SCS STUDENT AWARDS

SCS Student Awards
School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA 15213-3891
(412)268-8525 . (412)268-5576 (fax)

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School of Computer Science Distinguished Dissertation Award
– Awarded annually by the School of Computer Science in recognition of outstanding work by a graduate of our school-wide doctoral programs.

2023-2024 (Award 2024)

• Paul Pu Liang , May 2024 (MLD)
  Foundations of Multisensory Artificial Intelligence
  –Advisors: Louis-Philippe Morency, Ruslan Salakhutdinov
  
  

Honorable Mention

• Travis Hance, August 2024 (CSD)
  Verifying Concurrent Systems Code
  –Advisor: Bryan Parno
  
• Mikhail Khodak, August 2024 (CSD)
  The Learning of Algorithms and Architectures
  –Advisors: Maria-Florina Balcan, Ameet Talwalkar
  
• Rohan Sawhney, May 2024 (CSD)
  Monte Carlo Geometry Processing: A Grid-Free Approach to Solving Partial Differential Equations on Volumetric Domains
  –Advisor: Keenan M. Crane
  

2022-2023 (Award 2023)

• Gabriele Farina , May 2023 (CS)
  Game-Theoretic Decision Making in Imperfect-Information Games - Learning Dynamics, Equilibrium Computation, and Complexity
  –Advisor: Tuomas Sandholm
  
  

• Amanda Coston, May 2023 (Heinz/MLD)
  Principled Machine Learning for Societally Consequential Decision Making
  –Advisors: Alexandra Chouldechova, Edward H. Kennedy
  
• Isaac Grosof, July 2023 (CSD)
  Optimal Scheduling in Multiserver Queues
  –Advisor: Mor Harchol-Balter
  
• Dongshunyi (Dora) Li, July 2023 (CBD)
  Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Single Cell Data
  –Advisor: Ziv Bar-Joseph
  
• Hanrui Zhang, July 2023 (CSD)
  Designing and Analyzing Machine Learning Algorithms in the Presence of Strategic Behavior
  –Advisor: Vincent Conitzer

2021-2022 (Award 2022)

• Yong Kiam Tan , June 2022 (CS)
  Deductive Verification for Ordinary Differential Equations: Safety, Liveness, and Stability
  –Advisor: André Platzer
  
  

Honorable Mention

• Emily Black, July 2021 (CSD)
  (Un)Fairness Along the AI Pipeline Problems and Solutions
  –Advisor: Matt Fredrikson
  
• Ziv Scully, August 2022 (CSD)
  A New Toolbox for Scheduling Theory
  –Advisor: Mor Harchol-Balter
  
• Jonathan Sterling, October 2021 (CSD)
  First Steps in Synthetic Tait Computability: The Objective Metatheory of Cubical Type Theory
  –Advisor: Robert Harper

2020-2021 (Award 2021)

• Ellen Vitercik , August 2021 (CS)
  Automated algorithm and mechanism configuration
  –Advisors: Marina-Florina Balcan, Tuomas Sandholm
  
  

Honorable Mention

• Rose Bohrer, May 2021 (CSD)
  Practical End-to-End Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems
  –Advisor: André Platzer
  
• Jason Li, June 2021 (CSD)
  Preconditioning and Locality in Algorithm Design
  –Advisors: Anupam Gupta, Bernhard Haeupler
  
• Toby Jia-Jun Li, May 2021 (HCII)
  A Multi-Modal Intelligent Agent that Learns from Demonstrations and Natural Language Instructions
  –Advisor: Brad A. Myers
  
• Yang Yang , December 2020 (CBD)
  Computational methods for multi-species comparison of 3D genome organization and function
  –Advisor: Jian Ma

2019/2020 (Award 2020)

• Noam Brown , September 2020 (CSD)
  Equilibrium Finding for Large Adversarial Imperfect-Information Games
  –Advisor: Tuomas Sandholm
  
  

  Honorable Mention

• Naama Ben-David, August 2020 (CSD)
  Theoretical Foundations for Practical Concurrent and Distributed Computation
  –Advisor: Guy E. Blelloch
  Laxman Dhulipala, August 2020 (CSD)
  Provably Efficient and Scalable Shared-Memory Graph Processing
  –Advisor: Guy E. Blelloch
  
• Chieh Lin, March 2020 (MLD)
  Probabilistic Single Cell Lineage Tracing
  –Advisor: Ziv Bar-Joseph
  
• Eric Wong , May 2020 (MLD)
  Provable, structured, and efficient methods for robustness of deep networks to adversarial examples
  –Advisor: J. Zico Kolter

  
  

2018/2019 (Award 2019)

