UNC-Chapel Hill Computer Science - 2021 Impact Report

UNC - CHAPEL HILL DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE

IMPACT REPORT FALL 2021

UNC CS CULTURE Computer Science at Carolina is as unique as our students. With a liberal arts foundation and multidisciplinary interests, students come to UNC CS for a variety of reasons. What drives them is the chance for opportunity - opportunity to learn applicable skills and to make a real difference in technology. What supports them is a department full of committed and caring faculty, invested in the next generation of UNC CS graduates.

Greetings from Chapel Hill!

UNC Computer Science is the secondoldest free-standing CS department in the U.S., founded in 1964 by Dr. Fred Brooks, leader of the IBM System/360 operating system project. With an industry background, Dr. Brooks valued computer science as an applied discipline. The legacy of what he built lives on today as we celebrate the collaborative, problem-solving nature of our work.

The last 18 months have been a testament to the dedication and determination of our students, staff and faculty.

Our faculty and students received recognition from a variety of prestigious institutions, including four NSF Early Career Awards, a PECASE, and the establishment of a new collaborative NSF Institute for artificial intelligence.

As a valued member of our community, we share with you this Impact Report, which offers a snapshot of our department work and culture. Our research fosters collaborative relationships across campus and industry. As toolsmiths, we use the foundation of computer science to build a better future, critically and creatively using technology to provide solutions that benefit all.

Please join me in celebrating the amazing accomplishments of our faculty and students and their continued success in upholding our reputation as a leader in innovation.

Sincerely,

Kevin Jeffay Gillian Cell Distinguished Professor and Department Chair

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This report highlights the innovations of our students, From the graduate student to co-curricular undergradufaculty, and alumni, andexperience it reate student events, UNC cognizesclubs theirand contributions to CS strives to create an engaging community the fieldfor of all. computer science.

The core values of our department are collegiality and collaboration.

BY THE NUMBERS

#25

#10

among U.S. CS graduate programs, 2018

among U.S. CS & engineering programs, 2021

Academic Ranking of World Universities

$11.9m research expenditures

AY 2020-2021

U.S. News and World Report

#5

32

among U.S. public universities, 2021

AY 2020-2021

U.S. News and World Report

tenure-track faculty members

UNC CS STUDENTS - INNOVATORS, LEADERS, COLLABORATORS

Charlie Helms (2021)

Lindsay Zhou (2022)

Rida Bayraktar (2023)

In addition to pursing a bachelor’s in CS and minors in math & Arabic studies, Charlie co-founded UNC’s Black in Tech club and helped launch its inaugural conference, AfroPix, in Spring 2020.

Lindsay is pursuing a double-major in CS and linguistics with a Japanese minor. Outside her studies, she holds leadership positions for two hackathons: Carolina Data Challenge and Pearl Hacks.

Rida, a computer science and studio art major, founded non-profit Pink STREAM, designed to educate and empower young women in STREAM fields (science, technology, robotics, engineering, arts and math).

MENTORING TO BROADEN PARTICIPATION COMP 110, Intro to Programming, is the starting point for many CS majors. UNC CS alumus Kris Jordan teaches nearly 1,000 students every fall and strategically launched a Learning Assistant program to ensure every student has a point of connection and support while working through the coursework.

Jordan ensures students are paired with mentors of similar identities. For example, every woman is paired with another woman. The team of 45 LAs helps students develop confidence in their ability to apply programming

The COMP 110 LA team meets in Sitterson Hall, 2019.

techniques to problems in a broad range of fields, evolving the curriculum to be more empowering and welcoming, encouraging inclusivity and diversity.

Many COMP 110 students come to Carolina intent on other majors, but soon discover a love for computer science. Selina Zhang (pictured on page 2), a former pre-med student, took COMP 110 and soon became part of the COMP 110 LA team. “When I first joined the major, my classmates were much further along in their careers than I was. But they really helped me not just catch

30%

30% of UNC Computer Science undergraduate majors are women, compared to the national average of 21%.1

1. National Center for Education Statistics (2018/19)

up, but excel. COMP 110 offers community. Once you find that community, it really changes your college experience.”

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THE NEW FACES OF UNC CS Recent recruiting efforts brought a prestigious group of faculty researchers to UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Computer Science. This exceptional cohort will add to our already accomplished and internationally recognized faculty team and exemplifies our commitment to innovation, propelling students and research to the next level.

