Summer Awards Roundup

Monday, September 18, 2023

text: CSD Awards Roundup Summer 2023 - red background with gold stars thrown into the air from a gold trophy cup.
Our faculty and students routinely earn top honors for their research and teaching excellence.

CSD faculty and students win awards, grants, and recognition every day. Here's a look at recent awards we know about through Summer 2023. 

CSD Students & Teams

  • Diya Dinesh, a sophomore computer science and robotics major, was a finalist for the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) Aspirations in Computing Program’s NCWIT Collegiate Award.

  • Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Robotics Matthew O’Toole was part of a research team that received a Best Paper Award at the 2023 ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques for "Split-Lohmann Multifocal Displays."

  • CMU's Plaid Parliament of Pwning — the winningest team in DEF CON's Capture the Flag competition history —  earned its seventh victory in the past 11 years.

  • CMU's International Collegiate Programming Contest team beat its U.S. competitors and came in second overall at this year's North America Championship. SCS sophomores Edward Xiao and William Tsin, and master's student Joey Yu represented SCS, while professors Danny Sleator and Richard Peng coached the team.

  • A team including CSD Ph.D. student Hugo Sadok and Associate Professor Justine Sherry collaborated with colleagues at Intel, Microsoft and NYU to develop a system that changes how CPUs communicate with network interface cards. The system received both the Jay Lepreau Best Paper Award and the Distinguished Artifact Award at the USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation.

  • A team of CSD and Meta researchers received a Best Paper Award at the 50th International Symposium on Computer Architecture for their work to drastically improve memory management in data centers. The team was led by Assistant Professor Dimitrios Skarlatos and included CSD graduate students Kaiyang Zhao, Ziqi Wang, and Kaiwen Xue.

Faculty Awards

  • Professor Guy Blelloch received the inaugural Parallel Computing Award at the Association for Computing Machinery's Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures.

  • Mor Harchol-Balter, the Dr. Bruce J. Nelson Professor of Computer Science, was elected SIG chair for ACM SIGMETRICS, the ACM Special Interest Group for the computer performance evaluation community.

  • Assistant Professor Aayush Jain, nominated by UCLA, was the recipient of the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Indistinguishability Obfuscation from Well-Studied Assumptions,” which established the feasibility of mathematically rigorous software obfuscation from well-studied hardness conjectures. 

  • Adjunct Scientist Padmanabhan Pillai earned an ACM SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time Award for his 2001 paper, "Real-Time Dynamic Voltage Scaling for Low-Power Embedded Operating Systems."

  • Assistant Professor Aditi Raghunathan was named to the inaugural cohort of Schmidt Futures' AI2050 Early Career Fellows.

  • R. Ravi, the Andris A. Zoltners Professor of Business and professor of operations research and computer science, received a 30-year Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory Test-of-Time Award for "When Trees Collide: An Approximation Algorithm for the Generalized Steiner Problem on Networks."

  • The Department of Defense selected Professor Tuomas Sandholm for the 2023 class of Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows, the department's flagship single-investigator award for basic research.

  • Assistant Professor Rashmi Vinayak was named the 2023 Goldsmith Lecturer by the IEEE Information Theory Society. The program highlights the technical achievements of early-career women and helps build their professional careers and recognition.

  • Assistant Professor Weina Wang received the 2023 Rising Star Research Award from the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group for the Computer Performance Evaluation Community.

  • Post-Doctoral Researcher Sam Westrick received the John C. Reynolds Doctoral Dissertation Award from the ACM's Special Interest Group on Programming Languages for "Efficient and Scalable Parallel Functional Programming Through Disentanglement."

  • Computer Science Professor David Woodruff received a 10-year STOC Test-of-Time Award for his paper, "Low Rank Approximation and Regression in Input Sparsity Time."

Did we miss capturing an award? Email csd-news@cs.cmu.edu with details.*

For awards across SCS take a look at the SCS Summer Awards Roundup.

The Dean's Business Office also maintains a sortable archive of major faculty honors on the Faculty Awards website.

*Publication by SCS is not guaranteed and is subject to the discretion of the SCS News team.