Events & News

News Briefs

(Heard some news? .)

05/20/09	Professor Carole Beal is featured in UA News. Read more.
05/18/09	John Kececioglu, associate professor and BIO5 member, chairs the RECOMB2009 conference. Read more.
04/14/09	Gregg Townsend, staff scientist, received the College of Science COSSAC Staff Excellence Award for his leadership in reorganizing the department's web site.
04/09/09	Congratulations to Joe Schlecht who was selected as the 2008-09 Computer Science Galileo Scholar award recipient.
04/09/09	Congratulations to Justin Samuel who received the following awards: Outstanding Senior, Spring 2009; Galileo Scholar, 2008-09, and Excellence in Undergraduate Research 2008-09.
01/27/09	Carole Beal and her research team are featured in UA News. Click on the full article.
01/05/09	Paul Cohen and Carole Beal are featured in UA News. Read the full article.
11/17/08	The 2008-09 Lockheed Martin Scholars are Barbara Anderson, Keith Jerosky, Adam Robertson, Silviu Smarandache.
11/17/08	Justin Samuel is the recipient of the fall 2008 Lund Wolfe Computer Science Scholarship.
10/28/08	Computer science student Paul Stevens, and his brother Jacob, created the puzzle game 'Madstone.' Paul and Jacob are featured in the Arizona Daily Wildcat.
10/10/08	Tasneem Kaochar has been selected as the Department of Computer Science’s Outstanding Senior for fall 2008. In addition, Tasneem has also been selected as the College of Science Outstanding Senior for the fall 2008 semester. Tasneem will graduate with honors this fall with a BS in Computer Science and a BA in Spanish and Portuguese. She has won numerous awards and recognition during her time here and has been working on research with Professor Saumya Debray over the last two years. Tasneem has represented the department as a College of Science Ambassador and has volunteered her time to outreach efforts.
10/08/08	John Hartman and Chris Gniady are featured in UANews. Read more.
10/06/08	Rick Snodgrass, co-principal investigator on a three-year NSF grant, is featured in UANews. Read the full article.
09/29/08	Monte Lunacek, a postdoctoral researcher working with Paul Cohen and Yu-Han Chang, won the Best Student Paper award at the 10th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving in Nature (PPSN), 2008. The paper is called "The Impact of Global Structure on Search" by Monte Lunacek, Darrell Whitley, and Andrew Sutton.
09/19/08	Kyri Pavlou and Rick Snodgrass’s paper entitled "Forensic Analysis of Database Tampering" has been accepted to the ACM Transactions on Database Systems. The paper will appear in the December 2008 issue. This paper presents the design and pseudo-code for four successively more sophisticated forensic analysis algorithms: the Monochromatic, RGBY, Tiled Bitmap, and a 3D Algorithms. For each, their "forensic cost" is characterized under worst-case, best-case, and average-case assumptions on the distribution of corruption sites. The paper also states a lower bound on forensic cost; the RGBY and a 3D algorithms are shown to be optimal for a large number of corruptions. Highly accurate cost formulae for these algorithms, validated through extensive experiments, are provided. This work is supported by the National Science Foundation, and benefited from contributions from Huilong Huang, Qing Ju, Melinda Malgrem, Stanley Yao, Ricardo Carlos, Michael Patterson and Travis Wheeler. Learn more http://www.cs.arizona.edu/projects/tau/tbdb/
09/12/08	Jerrica Jones, a pre-computer science sophomore, narrates on YouTube about the 2008 Google Computer Science Summer Institute.
07/21/08	University of Arizona researchers Chris Gniady and Igor Crk presented their findings at the 2008 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston. Click on Government Computer News and ACM TechNews to read the full article titled “‘Prefetching’ scheme saves time, energy”.
06/16/08	Haifeng He won first place in the poster competition at the ACM SIGPLAN 2008 conference on Programming Language and Design Implementation (PLDI), held June 7-13, in Tucson, Arizona.
06/04/08	Kate Spriggs, CS alumna and camp coordinator for the 2008 Integration of Science and Computation Summer Camp, is featured in UA News. Read more.
06/02/08	Richard Snodgrass, ACM History Committee co-chair, is quoted in the ACM news release concerning the creation of the ACM Archive at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota Library. Read the release.
05/15/08	Kobus Barnard is featured in the May 14 issue of Lo Que Pasa. Read the full article.
05/05/08	Jamie Samdal is the first student in the Department of Computer Science’s history to complete the Eller College’s dual-degree master’s program. Read more.