Samarjit Chakraborty Real Time Systems As a William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at UNC CS, Samarjit Chakraborty continues his research on real-time, embedded and cyber-physical systems, with applications spanning across electromobility, affordable healthcare and electrical energy storage systems.

Prior to joining UNC CS, Chakraborty was a professor of electrical engineering at TU Munich in Germany, where he held the Chair for Real-Time Computer Systems. For five years, he was additionally a scientific advisor at the TUM CREATE Center for Electromobility in Singapore, where he also led a research group on embedded systems for electric vehicles. Chakraborty has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, Leibniz Transactions on Embedded Systems, Design Automation of Embedded Systems and Springer’s Lecture Notes on Electrical Engineering.

Snigdha Chaturvedi Natural Language Processing Previously: UC Santa Cruz Snigdha is passionate about natural language understanding, with a focus on narratives and social aspects of language.

Gedas Bertasius Computer Vision Previously: Facebook AI Gedas solves problems in computer vision and machine learning, with focuses on topics of video understanding, first-person vision and multi-modal deep learning.

Sridhar Duggirala Cyber-Physical & Real-Time Systems Previously: UConn Sridhar is developing scalable algorithms to verify complex interactions between the physical and cyber world.

Saba Eskandarian Computer Security Previously: Stanford Saba’s research focuses broadly on applied cryptography, security and privacy, and he is particularly interested in building new privacy-preserving and privacy-enhancing technologies.

Aaron Smith Video Compression & CS Education Previously: UNC-Chapel Hill Aaron’s interests include data compression, video adaptation, undergraduate education, web technology, entrepreneurship, cloud services and software engineering.

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UNC CS has experienced unprecedented growth, and CS is now one of Carolina‘s top five majors by enrollment.

Aaron‘s hire is part of the department‘s commitment to excellence in teaching. His approach in developing equitable and scalable tools for undergraduate CS education allows for an engaging classroom experience.

Student feedback consistently remarks on his ability to break down complicated concepts into understandable lectures with real-time feedback and review to ensure topic comprehension before moving forward.

Colin Raffel Machine Learning Previously: Google Brain Colin‘s research focuses on developing machine learning techniques, especially semi-supervised, unsupervised and transfer learning methods for learning from limited labeled data.

Shashank Srivastava Natural Language Processing Previously: Microsoft Research Shashank studies natural language processing, machine learning and interactive methods for AI.

Daniel Szafir Robotics Previously: CU Boulder Daniel works at the intersection of robotics and human-computer interaction to investigate the fundamental principles that underlie effective interactions between people and autonomous systems.

Danielle Szafir Data Visualization Previously: CU Boulder Danielle’s research involves information visualization, data science and cognitive science and has been integrated into leading tools such as D3 and Tableau.

Natalie Stanley Computational Biology Previously: Stanford Natalie’s research is broadly focused on single-cell bioinformatics, computational and systems immunology and developing algorithms for representing and understanding graph-based data.

Natalie‘s hire illustrates the interdisciplinary research collaborations that strengthen both our department and our university. Bringing a background in mathematics and computational biology as well as computer science, Natalie holds a joint appointment in both UNC CS and the Computational Medicine Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. She and her team work to solve applied biological problems.

UNC Computer Science was excited to add Colin Raffel to the faculty in the fall of 2020. His most recent work was as a senior research scientist at Google Brain. He completed his doctorate at Columbia University and holds a master’s degree in music, science and technology from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics.

What are you excited to do as a faculty member at UNC? I‘m most excited about building a lab and mentoring students! I have been working for the past four years in industry as a research scientist, so have not gotten many opportunities for mentorship or teaching. I‘ve always enjoyed the back-and-forth involved with advising students, where in the best case, the advisor learns as much as the student.

What made you choose UNC? I was impressed at how supportive the UNC CS department is of its new faculty and of the generally amicable culture in the department.

The students I met during my visits were also extremely sharp and engaged. On a more personal note, I am excited to live in an area I love.

What would you like others to know about your work?

My work addresses the shortcomings of machine learning that hold back its adoption in practically useful settings. For example, most of my recent research has been concerned with making machine learning methods less reliant on large labeled datasets to attain good performance. Since there are many applications where it is expensive to obtain labeled data, this line of work has significant real-world impact.

