CS News Briefs

Congratulations to Hongning Wang, associate professor of computer science, on winning a prestigious National Science Foundation award for his research on online learning to rank, a modern machine learning technique that adaptively improves result rankings during its interactions with end users. Learn more about the grant.

Haifeng Xu, Alan Batson Career Enhancement Assistant Professor of Computer Science, has been awarded a Computing and Communication Foundations grant from the National Science Foundation: AF: SMALL: ALGORITHMIC PERSUASION: RE-CREATING THE SUCCESS OF MECHANISM DESIGN. The research project studies methods for using information to "regulate" an adversary's attack choices in order to thwart the attack and create enhanced security.

Aidong Zhang, William Wulf Faculty Fellow and interim chair of The Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop novel machine learning models that better analyze cancer data for targeted therapeutics.Zhang serves as principal investigator. Co-investigators are Stefan Bekiranov, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics in the UVA School of Medicine; and, Chongzhi Zang, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics and public health sciences in the UVA School of Medicine.

Felix Lin, associate professor of computer science, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant: Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Medium: Understanding and Strengthening Memory Security for Non-Volatile Memory. Persistent memory is one of promising post-Moore's Law technology that is expected to get into mainstream computing, from internet of things devices all the way to the cloud.

Lu Feng, assistant professor of computer science and engineering systems and environment, has been awarded a National Science Foundation grant under the new Designing Accountable Software Systems program: Collaborative Research: DASS: Accountable Software Systems for Safety-Critical Applications. Feng will be collaborating with Bryan H. Choi, who holds joint appointments with the College of Law and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University.

Panagiotis Apostolellis, computer science assistant professor, and Brad Campbell, assistant professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering, have been named co-investigators on an National Science Foundation grant: EAGER: Adaptive Digital Twinning: An Immersive Visualization Framework for Structural Cyber-Physical Systems. Apostolellis and Campbell are teamed with principal investigator Devin K.

Yuan Tian, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science has been awarded a National Science Foundation Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace grant: Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Toward safe, private, and secure home automation: from formal modeling to user evaluation. Tian's research aims to gain a deeper understanding of security and privacy risks from internet of things devices in smart homes and then develop methods to mitigate the threats using formal modeling and automated analysis tools.

Daniel G. Graham, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science, has announced the publication of his book, “Ethical Hacking: A Hands-on Introduction to Breaking In.”“Because so much of our productivity depends on technology, attacks on our technological infrastructure can have grave social and economic consequences. Understanding how to defend this infrastructure is not enough. We need more ethical hackers to help secure it,” Graham wrote in the book's introduction.

On August 17, 2021 Professor Andrew Grimshaw gave a talk in Rice Hall titled "The Role of Computation in Accelerating the Deployment of Renewable Energy Resources".

Jundong Li, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science, has earned research awards from Cisco and JP Morgan Chase.The Cisco award will support his research on developing fairness-aware machine learning algorithms and the JP Morgan Chase award will support his research on causal inference for financial applications.