Spring 2009 Commencement Reception

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Publish Date: 05/26/2009

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.

For pictures of the reception, the award winners, and the undergraduate ceremony on Saturday, May 16, please scroll down the page.

Dr. Ed Fox, Ben Scott, and Mrs. Anne Gorsline

Benjamin C. Scott was awarded the George Gorsline Memorial Scholarship. Dr. Gorsline was the first head of the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Gorsline died in 1987, and in his memory, his wife Anne and numerous grateful alumni established the George Gorsline Memorial Scholarship. True to George's spirit, this scholarship is given each year to a rising senior who has overcome obstacles to become a successful CS major. Ben was a freshman in 2001, and was also a member of the National Guard. But after a less than stellar start, Ben took some time off from VT. He returned to VT Spring 04 only to be deployed in March 2004 for two years. Ben stated "During that time a lot of things happened: I got married to my wife, Cecilia, bought a house, and matured quite a bit. I had no problem staying focused and studying from that point forward, and my grades were excellent, each semester averaging higher than a 3.0." Ben returned to VT summer 2006, but here was to be one more deployment Spring 07. Ben returned to VT summer 08, and this time his goal is in sight. It has not been quick nor easy for Ben, but we applaud his determination and perseverance to accomplish his goal of completing a degree in Computer Science.

Dr. Ed Fox and Jenny Kammer

The departmental Service Award was presented to Jennifer Kammer. Jennifer is a member of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, Phi Kappa Phi, and Phi Beta Kappa. She was an undergraduate teaching assistant, president of the Association for Women in Computing, and an organizer of the annual AWC Women in Computing Day for middle school girls. Jennifer has completed multiple co-operative education terms, and was awarded the prestigious C. T. Tate Award for Outstanding Co-op Senior for 2009.

Dr. Ed Fox and Joe Bourne

The award for Scholarly Performance by a Graduating Senior was presented to Joseph Sprott Bourne, Jr. Joe is a member of the CS Honor Society Upsilon Pi Epsilon and the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. Joe has enjoyed being a Hokie Ambassador to share his love of Virginia Tech with prospective students and their families, and maintained the web site for the Ambassadors. Joe is spending his summer working for Microsoft in Redmond, Washington. He will return to VT Fall 09 to complete his masters degree in CS.

Dr. Ed Fox and Robert Hagan

Computer Science Scholar Awards were presented to Robert Hagan and Nicholas Ryan in recognition of achieving a 4.0 in CS courses. Robert is a CS/Math double major, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and has served as president of CS Squared. Robert plans to attend graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Dr. Ed Fox and Nick Ryan

Nicholas Ryan is a CS/Math double major who has served as the CS department representative to the Student Technology Council and is in the University Honors Program. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Upsilon Pi Epsilon. The department is grateful to Nick for his skill and dedication while serving as undergrad teaching assistant for the Operating Systems course. Nick will be working for Microsoft as a developer working on Excel after graduation.

Dr. Ed Fox and Robert Hagan

Robert Hagan was also recognized as the department's Outstanding Senior for 2009. In addition to his perfect 4.0 in CS courses, Robert has participated in numerous undergraduate research projects, site coordinator and president of CS Squared, president of Virginia Tech Gaming Project and president of the VT Runners Club. Robert has interned with IBM, and earned a coveted position in the IBM Extreme Blue Intern program. As mentioned above, Robert plans to attend graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Jaishankar Sundararaman and Dr. Barbara Ryder

Jaishanar obtained his MS degree under the direction of Dr. Godmar Back and now works at Google. He developed a novel software visualization system that can provide faithful and interactive visualizations of a program's runtime state. Simply stated this is like a window into how large computer programs function and is very useful for debugging and progarm understanding. This work was presented at the competitive ACM Symposium on Software Visualization in Munich.

Ashwin Aji and Dr. Barbara Ryder

Ashwin obtained his MS degree with Dr. Wu-chun Feng. He worked on genome scale sequence search, which is to take DNA sequences and quickly find their matches from a database. Before his work, algorithms for comparable tasks used to take nearly half an hour for each query, and Ashwin reduced it to 4 seconds. The novelty of his approach resulted in tremendous interest from IBM and a subsequent invention disclosure. We are also happy to report that we have reeled Ashwin back into our department and he will be re-joining us in Fall as a Ph.D. student.

Deepti Chafekar and Dr. Barbara Ryder

Deepti obtained her Ph.D. working with Dr. Anil Vullikanti and Madhav Marathe. She worked on wireless networks, specifically for applications such as cognitive radios. In particular she developed methods for estimating the capacity of these networks. Her thesis develops the first provable polynomial time approximation algorithm for optimizing latencies and throughut. If you are wondering what that means, polynomial time means "very fast" and so Deepti's results are likely to be very important and subsequently used by many in the future. She has published this work in all the top conferences in wireless and mobile networking, which have acceptance rates of less than 20%.

Rhonda Phillips and Dr. Layne Watson

Rhonda worked on her Ph.D. degree with Dr. Layne Watson. Her work is highly interdiscplinary and she developed algorithms for processing the massive amounts of data that come from remote sensed images. Her work is already being used by colleagues in forestry, civil engineering, and atomospheric sciences. She has also been extremely generous with her time in service activities for our department. She has been the social chair for the computer science
graduate council and has also been active in the CS honor society, Upsilon Pi Epsilon. She has been selected as a College of Engineering teaching fellow, a Sigma Xi Outstanding Ph.D. student, was the featured student for April 2009 by the VT graduate school, and received the first place award among all College of Engineering students at the VT annual graduate student research symposium held this year.

Matthew Schaefer and Dr. Barbara Ryder

Matthew is a highly sought after TA in our department. His teaching evaluations average at 4.9 out of a possible 5. Most recently, he was the teaching assistant for our junior level course on professionalism in computing. Not only does this course involve a tremendous amount of difficult grading, because students are required to write essays, but
this year there were some complications. One is that the course had group projects with another course here at VT and with two classes at the University of Limerick in Ireland. Matthew had to read roughly 150 discussion contributions/week for most of the semester in addition to the regular work in the course. Another point to mention is that when students performed not so well on the second writing assignment, Matthew volunteered to let them rewrite the assignment and regrade them. Needless to say, he has gone over and beyond the call of duty in providing student feedback and keeping the course organized.