Two CS alumni were recognized as ACM Distinguished Scientist this year, Evelyn Duesterwald (PhD,'96) currently at IBM Research and Lori Pollock (PhD,'86) at the University of Delaware.[December 2010]

Mary Jean Harrold, a 1988 PhD graduate of our department, will be elevated to the grade of Fellow in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society in 2011. Dr. Harrold is a Professor of Computing and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at Georgia Tech.[December 2010]

Yi Deng(Ph.D.'92) was appointed last year as Dean of the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.[December 2010]

CS Undergraduate Heather Friedberg has been selected for Honorable Mention in the Computing Research for CRA's Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards 2011. [December 2010]

Associate Professor Milos Hauskrecht received the Homer R. Warner award for his paper Conditional Outlier Detection for Clinical Alerting during the AMIA 2010. The co-authors are Michal Valko and Iyad Batal from CS department, Dr. Gilles Clermont from Dept. of Critical Care, and Dr. Shyam Visweswaran and Dr. Gregory Cooper from DBMI. [November 2010]

Computer Science's team for the MS Puzzle Challenge takes 6th place at CMU event and 62nd place of the 420 nationally competing teams. Heather Friedberg, Joanna Drummond, David Goldberg and Christian Woods also captured an honorable mention award in the "First Appearance" category at the local competition. See the official team rankings.[November 2010]

CS Grad students, Wenting Xiao, Yao Sun, Octavio Herrera, and Emilio Zegarra awarded second place in the Technology Scavenger Hunt of the 6th Annual Love Your Computer Event.[October 2010]

CS Undergraduate Heather Friedberg was awarded the 2010 Google Engineering Intern Scholarship. The recipients are selected from Google Summer 2010 Engineering Interns in North America and evaluated on their academic achievements, community involvement, and leadership accomplishments. [September 2010]

Panos Chrysanthis
Professor Panos Chrysanthis receives the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Asssociation of Computing Machinery (ACM). This distinction is for his contributions to the fields of computing and information technology. Panos is the first faculty member to receive this ACM award at the University of Pittsburgh.[August 2010]

Alexander Conrad, CS graduate student and Gregory Kapfhammer, CS alumnus (PhD,'07), receive the Best Paper Award in the Search-Base Software Engineering Track of the ACM SIGEVO Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (2010). "Empirically Studying the Role of Selection Operators during Search-Based Test Suite Prioritization" was co-authored with Robert Roos.[July 2010]

CS alumnus, John Grefenstette (PhD,'80), is named the director of the new Public Health Dynamics Laboratory at the Pitt Graduate School of Public Health, bringing together scientists to produce the next generation of tools for public health analysis. University Times article in the July 22 edition. [July 2010]

Sangyeun Paul Cho is promoted to Associate Professor with tenure (effective September 1st, 2010). Sangyeun is going to be the 5th Associate Professor currently in our Department.[July 2010]

Professor Panos K. Chrysanthis was named the Program Chair for HDMS2010, Program Co-Chair for ODBASE2010 and Group PC Leader for EDBT2011.[July 2010]

Best Paper Award at the 10th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) 2010 awarded to Professor Diane Litman, with co-authors, Min Chi (recent ISP graduate), and Kurt VanLehn(former CS faculty). "Do Micro-Level Tutorial Decisions Matter: Applying Reinforcement Learning to Induce Pedagogical Tutorial Tactics" is based on Min Chi's dissertation work.[July 2010]

Michal Valko, CS graduate student, receives the Google Best Paper Award during CVPR 2010. "Online Semi-Supervised Perception: Real-Time Learning without Explicit Feedback" was co-authored with Branislav Kveton, Matthai Philipose, and Ling Huang, from Intel Labs. [June 2010]

Yann Le Gall, CS graduate student is featured in the article, Yann Le Gall: Transcending Boundaries in the June, 2010 issue of the Arts & Sciences E-newsletter Snapshot.[June 2010]

