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.

Congratulations to CS&E graduate student Gang Fang who was awarded the Walter Barnes Lang Fellowship. The $2500 fellowship was awarded by the Institute for Engineering in Medicine.

Gang works in Department Head Vipin Kumar's bioinformatics lab. His research work on data mining helps researchers understand complex human diseases like cancer and diabetes through the analysis and integration of multiple types of biomedical data such as genomic, epigenetic, proteomic, metablomic and clinical data. The ongoing research in Kumar's lab are in close collaboration with department of genetics, medicine, phycology, psychiatry and nursing.

CS&E graduate student Ajay Joshi was awarded a 2010-2011 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DDF). The Fellowship is intended to enable Ph.D. candidates of particular promise to devote full-time effort to the research and writing of their dissertation during 2010-11.

Joshi's research is on the development of machine learning algorithms for improved understanding of image and video content, for applications like web image search, image and video analysis, and large scale image matching. The goal is to minimize human input in various kinds of image classification tasks that have traditionally required significant human supervision. Joshi's adviser is Professor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos.

Ph.D. student Joel A. Hesch has been selected as a recipient of the 2010 Honeywell Innovators Scholarship, which was awarded in conjunction with his participation in the Honeywell graduate internship program. The scholarship includes a $10,000 award.

Joel spent the summer months in the Communications, Navigation, and Surveillance group at Honeywell Aerospace, in Golden Valley, MN, where he developed techniques for reducing inertial drift during GPS-denied navigation. His contributions on IR&D projects advanced Honeywell’s IP and led directly to an application for a US patent.

Graduate student Justin Levandoski was chosen to receive an Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS-MN) Fellowship award. The award is for $5,000 per year for two years.

The ARCS Foundation is a national organization with chapters in 17 cities. Its members, all of whom are women, help their partner universities compete successfully for top scholars. In return, partner universities provide the chapters with outstanding speakers, opportunities to meet and talk with leading scientists and engineers, and tour facilities and laboratories not usually seen by the public.

Levandoski will be recognized at the ARCS-MN Open House at Eastcliff on June 22, 2010.