2019 CS Department Awards

On April 29, the Department of Computer Sciences held its annual Computer Sciences Majors and Awards Lunch in the Symphony Room at the Gordon Dining and Events Center.  Awards were presented in the following categories:

Undergraduate Awards
Programming Competitions
Best Paper Awards
External Graduate Student Fellowships and Awards
UW Awards
Industry Research Awards
UW Vilas Awards
External Faculty Awards
UW CS Internal Awards
Golden Brick Awards

Congratulations to all the awardees!

Undergraduate Awards

Undergrads completing a Senior Honors Thesis (advisor in parentheses)

  • Peilin Yu (Mark Craven)
  • Abhay Venkatesh (Vikas Singh)
  • Songwong Tasneeyapant (Vikas Singh)
  • Tavishi Gupta (Vikas Singh)
  • Thomas Powers IV (Bilge Mutlu)

Scholarship awards to undergrad students from the College of Letters & Science

  • Ruth Cesar Heymann: Gerald W. and Tui G. Hedstrom Scholarship
  • Mohamed Wane: Theodore Herfurth Sophomore Scholarship
  • Connor Deyoung: Florence Waste Pulver Scholarship
  • Houqi Li: College of Letters & Science General Scholarship – Sophomores
  • Omjaa Rai: Margaret E. and Allard Smith Undergraduate Scholarship
  • Jordan Bain: David H. Durra Scholarship
  • Brandon Radzom: David H. Durra Scholarship
  • Christopher DuPre: David H. Durra Scholarship
  • Taijing Chen: Margaret E. and Allard Smith Undergraduate Scholarship
  • Wei Hao: Ralph B. Abrams Scholarship
  • Zhaoqi Li: Ralph B. Abrams Scholarship
  • Eric Maccoux: Fearn Cook Low Scholarship
  • Eric Maccoux: Phil and Kit Blake WI Idea Scholarship for Computer Sciences
  • Sichao Yang: Jay C. Halls Scholarship

Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowships (Advisor in parentheses)

  • Dasong Gao, Computer Sciences and Mathematics (Kevin Eliceiri)
  • Pumeng Lyu, Applied Mathematics, Engineering, & Physics and Computer Sciences (Robert McDermott)
  • Haiyang Zheng, Biochemistry and Computer Sciences (Philip Romero)

Phi Beta Kappa

  • Jordan Bain
  • Xuanxuan Ge
  • Carolyn Hasselkus
  • Shangfeng Jin
  • Zhaoqi Li
  • Raizel Lieberman
  • Zhichao Ma
  • Theodore Milton Montalbano
  • Neil Perry
  • Tom Powers
  • Madeleine Kathleen Roberts
  • Mitchell John Schaller
  • Yining Wang
  • Yuhan Xie
  • Yien Xu

Elected but didn’t accept:

  • Matthew Cargille
  • Yongnan Che
  • Youmin Han
  • Nathan Christopher Kiraly
  • Yuanchen Li
  • Dillon Charles O’Leary
  • Jit Patil
  • Anna Rusk
  • Lin Su
  • Yuqi Wei
  • Matthew Hermann Westphall
  • Mark Wiemer
  • Gaowei Xu
  • Sichao Yang
  • Zonghao Zou

Student Research Competitions

Rong Pan won the undergraduate student research competition at the 2018 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (Advisor: Loris D’Antoni)

Programming Competitions

  • Jordan Henkel (CS graduate student), Shuvendu Lahiri (from Microsoft Research), Ben Liblit, and Tom Reps won CodRep, an international competition on machine learning on source code
  • International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), a.k.a. the ACM Programming Competition UW teams took 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th, 10th, 12th, 25th, and 31st place among 209 teams in the regionals.
    • 31st place team B trees (William Huang, Zhichun Huang, Andrew Lien)
    • 25th place team Rookie (Junda Chen, Xinyang Hu, Haoran Li)
    • 12th place team Team Badger (Sihan Liu, Dawanit Satitsumpun, Yuhan Xie)
    • 10th place team Kugelblitz (Jakub Dargaj, Xiating Ouyang, Xiaoyang Zhang)
    • 9th place team int main() (Suyan Qu, Zitong Zhan, Wanxiang Zhong)
    • 5th place team O(Y^3) (Dung Viet Bui, Yuanchen Li, Yi Rong)
    • 4th place team go_badger (Varun Batra, Vibhor Goel, Joshua Mathews)
    • Team dauntless (Shirui Chen, Zeyuan He, Bryan Jin) placed 3rd and advanced to the World Finals in Porto, Portugal, and obtained an honorable mention
    • Team Coaches: Ziyi Zhang, Jinman Zhao, and Prof. Dieter Van Melkebeek