CSR: Large: Storage Class Memory Architecture for Efficient Data
Associate Professor Bruce Childers (Principal Investigator) awarded an NSF grant and is a joint CS and ECE project. Dr. Childers will be working with Dr. Sangyeun Cho (Co-PI), Dr. Daniel Mosse' (Co-PI), Dr. Jun Yang (Co-PI), and Dr. Youtao Zhang (Co-PI). This project uses multiple technologies to construct a high-capacity, energy efficient memory system for virtualized computer servers with a new Storage Class Memory Architecture that incorporates multiple memory technologies such as DRAM, Phase-change memory (PRAM) and Flash. [June 2010]

Professors Panos K. Chrysanthis and Kirk Pruhs presented NSF-funded Research on Sustainable Computing at PittCS in the Coalition for National Science Funding Annual Science Exposition on Capitol Hill on April 15, 2010.[May 2010]

Amy Scarbrough, Honors College Student and CS Bioinformatics undergraduate, receives the Morris K. Udall Scholarship for her excellent academic record and research on the environment.[April 2010]

Toward Formal, Risk-Aware Authorization
Assistant Professor Adam Lee receives a four year NSF Award in the Trustworthy Computing Program. The Trustworthy Computing Program supports research and education activities that explore novel frameworks, theories, and approaches towards secure and privacy-preserving systems, recognizing that a number of intertwined scientific, technological, economic and sociological challenges must be overcome, if we are to realize a trustworthy computing future. [April 2010]

CAREER: Data-driven Bottom-Up Humanoid Articulations
Assistant Professor Liz Marai receives an NSF CAREER grant. Her work under this grant will investigate in much more detail the human anatomy and dynamics to further progress in replicating human articulation capabilities. [April 2010]

Associate Professor Bruce Childers named the Program Chair for the LCTES 2010 - ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems and is being held in Stockholm, Sweden.[March 2010]

The Pitt CS Technology Leadership Initiative, TLI, has been awarded $7,500 from the Google RISE Program to further the TLI's goals.[March 2010]

Assistant Professor Youtao Zhang receives Google award to design course projects for CS2210/CS1622. "Experimenting Effective Code Update Techniques for Android Phones" with 5 Verizon/Motorola DROID phones.[March 2010]

Associate Professor Alexandros Labrinidis was quoted in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in an article about the pervasiveness of smart-phones in modern society.[March 2010]

Miao Zhou, CS graduate student, received the outstanding paper award for his presentation in the 2010 Grad Expo.[March 2010]

CS Grad students, Michal Valko, John Yackovich, Maio Zhou, Santiago Bock, Socrates Demetriades, and Wenting Xiong were selected to present papers or posters at the 2010 Grad Expo on Monday, March 22nd. See the schedule for times of their presentations.[March 2010]

Dara Kusic has joined the Department of Computer Science as a 2009-2010 Computing Innovations Post-doctoral Fellow of the National Science Foundation (CIFellows).[February 2010]

Enabling Fast and Versatile Packet Processing for Future Larger-Scale Networks
Assistant Professor Sangyuen Cho receives a two-year NSF Award in the Division of Computer and Communication Foundations. This exploratory research addresses the increasingly more critical performance, power, and functional requirements of search operations in key inter-networking devices like routers and firewalls. [December 2009]

Undergraduate Yann Le Gall has been awarded the Arts & Sciences Chancellor's Undergraduate Research Fellowship.[November 2009]

Word Sense and Multilingual Subjectivity Analysis
Professor Janyce Wiebe received an NSF Award in the Robust Intelligence Program. The goal of this three year project is to investigate novel methods for subjectivity sense labeling, and to exploit the results in sense-aware subjectivity and sentiment analysis. [October 2009]

Detecting Deviations in Clinical Care in ICU data Streams
Associate Professor Milos Hauskrecht with his collaborator Professor Gilles Clermont in the Department of Critical Care has received $1,521,570 for a 3-year grant from the National Institute of General Medical Studies (NIH) to study computational methods for detecting deviations in clinical care in intensive care unit (ICU) data. [October 2009]

Using Medical Records Repositories to Improve the Alert System Design
Associate Professor Milos Hauskrecht was awarded a $1,137,679, 3-year grant from the National Library of Medicine (NIH) to develop and study a new computational framework from off-line evaluation and optimization of clinical alerting systems based on retrospective electronic health record data. [October 2009]

