CS Department Best Paper Awards Feed

Konstan, Riedl Receive James Chen Annual Award for Best Journal Article

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction (UMUAI), the Journal of Personalization Research has awarded Professors Joe Konstan and John Riedl the 2012 James Chen Annual Award for Best Journal Article for their paper Recommender Systems: from Algorithms to User Experience (UMUAI 22(1-2):101–123). The article was selected based on nominations from journal reviewers, editorial board members and guest editors, and a subsequent comparative review of the shortlisted papers by an award committee.

The James Chen Annual Award for Best Journal Article has been donated by the Chen family in commemoration of James R. Chen, a creative researcher in the area of user modeling and information retrieval, and twice a UMUAI author. The award carries a cash price of US$ 1,000.

ICDM Best Student Paper Award for Tian and Zhang

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Congratulations to Ze Tian and Huanan Zhang. Their paper, "Sparse Group Selection on Fused Lasso Components for Identifying Group-specific DNA Copy Number Variations," won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM). The ICDM conference is an established top conference for presenting the world's premier research in data mining. Their work in the paper introduced a novel computational model to discover cancerous genomic patterns for hidden patient subpopulations from DNA copy number change data. Ze graduated in 2012 and now works in the Bing group of Microsoft. Huanan is currently in the third-year of his PhD study. Their adviser is Assistant Professor Rui Kuang.

Best Paper Award for Nguyen

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Luan Nguyen, who won a best paper award at COLING 2012, in Mumbai, India. His paper, "Accurate Unbounded Dependency Recovery using Generalized Categorial Grammars" was co-authored by Marten Van Schijndel and William Schuler of Ohio State University. COLING is organized by the International Committee on Computational Linguistics.

Two Awards go to CS&E Students at ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS 2012

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Two CS&E students took prizes at the recent ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems in Los Angeles, California. Abdeltawab Hendawi won the Best Paper Award at the MobiGIS 2012 Workshop. His paper, "Predictive Spatio-Temporal Queries: A Comprehensive Survey and Future Directions," was co-authored with Professor Mohamed Mokbel.

Ph.D. student Saladi Rahul won first prize in the "Fast Forward Preview Session". For the session, authors of 60 poster papers, demos, and Ph.D. showcase papers were each given two minutes to share the highlights of their work. Rahul's paper, "Algorithms for Range-Skyline Queries," was co-authored by Professor Ravi Janardan.

Students Faghmous, Styles, and Mithal Win Best Student Paper Award

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Ph.D. students James Faghmous and Varun Mithal, along with undergraduate student Luke Styles won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2012 IEEE Conference on Intelligent Data Understanding (CIDU 2012) for their paper "EddyScan: A Physically Consistent Global Ocean Eddy Monitoring Application." In their work, Faghmous and colleagues were able to track ocean eddies (the oceanic analog of hurricanes in the atmosphere) on a global scale much more efficiently and accurately than existing methods. Monitoring global ocean eddy activity is crucial to understanding how salt, heat and nutrients are transported across the ocean as well as future marine biodiversity.

The paper was authored by James Faghmous, Luke Styles, Varun Mithal, Shyam Boriah, Stefian Liess, and Vipin Kumar in collaboration with Michel Mesquita and Vikebø Frode from Norway where Faghmous spent 5 months as part of an National Science Foundation (NSF) Nordic Research Opportunity Fellowship.

Ph.D. student Vanja Paunić Wins Best Paper Award

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Ph.D. student Vanja Paunić received the Best Paper Award for her paper "Prediction of HLA Genes from SNP Data and HLA Haplotype requencies" in the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining PhD Student Forum. The paper describes a novel approach to addressing the problem of HLA genes inference from single nucleotide polymorphism data. The paper was written by Vanja Paunić, Michael Steinbach, Martin Maiers and Vipin Kumar. As a part of the award Paunić will receive a financial support from the workshop. IEEE ICDM is one of the world's premier research conferences in data mining.

Best Student Paper Award for Cherian

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Ph.D. student Anoop Cherian received a Best Student Paper Award for his paper, “Robust Sparse Hashing” at the the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) in Orlando, Florida. The paper describes a robust image search algorithm based on the concept of sparse coding. The paper was written by Anoop Cherian, Vassilios Morellas and Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos. IEEE ICIP is one of the largest conferences in image processing.

Best Paper Award for Borbora and Srivastava

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Congratulations to Ph.D. student Zoheb Borbora and Professor Jaideep Srivastava for receiving a best paper award for their paper "User Behavior Modelling Approach for Churn Prediction in Online Games" at IEEE Social Computing 2012, held in Amsterdam. The Conference on Social Computing is the premier international forum for research on information and communication technologies that consider social context.

Best Student Paper Award for Chatterjee

Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 -0500

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.

Best Poster Award for Kawale

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Photo Courtesy of Diversity/Careers

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.