An exciting and successful faculty recruiting season will have us welcome six new faculty members to our midst in Fall '24: Katherine Kosaian, Erik Krohn, Lucas Silva, Weiran Wang, Muchao Ye, and Tianyu Zhang. In addition, Naimul Hoque will be joining us in Spring '25!

A research team led by Professor Cesare Tinelli (PI) and Professors Katherine Kosaian and Garrett Morris (co-PIs) will contribute to the DARPA-funded project PEGISUS: Proof EnGineering and Integration with Satisfiability modUlo theorieS.

Sixth year CS PhD students Hussam Habib and Osama Khalid joined forces to ride the first few days of RAGBRAI LI and share some highlights, insights, and advice for fellow students. Read on for bonus blog posts and more!

The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded UI computer science professor Garrett Morris $77,430 for a three-year research project entitled "Integrating Formal Methods into the Foundational Undergraduate Curriculum". Morris and Alberto Segre will partner with Grinnell College and Iowa State University faculty on this collaborative "Formal Methods in the Field" proposal.

Rishab Nithyanand, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, will tackle the enforcement of consumer privacy regulations with the help of a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award, the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty, includes a five-year grant for $633,023. Nithyanand and his team will develop a variety of computational tools to help enforcement agencies perform large-scale audits to determine if organizations are complying with consumer privacy regulations.

Katherine Kosaian, formerly Cordwell, who received her doctoral degree from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, has been selected as the 2024 recipient of the Bill McCune PhD Award. Her dissertation, Formally Verifying Algorithms for Real Quantifier Elimination, was chosen for its strong theoretical and practical contributions to formally verified quantifier elimination for the first-order logic of real arithmetic. The award was presented at the 12th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR 2024).

Professor Juan Pablo Hourcade and co-authors/student advisees Flannery Currin - who recently defended her doctoral thesis, Summer Schmuecker and Delaney Norris recently published “Understanding Adult Stakeholder Perspectives on the Ethics of Extended Reality Technologies with a Focus on Young Children and Children in Rural Areas”. This paper was awarded the Best Full Paper Award and Social Impact Honorable Mention at IDC '24 - the 23rd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference.

"The NSF’s support of UI research projects increased 56% for a record high of $18 million, including a new $1.2 million project to advance the personalization of hearing aids. The lead investigator on the project is Octav Chipara, a professor in the Department of Computer Science." Rishab Nithyanand work with School of Journalism and Mass Communication's Brian Ekdale on a $1.7 million DOD project also gets an accolade.

Meng Zhou earned his PhD in informatics from the University of Iowa in Dec.'23 and has embarked on a new role as an assistant scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). His research focuses on using satellite remote sensing to monitor environmental conditions, particularly pollutants like PM2.5 and nighttime wildfires. The unique aspect of Zhou’s work is that he utilizes sensors that operate at night, leveraging moonlight scattered by polluted air to monitor air quality. For wildfires, he developed an innovative algorithm to assess their intensity and combustion phases, providing critical data on how many pollutants, such as PM2.5, black carbon, and CO, will be emitted to the air by the wildfire.

Zachary Morris, who graduated this May 2024 with an MCS degree, was chosen to receive the award for “Academic Excellence in the Masters Program” for 2023-24. This competitive honor recognizes academic prowess, the variety and difficulty of courses taken along the way, as well as instructor feedback.