• Carlo Angiuli , September 2019 (CS)
  Computational Semantics of Cartesian Cubical Type Theory
  –Advisor: Robert Harper
  
  

  Honorable Mention

• Simon Shaolei Du, April 2019 (MLD)
  Gradient Descent for Non-convex Problems in Modern Machine Learning
  –Advisors: Barnabás Póczos, Aarti Singh
  
• Kenneth Holstein, September 2019 (HCII)
  Designing Real-time Teacher Augmentation to Combine Strengths of Human and AI Instruction
  –Advisors: Vincent Aleven, Bruce M McLaren
  
• Lerrel Joseph Pinto, August 2019 (RI)
  Data Centric Robotic Learning
  –Advisor: Abhinav Gupta
  
• Sabrina Rashid, 2019 (CBD)
  Distributed Computing in Nature
  –Advisor: Ziv Bar-Joseph

  
  

2017/2018 (Award 2018)

• Nika Haghtalab , August 2018 (CS)
  Foundation of Machine Learning, by the People, for the People
  –Advisors: Avrim Blum, Ariel Procaccia
  

  
  

2016/2017 (Award 2017)

• Kuen-Bang Hou (Favonia) , February 2017 (CS)
  Higher-Dimensional Types in the Mechanization of Homotopy Theory
  –Advisor: Robert Harper
  

• Junchen Jiang , September 2017 (CS)
  Enabling Data-Driven Optimization of Quality of Experience in Internet Applications
  –Advisors: Vyas Sekar (ECE), Hui Zhang (CSD)

  
  

2015/2016 (Award 2016)

• Kristina Sojakova , August 2016 (CS)
  Higher Inductive Types as Homotopy-Initial Algebras
  –Advisors: Steven Awodey, Frank Pfenning
  

  
  Honorable Mention

• John Wright, May 2016 (CS)
  How to Learn a Quantum State
  –Advisor: Ryan O'Donnell

• Sarah Loos, February 2016 (CS)
  Differential Refinement Logic
  –Advisor: André Platzer

  
  

2014/2015 (Award 2015)

• Julian Shun , May 2015 (CS)
  Shared-Memory Parallelism Can Be Simple, Fast, and Scalable
  –Advisor: Guy Blelloch
  

  
  Honorable Mention

• David Bamman, 2015 (LTI)
  People-Centric natural Language Processing
  –Advisor: Noah Smith

• Anca Dragan, 2015 (RI)
  Legible Robot Motion Planning
  –Advisor: Siddhartha Srinivasa

• Danai Koutra, 2015 (CS)
  Exploring and Making Sense of Large Graphs
  –Advisor: Christos Faloutsos

  
  

2013/2014 (Award 2014)

• Siddharth Gopal , August 2014 (LTI)
  Large-scale Structured Learning
  –Advisor: Yiming Yang
  

  
  

2012/2013 (Award 2013)

• Joseph Gonzalez , December 2012 (ML)
  Parallel and Distributed Systems for Probabilistic Reasoning
  –Advisor: Carlos Guestrin
  
• Richard Peng , August 2013 (CS)
  Design Using Spectral Graph Theory
  –Advisor: Gary Miller

  Honorable Mention

• Sicun (Sean) Gao , 2012 (CS)
  Computable Analysis, Decision Procedures, and Hybrid Automata: A New Framework for the Formal Verification of Cyber-Physical Systems
  –Advisors: Edmund Clarke, Jeremy Avigad

  
  

2011/2012 (Award 2012)

• Kanat Tanwongsan, August 2011 (CS)
  Efficient Parallel Approximation Algorithms
  –Advisors: Guy Blelloch, Anupam Gupta
  

• Vijay Vasudevan, October 2011 (CS)
  Energy-efficient Data-intensive Computing with a Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes
  –Advisor: David Andersen
  

  Honorable Mention

• André Filipe Torres Martins, May 2011 (IST/Portugal)
  The Geometry of Constrained Structured Prediction: Applications to
  Inference and Learning of Natural Language Syntax
  –Advisors: Noah Smith, Eric Xing, Mário Figueiredo, Pedro Aguiar

• Duen Horng Polo Chau, July 2012 (ML)
  Data Mining Meets HCI: Making Sense of Large Graphs
  –Advisor: Christos Faloutsos

2010/2011 (Award 2011)

• Jean-Francois Lalonde, December 2011 (RI)
  Understanding and Recreating Visual Appearance Under Natural Illumination
  –Advisors: Alexei Efros, Srinivasa Narasimhan
  

  Honorable Mention

• Daniel Licata, February 2011 (CS)
  Dependently Typed Programming with Domain-Specific Logics
  –Advisor: Robert Harper

