Three UI Computer Science PhD candidates have been honored with Graduate College awards:
- Santanu Bhowmick, a Presidential Graduate Research Fellow, has been named a recipient of the Ada Louisa Ballard and Seashore Dissertation Year Fellowship for the 2016/2017 academic year, in conjunction with a Presidential Fellowship for Summer 2016.
The Ballard Seashore Fellowship program provides an opportunity for doctoral students to benefit from a final semester of protected and supported time to focus on completing their scholarly research activities and the writing of their dissertations.
Santanu's research with Professor Kasturi Varadarajan examines certain fundamental geometric optimization problems that lie in the intersection of the areas of clustering and covering.
- Yuanyuan Jiang and Rahil Sharma have been named recipients of the Graduate College Post-Comprehensive Research Award for the fall 2016 semester.
This award program provides an opportunity for advanced doctoral students to benefit from protected and supported time to pursue their scholarly research activities. The award recognizes students with distinguished academic achievement during their early graduate training and is based on outstanding academic performance in coursework and early scholarly research activities.
- Rahil's research work with Professor Suely Oliveira, as well as in collaboration with John Deere (supported by Deere's 'Big Data Grant'), has focused on developing parallel algorithms using advanced programming models for scientific computing to solve big data problems in biological, social network, and spatial/agricultural domains.
- Yuan's work with Professor Joe Kearney centers on examining the influence of avatar fidelity on joint actions in shared virtual environments. This highly interdisciplinary research combines the technological development of computer-generated characters and avatars with psychological studies to evaluate road crossing behaviors, especially in the presence of other people.
