University and industry scientists are determining how to forecast significant societal events, ranging from violent protests to nationwide credit-rate crashes, by analyzing the billions of pieces of information in the ocean of public communications, such as tweets, web queries, oil prices, and daily stock market activity.

Ashwin Aji, PhD candidate in computer science, was recently awarded an NVIDIA Fellowship.  The NVIDIA Fellowships are highly competitive, with only 12 awarded this year.

Min Li recently received an IBM Fellowship Award.  The award is a highly competitive support program for excellent graduate students and provides recognition of outstanding research achievement. 

Members of the 3D Interaction Group, including several graduate students and faculty advisor, Dr. Doug Bowman, associate professor of computer science, took first place for a third consecutive year at the 2012 IEEE 3DUI Symposium in Costa Mesa, California.  The team also won the "People's Choice" award, which was voted on by conference attendees.

Doctoral student Karim Elish was a first place finisher in the poster category of the Virginia Tech Graduate Student Association's Research Symposium. 

Computer Science doctoral student Young-Woo Kwon won a Bronze Prize at the Samsung Human-Tech Thesis Prize Competition for his research entry entitled: "Power-Efficient and Fault-Tolerant Distributed Mobile Execution."

CS@VT graduate students, Monika Akbar and Kevin Buffardi, placed second and third, respectively, in the Student Research Competition at SIGCSE 2012.

The Virginia/DC Affiliate of the National Center for Women In IT (NCWIT) held its first awards and recognition ceremony on March 31, 2012.  The Virginia/DC affiliate is made up of representatives from Virginia Tech, George Mason University, and the University of Virginia.

The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors recently named Dr. Naren Ramakrishnan the Thomas L. Phillips Professor of Engineering. 

The National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) has created a new campaign, entitled "Sit With Me," to encourage more young women to pursue careers in computing.  As a member of NCWIT's Pacesetter's group, CS@VT was encouraged to participate.

Congratulations to CS faculty who have recently been awarded research funding from the Army Research Office, NEC Labs, NIH, NSF, and the S2ERC Center.
 

Dr. Ben Knapp, professor of computer science and director of the Institute for Creativity, Arts and Technology received the best presentation award at the 2011 International Computer Music Conference.

Under the direction of Dr. Francis Quek, a group of computer science students participated in an NSF funded drummer-game. 

Nicholas Polys, Affiliate Professor in the Computer Science Department and Director of Visual Computing at Virginia Tech, is collaborating with Peter Sforza and Thomas Dickerson on a mapping project for the town of Blacksburg.

Computer science student Eeshan Shah, advised by Dr. Eli Tilevich, is the recipient of a CRA Undergraduate Research Honorable Mention Award for 2012

CS PhD graduate Christopher Andrews and current CS PhD students M. Shahriar Hossain and Samah Gad, and their advisors Dr. Naren Ramakrishnan and Dr. Chris North, won the IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST) Mini Challenge Award.

Hari won this award at the premier conference in object-oriented (OO)  programming languages & systems.  This award is named for IBM-er John Vlissides, a co-author of the famous Patterns book for "best practices" OO programming.

A group of Computer Science graduate students recently won the award for the best student poster at the 2011 Human Systems Integration Symposium, held Oct. 25-27 in Vienna, Virginia, and sponsored by the American Society of Naval Engineers.

Dr. Kirk Cameron, associate professor, is featured in Bloomberg Businessweek.

Congratulations to CS faculty who have recently been awarded research funding from Agilent Laboratories, the Army Corps of Engineers - Engineering Research and Development Center, Department of Homeland Security, FAA - NIA, and the NSF.

The proposal title was "BusTracker.EDU: Integrating Transportation Concepts into CS Curricula."

"The authors of the article are: T. M. Murali, a computer scientist, and Brett Tyler of the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, both located at Virginia Tech, and Michael G. Katze, a microbiologist and associate director of the Washington National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington."

"Initial topics of research for the center include secure computing architectures, cloud computing security, visualization tools for cyber defense, securing critical infrastructure, wireless security, and malware detection and mitigation."

"Elementary-level school children in rural southwest Virginia will become the beneficiaries of an IBM Faculty Award presented to Wu Feng, associate professor of computer science and electrical & computer engineering at Virginia Tech."

Congratulations to CS faculty who have recently been awarded research funding from Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), the EPA, NSF, and Skype. 

