1Story continues on page 14

Inside

2 Department News

5 Awards & Achievements

8 Outstanding Students

12 Open House & Code Freeze

13 Alumni Spotlight - Mukund Deshpande

15 Supporting CS&E

Newsletter of the Department of Computer Science & Engineering

soundbyteSpring 2016

The Director of the University of Minnesota Software Engineering Center Mike Whalen has been working for the past four years with a number of research groups around the country including DARPA to find a way to make autonomous vehicles less vulnerable to systemic attacks by hackers.“DARPA has been very concerned about vehicle attacks,” said Dr. Whalen. “The concern is that an adversary could take over a vehicle or, worse, an entire fleet of vehicles by initiating an attack through the wireless networks used by these vehicles.”

As futuristic as that sounds, this is a real problem the military and its various defense

agencies have been forced to confront as warfare increasingly relies on unmanned vehicles.

“This has been carried out in real attacks,” said Dr. Whalen. “There was a case where Iran landed a brand new U.S. stealth drone on one of their airbases by jamming its communications and spoofing its GPS to convince the drone it was over a U.S. airbase in Afghanistan.”

The concern for this kind of security stretches beyond the military. For example, Dr. Whalen pointed out a much-publicized attack carried out by security researchers who demonstrated how they could manipulate a car’s braking system without ever touching the car by exploiting a vulnerability in the radio, broadcasting the attack via Wi-Fi and subsequently causing the radio to “spoof” the rest of the vehicle into thinking it was the braking system. Another security team was

U of M’s Mike Whalen Teams Up with DARPA to Create A Less Vulnerable Drone by Mark Rapacz

Faculty leadership

Department Head Mats Heimdahl

Associate Department Head George Karypis

Director of Graduate Studies Abhishek Chandra

Director of Undergraduate Studies Nick Hopper

MSSE Director of Graduate Studies Michael Whalen

Mishaps with EmojiEmoji users: Did you know when you send to your friend with your Nexus, they may see on their iPhone? Find out more on page 2 ...

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Emoji users: Did you know when you send to your friend with your Nexus, they may see

on their iPhone? And it is not just ; this type of thing can happen for all emoji.  In a paper that was published at AAAI ICWSM, GroupLens’s researchers showed that this problem can cause people to misinterpret the emotion and meaning of emoji-based communication, in some cases quite significantly.

What’s more, the researcher’s work also showed that when two people look at the exact same emoji rendering, they often don’t interpret it the same way, leading to even more potential for miscommunication.

To your smartphone, an emoji is  just like any other character (e.g., lower-case ‘a’, upper-case ‘B’) that needs to be rendered with a font. Since each smartphone platform has its own emoji font, the same emoji character can look quite different on different smartphone platforms. This is why when a Google Nexus owner sends  to a friend with an iPhone, the iPhone owner will actually see 

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To investigate whether “emoji font” diversity can cause miscommunication, GroupLens conducted a survey to compare how people interpret emoji. They did this for five manufacturer renderings (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, LG) of 22 of the most popular anthropomorphic emoji. For each emoji rendering, GroupLens asked participants to describe the emoji rendering in words

and assess the emotional meaning or sentiment of each rendering on a scale from -5 (strongly negative) to 5 (strongly positive).

The researchers found that in many cases, there is potential for miscommunication. For example, take a look at the figure above, which shows the emotion (sentiment) results for a popular emoji character. What this figure tells us is that if an iPhone user sends  to a Windows Phone, Samsung, LG, or Nexus user, the iPhone user is sending a mildly negative emoji to someone who will receive it as a relatively positive one.

They also found that people used different words when describing the emoji, as well. For instance, when seeing this Apple emoji rendering , participants used words like “stop” and “clap,” whereas they described the Google version of the same emoji character ( ) with words like “praise” and “hand.”

Overall, they found that if you send an emoji across platform boundaries (e.g., an iPhone to an Android), the sender and the receiver will differ by about 2.04 points on average on our -5 to 5 sentiment scale. However, even within platforms, the average difference is 1.88 points. For example, in the case of the Apple emoji ( ), there were some people who thought it was more positive while others thought it was more negative.

Hannah Miller is a third-year Ph.D. student in the GroupLens research lab. She co-wrote the paper on this research with colleagues Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Shuo (Steven) Chang, Isaac Johnson, Loren Terveen, and Brent Hecht. A downloadable version of the paper is available at z.umn.edu/emoji.

Mishaps with Emojiby Hannah Miller

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Professor Dan Keefe’s Interactive Visualization Lab (IV/Lab) sits at the intersection of human experience and current advancements in digital immersion. His mission and that of his students is to create and utilize interactive computer graphics, data-processing algorithms, and radical new computer technologies to address and understand problems through data, design, and art.

