2007 Major Department Awards and Recognition

2007 Major Department Awards and Recognition

AUSTIN, Texas - August 29, 2007

UTCS is pleased to note a number of recent, significant awards and honors. The department is deeply honored by the peer and public recognition of our work.

• UTCS Chairman J Strother Moore was selected a Fellow of ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery.
• Professor Kathryn McKinley has been named a 2006 ACM Distinguished Scientist.
• On April 30, 2007, an event honored the unveiling of the TRIPS chip prototype that is the first on a roadmap leading to ultra-powerful, flexible processors implemented in nanoscale technologies. This technology is expected to have significant impact on the computing industry.
• Professor Simon Lam received the College of Natural Sciences Teaching Excellence Award in 2007.
• Professor Steve Keckler has been selected as a 2006-2007 President's Associates Teaching Excellence Award.
• Professor Kristen Grauman and Dr. Jaydeep Bardhan of Argonne National Laboratory have been named the 2007 Frederick A. Howes Scholars in Computational Science.
• Professors Mike Dahlin and Lorenzo Alvisi were awarded best paper award at the 2007 USENIX Annual Technical Conference. The paper "SafeStore: A Durable and Practical Storage System" was co-authored by Ramakrishna Kotla.
• At the Props for Profs Dinner sponsored by the Natural Sciences Council, the 2006-7 Advising Award for the college was presented to UTCS Senior Advisor Judith Quinney.
• Professor Adam Klivan's student Sasha Sherstov won the Best Student Paper Award at this year's IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity for his single-authored paper "Halfspace Matrices."
• Two UTCS students on a team of UT students won the statewide 2007 Social Innovation Competition, sponsored by the RGK Foundation, along with $50,000 in prize money. The winners were 1) "AccessAbility: Information that moves you." AccessAbility provides users with pedestrian-scale searchable maps, offering detailed accessibility features such as hill gradients, curb cuts, ramps, automatic door entrances and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms by Manasi Deshpande, Tarun Nimmagadda (CS), Mickey Ristroph (CS), Matt Stolhandske, Ahailie Thakkar.
• Jason Davis, Brian Kulis, Prateek Jain, Suvrit Sra and Professor Inderjit Dhillon won a a Best Student Paper Award on Information-Theoretic Metric Learning at the top machine learning conference (ICML).
• UTCS won two awards at the PLDI (Programming Language Design and Implementation), the compiler community's premier conference:
  1. Best Paper Award went to Ben Hardekopf and Professor Calvin Lin for "The Ant and the Grasshopper: Fast and Accurate Pointer Analysis for Millions of Lines of Code."
  2. Best Presentation Award went to Ben Hardekopf for "The Ant and the Grasshopper: Fast and Accurate Pointer Analysis for Millions of Lines of Code."
• Y.W.Wong (John) and Professor Ray Mooney won the Best Paper Award, "Learning Synchronous Grammars for Semantic Parsing with Lambda Calculus," at the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
• Professor Mike Dahlin and recent grad who is working at HP Labs, Praveen Yalagandula, won the best paper award at the July 2007 First IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems for “Shruti: A Self-Tuning Hierarchical Aggregation System.
• Mazda Ahmadi and Professor Peter Stone were awarded the Best Paper award (also known as the Scientific Challenge Award) at the 2007 RoboCup Symposium for the paper "Instance-Based Action Models for Fast Action Planning."