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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.

 

 

Purdue's Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Chapter Awards:

Award

Recipient(s)

ACM Graduate Teaching Assistant Award

Christopher E. Potter

ACM Faculty Award

Gustavo Rodriguez-Rivera

ACM Undergraduate Teaching Assistant Award

Noah L. Alderton and Sri V Cherukuri

 

Graduate Student Board Awards:

Award

Recipient(s)

Top Graduate Teaching Assistant

Bader AlBassam

Most Influential Professor

Z. Berkay Celik

 

Scholarships:

Scholarship Name

Recipient(s)

Computer Science Endowment Scholarship

Domenic Conversa

Christopher Rosenblatt

Gowri Harish

Grace Hopper Scholarship

Sponsored by: David Spellmeyer

Pranjali Raturi

Sruthi Pillai

Harris Scholarship

Christopher Duncan

Zacharie Zirnheld

Donald Adams

Qualcomm Inclusion Scholarship

Alisa Garcia

Tania Ramirez

Qualcomm

Reece Jones

Nathan Ashta

Jizhou Chen

Salesforce Scholarship

Gore Kao

Corporate Partner Scholarship

Alan Bare

Shreyas Kharbanda

Raunak Srivastava

Ryan Borzello

Shangyin Tan

Victor Zhu

Vijay Bharadwaj

Daniel Kambich

Kartik Mittal

Rushank Jhanjaria

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

Raytheon Endowment Scholarship

Richard Li

Mitchell Augustin

Blake K. Baker Scholarship

Samantha Coe

Caterpillar Scholarship

Dithi Saxena

Man To Tang

FactSet Research Systems Scholarship

Kade Boltjes

Honeywell Scholarship

Sakshi Choudhary

Kunze Scholarship

Sponsored by: Aaron and Morgan Kunze

Kichul Kang

Kelly Kral

Rosen Endowment Scholarship

In memory of Saul Rosen

Arianna Smith

Arron Smith

David and Darla Dodson Scholarship

Neel Bagora

Christopher Lehman

Grub Scholarship

Sponsored by: Randy Reece

Riley Borgard

Gene & Marguerite Kim Scholarship

Samantha Coe

Michael and Jerralie Petersen Scholarship

 

Alexander Engels

Nylin Scholarship

Sponsored by: William C. Nylin Jr.

Claire Wallace

Boeing Scholarship

Vindhya Banda

Jacky Zheng

James Lim

Jieun Lee

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

Last Updated: Nov 1, 2023 3:42 PM

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