Awards and Scholarships in the Department of Computer Science
04-30-2020
Every April, the Department of Computer Science honors faculty, staff, and students who have been chosen to receive fellowships, awards, and scholarships. This year is no exception, although the traditional banquet has been canceled due to COVID-19. Though the department is not able to recognize the recipients in person, we offer our congratulations to this year's winners. We are proud of your accomplishments and look forward to your future contributions.
Maurice H. Halstead Memorial Award
Professor Maurice H. Halstead joined the computer science faculty in 1967. He was a pioneer in software engineering, and wrote some of the first books on compiling and decompiling of software. He is generally considered as the "father" of code decompilation. Professor Halstead is perhaps best known as the founder of the approach to defining and measuring software products and processes known as Software Science. Many people believe that his work, and that of former Professor Samuel Conte, was the true foundation for software metrics and software engineering. Following Dr. Halstead's death, a memorial fund was established in 1979 by his students, family, and colleagues to recognize a Purdue student who has made exemplary contributions to software engineering research. The winner is selected by the CS Awards Committee based on nominations submitted by the faculty and presented with an engraved plaque.
This year, Imtiaz Karim is the recipient of the 2020 Halstead Award. Karim was nominated by Professor Elisa Bertino for his work in system security and software engineering. His deep interests in using and extending software engineering techniques to uncover security vulnerabilities in widely used day-to-day systems led to the inception of a new grammar guided evolutionary fuzzing technique. The paper titled, Opening Pandoras Box through ATFuzzer: Dynamic Analysis of AT Interface for Android Smartphones received a distinguished paper award at the 2019 Annual Computer Security Applications Conference. Professor Bertino adds, "In addition to being a talented research with strong technical skills, Imtiaz is a team player - he is eager to collaborate with others and is an outstanding mentor to junior students."
Raymond Boyce Graduate Teaching Award
The Raymond Boyce Graduate Teaching Award was established in 1975 by Sandy Boyce and friends in memory of Raymond Boyce who received his PhD in computer science in 1972 with high honors. Raymond passed away unexpectedly on June 18, 1974. This year the Boyce Graduate Teacher Award was awarded to Meric Gemalmaz for the fall of 2019 and Dana El-rushaidat for the spring of 2020. They received a monetary award and their names will be inscribed on a permanent plaque in the display case by Room 3102 in Lawson Computer Science Building.
Emil Stefanov Memorial Partial Fellowship
Benjamin Harsha won the Emil Stefanov Memorial Partial Fellowship. The award is given to a graduate student specializing in security and shows originality and creative thinking in research. The fellowship was created in memory of Emil Stefanov, who earned his BS from Purdue in 2009 and passed away in 2014. Harsha's research focuses on modeling an adversary as a rational agent and then developing defenses to provably deter attackers. Professor Jeremiah Blocki commented on Harsha's nomination, "Ben is well deserving of the award. His research demonstrates creativity and originality and he has helped to mentor several younger PhD students.”
John R. Rice Partial Fellowship in Scientific Computing
John R. Rice, the W. Brooks Fortune Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Purdue, was one of the earliest faculty members of Purdue’s first-in-the-nation computer science program. This year, the John R. Rice Partial Fellowship in Scientific Computing was awarded to S M Ferdous. He was nominated by his advisor, Professor Alex Pothen for his work on approximation algorithms for computing significant subgraphs in graphs that can be implemented efficiently on parallel computers. Ferdous is currently applying his algorithms to the semi-supervised classification problem in machine learning, and to data privacy problems (anonymizing data for publication while satisfying privacy constraints that individuals have).
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award
The Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award honors an undergraduate student for their work as a teaching assistant. This year’s recipient was Logan Kulinski, he was nominated by Professor Dunsmore. Kulinski won the award when he was a sophomore and again this year as a senior. On why Kulinski deserves this award, Professor Dunsmore shared "Logan’s work as a TA is outstanding, he made his mark answering countless hours of questions concisely and accurately. He conducts live coding demonstrations and helps design homework, labs, projects, and exam questions. Kulinski performs his job with such professionalism that the students have no idea that he is an undergraduate TA. Most assume he is a graduate student or young faculty member."