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UNC CS RESEARCH ENHANCING AUTONOMY

nomous vehicle. The Real-

From automobiles to

by Anderson and Smith,

mobile phones, UNC Cyber-Physical Systems Group makes devices more efficient The

Cyber-Physical

Systems Group, already prolific in the field of real-time systems, got a boost with the exciting additions of Profes-

Time Systems Group, led took home Best Paper awards at ISORC 2021, RTNS 2021 (sweeping both awards), RTCSA 2020 and RTNS 2019, as well as Outstanding Paper awards at ECRTS 2021 and RTNS 2019. Duggirala’s research team also took first place in two autonomous racing competitions held in 2019 and 2021.

sor Samarjit Chakraborty and Assistant Profes-

The group also develops various embedded systems

sor Sridhar Parasara Duggirala in 2019. In 2021,

for healthcare applications. Chakraborty is collabo-

Chakraborty, Duggirala, Professor James Anderson

rating with researchers from the German Center for

and Research Professor Don Smith began work on

Infection Research, University of Giessen and TU

a project to transform the software development

Chemnitz to develop effective contact tracing for

process in modern cars, culminating in a fully auto-

COVID-19. In addition, he has developed a low-cost hearing screening device for use in developing countries. Assistant Professor Shahriar Nirjon is working to enable ultra-low-power, sensor-enabled devices to execute complex machine learning algorithms while being powered solely by harvested energy. He is also using voice assistant devices like Amazon Echo to optimize in-home healthcare for post-surgical cancer patients and caregivers.

Nirjon’s Embedded Intelligence Lab received Best Paper awards at AIChallengeIoT 2020 and DCOSS 2019, in addition to a Best Presentation award at UbiComp 2020.

UNC CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEMS (CPS) GROUP The UNC CPS Group integrates computation, networking, and physical devices, creating a network of smart devices and systems.

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James Anderson Kenan Distinguished Professor

Samarjit Chakraborty Kenan Distinguished Professor

Sridhar Duggirala Assistant Professor

Shahriar Nirjon Assistant Professor

Don Smith Research Professor

LOOKING BEYOND BATTERIES Embedded Intelligence Lab prepares for future lithium shortages by making batteryless systems smarter, more efficient

As technologists predict a shortage of lithium-ion batteries in the future, one focus of Assistant Professor Shahriar Nirjon’s Embedded Intelligence Lab is batteryless systems. These systems power themselves by harvesting energy from changes in light or temperature, vibrations and even radio-frequency (RF) microwaves. The issue with these systems, which are commonly used for wearable healthcare, environmental monitoring, and other applications, is that power can be sporadic.

Doctoral graduate Bashima Islam developed two task scheduling frameworks that greatly improve efficiency, consistency and predictability. The first framework calculates the amount of energy needed for a task to minimize time spent on energy harvest. The second framework, focused on deep learning tasks for real-time audio and video recognition, determines the minimum necessary subtasks required for sufficiently accurate results and prioritizes them, ensuring that if energy becomes unavailable, those minimum required subtasks will be completed. Together, these frameworks will help reduce our reliance on lithium-ion Shahriar Nirjon

In 2014, Associate Professor Donald Porter led the effort to build Graphene, a Linux-compatible library operating system that seamlessly and efficiently executed both single and multi-process applications, all while ensuring security isolation of distrusting applications on the same host system.

After porting it to Intel SGX in recent years, Porter and collaborator ChiaChe Tsai (now at Texas A&M University) saw increased interest in the project, leading them to form a working group to organize the project’s development and build a contributors’ community.

The developers have been working on

batteries in low-power monitoring devices.

integrations for platform-as-a-service products and additional languages, as well as support for Microsoft Windows as a host.

Now known as Gramine, Porter’s project has joined the Linux Foundation as an official Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) project in 2021. The CCC focuses on open source licensed projects securing data in use and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing through open collaboration, which aligns perfectly with the

SECURING THE CLOUD, WITH HELP FROM THE COMMUNITY OSCAR Lab project Gramine joins the Linux Foundation Confidential Computing Consortium

goals of the Gramine project.

Donald Porter 6

UNC CS RESEARCH structures in the body, thereby reducing negative side effects, while safely and accurately reaching difficultto-access nodules throughout the lung for biopsy and treatment. For this work, Alterovitz recently received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government to outstanding scientists and engineers.

