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.

The Goode Award was established to recognize achievement in the information-processing field-either a single contribution of theory, design, or technique of outstanding significance; or the accumulation of important contributions on theory or practice over an extended period.

Arvind was also recently elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He will be inducted into the 232-year-old academy at a ceremony on October 6, 2012 in Cambridge, Mass.

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.

Professor John Riedl has been named one of the 2012 Distinguished McKnight University Professorship award recipients for his work in “Recommender Systems for the Social Web.” He is one of five 2012 award winners to be honored by this designation and the fourth CS&E recipient.

The University of Minnesota selects Distinguished McKnight Professorship recipients as a way to highlight and reward the most notable faculty members at the mid-career level. The recipients are honored with the Distinguished McKnight University Professor title, which they hold for their University of Minnesota tenure, and a $100,000 grant to be spread across five years. The winners are selected based on their academic achievements, potential for future accomplishments in their field, and the extent to which their work has brought prominence to the University and a benefit to the broader community.

Chao is a junior pursuing a double major in genetics, cell biology and development in the College of Biological Sciences and computer science in the College of Science and Engineering. Following his undergraduate studies, he plans to pursue a doctorate in bioinformatics and possibly an M.D. with a future specialty in internal medicine. Working under the guidance of professor Chad Myers, he has researched mapping gene interaction networks in yeast and has extended these studies into an interaction network of human genes to predict possible protein interactions in humans.

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.

A student transcript (including overall GPA), a one-page resume with contact information, and a one-page description of the applicant's career goals are required. Submit your information as a single PDF file (file size of no more than 1 MB) to npapas@cs.umn.edu.

Scholarship winners will be notified by Monday, April 30, 2012.

The Computing Research Association, in consultation with the National Science Foundation (NSF), has appointed Professor Shashi Shekhar to the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council for a three-year term.

The CCC Council includes 18 leaders of the computing research community from industry, government and academia. The council directs and oversees the operations of the CCC, which provides scientific leadership and vision to computing research and future large-scale computing research projects. It helps identify major research opportunities and establish grand challenges for the computing field. It also creates venues for community participation in developing a vision for computing research and in launching new research activities. For more details, please see the CCC Press Release.

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.