2022 News

Undergraduate Researchers Honored through 2023 CRA Awards

December 20, 2022

3 individual headshots of students
Pictured left to right: Size Li, Adira Blumenthal, and Draco Xu

Three students from the University of Rochester were recognized through the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for 2023. This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding potential in an area of computing research.  Sizhe Li was selected as a finalist, while Adira Blumenthal and Draco Xu each received an honorable mention.

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Congratulations to 2022 UR Next Gen Challenge Winners

December 19, 2022

UR Next Gen Challenge is a think-tank style competition that gives students the chance to solve real-world problems with real-world engineers and scientists working alongside real-world industry representatives. The one-day think tank, sponsored by the MS in Technical Entrepreneurship and Management Program and the Ain Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, posed a real industry challenge. The students worked with company partner D3 Engineering to find an automated solution that minimizes setup and take down times when focusing camera lens variants without sacrificing consistency and quality.

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The Value of an Internship

December 19, 2022

Recent graduate Shoham Shitrit ’22, a computer science major, can testify to the value of an internship. Shoham spent the summer before his senior year at Microsoft in Seattle.

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Students Share Vision of FUTURE REALITY

December 15, 2022

room of students presenting posters
Students in CSC 216/416 present their projects in Studio X

Tuesday, students from Professor Zhen Bai’s CSC 216/416: AR/VR Interaction Design course shared their visions of future reality with the UR community in Studio X at the Carlson Library. This is a highly rewarding event that allows students to showcase their AR/VR systems, practice public speaking skills to a large audience, and celebrate their hard work as a team. It's also a fun event to raise awareness of AR/VR technologies for members of the UR community, and foster interesting conversation that may lead to future impact beyond the course. There was a wonderful turnout, and the students were eager to share their work. Projects ranged from addressing communication challenges to providing more accessible virtual spaces for creative designs that can be translated into real world products/spaces.  Professor Bai and her class want to give a big shout-out to Meaghan Moody - the Immersive Technologies Librarian at Studio X and her XR specialist team (Aleem Griffiths, Liam O’Leary, Muhammed El-Sayed, Haochen Zeng) for their kind support throughout the term!

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Students Attend Regional NSBE Conference

December 6, 2022

The University of Rochester’s student chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers sent 22 members to the society’s Fall Regional Conference in Syracuse, NY. Attendees got the opportunity to interact with students from other chapters in the northeastern region, professionals at Fortune 500 companies, and representatives from graduate schools across the nation. Some students, such as Jaden Addae, Computer Science ’25, left the conference having secured summer internships, while others, like Samuel Sylvestre, Mechanical Engineering ’23, left having secured full-time job offers. In addition to this, students benefited from the workshop sessions held such as cybersecurity, how to study, engineering graduate school for free, the art of negotiation, eliminating self-defeating behavior, and many more.

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CS Students and Staff Attend National SWE Conference

November 21, 2022

SWE students posing at conference
Society of Women Engineers members at last month’s national SWE conference. Back row, left to right: Audrey Yu, Fiorella Rivadeneira, Erin Nguyen, Emily Spence, and Niera Bakr. Front row, left to right: Madeline Smith, Hannah Rickert, Manuela Montes de Oca, and Yousra Awad. Not shown: Rebeca Zapiach, Maya Parada, and Leeza Nadeem.

In October, 12 members of UR’s Society of Women Engineers student chapter SWE’s national WE22 conference in Houston. CS students, Leeza Nadeema and Yousra Awad were amongst them. “It’s always incredibly empowering to be able to learn how to better ourselves as women in STEM through SWE Conferences,” says Hannah Rickert ’25 of biomedical engineering, a GEAR student and SWE conference coordinator. “With hundreds of workshop-style sessions about topics ranging from interviewing tips to being a minority in the workplace, we were able to pick and choose topics that related to what we wanted to improve upon. The conference also gave us the opportunity to network with not only larger companies that were seeking new hires, but also with women in STEM from across the country.”

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Best Paper Nominations for HCI group

November 14, 2022

Papers by Hajim computer science students addressing timely topics received best paper nominations at major conferences recently, reports Ehsan Hoque, associate professor of computer science.

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Boyang Wang Places Second at PACT 2022

October 12, 2022

Boyang (Oliver) Wang, a sophomore CS student, won Second Place at the SRC competition at PACT 2022 in Chicago (https://pact22.cs.illinois.edu/).  The research work was in Professor Chen Ding’s group last summer with another undergrad Adam Bobok.  Led by Ph.D. student Ben Reber, they developed and evaluated an independent tenancy model for the lease cache.

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Undergraduate Summer Research

June 13, 2022

Schwartz Scholars, funded through the Office of Undergraduate Research: Jeewong Chang ‘23 computer science (Fatemah Nargesian), Darien Dennis ’24 computer science (Danielle Benoit), Muhammad Qasim ’24 computer science (Yuhao Zhu), Yurong Liu ’23 computer science (Fatemah Nargesian), Yunlong Xu ’23 computer science (Fatemah Nargesian), Haochen Zeng ’23 computer science (Emily Sherwood)

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Abdoul Rasmane Maiga ’25 receives Projects for Peace Grant

May 9, 2022

Projects for Peace is a global program that partners with colleges, universities, and other educational institutions to provide grants to young people who design and implement summer projects focused on promoting peace and conflict resolution. Souleymane Diallo ’24 (politics, philosophy, and economics) and Abdoul Rasmane Maiga ’25 (computer science). Diallo is from Guinea and Maiga is from Burkina Faso, both in West Africa. Their project aims to promote long-term peace and reconciliation in Guinea, which has experienced numerous political instabilities, violence, and social injustices.

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PhD student Xiaofei Zhou receives a three-year Industry Fellowship

January 31, 2022

zhou_xiaofeiXiaofei Zhou, a third-year URCS PhD student advised by Professor Zhen Bai, has received a three-year Industry Fellowship through the AR/VR NRT program, which is a NSF graduate trainee program that offers interdisciplinary education and research in the cutting edge field of AR/VR. With the financial and mentorship support provided by this fellowship, Xiaofei is planning to design and develop innovative AR interfaces to empower STEM learning experiences by connecting accessible and meaningful digital information and ML interaction experience with the physical environment around learners.

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