Here’s how:

1. Speaking to thousands in “The Cave” – Imagine going back in time to 450 BCE and looking out over a crowd of thousands of Greeks and trying to convince them to go to war to expand their city-state. What would it look like? Would a crowd this size even hear the message without modern technology? Where would a political discussion like this take place and why would ancient people choose it? To answer these questions, the IV/Lab has developed a completely immersive virtual reality (IVR) application called “The Cave” used for visualizing the physical setting for ancient Greek oratorical performances. The crowd is created using cutting-edge crowd simulation techniques, making possible to perform an ensemble of simulations in order to study different historical phases and assembly sizes ranging from 1,000 to 14,000 citizens.

Lab Researcher: Ph.D. student Volcano Silver

2. Turning Climate Data into a Monet – One of the fundamental challenges the IV/Lab is designed to address is to take extremely complex data sets and find a way to visually present it in a clear way. Using a sketch-based interface and working with professional artists, the IV/Lab has been creating images that respect underlying data, but are far more eye-catching. Gone are generic, eight-color maps typical of data visualizations, and in their place are images with a near painterly quality. The results are not just visually better, but also help to better understand the phenomena described by the data. “We see more data in the visualizations than we saw before,” said Professor Keefe. “The data is the same, but the way these artists present it bring out much more.”

Lab Researcher: Ph.D. student Seth Johnson

3. Diving into the Human Heart – Until now, the only way to physically get into the human heart was through intensive surgery or science fiction. Nowadays, that

fiction is far more accessible and safer. Using the Cave’s four display screens, motion tracking cameras, multiple projectors, and two handheld wands, users can be immersed in a holographic heart. With a few waves of the wands, the heart can be as large as the room or small enough to fit in your palm. It makes exploring anatomy easier than ever and may one day help revolutionize medical device design.

Lab Researcher: Ph.D. student Dan Orban

4. Stretching Time to Illustrate Movement – Slow-motion has long been used to analyze athletic performance. Coaches use it to better see a batter’s swing or opportunities a running back may have missed. Imagine if you could not only slow time down or stop it, but stretch it. That is exactly what the IV/Lab is doing to help reveal movement patterns that would otherwise be missed, even with the latest and greatest video technology. Working with different visual cues to map motion-capture data (mo-cap), the IV/Lab researchers demonstrated an example of a golfer’s swing, projecting the mo-cap onto a 3D plane using their “Multivariate Trajectory Visualizer.” What you see is a kind of stick figure repeatedly going through the golf swing motion, with colored-signatures and the entire trail of motion being visualized. The motion trail is time being stretched while the color signatures show speed, all of which reveals opportunities for precise data analysis with exacting results that a number of industries could benefit from.

Lab Researcher: Undergraduate student Devin Lang

5. Growing a VR Forest to Fight Climate Change – Using technology similar to the engines that create popular first-person shooter video games, the IV/Lab is growing virtual forests. The forests are more than just creating thousands of virtual trees because these forests are representative of forests that spread over the northern U.S. landscape. Like all of the projects in the IV/Lab, this project is data-accurate, using information the Forestry Service has collected since the 1920s to create a 3D environment that can be surveyed and analyzed without heading into the woods. The lab is literally bringing the forests into research offices and finding ways for interested parties to more easily analyze crucial variables.

Lab Researcher: Ph.D. student Jung Nam

Visit the CS&E site for the full article at z.umn.edu/ivlab.

connecting humans to computers

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CS&E Researchers Begin Work in Innovative LabProfessors Chad Myers and Dan Knights now share a unique new lab space in the Molecular and Cellular Biology building with fellow researchers Frank Albert and Ran Blekhman. Their research focuses on studying complex biological systems using genomic data and other high-dimensional high-throughput assays. The new lab breaks down barriers to collaboration in computational biology research by creating a computational lab in the middle of a wet lab environment. The space makes collaboration and knowledge sharing easier and allows students to avoid spending time on problems other team members may have already solved.

Visit College of Biological Sciences’ blog for the full article at z.umn.edu/compbiolab.

Mapping Gene Expression in WormsBy observing the gene regulatory interactions in the intestines of C. elegans, a 1 mm long roundworm, a team of CS&E researchers from U of M’s Computational Biology and Functional Genomics Lab (CBFG) found numerous cell non-autonomous cell interactions. By mapping the circuitry that controls tissue-specific gene expression in the worms, the team has shown how complex the networks actually are in the context of a living animal. The team had their paper, “Transcription Factor Activity Mapping of a Tissue Specific In Vivo Gene Regulatory Network,” appear in Cell Systems, a well-renowned monthly journal that focuses on life sciences. The team’s research was headed by Associate Professor and CBFG Principal Investigator Chad Myers.

