7/21/2016
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The CS @ ILLINOIS Awards ceremony was held October 24. This year’s event was the culmination of a week of celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the establishment of CS as a department at the university.
These awards recognize alumni and faculty who have made professional, technical, educational, and service contributions that bring distinction to themselves, the department, and the university.
Distinguished Service Award
The distinguished Service Award honors alumni or faculty who have demonstrated an outstanding level of commitment to the department and its students, faculty and alumni through their support and service. This year past department heads were particularly recognized for their service to CS @ ILLINOIS.
Alan Braverman (BS CS ’96) is the founder of the Giant Pixel Corporation. He is a serial entrepreneur who has been building start-ups in Silicon Valley since the mid-1990s. He shares this expertise with his fellow alumni as an Advisory Board Member of the University of Illinois Silicon Valley Round Table, a speaker in the Illini Center West Luncheon Series, and through his startup studio, The Giant Pixel Corporation.
Roy Campbell is the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor at the University of Illinois. He was recognized for his services as director of graduate admission and advancement in CS @ ILLINOIS from 2007 to 2013. Campbell is a distinguished researcher and prolific mentor with contributions to concurrent programming, system software, security, and ubiquitous computing. He is currently chair of the University of Illinois Faculty Senate, and his campus leadership also includes chairing recruiting for the Grainger Engineering Breakthroughs Big Data Initiative, running the Illinois Cyber Security Scholars Program, and, until last year, leading graduate admissions efforts for CS @ ILLINOIS.
C. William Gear (MS Math ’57, PhD Math ’60) is president emeritus of NEC Research Institute and professor emeritus of CS @ ILLINOIS. He was recognized for his service as department head from 1985 to 1990. Gear is a pioneer in numerical analysis and scientific computing, as well as a leader in computer science education and industrial research. He created a groundbreaking method for solving stiff ordinary differential equations on digital computers and wrote a landmark computer program for the automatic integration of ordinary differential equations. As Head, he oversaw the third addition to the Digital Computing Lab and founded the CS Alumni News.
Michael Heath is Fulton Watson Copp Chair Emeritus at the University of Illinois. He was recognized for his service as department head from 2007 to 2010. Heath was the long-time director of the Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) program, the most successful program of its kind. He is an innovative researcher who led the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets CSAR). He is also an internationally recognized educator known for his effective communication and inspirational teaching. He led CS while continuing to direct CSE and CSAR, helping to bring high-profile projects like the UPCRC and the Cloud Computing Testbed to Illinois.
Brigid Johnson (BS CS ’08) is senior technical product manager at Amazon. An inspiration to students and faculty alike, she has previously returned to campus on multiple occasions, including as a CS @ ILLINOIS Engineer in Residence and as Keynote Speaker for the Women in Computer Science Annual Banquet, sharing about her experiences in industry and in pursuing her MBA.
Duncan Lawrie (MS CS ‘69, PhD ’73) is professor emeritus of the University of Illinois. He served as CS Department head from 1990 to 1996. An academic leader in high-performance computing, he contributed to the design of the ILLIAC IV, Burroughs Scientific Professor, and Cedar. He helped shape computing’s direction through service on numerous policy committees and as IEEE Computer Society president. As head of CS @ ILLINOIS, he helped to strengthen alumni relations, to introduce Senior Projects, and to launch our first webpage.
Daniel Reed is vice president for research and to economic development at the University of Iowa. He served as CS Department head from 1996-2001. He is an advocate who tirelessly promotes the value of computing and computational science at both the academic and national policy levels. He created multiple large-scale HPC systems and tools to support scientific research. As head of CS @ ILLINOIS, he helped launch the online MCS degree; oversaw increases in gifts, endowments, and research funding; and initiated planning for the Siebel Center.
Marc Snir is director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Lab and the Michael Faiman and Saburo Muroga Professor at the University of Illinois. He was department head of CS from 2001 to 2007. He is an exceptional researcher who has made significant contributions to the development, theory, and standardization of high-performance parallel computing through his work on the Message Passing Interface and IBM’s SP scalable parallel system. He managed the CS Department’s transition into the Siebel Center and its subsequent expansion. Later, he served as first director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, as chief software architect for Blue Waters, and as co-director of UPCRC.
Distinguished Achievement Award
The Distinguished Achievement Award honors alumni or faculty who have made professional and technical contributions that bring distinction to themselves, the department, and the university.
Steve Chen is entrepreneur in residence at Google. He is a technology innovator and entrepreneur who co-founded YouTube. He is also co-founder of AVOS Systems, which builds a common technology platform to speed app development and whose products help people create, find, and share multimedia content.
