Computer and Information Science | A Department of the School of Engineering and Applied Science

Camillo “CJ” Taylor, professor in CIS, is leading a team in the DARPA SubT Challenge. Teams competing in the SubT Challenge are tasked with creating a robotics system that can successfully navigate underground tunnels, urban transportation systems and natural caves. GRASP Lab members and their students have joined forces with Exyn Technologies and Ghost Robotics, two GRASP Lab spin-offs, to secure their place as one of seven DARPA-funded teams in their track of the SubT Challenge.

Professor Ani Nenkova providing in-depth, one-on-one instruction.

Computer and Information Science Department Chair Zachary Ives shows Levine Hall in Gather.town.

The 2021 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching: Professors Susan Davidson and Boon Thau Loo

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 country.

Professor Susan Davidson honored with VLDB Women in Database Research Award

Professor Susan Davidson in Computer and Information Science (CIS), who has spent nearly 40 years teaching with the Department, has been awarded the 2021 Very Large Database (VLDB) Women in Database Research Award.

Sponsored non-profit organisation Very Large Database Endowment Inc., the award focuses on the cumulative lifetime work of the researcher. Davidson was specifically honored “for groundbreaking work in the areas of data integration, data provenance and her efforts in cross-disciplinary research, namely bridging databases and biology.”

Minchen Li receives ACM SIGGRAPH Outstanding Dissertation Award

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 foremost special interest groups in the field of computer graphics.

According to their site, “Minchen’s dissertation presents a breakthrough in the notoriously challenging and long-standing problem of robust frictional contact simulation in nonlinear solid dynamics with guarantees of non-intersection.”

Shirin Saeedi Bidokhti receives 2021 NSF CAREER Award

This article originally appeared in Penn Engineering Today, written by Melissa Poppas.

Humans have never been more connected to one another, though the speed with which we can share with one another has its drawbacks. For example, the spread of COVID-19, as well as misinformation about it, have both been facilitated by our highly connected online and in-person networks. Fortunately, the branches of mathematics known as information theory and network theory can help us to understand how both systems work and how to control them.

Duncan Watts’ “Everyone’s an Influencer” receives the 2021 WSDM Test-of-Time Award

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 ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and “publishes original, high-quality papers related to search and data mining on the Web and the Social Web, with an emphasis on practical yet principled novel models of search and data mining, algorithm design and analysis, economic implications, and in-depth experimental analysis of accuracy and performance,” according to their site.

CIS News

Aaron Roth on ‘Machine Unlearning’

08.25.2021 | Read More

‘COVID-19, Protests, and Crime’

08.24.2021 | Read More

Xunjing Wu on a Mid-career Switch to Computer Science

08.16.2021 | Read More

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The Department of Computer and Information Science (CIS) at Penn Engineering is uniquely positioned to propel future intellectual leaders, entrepreneurs, thinkers and innovators to success. As an Ivy League institution, and the first university in the nation, The University of Pennsylvania ensures its students a transformative experience. Computer science at Penn comes in a variety of forms to meet your specific interests.

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