| Established in 2002, the
BU Computer Science Research Excellence Award (REA) is presented annually
to Ph.D. students who have produced outstanding research results over the
course of their studies in the department. To be considered for this award,
BU/CS PhD students must first be nominated by their advisor. The winners
are then recommended by a faculty REA selection committee and approved by
the entire BU/CS faculty.
The following are commendations by the REA selection committee for
distinguished winners from past academic years.
2010/11 Research Excellence Award Winner
2009/10 Research Excellence Award Winner
2008/09 Research Excellence Award Winner
2007/08 Research Excellence Award Winner
2006/07 Research Excellence Award Winner
2005/06 Research Excellence Award Winner
2003/04 Research Excellence Award Winners
2002/03 Research Excellence Award Winners
AY '10/11 Winners |
Michalis Potamias
Michalis's research has been on analyzing and querying large and complex
graph structures with applications in biological and social networks. He
proposed new distance functions between nodes in probabilistic graphs and
he designed and implemented efficient algorithms to answer nearest
neighbor queries on very large probabilistic graphs. In addition, he
proposed and implemented a scalable and effective algorithm to cluster
massive probabilistic graphs using graph edit distance. Furthermore, he
proposed a model to quantify and explain information propagation in social
networks based on both endogenous and exogenous criteria. Finally, he has
worked on a number of other diverse areas including query optimization on
the cloud, indexing deterministic graphs, and indexing multimedia data.
His work has been published in top database venues including VLDB, ACM
SIGMOD, IEEE ICDE, and ACM CIKM. His work on shortest path distance estimation in large networks received the Best Student Paper Award in ACM CIKM 2009.
Georgios Zervas
Georgios's research agenda is broad, and spans a wide spectrum of
technologies in the online economy, from sponsored search advertising and
second-price auctions, to modeling incentives in the link economy and the
blogosphere, to quantifying tradeoffs between the value of private
information and the ability to audit an untrusted third party. In his
research he combines mathematical modeling with data analysis of large and
original sources of data. An indicative example of Georgios's work is his
recent paper published in the ACM Symposium on Electronic Commerce (EC'10). The paper presents a large-scale study of the leading pay-per-bid
auctioneer, Swoopo. This paper is the first to model information
asymmetries across players and capture the large margins made by Swoopo
and other sites. The mathematical models that capture such asymmetries are
combined with a large-scale data-analysis study on traces of tens of
thousands of auctions. The experiments validate findings from the models
and also study the effectiveness of behavioral strategies by participants,
such as the impact of aggressive bidding. |
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AY '09/10 Winner |
Bhavana Kanukurthi
Bhavana's research has been on cryptographic key agreement
protocols that do not rely on any computational assumptions but
instead utilize minimal amounts of shared knowledge that the
communicating parties possess. She has constructed the first
such protocol to run in polynomial time (Eurocrypt 2009). She
then further improved it, using techniques from error-correcting
codes, to develop the first protocol in which the amount of
initial shared knowledge required is only linear in the desired
security (STOC 2010). With the help of undergraduates under her
supervision, she developed an implementation of the protocol
that demonstrated its applicability in practice. She has given
several excellent talks on her work at top computer science
departments around the world. |
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AY '08/09 Winners |
Kyle Burke
Kyle Burke’s research has been on games built upon mathematical theorems that are fundamental to Economics. Specifically, he designed two games, Atropos and Dictator. Atropos is based on Sperner's lemma, one of the most important Fixed Point Theorems. The Dictator is based on Arrow's theorem. The design of both games show great creativity. These games can be valuable for computer science and mathematics education. Kyle also obtained solid complexity results for both games.
Jorge Londono
Jorge Londono's research focuses on optimization and game-theoretic approaches for embedding multiple overlay (virtual) networks into a single shared (physical) host network. This "network embedding" problem is central to emerging cloud computing and virtualization paradigms. From a system-centric perspective, Jorge devised solutions that aim to maximize the efficiency of the hosting network. From a user-centric perspective, Jorge devised solutions that recognize the selfish nature of the users and host. In both settings, Jorge's contributions, which appeared in a number of papers, include theoretical results and empirical evaluation. |
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AY '07/08 Winner |
Gabe Parmer
Gabe Parmer's research has focused on both
mechanisms and policies that are central to the design of
dependable and predictable software systems. In 2006, he
co-authored a best-paper at IEEE RTAS, on the design of kernel-
and user-level solutions for sandboxing application-specific
real-time services. This was followed by the development of the
"Hijack" infrastructure for Linux, that supported interposition of
user-defined services on system calls and interrupts. In effect,
this allowed users to define application-specific services to
over-ride those of the underlying kernel, where appropriate, while
ensuring the integrity of the core OS was not compromised. More
recently, the work on Hijack has been used to implement a
component-based system, called "Composite", that features the
notion of "mutable protection domains" (MPDs). MPDs essentially
form adaptable isolation boundaries around software components,
thereby influencing the communication cost between one component
and another. This enables a system to adapt itself to the highest
degree of isolation between components, thereby maximizing
dependability, while ensuring timely execution. In 2007, Gabe had
several notable first-author publications and presentations
including at RTAS, RTSS, PDPTA and VMworld. |
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AY '06/07 Winner |
Jingbin Wang
Jingbin has shown excellent taste in selecting or defining the
tough problems that are central in his field. His algorithms are
not only theoretically interesting, but also solve important
practical tasks. For example, his results on tracking and
recognizing non-rigid hand motions are so far among the best in
the world. His work in the area of image segmentation and object
recognition appears in the proceedings of some highly competitive
conferences and a journal. Some problems he worked on: 1.