Best Paper Awards

(and other similar recognition of research papers by members of the CS Department)

  • Sizhuo Ma, Brandon Smith, and Mohit Gupta,
    “3D Scene Flow from 4D Light Field Gradients”
    (Sizhuo is a PhD student, Brandon was a post-doc with Mohit)
    Invited to the Int. Journal of Computer Vision special issue on Best Papers of European Conference on Computer Vision 2018.
  • Samuel Yeom, Irene Giacomelli, Matt Fredrikson, and Somesh Jha,
    “Privacy Risk in Machine Learning: Analyzing the Connection to Overfitting”
    received an IEEE CSF Distinguished Paper Award at the 2018 Computer Security
    Foundations Symposium (CSF)
  • David Porfirio, Allie Sauppe, Aws Albarghouthi, and Bilge Mutlu,
    “Authoring and verifying human-robot interactions”
    received the best paper award at the 2018 Symposium on User Interface Software
    and Technology (UIST)
  • Tony Nowatzki, Vinay Gangadhar, and Karu Sankaralingam,
    “Exploring the Potential of Heterogeneous Von Neumann/Dataflow Execution Models”
    CACM Research Highlight (to appear in the June 2019 issue)
  • Paul Barford and Steve Wright along with collaborators
    Joseph Chabarek, Joel Sommers, Cristian Estan, and David Tsiang
    received the IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Award for 2019
    for the paper “Power Awareness in Network Design and Routing”

External Graduate Student Fellowships and Awards

Fellowships

  • Michael Davies received an NSF Graduate Fellowship
  • Aishwarya Ganesan received a Facebook Fellowship
  • Daniel Rakita received a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship

Awards

  • Aishwarya Ganesan was selected to attend the Rising Stars in EECS Workshop at MIT
  • Ramnatthan Alagappan was named the Best Shadow Program Committee Reviewer for EuroSys 2019

UW Awards

Capstone PhD Teaching Awards

  • Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj (Ph.D. candidate in Computer Sciences and Education)

University Housing Outstanding Instructors

University Housing program to honor outstanding instructors through student nominations (https://www.housing.wisc.edu/residence-halls/academics/honored-instructors/)
In Fall 2018 they recognized 3 of our faculty associates:

  • Gary Dahl
  • Jim Skrentny
  • Jim Williams

Industry Research Awards

  • Loris D’Antoni was a Finalist for an Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship
  • Loris D’Antoni received a Facebook Testing and Verification research award
  • Justin Hsu received a Facebook Testing and Verification research award

University of Wisconsin Vilas Awards

  • Eftychios Sifakis: Vilas Early Investigator
  • Jignesh Patel: Vilas Associate

External Faculty Awards

  • Tim Theisen was awarded a National Appointment Number in the National Ski Patrol “National Appointments have long been a staple of the NSP, and recognize a patroller who demonstrates leadership, good judgment and character, and showcases extraordinary service to the NSP.”
  • Jignesh Patel’s spinoff DataChat won the information technology award at the 15th annual Governor’s Business Plan Contest
  • Paul Barford was named a Distinguished Alumnus by the Boston University Computer Science Department
  • Mohit Gupta helped Prof. Tomislav Pribanic from the University of Zagreb obtain a Fulbright Research Fellowship for Pribanic to visit the UW CS Department next year
  • Suman Banerjee was named an ACM Distinguished Member
  • Michael Ferris was awarded a Simons Fellowship in the Isaac Newton Institute at the University of Cambridge for Spring 2019
  • Mark Hill was named Chair of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC)
  • Matt Sinclair received Honorable Mention for the ACM SIGARCH/IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award
  • Justin Hsu was a co-recipient of the ACM SIGPLAN John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award
  • Andrea and Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau were the joint recipients of the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award for “outstanding leadership, innovation, and impact in storage and computer systems research”