Under Alterovitz‘s mentorship, UNC CS doctoral student Mengyu Fu was awarded a Best Paper Finalist

Ron Alterovitz

Award at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference in July 2021, a leading research conference in the

STEERING THE WAY

field of robotics. Fu’s research centers on new motion

The Computational Robotics Group is leading the way for less invasive and more accurate cancer diagnosis Ron Alterovitz and his team of researchers are developing a new medical robot that can enable earlier, less invasive and more accurate diagnosis of lung cancer.

planning algorithms, computing plans faster and with a higher success rate. Improving automated steerable needle procedures can enable physicians to accurately reach targets for

medical

procedures

Leading a cross-disciplinary team of researchers at

such as biop-

UNC Computer Science, the UNC School of Medicine,

sies and loca-

and Vanderbilt University, Alterovitz and his team are

lized therapy

developing a robotic steerable needle capable of au-

delivery

tonomously navigating to sites in the human body.

cancer.

for

The new robot has the potential to automatically curve around vasculature and other sensitive anatomical

FILLING IN THE GAPS

MIDAG Group collaborates with School of Medicine to automatically detect areas missed during colonoscopy During colonoscopy screenings, the folds of the colon and the need to continually direct the camera to the whole circumference of the colon often result in the endoscopist not viewing all of the polyps that are present. Led by UNC CS Professor Stephen Pizer, the Medical Image Display and Analysis Group (MIDAG) with specialists ranging from medical image analysis to computer vision to deep learning to colonoscopy from the UNC School of Medicine, have developed the ability to render 3D reconstructions of a colon from colonoscopy video in real time. As the computer analyzes the reconstruction Stephen Pizer

for holes, the physician can be alerted to which regions were missed by the camera and revisit them before moving the endoscope away from the site.

This ground-breaking collaboration will enable more effective diagnosis of

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precursors to colon cancer.

AUGMENTED TRAINING VIA AUGMENTED REALITY

UNC Graphics and Virtual Reality Group uses augmented reality to train laparoscopic surgeons The UNC Graphics and Virtual Reality Group, led by Professor Henry Fuchs, has been collaborating with surgeon Professor Timothy Farrell in the UNC School of Medicine and a team at the University of Arizona led by Professor Jerzy Rozenblit to use augmented reality alongside a physical training device to help surgical students master laparoscopic surgery techniques.

In the training environment, students use laparoscopes to move objects from one side of a peg board device to another. An augmented reality headset and forced feedback on the laparoscopes help students hone their skills.

The long-term goal of the project is a future in which laparoscopic surgery is performed using augmented reality instead of a camera and monitor. The millimeter-accuracy reconstruction needed to make that happen is still years away, but augmented reality is already a valuable tool in the training process.

Henry Fuchs

EASING THE BURDEN OF HARDWARE SECURITY

Hardware Security Lab recognized by Intel for security validation enhancements As the discovery of hardware vulnerabilities continues to make headlines, risking data security and public faith, security validation becomes increasingly important. Validating the security of a hardware design typically begins with defining the security properties of that design, but this is a difficult and timeconsuming task. To ease this burden, CS doctoral graduate Rui Zhang and Associate Professor Cynthia Sturton developed Transys, an algorithm to trans-

late security-critical properties written for one hardware design to make them suitable for use with a second design.

With Transys, properties already developed for existing designs can be leveraged to ease the burden for a new design. The result is a more thorough security validation process.

Transys earned Zhang and Sturton a second-place finish in Intel’s inaugural Hardware Security Academic Award, beating out submissions from 14 countries. As part of the award, Zhang and Sturton received $50,000 to be used for further research and curriculum development.

DUAL COMMITMENT In addition to research into fighting malware attacks and

securing

smartpho-

nes and Internet-of-Things devices, Professor Fabian Monrose on

has

maximizing

published student

engagement and learning outcomes in cybersecurity education. His work exemplifies the department‘s dual to

commitment teaching

research.

Cynthia Sturton

Fabian Monrose

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and

UNC CS RESEARCH TEACHING LANGUAGE MODELS TO SEE

UNC-NLP Group helps computers learn language more like humans do Visual context is an important part of humans’ language understanding. For example, an adult teaching a child the meaning of a word might point at an object while speaking the word. Even state-of-the-art language processing models, however, have largely failed to benefit from this Mohit Bansal

critical visual context. Incorporating visual context is critical in helping machines understand,

for example, that a black sheep is a common idiom but an uncommon sight. Doctoral student Hao Tan and Professor Mohit Bansal have developed a method to incorporate visual context, ultimately enhancing a computer’s understanding.

