Professors Susan Davidson and Boon Thau Loo have been awarded the 2021 Ruth and Joel Spira Awards for Excellence in Teaching. Sponsored by the Spira co-founded Lutron Electronics in 2019, the award specifically recognizes outstanding faculty within the C.I.S. department at Penn, and has corresponding awards at universities across the Read more
It seems the Computer and Information Science department is in the business of cultivating students so fulfilled with their undergraduate experience, that they return to take on leadership roles in C.I.S. Earlier in the year, former C.I.S. undergrad and Associate Professor Joseph Devietti stepped into the role of Undergrad Chair. Read more
The Penn Center for Innovation (PCI) has put together a fall speaker series focused on resources available for Penn Engineering faculty and students, featuring C.I.S. Professor and GRASP Lab Director Mark Yim. All are welcome to register for each session separately at pci-seas.eventbrite.com. Sept 21: Penn I-Corps with Mark Yim, PhD, ASA Whitney Read more
Stevens University Professor Duncan Watts has recently been awarded the 2021 Test-of-Time Award at the 14th ACM International WSDM Conference for his paper titled “Everyone’s an Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter,” published in 2011. Pronounced “wisdom,” the WSDM (Web Search and Data Mining) Conference is one of many presented by Read more
Rising junior Lejia Zhao is helping to strengthen CIS’s global connections: virtually working with professor Tang Kuk Zuea from the National University of Singapore on a project titled “Using Machine Learning for Medication Recognition” via Penn’s Global Research & Internship Program (GRIP). Lejia says applying to GRIP was important to Read more
When Associate Professor Joseph Devietti was an undergrad in the Department of Computer and Information Science almost 20 years ago, the pace and scale of the department was drastically different. “Everything has just gotten so professionalized and competitive. Computing has kind of exploded, across campus,” said Devietti. “Things like the Read more
Professor Tal Rabin is one of the latest researchers to receive ACM’s 2021 STOC Test of Time Award. Co-published with her then Ph.D. advisor, Michael Ben-Or, Professor Rabin’s “Verifiable secret-sharing and multiparty protocols with honest majority” (STOC 1989) was one of three papers to be recognized for its groundbreaking contributions 30 years later. This year marks the inaugural issuing of the award by ACM’s Special Interest Read more
Graduating Ph.D. student Minchen Li has received the ACM SIGGRAPH 2021 Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis titled “Robust and Accurate Simulation of Elastodynamics and Contact.” ACM SIGGRAPH, with its mission “to nurture, champion, and connect researchers and practitioners of Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques” is one of the Read more
The retiring CIS professor chats about his recent ACM SIGGRAPH election and his expansive computer graphics path Norman Badler’s election into the 2021 ACM SIGGRAPH Academy Class is right on time. After nearly 5 decades of teaching and trailblazing in the Penn community, the Rachleff Family Professor in the Department Read more
In January 2022, the Comp Info Sci department will welcome Andrew Head as an Assistant Professor. Andrew, who will be starting a Penn HCI (Human Computer Interaction) Group with associate new hire Danaë Metaxa, mainly focuses on helping others express their work fluidly and efficiently. “My particular sliver of Human Read more