04/24/08	The National Science Foundation has awarded Kate Spriggs a $90,000 Graduate Research Fellowship. Read more.
04/22/08	Bongki Moon will present a keynote address at the Sybase Engineering Summit, May 6-8, in Dublin, CA. The title of his presentation is “Flash Memory Database Systems: challenges and opportunities.”
04/14/08	Ana Rodriguez is the recipient of the College of Science Staff Recognition Award of Excellence for 2008. Ana was recognized for her professionalism, creativity, and commitment.
04/12/08	The President’s Office hosted a luncheon to honor university employees for their years of service. Computer Science employees recognized were Pete Downey, 30 years; Phil Kaslo, 25 years; Suzanne Collier and John Cropper, 20 years; Rick Mercer, 10 years.
03/26/08	The Spring 2008 Galileo Circle Scholars are Joe Fowler, Tasneem Kaochar, and Haifeng He.
03/26/08	Genevieve Max is the Spring 2008 Boeing Scholarship recipient.
03/26/08	Alex Henniges, Justin Samuel, Patrick Valenzuela, and Kendra Walworth are the 2007-08 Lockheed Martin Scholars.
03/14/08	Microsoft has awarded Assistant Professor Chris Gniady and Associate Professor John Hartman a $94,000 grant titled Energy: A Crucial Resource in Cell Phone as a Platform for Health Care. The goal of this project is to design and implement an infrastructure for semi-autonomous health care monitoring based on cell phone technology.
03/04/08	The College of Science has this year begun a new set of graduate student awards in three categories. These will be presented at a Graduate Student Awards Banquet on March 28. The department is pleased to announce the Computer Science winners of these awards: Scholarship: Joseph Schlecht, TA/Mentoring: Alex Balderrama, and Service: Justin Cappos.
03/04/08	Congratulations to this semester’s departmental winners of significant undergraduate awards: Andrew Davidson, Outstanding Senior and Juhani (Jay) Torkkola, Excellence in Undergraduate Research.
02/22/08	Beichuan Zhang has been awarded a two-year, $300K grant titled "WIT: A Watchdog System for Internet Routing" by the Department of Homeland Security. This project aims to develop a system that continuously monitors the routing activity on the Internet and notifies network operators of suspicious activities in a timely and reliable manner. This is a collaboration among Colorado State University (lead), UA, UCLA, and University of Oregon, with a $1.5M total budget.
02/22/08	Beichuan Zhang has been awarded a three-year, $257K National Science Foundation grant titled "Enabling Future Internet Innovations through Transit Wire (eFIT)." This project aims to develop a new Internet routing architecture that will be able to accommodate the fast growth of user networks, allow ISP networks and user networks to innovate independently, and enable new mechanisms for security and traffic engineering on the Internet. This is a UA-led collaboration with Colorado State University, UCLA, and University of Memphis, with a $1M total project budget. It is funded under the NSF Future Internet Design (FIND) program.
02/21/08	Kendra Walworth, a junior with a double major in Computer Science and Linguistics, was honored at the annual Pillars of Excellence reception. Kendra, a track and field student-athlete, who competes in the hammer throw, was one of ten student scholar recipients to be recognized. Tasneem Kaochar, a junior majoring in Computer Science, is one of 30 students who presented her work Identifying Unreachable Code for Compaction of the Linux Kernel at the 21st annual Undergraduate Research Forum. Tasneem’s research focuses on alias analysis.
02/14/08	Greg Andrews is featured in the KVOA news clip about the iPlant Collaborative. View the clip.
02/07/08	Many thanks to the eight UA Computer Science alums at Microsoft who directed their charitable gifts to Microsoft’s Employee Giving Campaign. Microsoft matched their contributions dollar for dollar, and our department will receive 220 Office Pro 2007 licenses.
1/31/08	The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a University of Arizona-led team $50 million dollars to create a global center and computer cyberinfrastructure within which to answer plant biology's grand challenge questions, which no single research entity in the world currently has the capacity to address. Principal Project Personnel from the Computer Science Department are: Greg Andrews, John Hartman, Kobus Barnard, Richard Snodgrass, and Suzanne Westbrook. Read the full article.
1/23/08	The work of Rick Snodgrass, Kyriacos Pavlou, and Michael Ju was mentioned in the article “Keeping Your DBA Honest,” in the January 2008 issue of Bank Technology News. Read the full article (requires registration).
1/09/08	Computer Science received a $4000 gift. The donation will support undergraduate scholarships.