Shuaiwen "Leon" Song recently placed third among PhD finalists in the College of Engineering's Paul E. Torgersen Research Excellence Competition.

Virginia Tech Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (VTURCS) encourages Computer Science undergraduate students to become involved in research. 

Dr. Ramakrishnan is being recognized for his work in data mining in diverse areas such as intelligence analysis, systems biology, sustainability, and recommender systems.

Congratulations to Dr. T.M. Murali, along with Dr. John Tyson, Biological Sciences, and Dr. Jean Peccoud, Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, on their new NIH R01 award entitled "Integrating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Models in Systems Biology with Application to Cell Cycle Control in Budding Yeast."

Members of the 3D Interaction Group, including several graduate students and faculty advisor Dr. Doug Bowman captured both the Grand Prize, for a second consecutive year, and the Best Paper Award at the 2011 IEEE 3DUI Symposium in Singapore.

Dr. Layne Watson, professor, and Dr. Rhonda Phillips, a recent graduate of the computer science department, co-authored a paper with Dr. Randy Wynne, professor of Forestry and Remote Sensing, that received the Best Paper Award at the 19th High Performance Computing Symposium. 

Dr. Ali Butt, assistant professor of computer science, was recently awarded a NetApp Faculty Fellowship. 

Congratulations to CS doctoral student Spencer Lee.  Spencer is a member of the winning team that was awarded a 2011 XCaliber Award.

As part of its ongoing 40th anniversary celebration, the Department of Computer Science hosted an open house on Friday, March 25. 

Computer Science Department faculty members ,Doug Bowman and Wu Feng, are among 47 ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) members honored for computing innovations this year.

With the latest release of The Green500 List, accelerator-based supercomputers now occupy the top eight slots of the Green500, where the ‘fuel efficiency’ (or energy efficiency) of supercomputers is defined as ‘millions of floating-point operations per second’ (MFLOPS) divided by ‘watts’ (W) or MFLOPS/W.

Congratulations to CS faculty who have recently been awarded research funding from NIH, BAE Systems, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NSF, and the College of Engineering!

Congratulations to Ginger Clayton, the CS Department’s Business and Facilities Manager, who was recently nominated for the annual Governor’s Award for Career Achievement.

On Saturday, May 15, the Virginia Tech College of Engineering conferred degrees on the class of 2010, including approximately 75 Computer Science undergraduate majors.  Graduate degrees were conferred at the Graduate Commencement on Friday, May 14.  Prior to the College of Engineering ceremony, Computer Science graduates, their guests and families, enjoyed a reception in the Torgersen Museum.  Several students were recognized for outstanding achievements and contributions, including Jeffrey Brabant, John Edstrom and Russell Wolf for undergraduate academic achievement, John Edstrom for service to the department, and Adam Stevens as the Outstanding CS Senior.  Two graduate students were also recognized: Amine Chigani for outstanding  teaching and John Linford for outstanding research.  Thomas Carroll Jones was awarded the George Gorsline Memorial Scholarship Award, given each year to a rising senior.

On Friday, May 14, Virginia Tech's Mu Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa initiated its Spring 2010 initiates in a ceremony in McBryde 100.  According to their official web site, PBK was founded at the College of William and Mary in 1776 and is the nation's oldest and most widely known academic honor society.  Among the Spring 2010 initiates were two Computer Science majors, Eric Johnson and Gabriel Martinez Arroyo.

Virignia Tech's College of Engineering held its thirteenth annual engineering faculty reception, honoring two dozen of its faculty for various awards in teaching, reasearch, service, and outreach.

For the second year in a row, a Computer Science student has won the C.T. Tate Distinguished Co-Op Award.  Computer Science senior Aaron Lindsay received the award after co-oping with IBM.

On Thursday, April 15, 2010, Upsilson Pi Epsilon (UPE) held its 54th induction ceremony.   UPE inducted twenty new members to their VT chapter during the 2009/2010 academic year. 

Professor of computer science, Roger Ehrich, has been conferred the "professor emeritus" title by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.

On Monday, February 18, the Computer Science Resources Consortium spring luncheon was held in Owens Banquet Hall at Virginia Tech, followed by the CS Spring Career Fair later that evening, which was also held in Owens Banquet Hall.  At the luncheon, company representatives, faculty, and invited students heard presentations from undergraduate and graduate students working on a variety of research projects. 

