Research Excellence
Award Commendations
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.
2006/07 Research
Excellence Award Winner
2005/06 Research
Excellence Award Winner
2003/04 Research
Excellence Award Winners
2002/03 Research
Excellence Award Winners
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AY'2006/07 Winner
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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'2005/06 Winner
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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'2003/04 Winners
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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'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'2002/03 Winners
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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'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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