• Hetunandan Kamisetty, March 2011 (CS)
  Structured Probabilistic Models of Proteins Across Spatial and Fitness Landscape
  –Advisors: Christopher J. Langmead, Eric P. Xing

• Brian Ziebart, December 2010 (ML)
  Modeling Purposeful Adaptive Behavior with the Principle of Maximum Causal Entropy
  –Advisors: J. Andrew Bagnell, Anind K. Dey

2009/2010 (Award 2010)

• Yi Wu, August 2010 (CS)
  The Approximability of Learning and Constraint Satisfaction Programs
  –Advisor: Ryan O'Donnell
  

  Honorable Mention

• Deepak Garg, December 2009 (CS)
  Proof Theory for Authorization Logic and Its Applications to a Practical File System
  –Advisor: Frank Pfenning

2008/2009 (Award 2019)

• Maria-Florina Balcan, September 2008 (CS)
  New Theoretical Frameworks for Machine Learning
  –Advisor: Avrim Blum
  

  Honorable Mention

• Andreas Krause, December 2008 (CS)
  Optimizing Sensing: Theory and Applications
  –Advisor: Carlos Guestrin
• Jurij Leskovec, September 2008 (ML)
  Dynamics of Large Networks
  –Advisor: Christos Faloutsos

2007/2008

• Derek Hoiem, May 2007 (RI)
  Seeing the World Behind the Image: Spatial Layout for 3D Scene Understanding
  –Advisors: Alexei (Alyosha) Efros and Martial Hebert
  

  Honorable Mention

• Pradeep K. Ravikumar, August 2007 (ML)
  Approximate Inference Structure Learning and Feature Estimation in Markov Random Fields
  –Advisor: John Lafferty
• Ryan Williams, August 2007 (CS)
  Algorithms and Resource Requirements for Fundamental Problems
  –Advisor: Manuel Blum

2006/2007

• Adam Wierman, May 2007 (CS)
  Scheduling for Today's Computer Systems: Bridging Theory and Practice
  –Advisor: Mor Harchol-Balter
  
• Jacob O. Wobbrock, July 2006 (HCII)
  EdgeWrite: A Versatile Design for Text Entry and Control
  –Advisor: Brad A. Myers
  

2005/2006

• Luis Von Ahn, December 2005 (CS)
  Human Computation
  –Advisor: Manuel Blum
  

2004/2005

• Angela Demke Brown, August 2005 (CS)
  Explicit Compiler-based Memory Management for Out-of-core Applications
  –Advisor: Todd Mowry
  
• Sanjit A. Seshia, May 2005 (CS)
  Adaptive Eager Boolean Encoding for Arithmetic Reasoning in Verification
  –Advisor: Randal E. Bryant
  

2003/2004

• Oley Mikhail Sheyner, May 2004 (CS)
  Scenario Graphs and Attack Graphs
  –Advisor: Jeannette Wing
  

2002/2003

• Michael H. Bowling, May 2003 (CS)
  Multiagent Learning in the Presence of Agents with Limitations
  –Advisors: Manuela Veloso
  
• John Gregory Steffan, September 2003
  Hardware Support for Thread-Level Speculation
  –Advisors: Todd C. Mowry
  

2001/2002

• Robert C. Miller, May 2002 (CS)
  Lightweight Structure in Text
  –Advisors: Brad Myers and David Garlan
  
• Perry S. Cheng, September 2001 (CS)
  Parallel, Real-Time Garbage Collection
  –Advisors: Guy Blelloch and Robert Harper
  

2000/2001

• Andrej Bauer, December 2000 (CS)
  DThe Realizability Approach to Computable Analysis and Topology
  –Advisor:Dana Scott
  
• Robert W. O'Callahan, May 2001 (CS)
  Generalized Aliasing as a Basis for Program Analysis Tools
  –Advisors: Daniel Jackson and Jeannette Wing
  

1999/2000

• Carl Burch, May 2000 (CS)
  Machine Learning in metrical Task Systems and Other On-Line Problems
  –Advisor: Avrim Blum
  

1998/1999

• A. David Redish, May 1997 (CS)
  Beyond the Cognitive Map: Contributions to a Computational Neuroscience Theory of Rodent Navigation
  –Advisor: David Touretzky

1997/1998

• Jonathan R. Shewchuk, May 1997 (CS)
  Delaunay Refinement Mesh Generation
  –Advisors: Gary Miller and David O'Hallaron
  

• Xudong Zhao, August 1996 (CS)
  Verification of Arithmetic Circuits
  –Advisor: Edmund Clarke
  

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