Department News
New Faculty and Staff
Crystal Daniel joined the Department in November 2015 as a proposal specialist. Crystal earned a master’s degree in public administration from UNC in 2006 and came most recently from the Department of Epidemiology.
Jamey Holland is a workstation support technician with the Facilities group. He joined the Department in April 2015, and he previously worked as an information technology administrator for Haugen Consulting.
Kris Jordan joined the Department as a lecturer in August 2015. Kris earned a bachelor of science with honors from the Department of Computer Science in 2006. He currently serves as technology director for New Media Campaigns, a web design, development, and marketing agency that he co-founded in 2006.
Beth Mayo joined as a human resources specialist in July 2015. She came to the Department from Biltmore Estate in Asheville, where she worked for six years. Beth holds a bachelor’s degree in English from UNC, which she received in 2003.
Shahriar Nirjon (goes by Nirjon) joined the Department faculty as an assistant professor in July 2015. Nirjon received a doctorate in computer science from the University of Virginia in 2014, and his research areas include mobile computing, embedded sensor systems, wireless networks, and data analytics for mobile systems.
Missy Wood became the Department Business Officer in August 2015. Missy previously served as Manager of the Research Support and Communications group, and she has been with the Department for 13 years.
Hope Woodhouse joined the Department in August 2015 as an events and outreach specialist working with the Research Support and Communications group. Hope earned a bachelor of arts in journalism and mass communication from UNC in 2014.
Thanks and Farewell
Fred Brooks retired in June 2015 after an incredible 51 years of service to the University and to the Department of Computer Science. Fred was responsible for founding the Department of Computer Science (originally the Department of Information Science) and for instilling the values and ideology that remain central to its mission today. One of our two buildings bears his name.
Latasha Mingo left the Department in May 2015 after serving as the Department’s Business Manager for two years. She now supports implementation and training for financial and grant management software at IT Works.
Kristen Palmer was a proposal and outreach coordinator in the Department until January 2015, when she left to take a job at Georgetown University. Kristen was a member of the Research Support and Communications group for two years.
Alden Sharpe left Chapel Hill in October 2015 for Johnson City, Tennessee. Alden served two and a half years as a member of the Research Support and Communications group, handling faculty support, events, outreach, alumni relations, and many other responsibilities.
Russ Taylor retired in February 2015. Before his retirement, Russ was a research professor of computer science, physics and astronomy, and applied physical sciences, and he was recognized with the UNC Inventor of the Year Award for 2014. Russ has been a faculty member in the department for 21 years after completing his undergraduate and graduate work at UNC. Russ remains an adjunct professor with the Department.
Leandra Vicci retired in September 2015 after 35 years of service. Leandra joined the Department in 1981 to found and direct the Microelectronic Systems Laboratory, which later became the Applied Engineering Laboratory. She is the inventor of Salphasic Clock distribution, a method for circumventing the limitations of the speed of light on the distribution of clock signals to globally synchronous systems, and a recipient of both the UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor’s Award and the North Carolina Governor’s Award for innovation.
Jordan Wolf left the Department in June 2015 for a position in the School of Nursing. Jordan served the Department for two years as a human resources specialist.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Faculty and Staff
Sanjoy Baruah was honored by the Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems with the Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award. More information about this award can be found on the Department Awards page.
Alex Berg received a National Science Foundation Early Career Deveopment (CAREER) Award, which carries a $500k grant for his work titled “Situated Recognition: Learning to understand our local visual environment.” The project aims to develop computer vision technologies for recognizing objects in our daily lives. For recognizing visual content around us, where cameras can record multiple images over a period of time, there is an opportunity to take advantage of context that is not available for internet images.
Tamara Berg has been promoted to the rank of associate professor beginning January 1, 2016.
Henry Fuchs was named an IEEE Fellow for 2015 and received the 2015 Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics at SIGGRAPH 2015. Read about both awards on the Department Awards page.
Kevin Jeffay was recognized by University of Washington Computer Science & Engineering with a 2015 UW CSE Alumni Achievement Award.
Jim Mahaney was recognized with the 2015 Catherine G. Perry Staff Excellence Award. More information can be found on our Department Awards page.
Steve Pizer was recognized by his former students, collaborators, and colleagues, who raised the funds necessary to rename a conference room in Sitterson Hall in his honor. A ceremony was held in November 2015 to dedicate the Stephen M. Pizer Conference Room in 284 Sitterson Hall. A photo from the dedication ceremony is featured on the back cover of the News & Notes.
Alumnus Jeff Terrell (Ph.D. 2009), professors Kevin Jeffay and Don Smith, and School of Medicine professor Rob Broadhurst were granted a patent, titled Methods, Systems, and Computer Program Products for Network Server Performance Anomaly Detection, in January 2015.
Graduate Students
Ravish Mehra earned a 2015 Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award for his dissertation Efficient Techniques for Wave-Based Sound Propagation in Interactive Applications. Read more about his award on the Department Awards page.
Qingyu Zhao’s paper “Surface registration in the presence of missing patches and topology change” won the Best Paper Award at the Medical Image Understanding and Analysis conference in July 2015. Co-authors on the paper were fellow graduate student True Price and professors Stephen Pizer, Marc Niethammer, Ron Alterovitz, and Julian Rosenman.
Undergraduate Students
Maegan Clawges was honored with a University Award for the Advancement of Women for her work as the founder of Pearl Hacks, an annual all-female hackathon at UNC. You can read more about Maegan and her award on the Department Awards page, and you can read about Pearl Hacks in our feature Pearl Hacks Brings Women into Computer Science.
