2014 News



John Criswell Receives Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

October 9, 2014

John Criswell, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, received the Honorable Mention for the 2014 ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award at this year's Symposium on Operating System Design and Implementation (OSDI 2014).  This award is given in memory of Dennis M. Ritchie who created the C programming language and co-created the Unix operating system.  John was awarded the honorable mention for his work on Secure Virtual Architecture (SVA).  SVA utilizes virtual instruction set computing and compiler techniques to protect existing operating systems and applications from cyber-attacks.

For more information on the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award, please see the SIGOPS webpage.

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ROC HCI wins gifts from Google and Microsoft Research

August 1, 2014

Ehsan Hoque has received a Google Faculty Research Award for his research on data-driven adaptive learning, and innovative assessment methods.
Details: http://services.google.com/fh/files/blogs/googlefras-aug2014.pdf

Philip Guo has received a gift from Microsoft Research to integrate interactive labs for computer science education into Microsoft Office Mix (https://mix.office.com/), building upon his Online Python Tutor (http://pythontutor.com) project.

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Five New Faculty Join URCS

July 1, 2014

John Criswell is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester.  He earned both his B.S. in Computer Science (2003) and Ph.D. in Computer Science (2014) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Maged Michael (Ph.D '97) receives Prestigious PLDI Award

June 12, 2014

At PLDI '14 (Programming Language Design and Implementation) held in Edinburgh, Scotland in June,  Maged Michael received the "Most Influential Paper Award" for his work from 2004 at IBM TJ Watson Research Center.  The paper, entitled "Scalable Lock-Free Dynamic Memory Allocation" received this citation from PLDI: "Maged Michael's PLDI '04 paper is considered a landmark in memory allocation for multithreaded programs, presenting the first completely lock-free general-purpose user-space allocator. It provides good performance with respect to scalability, speed and space efficiency, while at the same time only relying on common hardware and OS support. The work is highly regarded and frequently referenced, and is also the basis of multiple memory allocator implementations, both in IBM products and in follow-on research."

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Engin Ipek Receives Young Computer Architect Award

May 14, 2014

Engin Ipek received this year's IEEE TCCA Young Computer Architect Award. The award is given annually for "outstanding contributions in the field of computer architecture by an individual who has made contributions in research and/or education, and received his/her PhD degree within 6 years from the date of the nomination.”

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CSUG & RocHack Host First 24-hour Hackathon

April 12, 2014

Thanks to the leadership efforts of Steve Gattuso '16, Julian Lunger "14 and David Bang '14, our undergraduate council (CSUG) and the RocHack club successfully hosted their first 24-hour Hackathon April 12-13.  With plenty of food to sustain them, groups of students worked on various projects throughout the night.  Prizes donated by corporate sponsors were awarded at the end of the programming marathon.

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Computer Science Students Help Singers Learn Their Vowels

March 7, 2014

As part of the final project in Ehsan Hoque's Fall Human-Computer Interaction class, a team of students including Nate Buckley '15, Tait Madsen '15 (former ESM student now in CSC), Cynthia Ryan (MS candidate), Veronika Alex '14 and Josh Bronstein '14 joined with Prof. Katherine Ciesinski and her students from the Eastman School of Music. The team developed a prototype that provides real time feedback as singers produce vowels. The system automatically recognizes the speech formants and maps it into real time easy-to-interpret visuals. Students deployed the system at the Eastman School of Music and demonstrated that singers could produce vowels more effectively using the tool compared to the traditional method. This was done in less than a month as a HCI final project with a team of 4 undergraduates, and 1 graduate student who happens to be a full time employee at Xerox.  We're glad that we were able to include Eastman, Xerox and URCS in one project.  Full article.

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