The Department of Computer Science celebrated 2009 Fall Commencement for approximately twenty-three undergraduates and eighteen graduate students on Thursday, December 17, 2009.  December graduates, their friends and family, and CS faculty and staff attended the CS Commencement Reception.

On Monday, December 7, VT Career Services honored December 2009 graduates who participated in the Cooperative Education/Internship program.  Graduating CS majors honored at the reception in the Smith Career Services Building were Justin Bolling, Jared Chelko, and Ramesh Srigiriraju.

Margaret Ellis, a graduate of the CS Masters program, started the company DevelopEase that produces iPhone applications designed to assist students with special needs.

Computer Science alumnus Brian Sutton was awarded the 14th Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis this summer.

The Graduate School has named Hussein as October's "Featured Graduate Student."

The week of September 14th was a busy week for Computer Science majors thinking about future career opportunities.  On Monday, September 14, the Computer Science Resources Consortium fall luncheon and Career Fair were held in Owens Banquet Hall.  The CSRC welcomed 10 new companies: Abraxas Corporation, Comcast, CSC, ExcelaCom, G3 Technologies, General Dynamics AIS, OPOWER (Positive Energy), Qualcomm, SAIC, and Sapient.

Frances E. Allen, IBM Research Emerita, will be the first speaker in the Distinguished Lecture Series this Friday.

On Friday, May 15, the Department of Computer Science celebrated Spring 2009 commencement at a reception honoring undergraduates, graduates, friends, families and faculty. Approximately 65 students completed a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, and 35 graduate degrees were awarded. Special guest at the reception was Mrs. Anne Gorsline, wife of the first department head, Dr. George Gorsline. Dr. Barbara Ryder, Head of the Department of Computer Science, welcomed the guests and spoke about the department's accomplishments in the past year. The department also recognized several undergraduate and graduate students for achievements in scholarship, research and service.

On Friday, May 15, 2009, nine undergraduate Computer Science majors accepted an invitation to join the prestigious honor society Phi Beta Kappa.

Dr. John Paul C. Vergara, a 1997 Ph.D. alumnus of the Computer Science Department has recently been appointed Vice President for Administration and Planning at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.

On Tuesday, May 5, 2009, Jennifer Kammer was awarded the C. T. Tate Distinguished Senior Co-op Award by Career Services. 

On Thursday, April 9, 2009, Upsilson Pi Epsilon (UPE) inducted one of its largest groups of initiates.  Twenty-one students were inducted for the 2008/9 academic year.

On Monday, February 16, the Computer Science Resources Consortium spring luncheon was held at The Inn at Virginia Tech, followed by CS Career Night later that evening in the Bowman Room of the Jamerson Athletic Center.  At the luncheon, company representatives, faculty, and invited students heard from undergraduate and graduate students working on a variety of research projects.  Twenty one companies were represented at this year’s Career Night event, including the CSRC’s two newest members, Duke Energy and Fidelity.

The Department of Computer Science December Commencement Reception was held Thursday, December 18, in the Torgersen Atrium. 

A ribbon-cutting ceremony dedicated the newly renovated space on the first floor of McBryde Hall that forms the CS Undergraduate Learning Center.

Five students from the L'Ecole Supérieure d'Infotronique d'Haïti who are pursuing their CS degrees at Virginia Tech were featured in a "Picturing Change" photography contest sponsored by Higher Education in Development.

With its 2600 cores yielding over 22 Teraflops of performance, System G is powerful. But the Apple Mac-based system's array of energy and thermal sensor and power management capabilities make it an ideal platform for "green supercomputing" research.

Two elementary school teams connected to the Department of Computer Science made a big splash at the regional FIRST LEGO League tournament held in Blacksburg on November 16. The teams are both from Harding Avenue Elementary, located near the Virginia Tech campus. A total of 30 teams competed at the tournament in two age groups, almost double the number from last year.

Estelle Kim, a CS major, has been awarded a Vanguard Women in Information Technology Scholarship Award for 2008 -- one of nine merit-based awards by Vanguard to female students entering their senior year of college and pursuing studies in computer science, computer engineering, web design, or related information technology disciplines.

Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones, has been appointed to the new position of associate dean in residence and director for the office of diversity programs in The Virginia Tech Graduate School.

The Computer Science department at Virginia Tech had a strong presence at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2008.

