Academic researchers, government agencies, industry groups, and individuals have produced forecasts at an unprecedented scale during the COVID-19 pandemic. To leverage these forecasts, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) partnered with an academic research lab at the University of Massachusetts Amherst to create the US COVID-19 Forecast Hub.

Profs. Aaron Stump and Cesare Tinelli received a supplement of $58,446 from the NSF for the StarExec computing research infrastructure.  StarExec is a web service backed by a compute cluster of around 250 nodes. It is used by a dozen or so subcommunities of verification and automated reasoning, for evaluating logic solvers, including through annual evaluations and competitions.

Motivated by her experiences growing up with an older brother with Down Syndrome, Computer Science doctoral student Flannery Currin aims to go into a career to help people thrive. When she was younger, she anticipated entering a field like occupational therapy or speech-language pathology until she discovered an interest in computer science. Currin reconciled her desire to help those with disabilities and her interest in computer science by studying human-computer interaction at the University of Iowa.

In May, Levin Leesemann graduated with a BS in Computer Science along with minors in Music and Mathematics. Since he is pursuing a MCS degree as part of our U2G program, he will be at IOWA this coming academic year as well. During his senior year, he endeavored to meld his tenure on Hawkeye Marching Band Drumline1 and academic domains of predilection; advised by CS Chair, Prof. Alberto Segre. The result? A paper entitled: "Automated Drumline Rhythm and Instrument Recognition"

In this blog post, PhD student Hussam Habib (advised by Rishab Nithyanand) provides an overview of our work to understand whether dangerous online communities can be identified by their evolutionary characteristics. ______________________________________________________________ Title: “Are Proactive Interventions for Reddit Communities Feasible?” [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.11019.pdf] Authors: Hussam Habib (UIowa), Maaz Bin Musa (UIowa), Md. Fareed Zaffar (LUMS), Rishab Nithyanand (UIowa) Venue: AAAI International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2022)

Juan Pablo Hourcade, Associate Professor at The University of Iowa's Department of Computer Science and Director of Graduate Studies for the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Informatics, was recently appointed as one of ACM’s Distinguished Speakers.

Eric Pahl, Health Informatics PhD student and cofounder of OmniLife, a health technology communication and collaboration platform, recently received a $250,000 SBIR grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) | National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), which will support the “Transplants for Kids” project, which will use AI / machine learning algorithms to align optimal donor grafts with children awaiting liver transplants.

“It was a very emotional moment for me because up until then I didn’t realize how much I actually missed hearing my name correctly. From that moment, I knew I should make an effort to introduce my identity and culture properly.” Podolefsky not only made sure to say Bose’s name correctly, but he also let all the staff and student employees in the office know about the correct pronunciation of her name.

Prof. Hantao Zhang retired from the Computer Science Department on January 1, 2022. Please join us in wishing him a happy, healthy, and prosperous retirement.

... for a project entitled "Health Disparities and Machine Learning Community Feasibility" that proposes to develop equitable surveillance algorithms to get an accurate picture of large-scale epidemics. Specifically, team seeks to allocate surveillance kits (or tests) over time under budget constraints with the goals of obtaining an accurate picture of the spread while ensuring (i) Regional Equity and (ii) Demographic Fairness.