SPONSORED RESEARCH
Adaptive and Scalable Network Policy Enforcement. PI: Michael Reiter. U.S. Office of Naval Research.
Aggregate formation under turbulence: small-scale biophysical interactions driving carbon flux in the ocean. Co PI: Leandra Vicci. National Science Foundation.
“CC-NIE Network Infrastructure: Enabling data-driven research. PI: Jay Aikat. National Science Foundation.”
CGV: Small: Interactive Sound Rendering for Virtual Environments. PI: Ming Lin. National Science Foundation.
Clarity Evaluation. PI: Russell Taylor. Molecular Devices LLC.
Collaborative Research: CyberSEES: Type 2: A New Framework for Crowd-Sourced Green Infrastructure Design. Co-PI: Jack Snoeyink. National Science Foundation.
CPS: Breakthrough: Collaborative Research: Bringing the Multicore Revolution to Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems. PI: James Anderson. National Science Foundation.
CSR: Small: Real-time Computing Using GPUs. PI: Sanjoy Baruah, Co-PI: James Anderson. National Science Foundation.
Dense Crowd Simulation and Applications. PI: Dinesh Manocha, Co-PI: Ming Lin. The Boeing Corporation.
EAGER: Automatic Classification of Programming Difficulties by Mining Programming Events. PI: Prasun Dewan. National Science Foundation.
EAGER: Data Association and Exploitation for Large Scale 3-D Modeling from Visual Imagery. PI: Jan-Michael Frahm, Co-PI: Enrique Dunn. National Science Foundation.
EAGER: Interactive Reconstruction and Visualization of Metropolitan-Scale Traffic. PI: Ming Lin. National Science Foundation.
EAGER: Leveraging 3D structure estimates for photo collection based geo-localization and semantic indexing. PI: Jan-Michael Frahm, Co-PI: Enrique Dunn. National Science Foundation.
Efficient Tracking, Logging, and Blocking of Accesses to Digital Objects. PI: Fabian Monrose. Department of Homeland Security Advanced Projects Research Agency.
GENI in the classroom: Course Modules for Teaching Networking Concepts. PI: Jay Aikat. Raytheon BBN Technologies Corporation.
HCC: CGV: Small: Eyeglass-Style Multi-Layer Optical See-Through Displays for Augmented Reality. PI: Henry Fuchs. National Science Foundation.
II-NEW: A Robot Testbed for Real-time Motion Strategies and Autonomous Personal Assistants. PI: Dinesh Manocha, Co-Inv: Ron Alterovitz, Jan-Michael Frahm, Henry Fuchs, Ming Lin. National Science Foundation.
Integration of Endoscopic and CT data for Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning. PI: Juilan Rosenman, Co-PI: Stephen Pizer, Ron Alterovitz, Jan-Michael Frahm. NIH National Cancer Institute.
Mechanisms of Risk and Resilience in ASD: Ontogeny, Phylogeny and Gene Disruption. PI: Martin Styner, Co-Inv: Marc Niethammer. Emory University.
MRI: Development of Pneumatic water wave genesis: a versatile wavemaking instrument for the UNC Joint Fluids Lab. Co-PI: Leandra Vicci. National Science Foundation.
Multi-lumen steerable needles for transoral access to lung nodules. PI: Ron Alterovitz. NIH National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.
NSF Support for the 2014 USENIX Security Symposium. PI: Fabian Monrose. National Science Foundation.
Poisson. PI: Dinesh Manocha. Sandia National Laboratory.
Privacy on the Line: Next-Generation Defenses for Securing VoIP Communications. PI: Fabian Monrose. U.S. Army Research Office.
REU supplement for UNC GENI. PI: Kevin Jeffay, Co-Inv: Jay Aikat. Raytheon Company.
Robotic Natural Orifice Skull Base Surgery. PI: Ron Alterovitz. Vanderbilt University.
SBIR-Approach-specific, multi-GPU, multi-tool, high-realism neurosurgery simulation. PI: Dinesh Manocha. Kitware Inc.
STTR-Interactive Acoustic Simulation in Urban and Complex Environments (Phase II). PI: Dinesh Manocha. Impulsonic Inc.
STTR-Image-Based Quanitification and Analysis of Longitudinal Lung Nodule Deformations. PI: Marc Niethammer. Kitware Inc.
STTR-Scalable Communication and Scheduling for Many-Core Systems. PI: James Anderson. Real-Time Innovations.
Travel Subsidies for 2013 CPS PI Meeting. PI: James Anderson. National Science Foundation - Research.
TWC SBES: Medium: Collaborative: Crowdsourcing Security. PI: Michael Reiter. National Science Foundation.
TWC: Frontier: Collaborative: Rethinking Security in the Era of Cloud Computing. PI: Michael Reiter, Co-PI: Jay Aikat. National Science Foundation.
TWC: Small: Toward Pronounceable Authentication Strings. PI: Fabian Monrose. National Science Foundation.
Unlocking transcript diversity via differential analyses of splice graphs. PI: Jan Prins. NIH National Human Genome Research Institute.
Viewpoint Tracking via Acceleration Stabilized with Computer Vision. PI: Fred Brooks. National Science Foundation.
Workshop: Robot Planning in the Real World: Challenges and Unsolved Problems. PI: Ron Alterovitz. National Science Foundation.