The week of September 14th was a busy week for Computer Science majors thinking about future career opportunities. Starting with the CSRC picnic on Sunday, September 14, CS majors had several opportunities to meet with CSRC company representatives. On Monday, September 15, the Computer Science Resources Consortium fall luncheon was held at the Inn at Virginia Tech, followed by the CS Career Reception later that evening in the Bowman Room of the Jamerson Athletic Center.  The four newest members of the CSRC were introduced: Booz Allen Hamilton,  DCS Corporation, Hughes Network Systems, and Modea. 

The members of the Computer Science Resources Consortium,  the department’s industrial affiliates group, were on campus to learn more about the department and to recruit students as full-time employees, interns, and cooperative education students. CSRC companies provide support to the Department of Computer Science and student groups. 

These events also provided an opportunity for students and company representatives to meet our new department head, Dr. Barbara Ryder.

Computer Science students, faculty, staff, representatives from corporate sponsors, and guests enjoyed a picnic at the Virginia Tech Duck Pond on Sunday, September 14.  Sponsored by the Computer Science Resource Consortium, all attending enjoyed delicious food, fun games, and an opportunity to make new friends and spend time with old ones.

Pictures of the event are available below at the "more" link.

Ahmed Sidky has recently been appointed as Program Chair for Agile 2009.

Emil Constantinescu, Ph.D in Computer Science advised by Dr. Adrian Sandu at Virginia Tech, has recently earned this year’s Wilkinson fellowship at Argonne National Lab.

On Saturday, May 10, 2008, the Department of Computer Science celebrated Spring 2008 commencement at a reception honoring undergraduates, graduates, friends and families, and faculty.

Matthew Curtis-Maury, a Computer Science graduate student advised by Dr. Dimitrios Nikolopoulos, has been awarded the "Outstanding Graduate Student Award -- Doctoral" by the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech.

The Association for Women in Computing hosted their biggest and best Women in Computing Day on April 18th, 2008 headed by Meg Kurdziolek and Lise Vincent.

The Association for Women in Computing is happy to announce that five of its members are the proud recipients of the annual CAMEO Scholarship.

Four Computer Science majors were recently inducted into the Virginia Tech Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's oldest and most prestigious honor society.

The VTURCS Spring Research Symposium will be on April 24th from 4:00pm to 7:00pm.

The Comprehensive National Incident Management System being developed by the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL) for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency was presented at a technology forum in March 2008, held by the Senate Armed Services Committee. 

Vidhya Dass and Elisabeth Brennan recently made news developing a computational model to predict the Tidal Basin cherry blossoms bloom.

The Department of Computer Science hosted its annual Graduate Recruiting Weekend on March 14-15.

Wu Feng of the Departments of Computer Science (CS) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Virginia Tech, and Gerald Sabin  and V. “Nagu” Nagarajan (pictured at left) of RNET Technologies recently received a National Science Foundation Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant.

The Department of Computer Science is proud to announce the creation of a general scholarship fund for our undergraduate majors. 

On Monday, February 11, the Computer Science Resources Consortium spring luncheon was held at The Inn at Virginia Tech, followed by CS Career Night later that evening in the Bowman Room of the Jamerson Athletic Center.

Scott McCrickard, associate professor of computer science (CS) at Virginia Tech, and Todd Stevens, development team leader, Meridium, Inc., the leader in asset performance management software and consulting solutions, recently received a National Science Foundation Small Business Technology Transfer grant.

Emil Constantinescu, Ph.D. student at the Computer Science department at Virginia Tech, gave an invited seminar at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Office of Global Modeling and Assimilation, on December 18, 2007.

The Association of Women in Computing was proud to award Leadership Scholarships to three deserving applicants at its first meeting of Spring semester last Tuesday, January 22.

Ali R. Butt, assistant professor at the Computer Science (CS) department at Virginia Tech, has recently been awarded a $400,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for his research titled “A Scalable Hierarchical Framework for High-Performance Data Storage.”

The Department of Computer Science December Commencement Reception was held Thursday, December 13, in the Torgersen Atrium.

A proposal by Drs.  Ing-Ray Chen (left) and Chang-Tien Lu, entitled "Intelligent Visualization and Analysis of Traffic Data on the Sun Platform for Transportation Government Agencies", has been selected for an AEG equipment award with a value close to $40,000.

Adrian Sandu, associate professor at the CS department at Virginia Tech in collaboration with  I.M. Navon of Florida University, have received funding of $350,000 from NSF for research entitled "Solution of Inverse Problems with Adaptive Models."

Virginia Tech Upsilon Pi Epsilon inductions were held on Monday, December 3, 2007. 

