Publish Date: 05/22/2009

Nine undergraduate Computer Science majors accepted an invitation to join the prestigious honor society Phi Beta Kappa this spring.  According to the www.pbk.org, Phi Beta Kappa was founded at the College of William and Mary in 1776 and is "the nation's oldest and most widely known academic honor society."  Phi Beta Kappa celebrates and advocates excellence in the liberal arts and sciences.  CS majors achieving this recognition of academic excellence were Jacqueline Addesa, Jeffrey Brabant, John Edstrom, Jenny Kammer, Aaron Lindsay, Gaurav Raja, Benjamin Reid, Andrew Street, and Ramesh Srigiriraju.  

Pictured are Jenny Kammer and Dr. Cal Ribbens

Publish Date: 05/20/2009

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. The position of Vice President for Administration and Planning is a new position at the university. Among its chief functions is to develop a facilities plan and information technology (IT) plan for the university in consultation with relevant stakeholders.
 

Dr. Vergara is currently Professor and Department Chair of the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science of the Ateneo Loyola Schools and also Chair of the IT Faculty Cluster of the Ateneo Graduate School of Business.

For the official news release please see: http://www.ateneo.edu/index.php?p=120&type=2&aid=6470
 

Publish Date: 05/14/2009

On Tuesday, May 5, 2009, Jennifer Kammer was awarded the C. T. Tate Distinguished Senior Co-op Award by Career Services.  This award is open to students across the university and is based on a co-op employer nomination. According to Dr. Cal Ribbens, "In addition to her great co-op experience, Jenny has contributed in a remarkable number of ways to student organizations and to our department in general.  She was an excellent undergraduate teaching assistant; she often went the extra mile to make sure students understood the material."  Jenny is a member of both Upsilon Pi Epsilon and Phi Kappa Phi Honor Societies.  She has also held several leadership positions with the Association of Women in Computing. 

Congratulations to Jenny!

Jenny Kammer, Jason Dunn, and Robert Hagan

Publish Date: 05/12/2009

The Computer Science Department is proud to announce that two faculty members, Dr. Ali Butt and Dr. Adrian Sandu, were honored with a College of Engineering Faculty Award at the twelfth annual engineering faculty reception.

Dr. Ali Butt was the recipient of an Outstanding New Assistant Professor award. Ali joined the Computer Science Department in 2006 and is a member of the High-end Computing Systems and Network Research Group. He is also an NSF CAREER Award recipient for developing innovative storage techniques for emerging peta-scale computing platforms.

Dr. Adrian Sandu, an Associate Professor with the Computer Science Department was named an Engineering Faculty Fellow. This award carries a $5,000 account for three years to be used to support research. Adrian has several ongoing research projects, one of which is an NSF CAREER award to develop computational methods for the new generation of air quality models. The majority of Adrian’s research funding comes from highly competitive federal agencies like NSF, NASA, NOAA, and NIH.

Please see the associated College of Engineering News article for a complete listing of College of Engineering Faculty Award recipients.
 

Publish Date: 05/08/2009

Tejinder Judge, a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Computer Science, was recently invited to be a speaker at the 6th annual CRA-W Grad Cohort held in San Mateo, CA. She is one of the eight student speakers invited to present at this workshop. This year, the workshop hosted 225 graduate students.

The CRA-W Grad Cohort program, funded by Microsoft and Google, aims to increase female graduate students in computing by building and mentoring communities of women during their graduate studies. At the Grad Cohort Workshop, graduate students in their first, second, or third year of graduate school, are given the opportunity meet with senior computing researchers and professionals who share information, insights, and their experiences about a career in computer science. Through this workshop, students will be able to build mentoring relationships and develop peer networks to help throughout their graduate careers.

Tejinder previously attended the Grad Cohort in 2007 and 2008. She is currently in her third year of the doctorate program and works in the area of Human-Computer Interaction. Her research advisor is Dr. Scott McCrickard.

See: CRA-W Grad Cohort
 

Title: Keystroke Dynamic Authentication With Trusted User Inputs For Botnet Detection
Speaker: Danfeng (Daphne)Yao, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Date: Friday, May 8, 2009
Time: 11:15am-12:15pm
Location: KWII 1110 (new location!)
See: Abstract

Publish Date: 04/27/2009

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. 

Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) is the first and only international honor society for the computing sciences. The UPE Alpha Chapter of Virginia was chartered at Virginia Tech in 1975. Membership in UPE is limited to students and faculty who can effectively achieve the goals of the society:

• Recognition of outstanding talent in the computing sciences
• Promotion of high scholarship in the computing sciences
• Establishment and maintenance of high standards
• Representation of the computing sciences in interdisciplinary communications
• Encouragement of individual contributions to society through the computing sciences

Congratulations to all the new initiates!

Title: “GPUs for Smarties: From Gaming to General Purpose Computing”
Speaker: Dr. Yong Cao, Virginia Tech
Location: Torgersen 2150
Date: Friday, April 24, 2009
Time: 11:15am-12:15pm
See: Abstract
 

Publish Date: 04/15/2009

Rajesh Sudarsan, a PhD candidate in Computer Science, has been awarded the Paul E. Torgersen Graduate Student Research Excellence Award. The annual award is presented by the College of Engineering Graduate Student Committee as a way to showcase top research performed by graduating Masters and Doctoral students.

In his winning presentation, "A Scheduling Framework for Resizable Parallel Applications,” Sudarsan described his research on dynamic resizing of parallel applications.

As terascale supercomputers become common and petascale machines emerge, the challenge of providing effective resource management for high-end machines (e.g., System X at Virginia Tech) grows in both importance and difficulty. The most powerful HPC resources are extremely expensive to build and operate, so the cost of underutilization is high. A fundamental challenge is that conventional parallel job schedulers are static. That is, once a job is allocated a set of processors, it continues to use that same number of processors until it finishes execution. As a result, it is common to see jobs stuck in the queue because they require just a few more processors than are currently available, resulting in long queue wait times for applications and low overall system utilization.

Sudarsan’s research aims for a more flexible and effective approach, where the set of processors allocated to jobs can be expanded or contracted at runtime. He has developed a framework called ReSHAPE to explore the potential benefits and challenges of “dynamic resizing” of parallel applications. The framework includes a programming model, a runtime library for application resizing and data redistribution, and a parallel scheduling and resource management system. In his talk before a panel of faculty judges, Sudarsan described the potential of ReSHAPE for supporting interesting and effective scheduling techniques, and reported on experimental results which demonstrate a significant improvement in cluster utilization and turn-around time for applications executed using ReSHAPE.
 

Title: CS Educational Research at Virginia Tech
Speaker: Dr.Cliff Shaffer, Virginia Tech
Location: Torgersen 2150
Date: Friday, April 17, 2009
Time: 11:15am-12:15pm
See: Abstract