Department News
| June 2017 | March 2017 | December 2016 |
| September 2016 | July 2016 |
June 2017
Thanks and Farewell
Jade Barricelli, a senior assistant director for University Career Services and liason to computer science, left the university in June 2017. Jade was an invaluable resource for students in the job search. She revamped the Carolina to Career program in the department, increasing the number of corporate events, enhancing the visibility of events and opportunities to students, and making herself approachable to students who were unfamiliar with UCS resources in Hanes Hall.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Graduate Students
Graduate students David Dunn, Kent Torell, and Cary Tippets and professor Henry Fuchs received the Best Paper Award at IEEE VR 2017 for their paper, "Wide Field Of View Varifocal Near-Eye Display Using See-through Deformable Membrane Mirrors." The project was a collaboration between UNC-Chapel Hill, the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, and Nvidia
Undergraduate Students
Junior CS major Kaylee Llewellyn was recognized with a University Award for the Advancement of Women. Llewellyn founded the UNC Girls Who Code Club, served as an organizer of Pearl Hacks, and helped plan UNC CS Women in Tech Week.
Scott Emmons, a sophomore CS and mathematics double-major, earned a prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship.
Alumni
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
Ravish Mehra (Ph.D. 2014) was awarded the 2016 VGTC Virtual Reality Best Dissertation Award for his work developing simulated sound propagation algorithms.
Joshua Welch (Ph.D. 2017) received a 2017 Horizon Award from the Graduate School at UNC-Chapel Hill.
IN MEMORIAM
John Staudhammer, a former faculty member in the department and computer graphics pioneer, passed away in February 2017. John was an advisor to Nick England, Turner Whitted, Mary Whitton, and many other computer graphics researchers. John Staudhammer is survived by his two children, Anne (Nickerson) and Paul; his grandchildren, Jacob and Sara; and his siblings, Josephine Laue, Karl, and Fred.
Read the obituary shared by ACM SIGGRAPH
March 2017
Thanks and Farewell
Windows Systems Administrator Alan Forrest left the department in November 2016 for a position with the university's Division of Finance and Administration. Alan was with the department for 15 years, and we will miss his kindness and his patient, helpful demeanor, as well as his occasional office pranks. We wish him all the best in his new position.
David Harrison, the department's computer network coordinator, retired in January 2017. David's cheerful personality and passion for UNC basketball have been a mainstay in the department for the past 31 years, and his departure has already been felt.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Faculty and Staff
Michael Reiter earned the 2016 SIGSAC Outstanding Contributions Award for pioneering research contributions and leadership in information security.
Mohit Bansal was recognized in February 2017 with a Google Research Award in natural language processing. His project was one of only 143 selected by Google to receive funding.
Mary Whitton was named to the North Carolina State University Electrical and Computer Engineering Alumni Hall of Fame.
Alumni
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
DxContinuum, a startup by Debu Chatterjee (M.S. 1990), was acquired by ServiceNow in January 2017. ServiceNow is the third largest pure SaaS company, and DxContinuum’s predictive models will add greater efficiency in categorizing incoming requests from people and machines automatically.
Impulsonic, a startup formed by Anish Chandak (Ph.D. 2011), Lakulish Antani (Ph.D. 2013), and professors Ming Lin and Dinesh Manocha, was acquired by major video game developer Valve in January 2017. Impulsonic wasted no time in making a splash, and Valve released the Steam Audio SDK the following month.
IN MEMORIAM
Hussein Adbel-Wahab, a long-time adjunct faculty member in the department, passed away in New York in December 2016. Hussein was a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at Old Dominion University. He served as an adjunct faculty member at UNC from the late 1980s through the early 2000s. He spent his summers in our department as well as a day each week during the school year. He was described as a gregarious person and a great collaborator. He was influential in helping the department start the “Colab” CSCW research cluster that was active throughout much of the 1990s, and he developed some of the first shared window systems including the well known XTV system.
In January, Old Dominion University created The Dr. Hussein Abdel-Wasab Memorial Graduate Fellowship in his memory. You can find more information about it at odu.edu/compsci/academics/wahab-fellowship.
December 2016
CONGRATULATIONS!
Faculty and Staff
Mary Whitton was named to the Alumni Hall of Fame of the N.C. State Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering for 2016. She was honored at a luncheon on Friday, November 5, 2016.
