CS Department News Feed

CS&E Faculty and Alumni Featured in Twin Cities Business Journal

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

A recent article on big data in the Twin Cities Business Journal features the work of CS&E alumni Prasanna Desikan and Robert Cooley and Professor Jaideep Srivastava. Desikan is senior scientific advisor for the Center for Healthcare Research & Innovation at Allina Health System in Minneapolis, and Cooley is chief technology officer for OptiMine Software, Inc. Cooley and Desikan both received their Ph.D.s from the University of Minnesota.

The article, "The Many Uses of Big Data," discusses the overwhelming volume of data that is being created, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, and how that data is being used in healthcare, policing and multiplayer online games. Read the full article on the Twin Cities Business Journal website.

Professor Joe Konstan selected for 2013 SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award.

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0600

Professor Joe Konstan has been selected to receive the 2013 SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award. The SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award goes to individuals who have contributed to the growth of SIGCHI in a variety of capacities, and honors individuals who have provided extended services to the community at large over a number of years. Professor Konstan will be honored at the SIGCHI Awards Banquet held on Sunday, April 28, 2013 at CHI 2013, and in the SIGCHI President's Welcome.

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.

2012 INFORMS ISS Design Science Award for Collins, Gini, Schrater

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0600

John Collins, Maria Gini, Alok Gupta, and Paul Schrater together with Wolfgang Ketter of Erasmus University have received a 2012 INFORMS ISS Design Science Award for their work Design of Automated Agents Capable of Recognizing and Forecasting the Economic Environment. The purpose of the Design Science Award of the INFORMS Information Systems Society (ISS) is to promote and recognize research efforts centered on the design and realization of innovative information technology (IT) artifacts.

Judges for the award commented, "This work is outstanding. The authors have combined design science principles and economic theory to design and evaluate specific artifacts but also to develop “design theory” for software agents. The evaluation is well-conceived and convincing." The full annoucement can be found here.

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.

Student team qualifies for ACM-ICPC World Finals

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

A University of Minnesota team has qualified for the 2013 ACM-ICPC World Finals sponsored by IBM. Team Inazuma 0b11 members Jonathan Hsiao, Lihua Zhang, and Yuan Li will be traveling to St. Petersburg, Russia, where the competition will be held June 30 through July 4, 2013 at the National Research University ITMO. This is the second consecutive year that this University of Minnesota team has advanced to the World Finals.

Konstan Appointed Co-Director of SOBACO

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Professor Joe Konstan has been appointed co-director of the University-wide Social Media and Business Analytics Collaborative (SOBACO). SOBACO is an interdisciplinary University of Minnesota research collaborative housed at the Carlson School of Management. It received funding from President Kaler and Provost Hanson with the aim of positioning the University of Minnesota at the knowledge frontier of the intersection between social media and business/societal problems. SOBACO researchers work at the cutting edge of econometric, computational and experimental methodologies with the hope of drawing of causal inferences or strong predictions, as the case may be, from large-scale network and non-network data. Konstan, together with his Carlson School of Management counterpart, Professor Ravi Bapna, will work to further the research, education, and outreach mission of SOBACO.

Konstan Elevated to IEEE Fellow

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Professor Joe Konstan has been elevated to the grade of Fellow by IEEE. Professor Konstan was recognized for his contributions to human-computer interaction and social media applications. IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this prestigious grade elevation.

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.