Congratulations to the Faculty and Graduate Students who received awards at the 2009 Annual Welcome Back reception![September 2009]

An Affect-Adaptive Spoken Dialogue System that Responds Based on User Model and Multiple Affective States
Professor Diane Litman receives an NSF Award in the Robust Intelligence and the Human-Centered Computing Programs. The goal of this three year project is to improve the state of the art in affective spoken dialogue systems along three dimensions, by drawing on the results of prior research in a wider spoken dialogue and affective system communities. [September 2009]

Instructor and Graduate Student Jonathan Misurda was recognized by the Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education (CIDDE) for "Outstanding Contributions [...] Guiding, Instruction, and Nurturing Teaching Assistants" during the New Teaching Assistant Orientation (NTAO) sessions for the Academic Years 2004-2010.[September 2009]

Rebecca Hwa is promoted to Associate Professor with tenure (effective September 1st, 2009). Rebecca became the 4th Associate Professor in our department.[September 2009]

Assistant Professor Liz Marai and other colleagues in the Center for Simulation and Modeling awarded the 2009 University Research Council (URC) Multidisciplinary Small Grant to establish a Program on Geriatric Research in Ambulatory and Cognitive Excellence (GRACE). Caterina Rosano, Bob Boudreau (Epidemiology), and Bill Layton (Mathematics) will contribute to this multidisciplinary research, scholarship, and creative endeavor.[September 2009]

Towards a Dynamic and Composable Model of Trust
Assistant Professor Adam Lee received an NSF Award in the Trustworthy Computing Program. The Trustworthy Computing Program supports research and education activities that explore novel frameworks, theories, and approaches towards secure and privacy-preserving systems, recognizing that a number of intertwined scientific, technological, economic and sociological challenges must be overcome, if we are to realize a trustworthy computing future. [August 2009]

Professor Alexandros Labrinidis elected Secretary/Treasurer of ACM SIGMOD to serve a four-year term (July 2009 - June 2013). ACM SIGMOD, is the premier professional organization for database researchers and practitioners.[June 2009]

Kathleen O'Connor, CS staff member, has served four years on the Provost Advisory Committee on Women's Concerns (PACWC). PACWC received the 2009 Chancellor's Affirmative Action Award in honor of making a significant contribution in affirmative action. See the PACWC article.[June 2009]

Prof. Janyce Wiebe has been named the Program Co-Chair for ACL-IJCNLP 2009, the premier conference in Computational Linguistics which is being held in Singapore in August.[June 2009]

The Pitt CS Technology Leadership Initiative, TLI , is the recipient of a 2009 award from the Google RISE Program .[June 2009]

Undergraduate Heather Friedberg (WiCS undergrad coordinator) was awarded a Grace Hopper Celebration 2009 scholarship to attend the 2009 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, co-presented by ACM and ABI.[June 2009]

Congratulations to Kelli Ireland, a 2009 Anita Borg Scholarship finalist. Kelli is a graduate student in the CoE graduate program, which is joint between CS and ECE.[May 2009]

Liz Marai
Congratulations to Liz Marai, Assistant Professor, for receiving the 2009 Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence (ACIE) innovation in education award. Her proposal, Immersive Software Engineering, is one of only eleven to receive an ACIE award this year. [April 2009]

CS Day was a great success!! CS graduate and undergraduate students participated in several competitions and the 2009 CS Day Awards are those judged as the best entries.[March 2009]

Ihsan Ayyub Qazi and Swapna Somasundaran, CS graduate students, received the Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship for the 2009-2010 academic year.[March 2009]

Sri Mandayam (a WiCS coordinator), Kelli Ireland (CoE), and Tonya Groover (CS), all graduate students, have been selected to attend CRA-W 2009 Grad Cohort Workshop in March.[February 2009]

Colleges try to increase numbers of women, minorities in science and engineering and Tonya Groover, a graduate student in our Department, helps stimulate STEM interest.[February 2009]

