News
Jackson Abascal '19 and Qiuyue Sun '20 Win CRA Awards
The Computer Science department is thrilled to have two undergraduates recognized by the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards. Jackson Abascal ’19 was selected as a Finalist and Qiuyue Sun ’20 was selected as an Honorable Mention.
Jackson Abascal has done mathematics research during a summer REU and has done computer-science research with URCS Professors Lane Hemaspaandra and Muthu Venkitasubramaniam. His paper with Lane and URCS undergraduates Shir Maimon and Daniel Rubery studies the closure/nonclosure properties of the class of rankable sets. Jackson will present the paper at the 13th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications (LATA 2019). Lane notes that Jackson ``is a true joy to work with, and is near-impossibly bright, fast, and insightful. Jackson is planning to get a Ph.D. in CS, focusing on Theory, and I believe that his talent is so very strong that his career will make a deep difference to the area of theoretical computer science.''
Qiuyue Sun has been researching with Prof. Yuhao Zhu since Spring 2018. What started as a Raspberry Pi experiment led to research in VR and a paper submission to the ApSys Workshop, a top-tier workshop in the area of computer systems. Qiuyue currently conducts research in Project Transformation operations and high-level synthesis using FPGA. Prof. Zhu believes that Qiuyue “is truly a rising star… she is the kind of student who is totally unsatisfied with the theory learned in class, and is totally unafraid to get her hands dirty. I see a bright and motivated young computer scientist and engineer.”
The CRA noted that:
This year’s nominees were a very impressive group. A number of them were commended for making significant contributions to more than one research project, several were authors or coauthors on multiple papers, others had made presentations at major conferences, and some had produced software artifacts that were in widespread use… it is quite an honor to be selected.
Read more about the CRA and the Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards in the January 2019 edition of Computing Research News.