2019 News







Professor Hoque weighs in on the impact of AI in society at the Daily Connections by Evan Dawson at WXXI

November 1, 2019

Will artificial intelligence enhance or replace human activity? Ehsan Hoque, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UR, along with Hadi Hosseini, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at RIT, and independent journalist, Matt Kelly, weigh in on the impact of AI in society at the Daily Connections by Evan Dawson at WXXI. Listen to the show at: https://www.wxxinews.org/post/connections-will-artificial-intelligence-enhance-or-replace-human-activity 

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URCS Alumnus Daniel Sabbah receives 2019 Hajim Distinguished Alumnus Award

May 19, 2019

URCS alumnus Daniel Sabbah received the 2019 Hajim Distinguished Alumnus Award at the Hajim School Diploma Ceremony. Sabbah received his masters and PhD degrees from the Department of Computer Science as an advisee of Professor Jerome A. Feldman (the founding chair of URCS, now a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley). Sabbah is the former chief technology officer and general manager of the Next Generation Platform at IBM Corporation, where he was responsible for overhauling IBM’s direction for cloud computing and mobility into a coherent architecture and product portfolio. He is now the Principal Consultant at his consulting firm, DSabbah, LLC.

His advice to graduates was to not “go blindly forward in applying what you have learned . . . learn, refine, and apply, but also take into account societal impacts. Don’t blindly think that just because you have a great idea, it will be used that way.”

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URCS Alumnus Daniel Sabbah receives 2019 Hajim Distinguished Alumnus Award

May 19, 2019

URCS alumnus Daniel Sabbah received the 2019 Hajim Distinguished Alumnus Award at the Hajim School Diploma Ceremony. Sabbah received his masters and PhD degrees from the Department of Computer Science as an advisee of Professor Jerome A. Feldman (the founding chair of URCS, now a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley). Sabbah is the former chief technology officer and general manager of the Next Generation Platform at IBM Corporation, where he was responsible for overhauling IBM’s direction for cloud computing and mobility into a coherent architecture and product portfolio. He is now the Principal Consultant at his consulting firm, DSabbah, LLC.

His advice to graduates was to not “go blindly forward in applying what you have learned . . . learn, refine, and apply, but also take into account societal impacts. Don’t blindly think that just because you have a great idea, it will be used that way.”

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PhD student Parker Riley awarded Barnard Fellowship

May 6, 2019

Third-year PhD student Parker Riley (supervised by Professor Daniel Gildea) was awarded the Arts, Sciences and Engineering Donald M. and Janet C. Barnard Fellowship in recognition of his strong research record, as well as his clear commitment to mentoring, outreach, and service to the department and field. Parker Riley is working on the problem of learning translation models between languages for which no parallel text (translated document pairs) are available. His work has already resulted in one journal article in the journal Computational Linguistics, one first-author paper in the proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), and another paper currently under review for ACL.

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PhD student Andrew Read-McFarland wins Curtis Award

May 3, 2019

Second-year PhD student Andrew Read-McFarland was selected as one of the winners of the 2019 Edward Peck Curtis Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student. Andrew was recognized by faculty and students as consistently going above and beyond the expectations for a graduate TA. Professor Lane Hemaspaandra noted, "Andrew was an exceptional TA. He showed true affinity for the material, and dedication to helping young minds not just learn the material, but also see its beauty and applicability. He was very generous with his time, he truly cared, and as a cherry on top he was strong even on the type of logistics that people think are boring yet actually are an important part of supporting the students."

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Graeme McGuire '19 Receives Fulbright Grant

May 1, 2019

Computer Science and Linguistics dual major Graeme McGuire '19 (Take5) was offered a grant in the prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Grant program. The Fulbright program is designed to promote mutual understanding and peace between the US and other nations through educational and cultural exchange.

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CS Undergraduate Samuel Triest '20 wins Gold Medal in ACM SRC

April 19, 2019

Undergraduate Computer Science major Samuel Triest '20 was named the Gold Medalist of ACM's Student Research Competition (SRC) at the 24th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS). The SRC is a long-standing tradition of ACM that offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and attendees at well-known ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences.

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PhD student Louis Jenkins awarded Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship

April 17, 2019

First-year Ph.D. student Louis Jenkins has been awarded a US Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, the first such award in the department’s history.  Louis is a 2017 graduate of Bloomsburg University (part of the Penn State system) and a part-time consultant for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a specialist for Cray's Chapel programming language.  He received honorable mention in the Computing Research Association’s 2017 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher competition, based largely on his work on high-performance concurrent hash maps for the Go programming language.  For his doctoral thesis he hopes to exploit emerging persistent memory technologies to enhance productivity and performance of fault-tolerance mechanisms in high performance computing.

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Brynn Wilkins wins Department Coordinator & Leader Award

April 12, 2019

At the 3rd annual Gwennies Awards, hosted by the Gwen M. Greene Center for Career Education and Connections, the Computer Science Undergraduate Program Manager Brynn Wilkins was awarded the Department Coordinator & Leader Award. The Gwennies are awards given by the Gwen M. Greene Center to collaborative partners who exemplify the mission, values, and vision of the Greene Center.

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MD/PhD student Jesse Wang, advised by Prof. Henry Kautz, named a finalist in the ACP Innovation Challenge

April 11, 2019

Jesse Wang, an MD/PhD (Translational Biomedical Science) student advised by URCS Professor Henry Kautz, earned a spot as one of four finalists in the American College of Physicians' Innovation Challenge based on his proposal to create a virtual assistant to facilitate patient-physician communication by automating eRecord maintenance using speech recognition and NLP. 

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Zhen Bai Receives Sykes Engineering Faculty Award

February 26, 2019

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Zhen Bai who has been awarded the Wadsworth C. Sykes Engineering Faculty Award to support the development of a new course “AR/VR Interaction Design”. The course will be offered in Fall 2019 and aims to provide an introductory overview of the concepts, principles, technologies and special topics of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.

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Gianna Macri's '19 Experience in Peru

February 18, 2019

She has taken a demanding course load of computer science, linguistics, languages, and engineering. She walked onto the varsity crew team her freshman year. She interned each of the last four summers at IBM, GE and Amazon.

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Jackson Abascal '19 and Qiuyue Sun '20 Win CRA Awards

February 1, 2019

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.

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Jackson Abascal '19 and Qiuyue Sun '20 Win CRA Awards

February 1, 2019

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.

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Professor Luo named AAAI Fellow

January 28, 2019

Professor Jiebo Luo has been elected as an AAAI fellow in 2019 for "significant contributions to the fields of computer vision and data mining, and particularly pioneering work on multimodal understanding for sentiment analysis, computational social science, and digital health."

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