Raja, the Chair of the CS Industry Board was selected as a Carnegie Science 'Entrepreneur Award' winner. Raja was also featured in the Pittsburgh Magazine recently.[January 2009]

KyoungSoo Park
KyoungSoo Park joined the Computer Science Department as an Assistant Professor in the Spring of 2009. The goal of Dr. Park's research is to find and establish the fundamental principles in designing and improving the large-scale networked systems which impact the daily lives of millions of people. [January 2009]

Brian Wongchaowart, an undergradute student in our Department and a member of the ADMT Lab, has received an Honorable Mention at the 2009 CRA Undergraduate Student Award Competition.[December 2008]

Congratulations to the Faculty and Graduate Students who received awards at the Annual Welcome Back reception! Click here for a complete list of recipients.[September 2008]

Adam Lee
Adam Lee, Assistant Professor, a new faculty member, joined the Department in the fall of 2008. His research interests lie at the intersection of the computer security, privacy, and distributed systems fields.[August 2008]

CAREER: User-Centric Data Management
Associate Professor Alexandros Labrinidis received an award from the Faculty Early Career Development Program. The CAREER Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and eduction within the context of the mission of their organization.[July 2008]

CAREER: Robust Parsing for New Domains and Languages
Assistant Professor Rebecca Hwa, received an award from the Faculty Early Career Development Program. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.[July 2008]

Kirk Pruhs, a Professor in our Department is the recipient of a 2008 IBM Faculty Award for his work, "Algorithms for Integrated Scheduling and Power Management."[June 2008]

Alex Connor, an undergraduate student and staff member of the ADMT Lab, won the best poster award at the ACM SIGMOD 2008 Undergraduate Poster Competition. His poster entry was entitled "Nearest Neighbor Queries over Graph Data".[June 2008]

Sangyeun Cho, an Assistant Professor in our Department was recently awarded a 2008 A. Richard Newton scholarship.[June 2008]

CS Undergraduate student Corey Bonnell is featured in the Pitt News for his software, Pitt Lab Printer.[March 2008]

Michal Valko, Qinglan Li and Weijia Li, our three graduate students were awarded Mellon Fellowships for the 2008-2009 academic year.[March 2008]

Prof. Chrysanthis and Prof. Labrinidis to participate in Large Synoptic Survey Telescope effort (Press Release / University Times / Pitt News)[January 2008]

New recognition for Prof. Panos K. Chrysanthis: Panos is among the new 98 ACM Senior Members of 2007. In 2006, he was elected IEEE Senior member. (University Times article)[January 2008]

Staff Appreciation: Bob Hoffman, Nancy Kreuzer, Kathy O'Connor, and Terry Wood are being recognized by the University of Pittsburgh for their 30, 25, 25 and 20 years of service respectively. A big Thank You from the entire Department. [November 2007]

Starting salary offers for Computer Science majors continue to be among highest [NACE Salary Survey][November 2007]

Graduate Student Tonya Groover named Entrepreneur of the year by NFTE. Read the article about Tonya and the TLI here.[September 2007]

Ahmed Amer discussed his thoughts on the future of CD's in a recent issue of the Pitt Chronicle. View the full interview here.[September 2007]

Liz Marai
Dr. Liz Marai joined the Computer Science Department as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2007. Dr. Marai received her BS in Computer Science and Engineering from the "Politehnica" University in Bucharest, Romania. In May of 2007, she received her PhD from Brown University.[August 2007]

Professor Daniel Mossé was also featured in a recent article that ran in the Pitt Chronicle. The article can be found here.[August 2007]

Java Lab Upgrade: Our Java Lab classroom was recently upgraded from Sun SPARC machines running Solaris to Intel-based Apple Mac Minis running OS X Tiger. Through the use of the Parallels virtual machine software, these computers will also be able to run Microsoft Windows, allowing us to utilize this classroom for more courses than just those requiring Java.[August 2007]

Congratulations to the Technology Leadership Initiative (TLI) for another successful summer![July 2007]

Pittsburgh rated most livable city in the US according to the 25th Anniversary Edition of the Places Rated Almanac[April 2007]