Jason Cong (MS CS ’87, PhD ’90) is a Chancellor’s Professor at UCLA. He is an academic and entrepreneurial leader in electric design automation and is widely known for pioneering work on FPGA technology mapping and high-level synthesis. He has founded or co-founded three companies and trained more than 30 doctoral students.
Jawed Karim (BS CS ’04) is a founder/partner of Y Ventures. He is an entrepreneur and tech startup mentor who co-founded YouTube. He also helped develop the real-time antifraud systems for PayPal. With Y Ventures he helps entrepreneurs to move their innovative products forward.
Kenichi Miura (MS CS ’71, PhD ’73) is professor emeritus at the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo, Japan). He is an innovative researcher and corporate executive who made significant contributions to Fujitsu’s VP series of vector supercomputers, demonstrating how vectorizing compilers effectively takes advantage of hardware architectures. His numerical algorithms expertise led to systems for high-speed execution of scientific computational applications. From 2003 to 2008, he directed the Japanese National Research Grid Initiative (NAREGI).
Trevor Mudge (MS CS ’73, PhD ’77) is the Bredt Family Professor at the University of Michigan. He is an outstanding educator and researcher whose work has significantly advanced the field of low-power computer architecture and its interaction with technology. His students can be found throughout academia and the semiconductor industry.
Linda Petzold (BA Math & CS ’74, PhD CS ’78) is a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an innovative researcher who advanced new methods for computationally solving differential algebraic equations and incorporated these solutions into widely distributed software. She is a creative teacher and mentor who pioneered computational science and engineering education.
Parisa Tabriz (BS CS ’05, MS ’07) is Chrome Security Manager at Google—also known as Google’s Security Princess (that’s her actual job title!) and lead for the Chrome/Chromium Security engineering team. She got her start learning how to exploit software in ACM@UIUC, and then leveraged the “attacker mindset” to improve the security of Google software and teach other developers to do the same, protecting billions of Internet users from malicious cyber attacks.
Distinguished Educator Award
The Distinguished Educator Award honors alumni or faculty who have made outstanding contributions to computer science education and research, and recognizes those who excel at motivating computer science students.
Lawrence Angrave is a senior lecturer at the University of Illinois. He is a brilliant, charismatic, and insightful instructor responsible for transforming “Introduction to Computer Science” into a highly interactive and fun—but challenging—course. He is also a trail-blazer who ran the first MOOC on Android app development—with over 140,000 registered students.
Cinda Heeren (PhD CS ’04) is a senior lecturer at the University of Illinois. She is a passionate, enthusiastic, and engaging teacher who challenges hundreds of students each semester to become better problem solvers in her “Data Structures” course. A mentor who continues to stay involved as students complete their studies, she also helps spearhead our summer outreach efforts to middle school girls.
Der Tsai Lee (MS CS ’76, PhD ’78) is president of National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. He is a pioneer in computational geometry and algorithm design and analysis. In his roles of researcher and university president his work and leadership have impacted bioinformatics, information security, and digital library fields.
Franco Preparata is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science at Brown University. A CS @ ILLINOIS professor from 1966 to 1990, he literally wrote the book on computational geometry (Computational Geometry, first published 1985). His outstanding research contributions span coding theory, distributed computing, fault diagnosis, VLSI, and computational biology, while many of his students have gone on to highly successful careers around the globe.
Koushik Sen (MS CS ’03, PhD ’06) is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an outstanding researcher, educator, and mentor whose work impacts the software verification and testing fields. He is developer and co-inventor of Directed Automated Random Testing (DART) and Concolic Testing software, which detects standard errors such as program crashes, assertion violations, and non-termination.
C. W. Gear Junior Faculty Award
The C. W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award was established in honor of the contributions and services C. William Gear, head of the department 1985-1990. The award recognizes outstanding teaching and service.
Derek Hoiem is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois. He is an innovator at the forefront of a paradigm shift in computer vision. His work pioneers new approaches to object recognition through the use of attributes, and it includes new tools to better compare competing object recognition systems.
David J. Kuck Outstanding Thesis Awards
Established in honor of David Kuck’s intellectual and leadership contributions, this award recognizes one outstanding master’s thesis and one outstanding doctoral dissertation.
Siva Kumar Sastry Hari (MS CS ’09, PhD ’13) is now a research scientist at NVIDIA. He is an outstanding researcher whose breakthrough thesis work establishes the viability of software-driven hardware resiliency. His Relyzer tool allows for the low-cost prediction of a hardware fault injected anywhere into a software application’s execution, without the impractical use of comprehensive fault injection.
Wenxuan Zhou (MS CS ’12) is a PhD student at the University of Illinois. She is a creative researcher working to speed up the Web. Her practical low-latency transport mechanism influenced SPDY, an open networking protocol that has seen widespread deployment—with implementations found in every major Web browser plus the Apache and NGNIX Web server platforms.