Awards and Scholarships in the Department of Computer Science
04-18-2022
Every spring, the Department of Computer Science honors students, faculty, and staff who have been chosen to receive fellowships, awards, and scholarships.
We offer our congratulations to this year's winners. We are proud of your accomplishments and look forward to your future contributions.
Photos of the event are available here.
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 Professor 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. The recipient receives a $5,000 monetary award and their name inscribed on a permanent plaque in the display case by Room 3102 in Lawson Computer Science Building.
This year, Guannan Wei is the recipient of the 2022 Halstead Award. Wei was nominated by Professor Tiark Rompf for his contributions to software architecture and design as well as software analysis. Professor Rompf stated, “Wei’s contributions are reflected in his outstanding publication record. Not only has he succeeded in publishing one top-tier first-author paper every year of his PhD, he also found time to make significant co-author contributions for colleagues. The major topic of Wei's research is how to build program analyzers, a task that is notoriously complicated."
Guannan Wei is the recipient of the 2022 Maurice H. Halstead Memorial Award
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 Aala Alsalem for the fall of 2021 and Chris May for the spring of 2022. 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
Khaled Serag won the Emil Stefanov Memorial Partial Fellowship. The fellowship was created in memory of Emil Stefanov, who earned his BS from Purdue in 2009 and passed away in 2014. This award is given to a domestic graduate student specializing in security who shows originality and creative thinking in research. Professor Dongyan Xu commented on Serag's nomination, "His work aims at securing the communication of embedded computers inside traditional or autonomous vehicles. He has developed practical, legacy-compatible defenses against a wide range of attacks that exploit those vulnerabilities. Implementation of his defenses have been transferred to two companies that have independently reproduced the good results in efficiency and effectiveness. Serag is highly deserving of this award."
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 Myson Burch.
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, Richard Li, was nominated by Professor Jeremiah Blocki. On why Li deserves this award, Professor Blocki shared, "As head UTA, Li's responsibilities went well beyond the normal responsibilities of an undergraduate TA. In addition to holding office hours and regularly answering student questions on the course discussion board, Richard has volunteered to give the CS 290 lecture several times. His willingness to lecture demonstrates his deep mastery of the material and shows he is able to clearly explain these technical concepts to others." Blocki added, "Li also won several high-quality competitive programming problems for our end-of-the-year bonus competition. Throughout the semester Richard has repeatedly demonstrated exceptional creativity, ability to write clearly, and ability to clearly explain complex technical ideas to students."
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 won the award, it is his second year to win.
Outstanding Research Effort by an Undergraduate Student
The Outstanding Research Effort by an Undergraduate Student went to Shangyin Tan. He was nominated by Ranjani Rao for his accomplishments in research. He also won honorable mention for the CRA Undergraduate Researcher Award.
Tan was an author on two papers during his undergraduate career and first author for a short paper at POPL 2022.
- Guannan Wei, Shangyin Tan, Oliver Bračevac, and Tiark Rompf. 2021. LLSC: a parallel symbolic execution compiler for LLVM IR. Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1495–1499. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3468264.3473108
- Guannan Wei, Oliver Bračevac, Shangyin Tan, and Tiark Rompf. 2020. Compiling symbolic execution with staging and algebraic effects. Proc. ACM Program. Lang. 4, OOPSLA, Article 164 (November 2020), 33 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3428232
- [PEPM 22] Shangyin Tan, Guannan Wei, and Tiark Rompf. Towards partially evaluating symbolic interpreters for all (short paper). https://popl22.sigplan.org/details/pepm-2022-papers/1/Partially-Evaluating-Symbolic-Interpreters-for-All
Outstanding Student Awards
The department chooses students from each year in the computer science major and overall for the data science major to honor the exceptional work they have contributed. The students are awarded Outstanding Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior and Data Science Student.
- Austin Lovell (Outstanding Freshman)
- Yash Agarwal (Outstanding Sophomore)
- Ishita Agarwal (Outstanding Junior)
- James Joko (Outstanding Senior)
- Daniel Lawson (Outstanding Data Science Student)
Outstanding Staff Member
The award for Outstanding Staff Member is selected from staff nominations. This year's winner is Monica Shively, Assistant Department Head for Academic Programs.
Purdue's Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Chapter Awards
The Purdue CS Student Chapter of the ACM provides awards for graduate and undergraduate teaching assistant plus a faculty award. This years winners are; Andrew Plank for the ACM Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, Professor Jeffrey Turkstra for the ACM Faculty Award, and Kedar Abhyankar for the ACM Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award (this is his second year winning the award).
Andrew Plank won the ACM Graduate Teaching Assistant Award
|
Award |
Recipient(s) |
|---|---|
|
Top Graduate Teaching Assistant |
Himanshi Mehta |
|
Most Influential Professor |
|
Scholarship Name |
Recipient(s) |
|---|---|
|
Boeing Scholarship |
Kichul Kang Brian Fernando Anant Mishra |
|
Boeing Student Organization Scholarship |
Alexis Hvostal Karnika Soni Trang Tran |
|
Caterpillar Digital Scholarship |
Frances O'Leary Beatrice Williem |
|
Computer Science Scholarship |
Anthony Baumann Rosemary Ajish Aryan Jain Malia Marquez Kris Leungwattanakij Mikail Khan Pankaj Meghani Min Lu Wei Tan Shivam Bairoliya Alissa Honigford Winnie Li Eli Coltin |
|
Computer Science Undergraduate Award |
Grant Rivera Arjun Khorana Gowri Harish |
|
L3Harris Technologies Scholarship |
Kabir Batra Raghav Krishnaswamy Ananya Singh Hunter Haglid Daniel Lawson |
|
Grace Hopper Scholarship |
Tiffany Kuang |
|
Jason Yu Memorial Scholarship |
Yash Agarwal Elijah Colwill |
|
Kunze Scholarship Sponsored by: Aaron and Morgan Kunze |
Jonathan Oppenheimer Mitchell Augustin |
|
Mary-Ann Neel Computer Science Scholarship |
Ramitha Kotarkonda Raymond Xie Matthew Pearce Ian Blacklock Kevin Zhang |
|
NCWIT Scholarship |
Kalea Gin |
|
Raytheon Endowed Scholarship |
Kyu Kim |
|
Study Abroad Scholarship |
Jungeun Hwang Shivani Kogta |
The Department of Computer Science congratulates all winners and thanks our corporate and scholarship sponsors.