CS&E Ph.D. student Guoquan Huang was selected as one the recipients of the 2011 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad. The award was established to encourage research excellence and to recognize the achievements of Chinese students abroad. The awardees are selected from all areas of study in any country. This year's award was presented to 495 students worldwide (of more than 440,000 Chinese students studying abroad across the globe in 2011). Huang will receive a $6,000 cash prize and a certificate at a ceremony in September of this year. Huang's advisor is Stergios Roumeliotis.

The Mary A. McEvoy Award for Public Engagement and Leadership is given annually to one graduate and one professional student. Candidates must demonstrate exceptional dedication and assistance that benefits an individual, group or community, or strengthens a democratic way of life. In the ten years since the award's inception, Faghmous is the first CS&E student to receive the award. Faghmous will officially receive the award on April 30, 2012 and will speak at the President's Award Banquet.

CSE Ph.D. student James Faghmous has been selected to receive a 2012 President's Student Leadership and Service Award (PSLSA) for services rendered as co-founder and CEO of MuslimBuddy, Inc., a Minneapolis-based startup nonprofit. Faghmous' organization employs innovative approaches to transform how communities and organization collaborate to create collective social change. In addition to helping a dozen nonprofits amplify their social-impact, MuslimBuddy, Inc. in collaboration with several organizations, offered a free nonresident alien tax clinic at the University of Minnesota. The sole clinic for nonresidents in the state.

The PSLSA is a nomination-only award open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Faghmous will be recognized by President Kaler at an official awards banquet on April, 30, 2012.

Ph.D. student Qingquan Zhang recently won a best paper award for his paper "Collaborative Scheduling in Highly Dynamic Environments Using Error Inference" at the International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks (MSN 2011). His paper was selected from 135 papers submitted.

Zhang's work was completed under supervision by Associate Professor Tian He, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Tennessee Knoxville and Singapore University of Technology and Design.

A group of three CS Ph.D. students is selected as finalists in SIGMOD 2011 Programming contest.  The group is led by a first-year Ph.D student Ahmed Eldawy with Emery Mizero and Mohamed Khalefa as members. The group is advised by Professor Mohamed Mokbel. The group is awarded a $4,000 award to attend ACM SIGMOD 2011 in Athens, June 2011. The SIGMOD programming contest is sponsored by NSF and Microsoft. The task for this contest is to implement a high-throughput main-memory index that uses flash-based SSDs for durability. Details about the SIGMOD programming contest are available here: Third Annual SIGMOD Programming Contest

Faghmous is currently working on developing novel machine learning algorithms to study climate change and its effects on Atlantic hurricanes.

The NSF NRO program is a competitive grant open to NSF graduate research fellows. The NSF covers relocation costs, while the Research Council of Norway will provide a stipend for the duration of the visit. Faghmous, who is also the co-founder and CEO of the local nonprofit, MuslimBuddy, Inc., will begin his visit in September 2011.