Emma Lurie ’19, a CS and Chinese language and culture major at Wellesley, was recognized as a Runner Up in the Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher awards. Emma’s work in the Cred Lab with CS faculty member Eni Mustafaraj was previously featured here.
Category: Awards/Honors (Page 1 of 2)
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Eni Mustafaraj was awarded the highly competitive National Science Foundation CAREER grant for early-career faculty in support of her work on “Signals for Evaluating the Credibility of Web Sources and Advancing Web Literacy.” The 5-year $460,610 grant will support Eni’s work with several student researchers under her leadership in the Wellesley Cred Lab.
Eni’s project will identify and implement signals about online sources that will help users assess their credibility (should you believe what this source is writing about climate science or gender equality?) These signals can be used to augment search results, for example in Google. A concrete example in one of Eni’s blog posts uses the metaphor of “nutrition labels” to explain this augmentation.
Wellesley Cred Lab, Spring 2018 outing
According to the SRC website:
“Held every spring, SURA’s annual conference serves as a forum where undergraduates from all over the country can present their work, connect with other researchers, and hear from distinguished leaders in the research community. Students who share their findings accordingly will receive valuable feedback from the students, alumni, and faculty members in attendance—feedback that will help them develop their interests further or redirect their efforts altogether. Students currently not participating in research may find a project that inspires them to explore an idea of their own. In this fashion, the conference will facilitate the exchange of information that is necessary for intellectual advancement in today’s highly interconnected society.”
This year about 10% of the posters at the conference won that award. We are very pleased to have Hannah’s poster picked out of about 100 posters this year!
Christine Bassem, Lecturer in Computer Science, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to study “Mobility Coordination of the Crowds in Mobile Crowd Sensing Platforms.” The grant of $154,434 will support Christine’s work with student researchers on the intersection of algorithms, systems, mobile computing, and social computing.
Coordinated mobility depends on two areas: the mechanisms via which tasks/routes are assigned to agents; and the mechanisms via which agents are compensated for conformance, creating a rich set of problems in the fields of optimization problems, graph and data mining, and crowd economics. This project contributes towards the advancement of mobile crowd sensing for solving larger problems, with a great impact on smart cities initiatives, and the advancement of Internet of Things solutions.
Valerie Zhao ’18 was recognized with an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards. Valerie’s summer research was previously featured here. Valerie is currently pursuing research on the design of dynamic binary instrumentation tools for analyzing software at the machine code level, advised by Ben Wood.
Valerie Zhao ’18 and Ben Wood participated in SPLASH 2017, the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming Languages, Applications: Software for Humanity, in Vancouver, BC, in late October. SPLASH is an umbrella for several conferences and workshops in the area of programming languages.
Valerie won 3rd prize in the undergraduate category of the Student Research Competition, where she presented a poster and talk on her summer research work, Abstracting Resource Effects, undertaken at Carnegie Mellon University with Darya Melicher, Jonathan Aldrich, and Alex Potanin. Valerie’s collaborator Darya Melicher, a PhD student at CMU, presented more of their work at the OCAP workshop. Their work introduces a novel effect system that supports rigorous checking of how programs use system resources in a security-focused programming language.
Ben gave a talk on his OOPSLA paper, Instrumentation Bias for Dynamic Data Race Detection, with collaborators from Google, The Ohio State University, and the University of Washington. Their work introduced a software system for accurately detecting data races, a problematic type of concurrent programming error. The analysis helps eliminate a source of performance overhead in error detection by exploiting properties of common program patterns.
Earlier in October, Ben’s collaborator gave a talk on their paper, PARSNIP: Performant Architecture for Race Safety with No Impact on Precision, at the 50th ACM/IEEE Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), in Cambridge. This work, with collaborators at U. Penn, designed efficient hardware support for data race detection that, combined with software techniques, could eventually provide always-on concurrency error detection much like modern memory-safe languages provide explicit runtime exceptions for null dereferences or array bounds errors.
In April, Wellesley CS Lecturer Christine Bassem was selected in a highly competitive process as a member of the inaugural class of the new ACM Future of Computing Academy. Christine and fellow ACM-FCA members traveled to San Francisco in June to join Turing Award winners and others for the 50th anniversary of the ACM Turing Award. The ACM-FCA members will take a prominent role in shaping the future of the ACM and the broader computing field, building connections between academia and industry.
Congratulations to Christine on this well-earned honor!
Madeleine Barowsky ’18, a rising senior majoring in CS and Math at Wellesley, is one of this year’s winners of the Computing Research Association‘s competitive Scholarships for Women Studying Information Security (SWSIS). Madeleine plans to attend graduate school to pursue her passion for computer security and cryptography.
Congratulations Madeleine!
Wellesley students have a good track record with this honor: Nick Manfredi ’15 received the award in 2014.
CS and MAS faculty and senior majors and minors gathered at a luncheon in the Alumnae Ballroom to celebrate the red Class of 2016. This year, we look forward to graduating 43 CS majors, 11 CS minors, and 18 MAS majors!
The CS department presented awards to seniors. Jenny Wang received the Spirit Award for promoting CS community. Tiffany Ang and Jenny Wang were recognized for their co-leadership of the student CS Club. Sam Mincheva received the Academic Award. Kim Asenbeck and Naomi Day received the Rhys and Laurel Price Jones Team Leadership Award, established by former colleague Rhys Price Jones and his wife Laurel.
Congrats Class of 2017!
Two Wellesley alums affiliated with the Computer Science department were awarded prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowships to support their graduate studies. Several other Wellesley alums also received fellowships.
Su Lin Blodgett ’15 majored in Math and minored in CS after she discovered a passion for CS late during her time at Wellesley. She is now a PhD student at UMass studying the use of statistical text analysis to answer social science questions. She gave a Wellesley CS colloquium talk on her recent work last fall.
Emily Ahn ’16 majored in Cognitive and Linguistics Sciences with a CS concentration and completed an undergraduate honors thesis building a foreign accent classifier with Sravana Reddy. She is now studying language technologies at Carnegie Mellon University.
Congrats to Su Lin and Emily!