Awards and Scholarships in the Department of Computer Science
04-14-2021
Every spring, the Department of Computer Science honors students, faculty, and staff 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, Fei Wang is the recipient of the 2021 Halstead Award. Wang was nominated by Professor Tiark Rompf for his work in software architecture and design. Professor Rompf stated, “Fei’s most important result is truly ingenious, and connects the world of compilers and program transformations with deep learning, offering a new and principled understanding of reverse-mode automatic differentiation as a special form of continuation-passing transform, a program transformation that has been known for decades in the PL community.” The papers titled, Backpropagation with Continuation Callbacks: Foundations for Efficient and Expressive Differentiable Programming was presented at NeurIPS 2018 and Demystifying Differentiable Programming: Shift/Reset the Penultimate Backpropagator was presented at ICFP 2019. Professor Rompf adds, "I believe Fei’s contributions to software engineering – in particular in the space of ‘Software Engineering 2.0’ are truly outstanding."
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 Basavesh Ammanaghatta Shivakumar for the fall of 2020 and Jared Wilson for the spring of 2021. 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
Zhuo Zhang 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. Zhang’s research lies in analyzing binary programs to find security vulnerabilities and decompiling them to understand hidden malicious logic. He was nominated by his advisor, Professor Xiangyu Zhang who commented on Zhang’s nomination, "Zhuo is extremely bright, skillful and energetic. In my two and half years of experience working with him, he is one of the best students I have ever worked with."
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 Meng Liu. He was nominated by his advisor, Professor David Gleich for his research on how to use topology to understand graph neural networks and also for creating a library of codes for local graph analysis that blends python, C++, and parallel computing. Professor Gleich adds, “He is one of the most talented graph algorithmics designers and implementors I know of and he is eminently worthy of the Rice Fellowship based on his intellectual development of his published papers and upcoming work.”
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award
The Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award honors an undergraduate student for their work as a teaching assistant. This award is given to an undergraduate student who serves as a teaching assistant, faculty members nominate students they believe are deserving of special recognition. This year’s recipient Drew Davis, he was nominated by Professor Buster Dunsmore. On why Davis deserves this award, Professor Dunsmore shared "As the Head Bridge TA, Drew worked tirelessly to update Bridge labs and to hire an outstanding staff. For Bridge 2020, it was especially difficult to manage both online and on-campus programs but Drew managed it perfectly.” Dunsmore added, “Drew is also a CS 18000 TA and he adds to the students’ experience with help sessions and exam creation.”
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, Alex Block, Abhishek Gunasekar and Andrew Hou tied for this award.
Outstanding Research Effort by an Undergraduate Student
The Outstanding Research Effort by an Undergraduate Student went to Donald Quincy Adams. He was nominated by Professor Jean Honorio for his accomplishments in research. Adams was first author on, Information-Theoretic Bounds for Integral Estimation, a paper under submission to the International Symposium on Information Theory.
Outstanding Student Awards
Outstanding Student Awards for each year in computer science and for overall data science were given to:
- Anushka Sharma (Outstanding Freshman)
- Kanti Bharat (Outstanding Sophomore)
- Tom Appenzeller (Outstanding Junior)
- Jasmine Singh (Outstanding Senior)
- Jacob Bagadiong (Outstanding Data Science Student)
Outstanding Staff Member
The award for Outstanding Staff Member is selected from staff nominations. This year's winners are Enoch Adu, Ron Castognia, and Justin Gillingham. All were nominated for their relentless work in preparing the department and courses for online learning and improving processes associated with learning technologies.
|
Award |
Recipient(s) |
|---|---|
|
ACM Graduate Teaching Assistant Award |
Sean Flannery |
|
ACM Faculty Award |
Professor Buster Dunsmore |
|
ACM Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award |
Kedar Abhyankar |
|
Award |
Recipient(s) |
|---|---|
|
Top Graduate Teaching Assistant |
|
|
Most Influential Professor |
|
Scholarship Name |
Recipient(s) |
|---|---|
|
Blake K. Baker Scholarship |
Samantha Coe |
|
Boeing Scholarship |
Avi Patel Ramitha Kotarkonda Donald Adams Caleb Smith Darby Blum Yekaterina Yegorova |
|
Boeing Student Organization Scholarship |
Shruti Goyal Anushka Sharma Beatrice Williem Cindy Ding Vanshika Agarwal |
|
Caterpillar |
Andrew Hou Sanjeev Lingam-Nattamai |
|
Computer Science Endowment Scholarship |
Arjun Khorana Drew Kates Gayathri Sriram Annie Wong Jack Arnold Domenic Conversa |
|
Corporate Partner Scholarship |
Aleksei Natalenko Nancy Agarwal Pankaj Harish Meghani Shreyas Chickerur William White John Zylstra Xinyi (Christine) Zhou Nuo Chen Hunter Haglid Kevin Wu Neerali Shah Ziteng Jiao Patrick Kelly George Wang Bengisu Cuneyit |
|
David and Darla Dodson Scholarship |
Neel Bagora Christopher Lehman |
|
FactSet Research Systems |
Aarushi Singh |
|
Gene & Marguerite Kim Scholarship |
Samantha Coe |
|
Genesys Diversity Scholarship |
Sunil Green |
|
Grace Hopper Scholarship |
Pranjali Raturi Haleigh Gronwold |
|
Jason Yu Memorial Scholarship |
Logan Borders Trung Dang Richard Li |
|
Kunze Scholarship Sponsored by: Aaron and Morgan Kunze |
Vincent Vu Andrew Choi |
|
L3Harris Technologies Scholarship |
Devin Qu Carter Bruns Victoria Liu |
|
Mary-Ann Neel Computer Science Scholarship |
Jacob Zietek Tom Appenzeller |
|
Michael and Jerralie Petersen Scholarship |
Alexander Engels Elise Miller |
|
Nylin Scholarship Sponsored by: William C. Nylin Jr. |
Claire Wallace |
|
Qualcomm Scholarship |
Wyatt Klueber |
|
Qualcomm Inclusion Scholarship |
Alisa Garcia Tania Ramirez |
|
Raytheon Endowed Scholarship |
Ethan Loev |
|
Rosen Endowment Scholarship In memory of Professor Saul Rosen |
Arianna Smith Arron Smith Adrik Herbert Jenny Ha Grace Keeton |
|
salesforce Scholarship |
Gowri Harish Frances O'Leary Benjamin Hardin |
The Department of Computer Science congratulates all winners and thanks our corporate and scholarship sponsors.