Matthew Curtis-Maury, a Computer Science graduate student advised by Dr. Dimitrios Nikolopoulos, gave an invited seminar in the Computer Systems Lab (CSL) seminar series at Cornell University on November 20.

The Computer Science Department will have a strong representation at the upcoming SIGCSE 2008, to be held March 12-15 in Portland, Oregon.

Dimitris Nikolopoulos, associate professor of computer science, is organizing a workshop on "Parallel Programming on Accelerator-Based Systems."

Twelve women from Virginia Tech attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, which was held from October 17th to 20th in Orlando.

Virginia Tech had a strong presence at SC/07, the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, held November 10-16 in Reno, NV.

Scholars of the Future for the year 2007-2008

NSF-CPATH award

Naren Ramakrishnan, associate professor of computer science, served as the program chair for ICDM '07, held Oct 28-31 in Omaha, Nebraska.

Amrita Pati, a Ph.D. candidate in the CS department, has won the third prize in ACM's Student Research Competition at the Grace Hopper Conference this year.

General Motors (GM) officials visited the computer science (CS) department at the Virginia Tech’s Corporate Research Center on Friday, October 12, to launch the Laboratory for Neuroinformatics.

The Synergy Lab, led by Wu Feng, and Argonne National Laboratory have collaborated to land a finalist slot in the SC|07 Storage Challenge. 

Scholars of the Future Program.

Dimitris Nikolopoulos, Associate Professor, is appointed as Program Vice-Chair for the 36th International Conference on Parallel Processing, in the OS and Resource Management technical track.

Athman Bouguettaya of Computer Science and Mohamed Eltoweissy of Electrical and Computer Engineering (and courtesy appointment in Computer Science) have been awarded a highly competitive NSF grant to support their research on "Reputation Management for Web Services".

The Computer Science Department continues to build a strong research group in computing systems and networking.

Layne Watson, a professor in the computer science and mathematics departments, has been appointed General Chair for the 2007 High Performance Computing Symposium , part of the Spring Simulation Multiconference to be held March 25-29, 2007 in Norfolk, Virginia.

Congratulations to Kunmi Ojitoju on being recognized as Virginia Tech Graduate Student of the month for September. 

Dr. Stephen Edwards, associate professor in the computer science department in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been selected to receive an XCaliber Award.

Alexey Onufriev, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, has recently been awarded a $1.1 million grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) for a project entitled "Analytical Electrostatics: Methods and Biological Applications."

Yang Cao has recently joined the Computer Science Department as an Assistant Professor.

Naren Ramakrishnan, Cal Ribbens and Srinidhi Varadarajan of Computer Science, along with Danesh Tafti of Mechanical Engineering, have recently been awarded a highly competitive $640,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Systems Research (CSR) grant titled "The Adaptive Code Kitchen: Flexible Tools for Dynamic Application Composition."  

Doug A. Bowman, associate professor, has been appointed the general chair of the IEEE Virtual Reality 2007 Conference. The conference will be held March 10-14 in Charlotte, North Carolina. IEEE Virtual Reality is the world's premier conference on all aspects of virtual environments, augmented and mixed reality, and three-dimensional user interfaces. Dr. Bowman, who directs the 3D Interaction Group, also served as the program chair for IEEE VR in 2006.

Virginia Tech will be well-represented at this year's Supercomputing Conference (SC06) , the premier international conference on high-performance computing, networking and storage. Virginia Tech researchers will present 3 of the 54 technical papers accepted to the conference. These papers were peer reviewed and selected among the 239 paper submissions.

The first annual symposium to showcase the proceedings of the Center for Human-Computer Interaction’s (HCI) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) was held at Knowledge Works II on July 13, 2006.

The REU is a new program at Virginia Tech funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant IIS0552732). The program provides undergraduate students from various universities with the opportunity to spend eight weeks at Virginia Tech, working with faculty and graduate students on research projects utilizing the state-of-the-art technology and laboratories available here.

Virginia Tech and Villanova University researchers have received a $450,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to extend the benefits of its free, online library by developing technology that will allow college students and professors to conduct flexible and customized information searches directly from course Web sites.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year grant of over half a million dollars to Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to develop a digital library curriculum. The project is titled "Collaborative Research: Curriculum Development: Digital Libraries."

Barbara G. Ryder, professor of computer science at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, will become the computer science department head at Virginia Tech, starting in fall 2008.