mission, values, and vision of the Greene Center.
MD/PhD student Jesse Wang, advised by Prof. Henry Kautz, named a finalist in the ACP Innovation Challenge
Jesse Wang, an MD/PhD (Translational Biomedical Science) student advised by URCS Professor Henry Kautz, earned a spot as one of four finalists in the American College of Physicians' Innovation Challenge based on his proposal to create a virtual assistant to facilitate patient-physician communication by automating eRecord maintenance using speech recognition and NLP.
Sam Lerman receives Honorable Mention in NSF GRFP Competition
Second-year URCS PhD student Samuel (Sam) Lerman received Honorable Mention in the National Science Foundation's 2019 Graduate Research Fellowship Program competition. Sam is co-advised by Prof. Henry Kautz (Computer Science) and Prof. Charles Venuto (Neurology, URMC), and his interdisciplinary research involves applying deep learning to the biomedical domain and reinforcement learning.
Maisha Idris '19 Highlighted as First Generation Student
Computer Science major Maisha Idris '19 dreamed of attending college as a child, despite long odds. Her parents were immigrants from Bangladesh who settled in New York City. Neither graduated from high school. Both worked low-paying jobs.
Zhen Bai Receives Sykes Engineering Faculty Award
Congratulations to Assistant Professor Zhen Bai who has been awarded the Wadsworth C. Sykes Engineering Faculty Award to support the development of a new course “AR/VR Interaction Design”. The course will be offered in Fall 2019 and aims to provide an introductory overview of the concepts, principles, technologies and special topics of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.
Gianna Macri's '19 Experience in Peru
She has taken a demanding course load of computer science, linguistics, languages, and engineering. She walked onto the varsity crew team her freshman year. She interned each of the last four summers at IBM, GE and Amazon.
Jackson Abascal '19 and Qiuyue Sun '20 Win CRA Awards
The Computer Science department is thrilled to have two undergraduates recognized by the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards. Jackson Abascal ’19 was selected as a Finalist and Qiuyue Sun ’20 was selected as an Honorable Mention.
Jackson Abascal '19 and Qiuyue Sun '20 Win CRA Awards
The Computer Science department is thrilled to have two undergraduates recognized by the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards. Jackson Abascal ’19 was selected as a Finalist and Qiuyue Sun ’20 was selected as an Honorable Mention.
Professor Luo named AAAI Fellow
Professor Jiebo Luo has been elected as an AAAI fellow in 2019 for "significant contributions to the fields of computer vision and data mining, and particularly pioneering work on multimodal understanding for sentiment analysis, computational social science, and digital health."