At the 2012 ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining held in February in Seattle, our research team of Adam Sadilek, Henry Kautz and Jeff Bigham received the Best Paper Award for the conference. The paper, entitled "Finding Your Friends and Following Them to Where You Are" was chosen from 75 papers presented at the conference.
Graduate student Adam Sadilek's recent work has focused on predicting a social network user's location by looking where their friends are. His work is featured in a recent publication by New Scientist magazine.
On Friday, 10/28, the Hajim School of Engineering held their second annual Pumpkin Design Contest during the October E-Social held in Goergen Hall. Representatives from each department carved pumpkins with a design that reflected their discipline. CSC's students Jon Hinkel and Xu Wang were judged to be the winners based on the current events theme of their pumpkin, dubbed "The Ghost of Steve Jobs". Last year our winning pumpkin entry was a Scribbler Robot that danced to the Monster Mash. Congratulations team!
Intel announced yesterday that the University of Rochester Department of Computer Science will be one of several university partners in its latest Science and Technology Center. Henry Kautz, chair of Computer Science, will lead UR's Pervasive Computing group.
Due to the efforts of Skylab 4 Astronaut Ed Gibson '59, University of Rochester became eligible for the first time this year to participate in the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation's program. As a result, UR Computer Science senior Darcey Riley became UR's first recipient of the $10,000 scholarship for exceptional students in science, math, engineering and technology. As a recipient of this scholarship, Darcey becomes a member of an elite group of 279 astronaut scholars who continue to mee
University of Rochester Alumnus and Astronaut Ed Gibson will be in Rochester on September 15th to present URCS senior Darcey Riley (AKA Halley Orshan) with the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation's check for $10,000. Please join us in celebrating this event in Hoyt Hall at 7PM on Thursday September 15th.
Prof. Jeff Bigham's VizWiz research team had made the news yet again. They have been featured in an article on BBC Mobile news.
Jeff Keesom graduated from URCS in '08, and completed a Masters in Software Engineering at RIT the following year. Currently, he is attending Syracuse University where he is pursuing a combined law degree and Master of Public Administration from the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, with a Certificate in Security Studies.
Rising senior Halley Orshan '12 (known in URCS as Darcey Riley) has been chosen one of the national winners of the 2011-2012 Astronaut Scholarship Foundation Scholar. Students throughout the STEM disciplines at the University of Rochester were nominated by their department chairs and a committee lead by Undergraduate Research Director Steven Manly selected two nominees from Rochester for the national competition. Darcey will receive $10,000, which will be presented to her this fall on campus by a yet unnamed astronaut. Further details of the astronaut's visit, talk an
UR CS graduate student Naushad UzZaman, a student of James Allen, was awarded 3rd place in the poster contest for Rochester's Center for Research Computing. Naushad's poster was entitled "Multimodal summarization for people with cognitive disabilities in reading, linguistic and verbal comprehension."