11/28/07	We note with sadness the passing of Madge Griswold, who died November 25. She was the widow of Ralph Griswold, founder of the Computer Science department and Regents Professor Emeritus. Together they authored books about the Icon Programming Language and published the Icon Newsletter and Icon Analyst. Trained as a journalist, Madge was also an accomplished chef. She combined these passions in her scholarly writings on culinary history, and was the 1998-1999 chair of the Board of Trustees of The Culinary Trust.
9/22/07	We regret to report the passing of Stephen Mahaney, who died June 26. Dr. Mahaney was an associate professor in the department from 1989 through 1994.
8/24/07	John Kececioglu's research in finding reversals in gene sequences was featured prominently in a column in the September-October 2007 issue of American Scientist.
6/04/07	Congratulations to Joseph Schlecht who has been awarded a Biology, Mathematics and Physics Initiative (BMPI) fellowship for the 2007/2008 academic year. This award, sponsored by BIO5, is for graduate students from many different departments interested in research at the interface of biology, mathematics and physics. The award is to support work in inferring 3D models for the structure of microscopic fungus from the genus Alternaria from image data (more information). This is joint work with Ekaterina Spriggs, Barry Pryor, and Kobus Barnard.
5/01/07	ACM's History Committee (co-chaired by Richard Snodgrass) recruited historians, archivists, and early ACM pioneers and volunteers to contribute their memories, findings, and accounts to a special section of CACM commemorating ACM's 60th anniversary. The section, in the May 2007 issue, is freely available online. Check the CACM home page in the Digital Library to access the articles. See news story.
1/01/07	Rebecca Mitchell, the pre-major advisor for the Computer Science undergraduate program, was elected co-chair of the University Professional Advising Council (UPAC) and will serve a two-year term.
12/01/06	Ekaterina Spriggs was a finalist in the Computing Research Association (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Awards Program for 2007. This program recognizes undergraduate students across North American universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research. As a finalist, Ekaterina is among a very select group of 15 students (six female and nine male) across North America.
11/17/06	Student Showcase Double Winner: Undergraduate Ekaterina Spriggs won two awards at the 2006 Student Showcase. She received first place in the Physical Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Engineering, & Computer Science category at the UA student showcase, as well as the BIO5 innovator award. The Arizona Daily Wildcat article on the Showcase featured a photograph of Ekaterina being congratulated by the Provost. The exhibited work was on "Modeling and Visualizing Alternaria", which is collaboration with Joseph Schlecht, Barry Pryor, and Kobus Barnard.
11/04/06	Best Paper Award: The paper " Prioritizing Test Cases Using Relevant Slices,'' by Dennis Jeffrey and Neelam Gupta won the Best Paper Award (out of a total of 183 submissions) to the International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2006).
11/04/06	Neelam Gupta is serving as the Program Committee Co-chair of the Third Workshop on Software Quality Assurance (SOQUA 2006), co-located with Fourteenth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE-14).
11/01/06	Lupe Jacobo received a College of Science STAR award for her contributions to Academic Services and the department. The COSSAC group (College of Science Staff Advisory Council) gave her this award on Wednesday, November 1. Lupe has worked for our department since 2002.
8/28/06	Noah Snavely, a 2003 graduate, is working on a 3-D modeling project at the University of Washington. "The idea is to take photos of a scene and extract enough 3-D information from these photos to build a better photo browser."
8/08/06	Richard Snodgrass was awarded a $98,966 National Science Foundation research grant entitled "Towards a Science of Database Systems." This project takes a scientifically rigorous approach to an area previously dominated by the engineering perspective, that of database query optimization. This grant was funded by the Information and Intelligent Systems Division of NSF.
6/12/06	Neelam Gupta (PI) and Rajiv Gupta (Co-PI) were awarded a National Science Foundation grant "ExPert: dynamic analysis based fault location via Execution Perturbations" for the amount of $332,000 over three years. This project is being supported under the Computing Systems Research Program.
5/20/06	Upon invitation from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), Rajiv Gupta recently became a member of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for Networking and Information Technology. This TAG will provide input and feedback to the PCAST as it conducts a review of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program.
4/11/06	Neelam Gupta and Rajiv Gupta were awarded a research grant by Microsoft for the project "Integrating Dynamic Slicing into the coredbg Debugger". This project aims to integrate their recent work on dynamic slicing based automated fault location techniques into Microsoft's Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure. Their proposal was one of 13 selected for funding from nearly 100 submissions from 21 countries under the Microsoft Research Phoenix/SSCLI RFP 2005.
4/11/06	Stephen Kobourov was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for an year of research and lecturing at the University of Botswana. Read about it in the Arizona Daily Star.