Alumni
Bill Oliver (M.S. 1990) retired as a professor of medicine from the Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University in March 2016 and moved to the mountains of East Tennessee. While getting ready to pay off his retirement home, he has taken a position as Assistant Medical Examiner in Knoxville, TN. Over the past year, he has also been re-appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Association of Medical Examiners, the Medicolegal Death Investigation subcommittee of the Organization of Scientific Area Committees for the National Institute of Science and Technologies, and the standards committee for investigation of patterned injuries for the American Association of Forensic Sciences.
FAMILY MATTERS
Associate professor Ron Alterovitz and his wife Sheyna welcomed their second son Meyer in November 2016.
September 2016
Thanks and FarewellCrystal Daniel left the department in July 2016 after working for nine months as a proposal specialist.
Enrique Dunn, a research assistant professor working in computer vision, left Chapel Hill for a tenure-track position at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey in August 2016.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Faculty and Staff
Associate professor Tamara Berg received the Philip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement by Young Faculty. The Hettleman Prize, which carries a $5,000 stipend, recognizes the achievements of outstanding junior tenure-track faculty or recently tenured faculty at UNC.
Alumni
Doug L. Hoffman (Ph.D. 1996) has retired from Axciom Corporation and teaching at UCA and Hendrix College. He remains in central Arkansas but intends to spend time traveling and writing. His sixth science fiction novel, Starflake, is now available, and he is working on a seventh novel.
Ramesh Raskar (Ph.D. 2002) was awarded the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize for 2016. The Lemelson-MIT Prize, worth $500,000, honors outstanding mid-career inventors improving the world through technological invention and demonstrating a commitment to mentorship in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Over the next three years, Raskar will be investing a portion of the prize money to support the development of young inventors.
IN MEMORIAM
W. Sands "Sandy" Hobgood (B.A. 1967, M.S. 1969) died in an accident near Brevard, N.C. in August 2016. Sandy was one of the original architects of ARPANET, which led directly to the creation of the internet. He discussed the topic in his lecture during the department's 50th Anniversary Celebration (his talk, with the tongue-in-cheek title "How I Helped Invent the Internet: The First Distributed Processing Application," can be viewed here). Sandy loved people and the arts, and he served multiple church congregations in the Chapel Hill area as a musician and band/choir leader. He also founded the Really Terrible Orchestra of the Triangle (RTOOT) in 2008 as an outlet for amateur musicians who enjoy community music. Memorials may be made to RTOOT.org or to the church or community music program of your choice.
July 2016
WELCOME!
New Staff
Charlie Bauserman joined the Facilities staff in April 2016 as a systems analyst.
Robin Brennan joined the department in May 2016 to provide administrative and faculty support.
Shannon Brownfield began as an accounting technician in June 2016 after 15+ years of accounting experience from the department of City and Regional Planning.
Janet Chang joined the department in May 2016 as an accounting technician.
David Cowhig joined the Facilities staff in June 2016 as a Linux administrator. He previously worked as a research assistant with ibiblio.
Gina Rozier became manager of the newly renamed External Relations group (formerly RSAC) in December 2015. Gina previously worked at the Durham County Library.
New Faculty
Mohit Bansal was hired as an assistant professor to begin in the 2016-2017 academic year. Bansal previously held a three-year research assistant professor position at the Toyota Technical Institute in Chicago. Bansal’s research interests include statistical natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on semantics (distributional, compositional, and multimodal), question answering and dialog, language generation, structured prediction, and neural networks.
Don Porter, formerly the Kieburtz Young Scholar in Computer Science and head of the Operating systems, Security, Concurrency, and Architecture Research (OSCAR) lab at Stony Brook University, was hired as an assistant professor beginning with the 2016-2017 academic year. Porter’s research develops better abstractions for managing concurrency and security, primarily in the operating system, and extends these abstractions to other portions of the technology stack as appropriate.
Thanks and Farewell
Sandra Carter was the department’s accounting manager for over 13 years until she departed for a position with the UNC Department of Genetics in September 2015.
Bridgette Cyr, an administrative support associate in the department for nearly three years, departed in February 2016 to work with the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham.
Chase Debnam, who joined the department as an accounting technician in July 2013, left in December 2015 for a position in the UNC Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Faculty and Staff
Fay Alexander, Mike Carter, and Brett Piper were recognized by the department with Star Heel awards for 2016.
