Personal Mention

Two Institute for Software Research professors, Mary Shaw and David Garlan, will receive IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering (TCSE) awards at the International Conference on Software Engineering, May 20-28 in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Shaw will accept the 2017 TCSE Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering Leadership Award, which recognizes outstanding and/or sustained leadership in the software engineering community, particularly for encouraging women to explore science and engineering career paths. Shaw has been a computer science faculty member since 1971 and is a leader in software engineering research. Her work on software architecture — the large-scale structure of software systems — helped establish it as a recognized discipline. She also is an educational innovator who has developed computer science curricula from the introductory to the doctoral level, including graduate programs targeted at software professionals. She won CMU's Doherty Award for Sustained Contributions to Excellence in Education this year.

Garlan will accept the 2017 TCSE Software Engineering Distinguished Education Award, which recognizes outstanding and sustained contributions to software engineering education. Garlan has been a faculty member since 1990 and led the development of numerous curricula and courses on software architecture, modeling and engineering. The TCSE noted Garlan’s pivotal role in the development and growth of the Master of Software Engineering graduate programs, which the council called “an international benchmark, having inspired many similar efforts, and, having influenced many others throughout the world.”

Justine Cassell, associate dean of technology strategy and impact for the School of Computer Science (SCS), presented a keynote address yesterday at a United Nations event on emerging technologies. She was joined by fellow keynoters Astro Teller, chief executive officer of Google X and an SCS alumnus, and Peter Diamandis, chairman of the XPrize Foundation, at the Sustainable Development Goals Action Event on Innovation and Connectivity. The meeting at U.N. Headquarters in New York City was convened by H.E. Peter Thomson, president of the U.N. General Assembly, to help member states and the U.N. system adapt to the rapidly changing technological landscape. Cassell discussed “Managing Risks and Seizing Opportunities for Public Good” in her address to member states, U.N. staff and invited guests. The event was intended to support implementation of 17 sustainable development goals for achieving the U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Giant leaps in artificial intelligence, robotics and other technologies have changed the landscape for achieving those goals, creating both unique opportunities and presenting new societal challenges.

Two School of Computer Science students are among 11 recipients of 2017 NVIDIA Graduate Fellowships. The company sponsors the annual program to recognize and support excellence in computing research using graphics processing units. Adams Wei Yu (far left), a Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department, and Xialong Wang, a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute, were named as 2017 fellows.

Yu’s research lies in large scale optimization, deep learning, statistical machine learning and their applications. He has interned with the Google Brain team and the Microsoft Research machine learning group. He received his bachelor’s degree in math from Beihang University and a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Hong Kong.

Wang’s research interests are computer vision and machine learning, focusing on exploiting redundancy in visual data to train visual representations. He earned a master’s degree in computer science at Sun Yat-sen University and a bachelor’s degee in software engineering at South China Agricultural University.