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Computer Science Students Receive Awards
The Department of Computer Science recently gave awards to six outstanding undergraduate and graduate students:
Outstanding Senior Award: Mackenzie Bechtel-Hall
Undergraduate Research Award: Djuan Blue
Service Award: Piyaphol Phoungphol
Graduate Teaching Award: Haidong Xue
Graduate Research Award: Qian Hu
Outstanding Graduate Student Award: Dinesh Agarwal
Djuan Blue and Dinesh Agarwal received their awards at the annual Arts and Sciences Honors Night ceremony, which was held on April 18 in the Student Center. ( Posted 5/20/13) |
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Department to Move to Former SunTrust Building
The Department of Computer Science has begun moving to the former SunTrust Bank building at 25 Park Place. This building is just across Woodruff Park from the department’s current offices at 34 Peachtree Street, where it has been located for the past ten years.
Last December, the department’s Ph.D. students were relocated to the sixth floor of 25 Park Place, which Computer Science shares with the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Over 60 computer science Ph.D. students currently have cubicles on the sixth floor. The department’s space also includes six small discussion rooms, a kitchen, and a conference room that is shared with Physics and Astronomy.
In the second phase of the move, which will happen sometime between December 2013 and April 2014, faculty and staff offices will move to the seventh floor of 25 Park Place. This floor, which measures approximately 14,500 square feet, will be completely occupied by Computer Science.
The Georgia State University Foundation purchased the 26-story SunTrust Bank building in 2006, along with several adjoining buildings and a parking deck. However, SunTrust was given a multi-year lease to continue occupying 25 Park Place, so it was not until 2012 that Georgia State was able to begin moving in. The building is being renovated floor by floor as money becomes available. Six departments in the College of Arts and Sciences are expected to move to the building by next year.
25 Park Place was built in 1971 to house the Trust Company of Georgia, the predecessor of SunTrust Bank. ( Posted 4/21/13) |
Ph.D. Students Win Travel Grants for ACM BCB 2012
Ph.D. students Bismita Srichandan and Serghei Mangul won travel grants to attend the ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology and Biomedicine (ACM BCB 2012), which was held on October 7–10 in Orlando.
Ms. Srichandan received a $1,000 travel grant from ACM BCB to participate in the conference’s Ph.D. Forum. In addition, she presented the paper “An Iterative MapReduce Approach to Frequent Subgraph Mining in Biological Datasets” at one of the conference’s four workshops. The paper was co-authored by Steven Hill, a student at the University of Maryland, and Dr. Raj Sunderraman, Ms. Srichandan’s Ph.D. advisor. Ms. Srichandan received additional travel support from Georgia State’s Molecular Basis of Disease program.
Mr. Mangul also received a $1,000 travel grant to attend BCB, where he participated in the Ph.D. Forum and presented a paper. The paper, titled “An Integer Programming Approach to Novel Transcript Reconstruction from Paired-End RNA-Seq Reads,” was co-authored by Ph.D. student Adrian Caciula; Dr. Dumitru Brinza of Life Technologies; Dr. Sahar Al Seesi, Dr. Abdul Banday, Dr. Rahul Kanadia, and Dr. Ion Mandoiu (all of the University of Connecticut); and professor Alex Zelikovsky, Mr. Mangul’s Ph.D. advisor. Mr. Mangul received his Ph.D. from GSU last December. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA, working for Dr. Eleazar Eskin in ZarLab, Dr. Eskin’s computational genetics group.
ACM BCB is the flagship conference of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Biomedical Informatics (SIGBioinformatics). The focus of the conference, which has been held annually since 2010, is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research that spans the fields of computer science, mathematics, statistics, biology, bioinformatics, and biomedicine. ( Posted 4/20/13) |
Cai Receives NSF CAREER Award
Assistant professor Zhipeng Cai has received a five-year, $400,000 award from the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The CAREER grant, which emphasizes high-quality research and novel education initiatives, is the most competitive and prestigious award from NSF to young faculty members in science and engineering fields.
Dr. Cai will use funding from the award to study routing in cognitive radio networks. A cognitive radio is a transceiver that attempts to optimize wireless communication bandwidth by changing its operating parameters, which include the channels that it uses for sending and receiving. Users of a cognitive radio network are classified as either primary or secondary. Secondary users (SUs) communicate through unassigned spectrum bands without disrupting primary users (PUs). Dr. Cai is studying how SUs can take advantage of the social activity patterns of PUs to obtain more spectrum opportunities.
After joining Georgia State University in 2011 as an adjunct faculty member, Dr. Cai became an assistant professor in 2012. Prior to his arrival at GSU, Dr. Cai held research positions at Georgia Tech, Mississippi State University, and the University of Alberta. Dr. Cai holds a B.S. degree in computer science from the Beijing Institute of Technology and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in computing science from the University of Alberta. Dr. Cai's research interests include algorithm design and analysis, cognitive radio networks, social networks, and computational biology.
Dr. Cai is the sixth faculty member from the Department of Computer Science to win an NSF CAREER award. The previous winners are Dr. Raheem Beyah (2009), Dr. Xiaojun Cao (2006), Dr. Xiaolin Hu (2009), Dr. Yingshu Li (2006), and Dr. WenZhan Song (2010). Dr. Beyah left GSU in 2011 and is now an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. ( Posted 4/14/13) |
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