The researchers’ algorithm, which was featured in MIT Technology Review, takes the textual “tokens” that are typically used to train language models and uses unsupervised machine learning techniques to find visualizations of each token (which the researchers call “vokens”) from a large dataset of images. The model can then be trained with both modalities using visually supervised machine learning techniques, resulting in significant improvements in comprehension over existing pure-language methods.

REVITALIZING AN ENDANGERED LANGUAGE

UNC-NLP Group works alongside Cherokee linguist in American Studies to revitalize the language Cherokee is a highly endangered Native American language spoken by the Cherokee people. Cherokee culture is deeply embedded in its language, but there are now only an estimated 2,000 fluent first language Cherokee speakers in the world, with that number declining each year. Benjamin Frey, a professor of American studies at UNC and citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, has been working for years to revitalize the language.

Collaborating closely with Frey, Associate Professor Mohit Bansal and doctoral student Shiyue Zhang of the UNC Natural Language Processing Group have worked to help save the Cherokee language by facilitating machine translation research between Cherokee and English with a Cherokee-English parallel dataset.

The group’s new dataset, ChrEn, is extremely low-resource and is accompanied by several Cherokee-English and English-Cherokee machine translation systems. The project’s data and code will be made publicly available, in hopes of encouraging future Cherokee language revitalization work by others.

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ADDRESSING A BLIND SPOT

LUPA Lab turns a machine learning detector into a detective When dealing with incomplete information, humans routinely choose to pursue additional information rather than make a poorly informed decision. For instance, doctors often face a critical decision when diagnosing a patient, weighing the cost of making an incorrect diagnosis due to limited data against the cost of obtaining more information, in terms of time, risk or money.

In contrast, Assistant Professor Junier Oliva, director of the Learning and Understanding Patterns with Analytics (LUPA) Lab, says that modern machine learning algorithms are not prepared for a future where they are able to actively obtain information from their environment as they make decisions.

His group is addressing a “blind spot” in data science, by turning a machine learning detector into a detective, creating a system capable of reasoning with incomplete instances and interacting with the environment to obtain new information, or new clues, on-the-fly as it is making decisions. His project was

Junier Oliva

recently awarded a $500,000 NSF grant.

UNC MULTIMODAL AI HUB

Researchers combine efforts in ML and NLP with computer vision to improve the power of AI

One of the team‘s first projects is the collaboration with

Integrating

NSF grant, UNC CS researchers will create more equi-

multi-disciplinary

artificial

intelligence

tools such as natural language processing, computer vision and machine learning, researchers in the UNC Multimodal AI Hub will work together to improve accuracy in the learning process. Research application would allow AI systems to experience better prediction performance from everything from video captioning to digital assistant devices and services.

Mohit Bansal Parker Associate Professor

Gedas Bertasius Assistant Professor

Snigdha Chaturvedi Assistant Professor

the new $20 million NSF Artificial Intelligence Institute for Engaged Learning. With a $4.5 million portion of the table, inclusive educational experiences by developing groundbreaking, foundational AI innovations that when applied can communicate with speech, facial expression, posture and more. The analytical tools will allow educators to customize scenarios as needed, making a more tailored approach to individual students and their learning style and capability.

Junier Oliva Assistant Professor

Colin Raffel Assistant Professor

Shashank Srivastava Assistant Professor

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COVID-19 IMPACT RE-EXAMINING RESEARCH IMPACT

COVID-19 pandemic highlights new applications for existing research The COVID-19 outbreak’s swift and shocking impact on the world has caused our faculty to re-examine their research projects with an eye toward improving life during a global pandemic.

Professors Ron Alterovitz and Mohit Bansal were already collaborating on algorithms to enable and enhance human-directed autonomous operation of robots in dangerous scenarios, and the pandemic presented new applications for their work. While they envisioned, for example, an autonomous robot navigating a burning building using verbal commands and object recognition, the pandemic showed how these algorithms could allow assistive robots to minimize human contact with patients in quarantine.

