CSE graduate student Vassilios Christopoulos’ paper, co-written with CSE Associate Professor Paul Schrater, was recently accepted for publication in the highly prestigious journal PLoS Computational Biology. The journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal featuring works of exceptional significance that further our understanding of living systems at all scales through the application of computational methods.

For their paper, titled  "Grasping Objects with Environmentally Induced Position Uncertainty," they studied human strategies in grasping objects with position uncertainty and compared human performance against normative predictions. The results provide the first demonstration
that humans compensate for uncertainty in a complex purposive task.

CSE graduate student Rohit Gupta was selected to present his work on "Colorectal cancer despite colonoscopy" in the clinical science plenary session in DDW 2009, an international conference on gastroenterology recently held in Chicago and attended by more than 15,000 GI professionals. Out of 4,475 submissions, Gupta's work was among the only 4 selected based on a rigorous 4-stage selection process and audience appeal, for presentation at the clinical science plenary session.

Gupta also received the student abstract prize for this work, which included a certificate and an honorarium of $1000. Gupta was a Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology (BICB) supported graduate trainee co-advised by Dr. Vipin Kumar (CSE, UMN) and Dr Piet C. de Groen (Mayo Clinic).

CSE graduate student Jie Chen was one of 3 winners chosen for the 2009 SIAM Student Paper Prize for his paper “On the Tensor SVD and the Optimal Low Rank Orthogonal Approximation of Tensors.” The award will be given at the 2009 SIAM annual meeting July 6-10 in Denver Colorado, and includes a $1,000 cash prize. The paper was co-authored by Professor Yousef Saad.

CSE Ph.D. student Esha Nerurkar was one of the 3 finalists for the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'09) in Kobe, Japan. ICRA is the main international conference on robotics and automation. This year there were 1624 submissions and 699 papers were selected for publication. Nerurkar’s advisor is Stergios Roumeliotis.

CSE grad student Andy Exley was selected to receive the John Bowers Excellence in Teaching Assistance Award. Andy has been a TA for several years, primarily for the Data Structures in Java course.  Exley is a PhD student working with William Schuler. He is also a past president of CSGSA who has been active in all campus student government. Exley can be found going on grueling punishment trips with Reid Priedhorsky or working on his thesis in the Natural Language Processing lab.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press profiled a department project, Cyclopath, in separate stories July 19. The project is led by Ph.D. student Reid Priedhorsky and supervised by Professor Loren Terveen.

Cyclopath is a geowiki designed for bicyclists. Cyclists can collaboratively add, remove, modify roads and other bike facilities block-by-block, in addition to editing points of interest and annotations on map items. Cyclopath also provides personalized routing advice based on up-to-the minute user editing. The site is intended as a research tool to study online communities.

A forthcoming paper on the project, "Computational Geowikis: What, Why, and How" was nominated for Best Paper at the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, to be held November 8-12.

Other students working on the project are Michael Ludwig, Andrew Sheppard, and Fernando Torre.  For more information, visit cyclopath.org, the Star Tribune article titled ‘Biking website pools cyclists' expertise,’ and the Pioneer Press article titled ‘MapQuest for the cycling set.’

MinnPost.com, a Twin Cities newspaper and online news source, posted the recent CSE newsletter story about CSE professor Dan Boley's work on an ethanol project with chemical engineering professor Friedrich Srienc. The story also highlights the efforts of CSE graduate student Dimitrije Jevremovic, whose work is supported by a Traineeship Program award through the University of Minnesota's Biomedical Informatics and Computational Biology program.

For more information about this story, visit Can a car run on E.Coli?

CSE graduate student Brett Hemes recently finished work on a new tumbling robot as a result of his work with CSE professor Nikos Papanikolopoulos. The robot serves as a tool to demonstrate and test his research, aimed at producing generalized methods for controlling and designing tumbling robots. He demonstrated the robot at a workshop with representatives for the National Science Foundation and members of industry, hosted in the Digital Technology Center.

The robot can maneuver over challenging terrain, such as woodchips and pebbles, without getting stuck, because the body plays an active role in movement and provides capabilities not found in traditional robotic designs. The robot has a flat, triangle-shaped body and two legs it uses to lift itself out of the way of obstacles. CSE graduate student Duc Fehr co-authored a paper on the topic with Hemes, entitled “Motion Primitives for a Tumbling Robot,” which describes a method for discretizing the motion of tumbling robots into smaller pieces that are useful for motion planning. Their paper was accepted to the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems to be held September 22-26 in Nice, France. For more information about CSE robotics work, visit CSE robots.

The University of Minnesota’s Graduate School awarded CSE graduate students Yu (Jason) Gu and Faraz Mirzaei the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (DDF) for the 2008-2009 academic year.

Recipients of the 2008-2009 fellowship will receive a stipend of $22,000 for the academic year, plus full tuition for thesis credits. Candidates are nominated by their graduate program's Director of Graduate Studies. Approximately 75 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships are awarded annually. For more information, visit DDF.