Department of Computer and Information Science at Penn

Just like humans, artificial intelligence systems can make mistakes. Research by PRECISE Center research scholar Ramneet Kaur aims to better detect scenarios where errors are likely, leading to more accurate performance by safety-critical cyber-physical systems.

Happy Halloween from the CIS Department! 🎃👻 (Part 2)

This past Friday, our department chair, Zack Ives, threw his annual Halloween Party for CIS faculty and staff and we had a blast! There were so many creative costumes, pumpkin painting for the kids, and delicious food and drink. What a fun way for the department to come together!

Thank you Zack!

Happy Halloween from the CIS Department! 🎃👻 (Part 1)

This past Friday, our department chair, Zack Ives, threw his annual Halloween Party for CIS faculty and staff and we had a blast! There were so many creative costumes, pumpkin painting for the kids, and delicious food and drink. What a fun way for the department to come together!

Thank you Zack!

Congratulations to PhD student, Yuxuan Zhang & Joe Devietti, PhD with collaborators from Intel, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Santa Cruz for winning a best paper award for their paper, “Online Code Layout Optimizations via OCOLOS” !!

“Our system OCOLOS shows how to improve the performance of datacenter programs by adjusting them for their environment as they run. We built on systems from Meta and Google that could do adjustment once up-front, and extended them to make improvements continuously. It's like we continually reorganize the food in the fridge based on what you eat most often, so that the things you want are always close to the front, even as your tastes change.”

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Congratulations Yu Chen for receiving the 2023 Morris and Dorothy Rubinoff Award. Chen won this award due to his exemplary dissertation and research accomplishments. As a CIS PhD student, Chen was advised by Sampath Kannan and Sanjeev Khanna and is currently a postdoc in the theory group at EPFL.

"I want to thank both of my advisors, Sampath and Sanjeev, for spending so much time with me and teaching me everything about becoming a researcher. I'm looking forward to solving more challenging research problems in the future."

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Congratulations Nathan White, who has been awarded the 2023 NDSEG Fellowship!

"My research is broadly about algorithms, using the lens of mathematics to find ways to speed up computation. I'm particularly interested in sublinear algorithms: what computational problems can we solve using much fewer resources (like time, space, or samples) than would be required to enumerate through the whole input? A classic example of a sublinear time algorithm is binary search, since the algorithm only has to examine a small portion of the input array. Following this award, I hope to work on designing sublinear algorithms, as well as similar topics such as parallel algorithms and property testing. I also hope the NDSEG fellowship program will help me foster collaborations."

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Congratulations Yiping Ma, a Ph.D. student studying computer science (CIS), on receiving the 2022 Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship!

“This is a testament of the hard work and dedication of my advisors, mentors, collaborators and I that put into my past research. It is also an encouragement for me to explore new avenues of my research.”

Advised by Sebastian Angel and Tal Rabin, her interests include cryptography, security and privacy, and computer systems.

“Currently I am working on developing privacy-preserving techniques from both a theory perspective and a system-building perspective; in the long term, I hope that my research can have impacts on industry deployment.”

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Huge congrats to three 2nd year Ph.D. students, Shreya Halvader, Natalie Maus, and Adam Stein, who have received the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program Award!

Shreya currently works with Penn NLP and the World Well Being Projects. Advised by Lyle Ungar and Eric Wong, her work is focused on explainability within multilingual NLP and understanding how cultural dimensions are reflected in language.

Advised by Jacob Gardner, Natalie is interested in machine learning, Bayesian optimization, generative modeling, and applications in scientific discovery.

Adam, advised by Mayur Naik, is interested in building usable tools for enabling uses of machine learning. He is currently working on methods for learning with noisy and imbalanced data.
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In the past year, the C.I.S. Department has welcomed an unprecedented number of academic professionals to join Penn’s faculty. One of the Asst. Professor’s who has joined both CIS and ESE this past Fall is Mingmin Zhao, an MIT grad with a PhD focusing on building wireless sensing systems with artificial intelligence.
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To learn more about Mingmin, head to the link in our bio!

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In the Spotlight: Mingmin Zhao and Building a Bridge Between Machine Learning and Monitoring Health - Computer and Information science Beginning his teaching career in the CIS & ESE Departments this Spring 2023 is Asst. Prof. Mingmin Zhao. Welcome to Penn Engineering!

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Increasing User Engagement with Public Health Technologies
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When it comes to public health outreach, efficacy can only be achieved to the extent that the public serves as active and willing participants. As access to smart devices continues to increase around the world, understanding how people view and engage with public health tech remains an evergreen concern for researchers and governments, and a critical aspect of determining the competence of disease-control programs.
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Sukanya Joshi, a grad student in Penn Engineering's Data Science program, and collaborators are working to determine what drives people to utilize the apps that utilize the Exposure Notification System (ENS) developed by Google and Apple, known as "contact tracing apps", and how they experience
them.
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Joshi will be discussing the team's work, the subject of a study titled "COVID-19 contact tracing app reviews reveal concerns and motivations around adoption," as a student speaker at this year's fourth annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) @ Penn Conference. Hosted by Penn Engineering and the Wharton School on February 3 at Penn's Perry World House, WiDS @ Penn is a celebrated interdisciplinary event showcasing the latest advances in data science, speaker Q&A sessions, and networking opportunities.