Recognizing objects with varying shape in images. Parts of such
objects can appear in many different ways in an image and can even
be occluded altogether. With his co-authors, he developed a
probabilistic tool, ``Hidden State Shape Models'', then (by
himself) applied it to localize hands, fingers and other objects
in heavily cluttered test images. 2. Combination of grouping image
regions with shape-based object recognition; the resulting
first-authored paper became very visible. 3. For the problem of
locating the major lung fissures on CT (computer tomography), he
discovered an elegant, probabilistic method to combine prior shape
information with data. 4. He designed and independently wrote the
code for an extensively-used human-computer interaction system for
visualization and processing of chest CT images. |
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AY '05/06 Winner |
Anukool Lakhina
Anukool has shown that analyzing traffic measurements
from many points in the network simultaneously yields enormous leverage
on a number of practical problems in networking. He has been the first
to develop methods to do this. The work attracted attention at a series
of top conferences, and results in an outstanding publication record
that would be the envy of any junior faculty member (and a good start
on a strong tenure case at a top-ranked school). While being theoretically
grounded, it has immense practical value, since it is useful for identifying
unusual operating conditions in networks, for predicting future traffic
patterns, for estimating unavailable traffic measurements, and for diagnosing
network intrusion and network abuse. The methods that Anukool has developed
are quickly being adopted by other researchers; papers are already appearing
that are applying his methods to other problems. |
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AY '03/04 Winners |
Vassilis Athitsos
As a senior graduate student in the Image and Video Computing group
at Boston University, Vassilis has been productive in a wide range
of areas -- computer vision, machine learning, pattern recognition,
databases, and human-computer interfaces. His most recent first-authored
paper on a method for constructing embeddings for similarity indexing
and nearest-neighbor classification was accepted as an oral presentation
at the 2004 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.
The conference committee only accepted 56 out of 810 submissions
(7%) for oral presentation. Vassilis' innovative research in hand
pose estimation has also drawn considerable attention in his research
community. His rigorous, trend-setting methods have been published
in the proceedings of several refereed national and international
conferences. His earlier collaborations have led to papers on skin-color
based segmentation and computational tools for analyzing American
Sign Language in prestigious journals. Vassilis' record demonstrates
that he is a very creative, productive, and versatile researcher. |
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Jeffrey Considine
Jeffrey's research at B.U. has covered an astonishingly broad set
of areas, spanning theory, networking, databases, programming languages
and security. His collaborations have led to publications in top
conferences in many of these disciplines. Most recently, Jeffrey
has focused on services and applications for peer-to-peer and overlay
networks, with well-received recent papers at ACM SIGCOMM '02 and
IPTPS '03. An extension of his SIGCOMM '02 paper was recently accepted
in the prestigious IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. Jeffrey
was the first author on an IEEE ICDE '04 paper which won the best
paper award for contribution to the emerging area of sensor aggregation.
Jeffrey has demonstrated an amazing versatility as a researcher
with a remarkable ability to go deep in the diverse contexts of
theorem-proving, experimental evaluation, and systems-building. |
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AY 02/03 Winners |
Liang Guo
Liang's Ph.D. thesis, which he defended in May 2003, considers
novel extensions to the existing Internet architecture to manage
traffic using fast flow classification. His Ph.D. examining committee
was uniformly impressed with the technical depth in his models and
analysis and with his comprehensive experimental findings. Results
from his thesis have been widely disseminated in top networking
conferences and have spurred a great deal of interest in the community
at large. In addition to his dissertation work, Liang published
numerous papers on other networking topics ranging from congestion
control to applied queuing theory to network routing.
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Shudong Jin
Shudong's Ph.D. thesis, which he defended in May 2003, advances
the state of the art in two distinct areas in computer networking:
Internet characterization and in scalable content delivery. He
is being recognized for the technical strength of his research work,
for the independence with which he pursued his PhD research, and for
his initiative in pursuing collaborative research with fellow graduate
students. Shudong's publication record is exceptionally strong
for a graduate student, with over ten refereed conference papers
and five journal articles, including a recent article in IEEE/ACM
Transactions on Networking. |
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