Outstanding Service to the Department by a Student
The Outstanding Service to the Department by a Student Award is determined by votes of computer science and data science students. This year, both Noah L. Alderton and Andrew Orlowski tied for this award.
Outstanding Research Effort by an Undergraduate Student
The Outstanding Research Effort by an Undergraduate Student went to Xiao Hu. He nominated by Professor Ming Yin for his accomplishments in research. He has co-authored two papers, Discovering Biases in Image Datasets with the Crowd and Crowdsourcing Detection of Sampling Biases in Image Datasets and helps lead the work of other undergrad students.
Outstanding Student Awards
Outstanding Student Awards for each year in computer science were given to;
- Frances O'Leary (Outstanding Freshman)
- Shree Kulkarni (Outstanding Sophomore)
- Sasha Kipnis (Outstanding Junior)
- Noah Curran (Outstanding Senior)
- Jack Arnold (Outstanding Data Science Student)
Outstanding Staff Member
The award for Outstanding Staff Member is selcted from staff nominations. This year's winner is Victory Soe. He was nominated for going above and beyond his position requirements over the past year related to course support, lab instruction, and mentoring. Victory and a team of instructional specialists were instrumental in helping to prepare the department for transitioning classes online by assisting faculty with course needs and improving processes associated with learning technologies.
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Award |
Recipient(s) |
|---|---|
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ACM Graduate Teaching Assistant Award |
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ACM Faculty Award |
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ACM Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award |
Noah L. Alderton and Sri V Cherukuri |
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Award |
Recipient(s) |
|---|---|
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Top Graduate Teaching Assistant |
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Most Influential Professor |
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Scholarship Name |
Recipient(s) |
|---|---|
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Computer Science Endowment Scholarship |
Domenic Conversa Christopher Rosenblatt Gowri Harish |
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Grace Hopper Scholarship Sponsored by: David Spellmeyer |
Pranjali Raturi Sruthi Pillai |
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Harris Scholarship |
Christopher Duncan Zacharie Zirnheld Donald Adams |
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Qualcomm Inclusion Scholarship |
Alisa Garcia Tania Ramirez |
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Qualcomm |
Reece Jones Nathan Ashta Jizhou Chen |
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Salesforce Scholarship |
Gore Kao |
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Corporate Partner Scholarship |
Alan Bare Shreyas Kharbanda Raunak Srivastava Ryan Borzello Shangyin Tan Victor Zhu Vijay Bharadwaj Daniel Kambich Kartik Mittal Rushank Jhanjaria |
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Computer Science Scholarship Sponsored by: CS Alumna |
Andrew Hou James Joko Beatrice Williem Kaung Zaw Hamza Shaikh Benjamin Hardin Vanshika Agarwal Jack Arnold Nicholas Pappas Pallav Agarwal Noah Alderton Patrick Kelly Aditya Subramaniam Luciano Handal Baracatt Joseph Barr Shotobhisha Sinha Ray |
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Raytheon Endowment Scholarship |
Richard Li Mitchell Augustin |
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Blake K. Baker Scholarship |
Samantha Coe |
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Caterpillar Scholarship |
Dithi Saxena Man To Tang |
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FactSet Research Systems Scholarship |
Kade Boltjes |
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Honeywell Scholarship |
Sakshi Choudhary |
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Kunze Scholarship Sponsored by: Aaron and Morgan Kunze |
Kichul Kang Kelly Kral |
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Rosen Endowment Scholarship In memory of Saul Rosen |
Arianna Smith Arron Smith |
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David and Darla Dodson Scholarship |
Neel Bagora Christopher Lehman |
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Grub Scholarship Sponsored by: Randy Reece |
Riley Borgard |
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Gene & Marguerite Kim Scholarship |
Samantha Coe |
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Michael and Jerralie Petersen Scholarship
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Alexander Engels |
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Nylin Scholarship Sponsored by: William C. Nylin Jr. |
Claire Wallace |
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Boeing Scholarship |
Vindhya Banda Jacky Zheng James Lim Jieun Lee |
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Boeing Student Organization Scholarship |
Elise Miller Madison Rosen Haleigh Gronwold Ayushi Gupta Dhanushikka Ravichandiran |
The Department of Computer Science congratulates all winners and thanks our corporate and scholarship sponsors.
Writer: Emily Kinsell, 765-494-0669, emily@purdue.edu