Alex Berg was promoted to associate professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2016.
Enrique Dunn and Shahriar Nirjon were recognized with 2016 Junior Faculty Development Awards.
Shahriar Nirjon was one of three researchers named as 2016-2017 Data Fellows by the National Consortium for Data Science (NCDS).
Rheomics, a startup formed by Ricky Spero, adjunct professor Richard Superfine, and professor emeritus Russ Taylor was one of six recipients of a Fall 2015 NC IDEA grant award worth $50,000.
Alumni
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
Dick Sites (1969-70) retired from Google in April. He previously worked at Adobe, Digital Equipment Corp., and taught at the University of California/San Diego. He and his wife Lucey are off to Singapore in mid-July for a one-semester stint teaching at the National University of Singapore.
David Luebke (Ph.D. 1998) was promoted to Vice President of Graphics Research at NVIDIA.
Steven Bellovin (M.S. 1977, Ph.D. 1982) was appointed the first Technology Scholar of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.
Craig Mudge (Ph.D. 1973) was named an Officer of the Order of Australia.
Undergraduate Alumni
In Fall 2015, Amy Rae Fox (B.S. 2004) entered the doctoral program in Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego, advised by Professor Jim Hollan. Amy joined the Design Lab, where she will research how human conceptualization of space, time, and number informs the design of information visualizations.
Graduate Students
Victor Heorhiadi received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Matthew Leming (M.S. 2016, B.S. 2015) was one of only 35 recipients of a 2016 Gates Cambridge Scholarship. There were 826 applicants in the U.S. competition for the scholarship. At Cambridge University, Matt will pursue a doctorate in psychiatry in Churchill College, focusing his research on analyzing the circuitous connections in the brain with diffusion and functional MRIs, as a way to predict mental illness and neurological disorders in children.
The paper "From Motion to Photons in 80 Microseconds: Towards Minimal Latency for Virtual and Augmented Reality" received a Best Paper award at IEEE VR 2016. Co-authors on the paper were graduate students Peter Lincoln and Alex Blate and faculty members Montek Singh, Turner Whitted, Andrei State, Anselmo Lastra, and Henry Fuchs.
Wei Liu was awarded a Google Fellowship in computer vision.
Best Paper Honorable Mention at IEEE VR 2016 was awarded to the paper "Interactive Coupled Sound Synthesis-Propagation using Single Point Multipole Expansion", authored by graduate students Atul Rungta, Carl Schissler, Ravish Mehra, and Chris Malloy and professors Ming Lin and Dinesh Manocha.
Sean Sanders received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
Tetsuya Takahashi received a scholarship from the Japanese Student Services Organization Student Exchange Support Program (JASSO).
Undergraduate Students
Undergraduate students Dayton Ellwanger, Forrest Li, and David Spencer represented UNC at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals in Phuket, Thailand, where they correctly solved two problems and finished 108th.
Tia Holmes was awarded a $10,000 Google Lime Scholarship for the 2016-2017 academic year.
FAMILY MATTERS
Samuel Benjamin Newton was born to graduate student Ben Newton and his wife Erin in January 2016. Samuel is their third child.
Akaal Singh Lindsley was born in January 2016, the second child of professor Montek Singh and his wife Mary.
Associate chair for business affairs Michael Fern and his wife Sara welcomed their second child, Mariam Lily Fern, in June 2016.
IN MEMORIAM
Ralph Mason passed away in March 2016. Ralph, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy, served as the department’s associate chair for administration and finance from 1981 until 1995. The following remarks were written in News & Notes at the time of his retirement in 1995:
“He has judiciously managed the department through an extraordinary period of growth since 1981: the number of graduate students and full-time faculty have each nearly tripled, and total budgets have grown more than tenfold. His incredible understanding of the entire enterprise and his great talent and sincere dedication to sound resource and fiscal management have contributed mightily to our success in winning and keeping many external contracts and grants. Ralph was also a key player in the planning and design of Sitterson Hall, where we consolidated from six buildings to one in the summer of 1987."
Jamie Darst (B.S. 2006) passed away in April 2016 at the age of 33. Jamie was described by classmate and Red Hat colleague Brad Davis as dependable, both personally and professionally. He is survived by his wife and two children.
