Soumyadeep Chatterjee received the Best Student Paper Award at the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM) 2012 for his paper titled "Sparse Group Lasso: Consistency and Climate Applications" authored by Soumyadeep Chatterjee, Karsten Steinhaeuser, Arindam Banerjee, Snigdhansu Chatterjee and Auroop Ganguly. The paper proves statistical consistency bounds for estimators with hierarchical sparse regularizors and shows utility of using such estimators for high dimensional regression problems in climate science. Soumyadeep works on the NSF Expeditions in Computing project entitled "Understanding Climate Change: A Data Driven Approach." His adviser is Associate Professor Arindam Banerjee.

Jaya Kawale received the best graduate poster award at MinneWIC 2012 for the poster titled "A Graph Based Approach to Find Teleconnections in Climate Data" by Jaya Kawale, Vipin Kumar, Stefan Liess and Michael Steinbach. As part of the award Kawale received a scholarship to attend the 2012 Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing conference.

Graduate poster awards also went to went to Vanja Paunic for her poster titled "Discovery of Higher Level Structures from Biomarkers" by Vanja Paunic, Gang Fang, Wen Wang, Michael Steinbach and Vipin Kumar and to Puja Das for her poster entitled "Online Optimization and application to Portfolio Selection" by Puja Das and Arindam Banerjee. All poster awards included a Symantec software package.

Computer Science graduate student Aditya Pal, working with  Rosta Farzan, Joseph A. Konstan and Robert E. Kraut, won the James Chen Best Student Paper Award for "Early Detection of Potential Experts in Question Answering Communities" at the 19th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP) 2011, held in Girona, Spain, July 2011.

The award carries a prize money of $1000.

Associate Professor Victoria Interrante and her team of students and researchers were recently awarded a best paper award at the 2010 Joint Virtual Reality Conference. The paper, titled "A Further Assessment of Factors Correlating with Presence in Immersive Virtual Environments," was written by Lane Phillips, Victoria Interrante, Michael Kaeding, Brian Ries, and Lee Anderson.

Graduate students Anastasios Mourikis and Nikolas Trawny, with Associate Professor Stergios Roumeliotis, and JPL/NASA colleagues A.E. Johnson, A. Ansar, L. Matthies have won the IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award at the annual IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Their paper, "Vision-Aided Inertial Navigation for Spacecraft Entry, Descent, and Landing," received the award based on technical merit, originality, potential impact on the field, clarity of presentation, and practical significance for applications.

Graduate student Vijay Adhikari recently won the Best Paper at the highly selective USENIX/ACM Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'10) for his paper "Reverse Traceroute." The paper was co-written with Ethan Katz-Bassett, University of Washington; Harsha V. Madhyastha, University of California, San Diego; Colin Scott, Justine Sherry, Peter van Wesep, Thomas Anderson, and Arvind Krishnamurthy, University of Washington.

CS&E graduate students Katherine Panciera and Reid Priedhorsky, along with Associate Professor Loren Terveen and IBM researcher Thomas Erickson received an Honorable Mention Best Paper Award for their paper "Lurking? Cyclopaths? A Quantitive Lifecycle Analysis of User Behavior in a Geowiki."

The group will receive the award at the upcoming ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), in Atlanta, April 10-15, 2010.

CS&E Professor John Riedl and his student, Michael D. Ekstrand, received a best paper award for their work "rv you're dumb: Identifying Discarded Work in Wiki Article History" at WikiSym 2009, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, in Orlando, Florida. Forty-five papers were submitted, of which 16 were accepted (36%), and one named Best Paper.

CS&E Assistant Professor Abhishek Chandra and his student Dave Boutcher received a best paper award for their paper "Does Virtualization Make Disk Scheduling Passé?" at HotStorage'09: SOSP Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems in Big Sky, MT. The paper was one of three best papers at the workshop, for which the acceptance rate was 21%.

CS&E Associate Professor Jon Weissman and his colleagues received a best paper award at the 10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid 2009) in Banff, Alberta, for their paper "Critical Perspectives on Large-Scale Distributed Applications and Production Grids."  The acceptance rate for the conference was 24%