People@CoC
2009 UROC Symposium a Great Success
Congratulations to the following winners of the 2009 UROC Research Symposium, which was held April 15.
JUDGES' AWARDS
First Prize ($750)
Brian Stebar II - Scalable Video Conferencing
Adviser: Kishore Ramachandran
Second Prize ($300)
Kathryn Long - Learning as an Alternative to a Simulator in Real-Time Strategy Games
Adviser: Ashwin Ram
Third Prize ($100)
Dan Gifford - The Effects of Mobility on Mini-Qwerty Text Input
Adviser: Thad Starner
PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARDS
First Place (Prize: $50)
Kathryn Long - Learning as an Alternative to a Simulator in Real-Time Strategy Games
Adviser: Ashwin Ram
Second Place
Brian Stebar II - Scalable Video Conferencing
Adviser: Kishore Ramachandran
Third Place
Peter Tsankov - Execution Hijacking
Adviser: Alex Orso
Paper on Botnet-Based Scam Hosting Wins Best Paper Award
“Dynamics of Online Scam Hosting Infrastructure,” a paper by graduate student Maria Konte and Assistant Professor Nick Feamster (both in CS), as well as Jaeyeon Jung at Intel Research, won the Best Paper Award at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM). PAM focuses on research and practical applications of network measurement and analysis techniques. The paper, which studies the infrastructure that scammers use to host phishing and scam attacks on the Internet, was presented April 3 at the conference in Seoul, Korea, and can be read here.
Ph.D. Student Paper Wins Supercomputing Award
Ph.D. student Virat Agarwal (CSE) is the first author of a paper that won the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) 2009 Award. The 24th ISC, to be held June 23-26 in Hamburg, Germany, is the premier supercomputing event in Europe. Agarwal’s paper, “Faster FAST: Multicore Acceleration of Streaming Financial Data,” focuses on accelerating streaming applications and is the result of research collaborations between Georgia Tech (Agarwal and CSE Professor David Bader) and IBM Research.
Software Group to Present Three Papers at SIGSOFT Symposium
Three papers by the Software Engineering group (SE@GT) have been accepted to the upcoming ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, which is the top conference in its specific area of software testing and analysis.
“Fault Localization and Repair for Java Runtime Exceptions,” by S. Sinha, Hina Shah, Carsten Goerg, S. Jiang, Mijung Kim and Mary Jean Harrold
“PENUMBRA: Automatically Identifying Failure-Relevant Inputs Using Dynamic Tainting,” by James Clause and Alex Orso
“Precise Interface Identification to Improve Testing and Analysis of Web Applications,” by William Halfond, Saswat Anand and Alex Orso
The symposium is scheduled for July in Chicago.
IC Has Major Presence at SIGGRAPH 2009
Four papers authored or co-authored by interactive computing faculty and students have been accepted to the ACM SIGGRAPH 2009 conference, to be held Aug. 3-7 in New Orleans.
“Dextrous Manipulation From a Grasping Pose,” by Karen Liu
“Performance-Based Control Interface for Character Animation,” by Satoru Ishigaki, Timothy White, Victor Zordan and Karen Liu
“Deforming Meshes That Split and Merge,” by Chris Wojtan, Nils Thuerey, Markus Gross and Greg Turk
“Physically Guided Liquid Surface Modeling from Videos,” by Huamin Wang, Miao Liao, Qing Zhang, Ruigang Yang and Greg Turk
CHIstory Video Wins Golden Mouse Award at CHI 2009
A video co-produced by IC graduate students Kurt Luther and Erika Poole won the Golden Mouse Award for the Best Entertaining Video at the CHI 2009 conference. “CHIstory” is set 100 years in the future and offers a playfully imaginary look back at the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). “CHIstory” was one of 25 videos accepted for the CHI 2009 Video Showcase by a jury of HCI experts.
Grad Student Wins Fellowship
Graduate student Anna Mansour (IC) has won a 2009-2010 Selected Professions Fellowship (for graduate students in Computer/Information Sciences) from the American Association for University Women (AAUW). Mansour and Associate Professor Ashwin Ram (IC) also co-authored a paper titled “MunchCrunch: A Game to Learn Healthy-Eating Heuristics” that was accepted to the 8th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (IDC 2009), to be held in Como, Italy, June 3-5.
Spring 2008 Faculty Election Results
Four College of Computing faculty members were elected to leadership positions in the Georgia Tech Faculty Senate during recent elections. These results were approved by the Executive Board on April 15. The four are:
Faculty Honors Committee: Gregory Abowd (IC)
Undergraduate Curriculum Committee: Milena Mihail (CS)
Graduate Committee: Alex Gray (IC) and Leo Mark (CS)
Software Engineering Grad Student Wins Conference Awards
William Halfond, a Ph.D. student in computer science focusing on software engineering, won a Best Presentation Award at the International Conference on Software Testing (ICST) in Denver, April 1-4. Halfond presented the paper, “Penetration Testing with Improved Input Vector Identification,” which he co-authored with Associate Professor Alessandro Orso (CS) and fellow grad student Shauvik Roy Choudhary. The conference is one of the premier conferences on software testing. The paper was based on research Halfond conducted as part of his dissertation work on improving penetration testing by using interface analysis. The analysis he developed resulted in a technique that can discover three to four times as many vulnerabilities as previous techniques. Halfond also won a Best Student Presentation on another paper he co-authored with Orso at the Foundations of Software Engineering conference in November 2008.
Postdoc Speaks on Case-Based Planning, Organizes Conference
Santi Otanon, a postdoctoral researcher working with Associate Professor Ashwin Ram (IC), gave two invited talks in March and is co-organizing a conference to be held in May. Otanon spoke about “Case-Based Planning for Real-Time Strategy Games” at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, on March 20 and at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania on March 30. He also was invited by the Navy Research Lab in Washington, D.C., to give the same talk on Jan. 26. Otanon and Ian Watson from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, are organizing the Special Track in Case-Based-Reasoning for the conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS 2009) conference, May 19-21 on Sanibel Island in Florida.
Ph.D. Student Presents Research of Game Design Tools
Mark Nelson, a Ph.D. student in artificial intelligence, presented a paper he co-wrote with adviser Michael Mateas (former assistant professor in IC, now at University of California, Santa Cruz) at the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2009) conference, April 26-30. In the paper, “A Requirements Analysis for Videogame Design Support Tools,” the authors analyze what a design-support tool for game design would require in order to be useful in helping designers reason about game mechanics and gameplay.
Bader Keynote Speaker at Multicore Conference
David Bader (CSE) is giving the keynote address at the 2nd Annual Carleton Cell BE Programming Workshop (CCPW) in Ottawa, Canada, May 13-15. As multicore desktop computers become ubiquitous, programming techniques are increasingly important to achieving performance goals, he said. Expertise in multicore programming represents a significant gap that needs to be addressed. The CCPW features tutorial sessions, hands-on labs, keynote presentations, poster presentations and scientific talks intended to address that gap.
CS and CSE Researchers Collaborate on Conference Paper
A paper co-authored by assistant professors Nick Feamster (CS) and Alex Gray (CSE), graduate student Shuang Hao (CS) and two other computer scientists has been accepted at the 18th USENIX Security Symposium, Aug. 10–14 in Montreal, Canada. The paper, “Detecting Spammers with SNARE: Spatio-Temporal Network-Level Automated Reputation Engine,” investigates ways to infer the reputation of an email sender based solely on network-level features, without looking at the contents of a message. The paper can be viewed online. |