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.
Last year during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, testing and contact tracing failed to quell the spread. Many circumstances — including a decades-old underfunding of state health departments, and slow workforce build – have contributed to this outcome.
However, according to Department of Computer and Information Science Professor Andreas Haeberlen, one of the main reasons contact tracing had limited success is simple: people don’t feel comfortable sharing their information!
The School of Engineering and Applied Science, the Annenberg School for Communication and the Wharton School have joined together to form the Computational Social Science (CSS) Lab. Established in March 2021, the CSS Lab brings together a team of undergraduate, graduate and postdoc students from all three schools, as well as a dedicated staff, and researchers from other esteemed universities.
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.
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.
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.
