Department News
| September 2017 | November 2017 | February 2018 | June 2018 |
June 2018
Goodbye and Farewell
Beth Mayo, a human resources specialist with the department for more than two and a half years, took a position with the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute.
Shannon Brownfield, and accounting technician with the department for two years, retired in June 2018.
CONGRATULATIONS!
The Department of Computer Science was ranked #25 among graduate computer science programs for 2019 by U.S. News and World Report.
The Department of Computer Science recognized 31 graduates (12 Ph.D., 31 M.S., 178 B.S., 94 B.A., and 36 undergraduate minors) in its annual commencement ceremony in Carmichael Arena on May 13.
Faculty and Staff
Federico Gil Distinguished Professor Henry Fuchs received an honorary doctorate from TU Wien in Vienna, Austria.
Assistant professors Donald E. Porter and Cynthia Sturton were recognized by the graduate student body with the UNC Computer Science Student Association Excellence in Teaching Award.
Professor David Stotts was recognized by the graduating senior class with the Computer Science Undergraduate Faculty Award.
Hope Woodhouse, an events coordinator and interim manager of the external relations team, received the 2018 Catherine G. Perry Staff Excellence Award.
Business Officer Missy Wood and Administrative and Faculty Support Specialist Robin Brennan were honored with Chair's Awards for 2018.
Graduate Students
Lisa Bauer earned a 2018 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
Alan Kuntz was named the Timothy L. Quigg Student Inventor of the Year for 2018 by the Department of Computer Science.
Tanya Amert and Catherine Nemitz were among 21 inductees to UNC's Frank Porter Graham Honor Society for 2018.
Jeffrey T. Young was awarded the John M. Glotzer Teaching Assistant of the Year Award for 2017-2018.
Undergraduate Students
Senior Jon Kaplan received the 2018 Stephen F. Weiss Award for Outstanding Achievement in Computer Science.
Senior Marcus Wallace earned the Learning Assistant of the Year Award for 2017-2018.
Alumni
Jim Foley, a member of the UNC CS faculty from 1970 to 1976, retired from Georgia Tech in December 2017.
Andrew Maimone (Ph.D. 2015, M.S. 2012) received the IEEE Virtual Reality Best Dissertation Award for his dissertation "Computational See-Through Near-Eye Displays," which he completed under advisor Henry Fuchs.
February 2018
Goodbye and Farewell
John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor Ming Lin was named Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland in January 2018.
Megan Erlacher, an accounting technician in the department for more than four years, took a position in the Department of Applied Physical Sciences at UNC.
External Relations Manager Gina Rozier left the department after two years to work with Downtown Durham Inc.
After six months in research administration with the department, Dief Alexander moved to Boone, N.C. and took a position at Appalachian State University.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Faculty and Staff
Phi Delta Theta/Matthew Mason Distinguished Professor Dinesh Manocha was named an AAAI Fellow for 2018.
Federico Gil Distinguished Professor Henry Fuchs, Professor Emeritus Anselmo Lastra, Professor Jan-Michael Frahm, Nate Dierk (M.S. 2014, B.S. 2012), and David Perra (M.S. 2014) were granted a patent for low latency stabilization for head-worn displays.
Graduate Students
Doctoral student Alan Kuntz was among the first ever cohort of Thomas S. Kenan Graduate Fellows. The 10 students in his cohort receive a $5,000 increase to their regular stipend for the next academic year and a $2,500 summer stipend in either 2018 or 2019.
Alumni
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
Thanks to a focus in recent years on the legal and policy aspects of technology, Steven Bellovin (Ph.D. 1982, M.S. 1977) became an affiliated faculty member of the Columbia Law School.
Raymond Van Dyke (M.S. 1989) was accorded a Fellow of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) for prominence in the field of intellectual property. Raymond's IP practice includes procurement, licensing, advocacy, and teaching.
Amitabh Varshney (M.S. 1991, Ph.D. 1994) was named Dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland.
FAMILY MATTERS
Adjunct Assistant Professor Bea Paniagua and Research Engineer Jan Werner welcomed their second child, Daniel Jakub Paniagua Werner, in February 2018.
November 2017
Goodbye and Farewell
Student services manager and department registrar Jodie Gregoritsch left the department in November 2017. Jodie had been with the department since 2011, cheerfully handling an ever-increasing workload as student enrollment grew rapidly. She was acknowledged for her support for graduate students at virtually every dissertation defense. We wish her all the best in her future endeavors.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Faculty and Staff
Associate professor Alex Berg won the 2017 Helmholtz Prize for significant contributions to computer vision research by a paper he co-authored in 2003.