Some projects have seen more utility since the outbreak. Tar Heel Reader, an online repository of easy-to-read books built by Professor Gary Bishop to help beginning readers with disabilities, experienced a surprising increase in usage after schools closed. With students no longer accessing the site together in classrooms, site visits became more evenly distributed throughout the day and even into weekends, when students typically hadn’t been reading before.

Other researchers, like Professor Samarjit Chakraborty, shifted to COVID-focused projects. Chakraborty has been developing smartphone-based contact tracing protocols that would automatically determine which mobile devices have come into near contact with the device of an infected person and alert their users to isolate and get tested.

A comparison of Tar Heel Reader site visits before (orange) and during (blue) social distancing measures shows the change in site usage during lockdown.

NICE TO E-MEET YOU

COVID times call for connection more than ever Relying almost entirely on virtual interactions over the past year has made it more challenging to maintain meaningful connections and collaborations with others. The UNC CS Alumni Mentorship Program became an integral strategy to connect students with industry mentors.

Junior computer science and economics double-major Tarini Ramesh and alumna Katherine Griffin (B.S. 2020) have forged a bond through this experience that will extend beyond their year-long structured mentoring relationship.

After graduating amid the pandemic, Griffin sought out opportunities to give back to the department and stay connected. The Alumni Mentor Program seemed like a great fit. As a woman in tech and a software engineer at GitHub, she was eager to connect with an undergraduate student who could benefit from her experiences both inside and outside the classroom.

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CHANGE OF VENUE

Student hackathon planners transition quickly to digital platforms When the university moved classes online in August 2020, the plans for student hackathons at UNC were turned upside down. No longer able to hold the events in person but unwilling to give up, the student leaders had fewer than 60 days to develop an online model for hackathons attended by hundreds of people.

HackNC, UNC’s largest and longest-running hackathon, and Carolina Data Challenge, a hackathon focused on data analytics, not only modified their formats but also their target audiences to better fit the new forum. The two hackathons brought together more than 1,300 people, with more than 100 unique submissions. To redirect funding typically spent on venue and food, HackNC made donations to charities selected by winning hackers, raising $10,000 for multiple non-profits serving underserved and marginalized communities.

The success of the first two UNC digital hackathons led the way for subsequent events, including the inaugural queer_hack, serving the LGBTQ+ community, and Pearl Hacks, the nation’s longest-running hackathon for women and non-binary students. “For a virtual event, I was very impressed and excited with the amount of people who enjoyed it,” said Bea Manaligod, Pearl Hacks Director of Marketing. “We had more than 500 attendees and 31 countries represented. Even though we were online, I felt that we were able to recreate the feeling of growth and community as we did when we were in person.“ For the 2021/22 academic year, students are working to reimagine once again to produce hybrid events, combining the digital format with pop-up, in-person events.

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM, UNCONVENTIONAL DISTRIBUTION Teaching Professor Kris Jordan fights limited access to CS education with YouTube-based course

Each year, over 1,000 UNC students are introduced to computer science by Teaching Professor Kris Jordan and his team of enthusiastic undergraduate teaching assistants. Jordan’s unique brand of teaching and attention to students’ needs has turned Introduction to Programming into one of the most popular courses at UNC. Having come from a public education background in which computer science courses were unavailable, Jordan has long been committed to finding ways for all interested students to find their place in tech. When the university switched to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jordan took advantage of an opportunity to expand access to the field, adapting some of his new remote course materials to create a YouTube primer on introductory programming, complete with free lessons, slides and hands-on lab tutorials. Within two months, visitors to the YouTube channel had spent tens of thousands of hours viewing his instructional videos. Within a year, some of his videos had more than 17,000 views.

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AWARDS

Selected Faculty Awards Amazon Research Awards

Ron Alterovitz, Parasara Sridhar Duggirala DARPA Director’s Fellowship

Mohit Bansal Google Faculty Research Award

Jasleen Kaur Google Focused Research Awards

Mohit Bansal, Jasleen Kaur IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award

David Luebke

Professor Ron Alterovitz was recognized with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government to outstanding scientists and engineers.

IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award

Mary Whitton Intel Hardware Security Award, Runner-Up

Cynthia Sturton Microsoft Investigator Fellowship

Mohit Bansal NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards

Mohit Bansal, Snigdha Chaturvedi, Shahriar Nirjon, Danielle Szafir Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)

Ron Alterovitz

Selected Association Elections Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

James Anderson Fellow, European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics)

Henry Fuchs Professor James Anderson was announced as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

His team continues to sweep top paper awards at real-time systems conferences.