UW CS Internal Awards

Summer Research Assistantships (Advisors in parentheses)

  • Yin (Hugh) Liu (Yingyu Liang)
  • Mehmet Furkan Demirel (Yingyu Liang)
  • Yufei Wang (Yingyu Liang)
  • Samuel Jackson (Aws Albarghouthi and Loris D’Antoni)
  • Yiding Chen (Jerry Zhu)
  • Yutian Tao (Eftychios Sifakis)
  • Shyam Murthy (Guri Sohi)

David DeWitt Undergraduate Scholarship ($8,000)

  • Ali Zaidi

Graduate Student Instructor Award

  • Aditya Barve

Klug NCR Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in Database Systems

  • Shaleen Deep

Landweber NCR Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in Distributed Systems

  • Yanfang Le

Cisco Distinguished Graduate Fellowship

  • Tianyu Liu

UW CS Graduate Student Research Award

  • Junaid Khalid
  • Honorable Mention: Ram Alagappan

UW CS Department Service Award

  • Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, AnHai Doan, and Gurindar Sohi
    “for their creative and tireless work to create a School of
    Computing, Data, and Information Sciences at UW-Madison”

Golden Brick Awards

In addition to the honorees above, many in the department received “golden brick” awards designed to recognized the many unsung tasks that go on the in the department that are critical to making it an outstanding place to study, work, and conduct research.

Click here to read why each honoree was chosen.

The following are “golden brick” recipients:

  • Aishwarya Ganesan (graduate student)
  • Deb Deppeler (faculty associate)
  • Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau (faculty)
  • Isabella Luo (undergraduate)
  • Karen Barrett-Wilt (communications coordinator)
  • Andrew Kuemmel (faculty associate)
  • Kyle Wang (undergraduate)
  • Lance Potter (department administrator)
  • Mollie Stolbov (undergraduate advisor)
  • Pratyush Mahapatra (graduate student)
  • Trish Rentner (assistant to the chair/receptionist)
  • Shawn Zhong (undergraduate)
  • Stacey Sykes (PMP and capstone coordinator)
  • Ziyi Zhang (undergraduate)
  • Angela Thorp (graduate program coordinator)
  • David Merrell (graduate student)
  • Bart Miller (faculty) and Elisa Heymann (instructional staff)
  • Michael White (undergraduate) and Jeremy McMahan (graduate student)
  • Mark Mansi (graduate student)
  • Alexi Brooks (graduate student)
  • Hilary Heffley, Leidy Foronda Gutierrez, Amit Harbaran (CS travel team)
  • Calvin Smith, Yash Trivedi, Luke Swanson (SACM Food Team)
  • Mikayla Buford, Lynn Liu, Arushi Saran, Maya Subramanian (WACM)
  • Matthew Wolff, Adithya Murali, Peter Rehani, Tyler Caraza-Harter, Theodoros Rekatsinas (Data Science Club)
  • Katie Zutter, Suchita Pati, Amrita Roy Chowdhury, Aishwarya Ganesan (WACM)
  • Aishwarya Ganesan, Swati Anand, Anshu Verma, Varun Chandrasekaran, Amrita Roy Chowdhury, David Merrell, Andrew Schoen, Anjali (CS Student Research Symposium)
  • Pratyush Mahapatra, Yugali Gullapalli , Katie Zutter, Mehmet Demirel, Mike Davies, Swati Anand, Viswesh Periyasamy, Samuel Jackson (Prospective Grad Student Weekend)
  • Meena Syamkumar, Lynn Liu, Yuren Sun, Anjali, Rogers Jeffrey Leo John, Adalbert Gerald Soosai Raj (Organized introduction to programming workshop for Sennett middle school and WISE)