Prof. Kirk Pruhs has been invited to join the editorial board of ACM Transactions on Algorithms.[April 2007]

Xin Li's work on Face Alive Icons has been mentioned in the Technology Review (full article here). [March 2007]

Professor Daniel Mossé was recently featured in an article from the Spring 2007 issue of the Pitt Magazine.[March 2007]

Understanding Events and Beliefs Expressed in Text
Professor Janyce Wiebe will lead research in a University Affiliate Research Center funded by the Department of Homeland Security. The center has been awarded $2.4 million over the next three years to develop accurate and robust techniques for extracting and summarizing information about events and beliefs from text.[August 2006]

After years of networking research, Professor Taieb Znati, has become the NSF Director of the CNS (Division of Computer and Network Systems).[April 2006]

Center for Modeling Pulmonary Immunity
Professor Panos K. Chrysanthis and Professor Alexandros Labrinidis will lead the bioinformatics effort in the recently established Center for Modeling Pulmonary Immunity. The center was established in September 2005, from a $9 million contract from the National Institutes of Health, and is a joint effort between the University of Pittsburgh (School of Medicine and School of Arts & Sciences), Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Michigan. [January 2006]

Ras Bodik
Ras Bodik got his PhD at Pitt in 2000 under the guidance of Rajiv Gupta and Mary Lou Soffa. He then went on to work as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. After two happy years in Madison, he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he is now a tenure-track assistant professor. [September 2005]

Optoelectronic Computing Research Group Installs Clean Room
The newest addition to the research facilities in Sennott Square is a 300 square foot, class 1000 clean room facility in the fifth floor optical computing lab. Dr. Chiarulli and Dr. Levitan use this facility in their research on high-speed optical and electronic data links for chip-to-chip and network-on-chip applications. [August 2005]

Parsing Arabic Dialects
This summer, Assistant Professor Rebecca Hwa, along with researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland and the University of Amsterdam, is participating in an NSF-sponsored workshop on Parsing Arabic Dialects. Students from Stanford University, The University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins University and Georgia Tech are also participating in the project. [August 2005]

Kurt VanLehn Presents LearnLab in D.C.
Kurt VanLehn, a professor in Pitt's Department of Computer Science and codirector of the Pitt-Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC), represented the University at the June 21 Exhibition of the Coalition for National Science Funding in Washington, D.C. [June 2005]

Mary Lou Soffa
After being recruited by a number of other universities during her outstanding academic career, Professor Mary Lou Soffa finally succumbed to an offer – a very attractive offer. She decided to leave her faculty position in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, effective September of 2004, to assume the roles of Owen R. Cheatham Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science of the University of Virginia. [February 2005]

Gerard A. Pompa
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Mr. Pompa received his BS in computer science and mathematics and his MS in computer science from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981 and 1987. [September 2004]

Sangyeun Paul Cho
Sangyeun Cho joined the Department of Computer Science in the fall of 2004. He received his BS in computer engineering from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea in 1994, and his PhD in computer science from the University of Minnesota in 2002. [August 2004]

Daniel Mossé
Dr. Daniel Mossé became a full Professor in the Computer Science Department in 2004. Here, he discusses how he came to the department, his love for teaching, and his (so far) fruitless campaign to squeeze more time into a 24-hour day.[August 2004]

Panos Chrysanthis
Dr. Panos K. Chrysanthis became officially the ninth full Professor in our Department on 1.1.2004. He is the co-director of the the Advanced Data Management Technologies (ADMT) lab which focuses on innovative theories, paradigms, and applications in network-centric data management. [January 2004]

Rebecca Hwa
Dr. Rebecca Hwa joined the Department of Computer Science in the fall of 2003. She received her BS in Computer Science and Engineering from UCLA in 1993, and her PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University in 2001. Her research is in the areas of artificial intelligence and natural language processing.[August 2003]

D. Raja
D. Raja is the co-founder of Computer Enterprises, Inc., better known as CEI. Raja holds an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Anna University, India. Raja moved to the United States from India to obtain his M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh. [April 2003]