4/10/06	At the Annual Academic Advising Recognition Ceremony, the UA Excellence in Academic Advising Awards were given for the first time. Rebecca Mitchell, the computer science pre-major advisor, received the Emerging Professional Advisor Award. Pat Murray, our Department's undergraduate program coordinator, received the Professional Academic Advising Award.
4/01/06	Lupe Jacobo, Administrative Associate in Academic Services, was appointed by President Peter Likins to serve on UA's Staff Advisory Council. She will serve on this committee until June 2009.
3/01/06	Ekaterina Spriggs was among the undergraduate students chosen in 2006 for the Pillars of Excellence.
2/23/06	Rick Mercer is Educator Symposium Chair for OOPSLA 2006 in Portland, Conference Chair for ChiliPLoP 2006 in Carefree, and Student Volunteer chair for Agile 2006 in Minneapolis.
2/13/06	Rajiv Gupta joined the editorial board of the journal "Computer Languages, Systems and Structures".
1/30/06	Stephen Kobourov was awarded a $405,000 five-year National Science Foundation Career grant "Embedding, Morphing, and Visualizing Dynamic Graphs."
1/05/06	Rajiv Gupta was awarded an National Science Foundation grant "Dynamic Unmasking of Compiler Optimizations and Obfuscations" for the amount of $300,000 over three years. This project will investigate automatic techniques for matching two versions of a program by comparing their Whole Execution Traces (WETs). WET is a representation for detailed execution profiles developed by Rajiv's research group.
1/05/06	John Kececioglu joined the editorial board of the journal "Algorithms for Molecular Biology (AMB)".
12/20/05	Neelam Gupta will be the Program Committee Co-chair of the Fourth International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (WODA 2006), that will be co-located with the ICSE 2006 in Shanghai, China on May 23, 2006.
10/30/05	Stephen Kobourov joined the editorial board of Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications.
10/20/05	Undergraduate Ekaterina Spriggs achieved first place in the Physical Sciences, Mathematics, Computer Engineering, & Computer Science category at the UA student showcase. She exhibited her work on "Detecting Tone and Textual Semantics in the Contexts of Human Interaction". This work is in collaboration with Kobus Barnard , Emily Butler, Quanfu Fan, and James Gross.
10/16/05	Richard Snodgrass was identified as having the third highest closeness score in an analysis of 32,689 authors in the database community in the DBLP citation digital library in an article ACM SIGMOD Record. "One of the interesting aspects of co-authorship networks is to identify the most "central" scholars in the network. Authors who are the most prominent in the community are often (certainly not always) located in the strategic locations of the co-authorship network, which may allow them: (1) to communicate directly with many other authors, (2) to be close to many other authors, or (3) to be an intermediary in the interactions of many other pair of authors. ... The closeness can be defined as how close an author is on average to all other authors."
10/04/05	Alon Efrat, Kobus Barnard and Bongki Moon were awarded a research contract from the LSST Corporation for their work on Rapid Mover Association Pipeline for tracking near-Earth asteroids. The amount of the fund is $217,724 for the first two years.
9/01/05	Richard Snodgrass, Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Database Systems, announced in September that the TODS "Editorial Board is now committed to providing an editorial decision within five months." He also announced that in "terms of turnaround time, TODS at 12.5 weeks is now equivalent to conferences (as exemplified by SIGMOD and PODS at 12 weeks), while being more flexible in not imposing a submission deadline." ACM SIGMOD Record 34(3):114-118, September 2005
8/31/05	Mohan Rajagopalan, a PhD student in our department, was recently awarded the IEEE W.C. Carter Award for the dissertation research he is conducting at the department. This is a very prestigious award, and the first time it has been won by a UA student.
8/31/05	In the annual ACM Awards dinner, held in San Francisco this June, Richard Snodgrass was awarded the 2004 Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award, "for exceptional leadership in broadening the vision of the ACM Digital Library, and for service to the board of ACM's Special Interest Group on Management of Data (SIGMOD)... [He] led a successful effort to align ACM's Special Interest Groups behind the goal of broadening the ACM Digital Library, the renowned archival resource for the computing research community, into a portal spanning the entire computing literature, with more than 40 years of publications, proceedings, and bibliographic sources."
8/31/05	Richard Snodgrass, Principal Investigator, and Christian Collberg, as co-Principal Investigator, were awarded a $330,000, three-year National Science Foundation grant in August to refine and extend their novel technology of tamper detection in databases, with the goal of tamperproofing such databases.