University of Kentucky Computer Science

Congratulations to CS PhD student Lasantha Senanayake and Prof. Stephen G. Ware for winning Best Paper at the 2025 Foundations of Digital Games conference for their paper, "Language Models as Narrative Planning Heuristics."

Language Models as Narrative Planning Heuristics This presentation was given by Lasantha Senanayake of the University of Kentucky Narrative Intelligence Lab at the 2025 ACM Foundations of Digital Games conf...

US News and World Report has ranked the University of Kentucky Computer Science Department #103 nationally among its Best Graduate Schools!

Best Graduate Schools Ranked in 2024 Find the best graduate program for you using the US News Best Graduate Schools rankings.

UK CS Professor Simone Silvestri and our director of graduate programs will be giving two talks this month!

The first is a keynote address at the Missouri University of Science and Technology ISC Graduate Research Symposium titled "Climbing the Doctoral Mountain: Essential Strategies for a Successful PhD."

The second will be at the University of Padua, Italy and it titled “Towards the Internet of Agricultural Things: Optimization, AI, and Communication Solutions for Modern Farming"

https://www.math.unipd.it/news/towards-the-internet-of-agricultural-things-optimization-ai-and-communication-solutions-for-modern-farming/

Congratulations UK CS graduate students Xu Tao and Jackson Butcher, to UK CS Prof. Simone Silvestri, and to their colleague Sajal K. Das, on receiving the Best Demo Runner Up paper award at the IEEE PerCom conference!

Their paper, "iCrop+: An Edge-boosted Crop Disease Detection System via TinyML and LoRa Communication" can be found in the 2025 proceedings of the International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications.

Congratulations to UK CS Professor Simone Silvestri for being named a Distinguished Technical Program Committee Member for IEEE INFOCOM, one of the top conferences in our field. This award is given to peer reviewers who do an exceptional job analyzing papers that have been submitted for publication and giving feedback to the authors.

Congratulations to UK CS Professor Judy Goldsmith for being awarded the NCWIT Higher Education Alliance Harrold and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award!

Dr. Goldsmith has a long and well-recognized history of mentoring graduate students in our department, and we are very excited that she has received this award to recognize her hard work.

Congratulations to UK CS PhD student Afsaneh Mahanipour on being named a Cyber-Physical Systems Rising Star!

The CPS Rising Star program identifies outstanding PhD students and Postdoctoral Scholars who are pursuing research on Cyber-Physical Systems, the small Internet of Things devices like drones, smart thermostats, and sensors that are playing an increasingly important role in the world around us.

We also congratulate Afsaneh's advisor, Prof. Hana Khamfroush, on helping this outstanding student realize their potential!

Congratulations for UK CS Professor Xin Liang on being awarded the prestigious NSF CAREER award!

CAREER grants are given to early career scientists who the National Science Foundation considers to be the best and the brightest in the field. Prof. Liang joins 7 other UK CS faculty in being awarded this honor.

Prof. Liang's project will study how to make the movement of large data between data centers faster. This project can have a positive impact on a wide range of scientific applications that use huge datasets, from genomics to weather forecasting to material design.

www.nsf.gov

Congratulations to Nathan Arnold, a recent UK CS PhD graduate, on the acceptance of their journal article "College Students’ Time Management and Effort Regulation Patterns, Academic Emotions, and Performance in an Asynchronous Online Class," which will be published in Educational Technology & Society. Nathan joins UK professors Kun Huang and Anita Lee-Post as authors on this article.

We're proud to announce that UK CS Professor Simone Silvestri will lead the Cyber-Physical Systems Principal Investigators meeting this March at Vanderbilt University. Service to the research community like this is one of the many things that make our faculty leaders in CS research.

https://cps-vo.org/group/cps-pimtg25

Congratulations again to UK CS professor Simone Silvestri for being awarded a 2024 Excellent Editor Award for the journal IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering. This is his second editor award this year!

Congratulations to UK CS Professor Simone Silvestri for being awarded the 2024 Best Editor Award for the Pervasive and Mobile Computing journal!