Selected Student Awards Adobe Research Fellowship

Jie Lei Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellowship

Shiyue Zhang CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher, Finalist

Han Guo CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher, Runner-Up

Sweta Karlekar Google PhD Fellowship

Peter Hase Intel Hardware Security Award, Runner-Up

Rui Zhang

Assistant Professor Sridhar Duggirala received an Amazon Research Award and led the 1st place team at CPS-IoT Week 2019 F1TENTH Autonomous Racing Competition.

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Microsoft Research Fellowship

Ramakanth Pasunuru NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Individual Predoctoral (F30) Fellowship

Inbar Fried NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Darryl Hannan

Conference Paper/Presentation Awards Robotics: Science & Systems (RSS) 2021

Best Paper, Finalist

Mengyu Fu, Ron Alterovitz Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS) 2021

Outstanding Paper

Shareef Ahmed, James Anderson Conference on Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2021

Best Student Paper, Honorable Mention

Jie Lei, Tamara L. Berg, Mohit Bansal IEEE Int‘l Symposium on Real-Time Computing (ISORC) 2021

Best Paper

Tanya Amert, James Anderson CPS-IoT Week 2021 Generalized Racing Intelligence Competition (GRAIC)

First Place

Abel Karimi, Parasara Sridhar Duggirala European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2021

Best Long Paper, Honorable Mention

Xiang Zhou, Mohit Bansal Int‘l Conference on Real-Time Networks & Systems (RTNS) 2021

Best Paper

Nathan Otterness, James Anderson Int‘l Conference on Real-Time Networks & Systems (RTNS) 2021

Best Junior Workshop Paper

Tyler Yandrofski, Leo Chen, F. Donelson Smith IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality & 3D User Interfaces (VR) 2021

Best Paper

Young-Woon Cha, Husam Shaik, Qian Zhang, Fan Feng, Andrei State,

Adrian Ilie, Henry Fuchs ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS) 2021

Best Paper

Samarjit Chakraborty Workshop on Challenges in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning for Internet of Things (AIChallengeIoT) 2020

Best Paper

Seulki Lee, Shahriar Nirjon ACM Int‘l Joint Conference on Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) 2020

Best Presentation, Judges Award

Seulki Lee, Bashima Islam, Yubo Luo, Shahriar Nirjon ACM Int‘l Joint Conference on Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) 2020

Gaetano Borriello Outstaning Student Award, Finalist

Bashima Islam IEEE Int‘l Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA) 2020

Best Paper

Sims Osborne, Shareef Ahmed, Saujas Nandi, James Anderson Int‘l Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems (RTNS) 2019

Best Paper

Clara Hobbs, Zelin “Peter” Tong, James Anderson Int‘l Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems (RTNS) 2019

Outstanding Paper

Catherine Nemitz, Tanya Amert, Manish Goyal, James Anderson Int‘l Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS) 2019

Best Paper

Shiwei Fang, Ketan Mayer-Patel, Shahriar Nirjon CPS-IoT Week 2019 F1TENTH Autonomous Racing Competition

First Place

Nathan Otterness, Charlotte Dorn, Tanya Amert, Abel Karimi,

Manish Goyal, Parasara Sridhar Duggirala ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) 2019

Best Paper

Samarjit Chakraborty

UNC CS boasts four recent recipients of the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF): Associate Professor Mohit Bansal, Assistant Professor Snigdha Chaturvedi, Assistant Professor Shahriar Nirjon and Assistant Professor Danielle Szafir.

Bansal also received the DARPA Director‘s Fellowship as a standout Young Faculty Award recipient, and his research drew industry awards from companies like Google and Microsoft.

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UNC Department of Computer Science 201 S. Columbia St. CB #3175 Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3175

The Department of Computer Science at UNC-Chapel Hill was one of the first independent computer science departments established in the U.S. Founded in 1964

by Turing Award winner Dr. Frederick Brooks, Jr., the department has more than 1,600 students in its program and boasts awardwinning faculty who are recognized internationally for their groundbreaking research and expertise.

cs.unc.edu © 2021 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Computer Science. All rights reserved.