Graduate Students
Doctoral students Catherine Nemitz and Tanya Amert and professor James Anderson received the Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems (RTNS) 2017 in Grenoble, France.
Alumni
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
Injong Rhee (Ph.D. 1994) was the keynote speaker at ACM Multimedia 2017 in Mountain View, California in October 2017. He was also profiled by People of ACM.
Vicente Ordonez (Ph.D. 2015) received the Best Long Paper Award at EMNLP 2017 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The award-winning paper he co-authored was titled "Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints".
William Brown (M.S. 1990, B.S. 1977) retired from Boeing in May 2017 after 24 years. He is now enjoying attending colloquia and meet-ups on CS-related topics in the Seatlle area, and he and his wife dance and play music weekly with friends.
Dan Palmer (Ph.D. 1996) was recognized with the John Carroll University Distinguished Faculty Award for 2017.
Undergraduate Alumni
K.J. Moon (B.S. 2015) was profiled by Real Change as part of the Rampant Radicals series. K.J. left the tech industry to work as an organizer for transportation and housing justice with the Transit Riders Union (TRU) in Seattle.
Former Faculty
James Foley (1970-1976) will retire from Georgia Tech at the end of 2017.
September 2017
Welcome
Dief Alexander joined the department in July 2017 to handle research funding and proposal administration. Originally from Australia, Dief's previous experience includes the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Australia. He also spent 13 years in New Zealand before moving to the United States.
Brandi Day began in July 2017 as a diversity coordinator. Brandi will be responsible for helping to develop and coordinate recruitment and retention efforts targeting under-represented groups. She was recently a "Tech Prep" manager for community engagement and education at Facebook.
Goodbye and Farewell
Sanjoy Baruah left the department for a position at Washington University in St. Louis.
Vladimir Jojic left the department to join a computational biology startup.
Anselmo Lastra retired in July 2017 after more than 25 years with the department. In addition to serving as a professor, Anselmo was also chair of the department from 2009 to 2014, overseeing a more than threefold increase in undergraduate computer science majors. In retirement, Anselmo looks forward to continuing to travel the world, having already made plans to re-visit Southeast Asia and go to Bhutan for the first time.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Faculty and Staff
Assistant professor Mohit Bansal earned a DARPA Young Faculty Award for 2017. Read more at college.unc.edu/2017/10/23/darpa-award.
In a recent review of publications from the last 20 years of Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), it was reported that a UNC CS paper was among the top 10 most cited in the history of the conference and the most cited in the area of computer-aided intervention. The paper, "Augmented reality visualization for laparoscopic surgery," was authored by Henry Fuchs, Mark A. Livingston, Ramesh Raskar, D'nardo Colucci, Kurtis Keller, Andrei State, Jessica R. Crawford, Paul Rademacher, Samuel H. Drake, and Anthony A. Meyer.
Professor Ming Lin was elected a Eurographics Association Fellow for 2017.
Professor Fabian Monrose was named a UNC Kenan Distinguished Professor, effective July 1, 2017. The professorship will provide Fabian's salary, benefits, and additional research funds. Fabian joins Jim Anderson and Steve Pizer as current Kenan Professors in the department. Fred Brooks also held a Kenan Professorship.
Graduate Students
Doctoral student David Dunn received the DCEXPO Prize for the best Emerging Technologies item at SIGGRAPH 2017. As the winner, David will be flown to Tokyo to exhibit his research at the 2017 DCExpo in October 2018. The winning item is the deformable membrane augmented reality display which also won a Best Paper Award at IEEE VR for David and other researchers from UNC, NVIDIA, MPI-Informatik, and Saarland University.
Graduate students Md Tamzeed Islam and Bashima Islam and assistant professor Shahriar Nirjon were awarded Best Demo Runner-Up at the ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys) 2016 for "SEUS - A Wearable Multi-Channel Acoustic Headset Platform to Improve Pedestrian Safety."
Doctoral student Ramakanth Pasunuru and assistant professor Mohit Bansal earned an Outstanding Award at the annual meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2017. The award was given to the top 1.5% of papers submitted to the conference, or about 20 out of nearly 1,400.
Undergraduate Students
Cenk Baykal (B.S. 2015) and associate professor Ron Alterovitz earned a Best Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2017 for their paper, "Asymptotically Optimal Design of Piecewise Cylindrical Robots using Motion Planning."
Alumni
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
Michele Weigle (M.S. 1998, Ph.D. 2003) was approved for ACM Senior Member status in July 2017.
Vicente Ordonez (Ph.D. 2015) co-authored a paper that won Best Long Paper at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2017. The paper, titled "Men ALso Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints," was a joint project between researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin.
