Dear friends and colleagues, I hope this message finds you well and that you and your families are staying safe during these unprecedented circumstances. Our CS department community has shown incredible resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic—from directing research toward finding ways to stem this global health crisis, to moving classes online and supporting our students through a number of virtual events and workshops. I am eager to highlight the ways our community has shown leadership and innovation over the past few months, both related to the pandemic and beyond. We also have good news to share, including welcoming four new tenure-track faculty members, two faculty of instruction, and an incoming PhD class of 25 candidates, as well as a number of exciting honors and awards. I continue to be grateful to all of my colleagues for their dedication to CS, and I hope you have a safe and healthy summer. |
Samir Khuller
Peter and Adrienne Barris Chair
and Professor of Computer Science
McCormick School of Engineering |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Northwestern Computer Science department welcomes four new tenure-track, joint appointed (CS+X) faculty members and two teaching-track faculty members as part of its ambitious hiring initiative. With their arrival, CS is able to expand on its research impact and develop additional joint research collaborations and academic programs with a number of Northwestern departments. |
|
|
|
|
To move vital medical resources during the COVID-19 pandemic where they are needed most, Professor Kris Hammond and a group of students are collaborating with Chicago startup Rheaply to create Emergency Resource Exchange (ERx), a central hub that quickly connects Illinois healthcare providers with supplies. |
|
|
|
|
An expert in reasoning under uncertainty, Professor Jessica Hullman writes in Scientific American how unquantifiable uncertainty can be overlooked in COVID-19 data and models, and what that means for our future. |
|
|
|
|
Scalability is one of the biggest bottlenecks in blockchain networking technology. Professor Aleksandar Kuzmanovic and alumnus Uri Klarman found a solution, and within five years built the startup company bloXroute Labs that raised $10 million in seed funding from leading venture capitalists. |
|
|
|
|
Joining forces with Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and University of Chicago, Northwestern University colaunched the Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms, and Learning (IDEAL) to answer theoretical data science questions. It is currently in its first Spring Special Quarter, “Inference and Data Science on Networks.”
|
|
|
|
|
Professor and Chair Samir Khuller received the 2020 CRA-E Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentoring Award. The honor recognizes outstanding mentorship and guidance on admission and matriculation of students to research-focused graduate programs in computing. Professor Ken Forbus and PhD student Kezhen Chen received a Best Paper Award at the KR2ML Workshop at NeurIPS 2019, held in December in Vancouver. Professors Stephen Tarzia and Sarah Van Wart were named 2020 recipients of The Alumnae of Northwestern University’s Award for Curriculum Innovation to support the development of new courses that incorporate ethics into the study of computer science. PhD candidate Nicholas LaGrassa and incoming PhD candidate Nicholas Franzese were awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award. PhD candidate Lukas Lazarek received an NSF GRFP honorable mention. Computer science undergraduates Ulyana Kurylo, Alisa Liu, and Maxine Whitely received honorable mentions in the Computer Research Association’s 2020 Outstanding Research Award Program. PhD candidate Kaiyu Hou won the department's Outstanding TA award, and undergraduate Anna Deng won the Outstanding Peer Mentor award for the Winter quarter. Fall quarter awardees were PhD candidate Lief Rassmussen (Outstanding TA) and undergraduate Daniel Birnbaum (Outstanding Peer Mentor). |
|
Northwestern CS proudly hosted Christos Papadimitriou on May 6 and Jon Kleinberg as a Dean's Seminar Series speaker on May 13 as part of the CS Distinguished Lecture Series. See more events. The CS+Law Faculty Talks event on February 26 brought together Northwestern faculty interested in the intersections of computer science and law with the purpose of fostering collaboration and interdisciplinary research as part of the CS+X Initiative. Adobe Research, the company’s team of research scientists and engineers shaping early-stage ideas into innovative technologies, has donated $250,000 to the Computer Science Department to support new areas of research and collaboration with the Kellogg School of Management. Congratulations to the following CS faculty members who were recently awarded grants: | • | Lawrence Birnbaum - Envisioning Workshops for Computing in Undergraduate Education (National Science Foundation) | | • | Fabian Bustamante - RAPID: Internet Traffic and Compliance with Government Stay-at-Home Measures (National Science Foundation) | | • | Simone Campanoni - SHF: Small: The Compiler-Architecture Solution to the Data Dependent, Circuit-Level Critical-Paths Variations (National Science Foundation) | | • | Oliver Cossairt - The Hogel Basis Screen: Data Driven, Wide-angle 3D Displays near the Spatial Bandwidth Product Limit (Sony Corporation of America) | | • | Kenneth Forbus - Towards Intelligent Agents that Learn by Multimodal Communication (Office of Naval Research) | | • | Kristian J. Hammond - EB Knowledge Companion (Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.) | | • | Jason Hartline - HDR TRIPODS: Collaborative Research: Institute for Data, Econometrics, Algorithms and Learning (National Science Foundation) | | • | Josiah Hester - RAPID: Low-cost, Batteryless Smart Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Tackling the COVID-19 Pandemic (National Science Foundation) | | • | Han Liu - SHIELD: A Statistical Machine Learning Framework for Diversity Enabled Ensemble Robustness (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) | | • | Konstantin Makarychev - Collaborative Research: AF: Medium: Design and Analysis of Models and Algorithms for Real-life Problems (National Science Foundation) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
© Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Northwestern University
|
|
|
|
Northwestern Department of Computer Science 2233 Tech Drive, Third Floor, Evanston, Illinois, 60208 Unsubscribe |
|
|
|
|
|