Visit Cell Systems for the full paper at z.umn.edu/geneexp.

Why Gamers Are Drawn to Frustrating GamesAssociate Professor Paul Schrater explained why gamers are drawn to extremely difficult and highly frustrating games in Scientific American’s article, “Why We Love the Games That Enrage Us Most.” His theory posits that fun has little to do with the addictive aspects of gaming. “Our brains are designed to be very complex constraint-satisfaction machines,” he says. “We are goal seeking, and having a goal means defining a constraint on an outcome. Satisfying that constraint can involve a whole path toward the goal that’s unenjoyable, like climbing a mountain to reach food or safety. Achieving the goal involves releasing the goal, which is satisfying—but it is a peculiar kind of nonhedonic kind of satisfaction.” Schrater goes on to explain that players are not necessarily motivated by pleasure associated with competence. Instead, it has more to do with the act of setting and releasing constraints in a specific context that is inherently motivating.

Visit Scientific American’s site for the full article at z.umn.edu/enragegames.

Sattar Weighs in on Underwater Storage for IEEEIn the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ flagship magazine IEEE Spectrum, new Associate Professor Junaed Sattar provided insight on Microsoft’s experimental underwater data center initiative, called Project Natick. An expert in underwater robotics Professor Sattar speculated that Microsoft’s plan is to find ways to drastically reduce operating temperatures with an ocean plunge. “The underwater domain is a prime location to put something heat-producing like a data center,” Sattar said. “Heat will dissipate really fast and really far underwater. I see that as big cost savings.” He went on to caution that it is tough to predict the environmental impact of such large data center farms.

Visit IEEE’s site for the full article at z.umn.edu/projectnatick.

Robots in the Workplace?Associate Professor Vokan Isler was featured in both an article and video segment for KSTP. The piece, “Robots in the Workplace? Not as Far-fetched as it May Seem,” looked at the

steady progress robotics has made in entering common career fields. Professor Isler was the resident expert they highlighted, talking about what will possibly come in the next few years as robots gradually change the agricultural and manufacturing segments. “Just like how the industrial revolution changed things, and then the IT revolution changed things, I think having devices that can sense and interact with the environment is also going to change the nature of our workplace,” Isler said.

Visit KSTP’s site for the article and video feature at z.umn.edu/workrobots.

Spatial Computing at the U of MProfessor Shashi Shekhar’s article “Spatial Computing” was the featured cover story for the January 2016 Communications of the ACM. Shekhar’s article presents a perspective on the societal impacts, recent shifts and potentially transformative opportunities in spatial computing, including notable advances such as the public availability of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) in the early 1990s and the enrichment of billions of lives through location-based services (e.g., Google Maps, Uber, geo-tagging, and geo-targeted alerts including Amber alerts). Spatial Computing has also advanced Computer Science through ideas like spatial databases, spatial statistics, spatial data mining, and spatial decision making (e.g., Precision Agriculture). Future potentially transformative opportunities include ubiquitous indoor location-based services, the location-aware Internet of physical things, and continuous global monitoring, visualization, forecast, alerts and warnings to address societal challenges, such as climate change and nexus of food, energy and water security.

Visit CACM’s site for Prof. Shekhar’s full article at z.umn.edu/spatialcomputing or CS&E’s site for our feature on spatial computing at z.umn.edu/umspatial.

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selections were made by the Senate Committee on Education Policy (SECP).

Professor Gini was also honored with the 2016 Distinguished Service Award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The award recognizes one individual each year for their extraordinary service to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community.

The AAAI recognized Professor Gini “for her outstanding contributions to the field of artificial intelligence through sustained service leading AI societies, journals, and conferences; mentoring colleagues; and working to increase participation of women in AI and computing.”

The award has been given out annually since 1999 to leaders and scholars in the AI field. The AAAI is a nonprofit scientific society that aims to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence, as well as increase the public’s understanding of artificial intelligence, improve the teaching and training of AI practitioners, and provide guidance for research planners and funders concerning the importance and potential of current AI developments and future directions.

Please join CS&E in sending our sincerest congratulations to Professor Maria Gini for her well-deserved recognition as a teacher, scholar, and leader in the field of computer science.

Visit the CS&E site for a full llist of faculty awards at z.umn.edu/157i.

Professor Maria Gini has been selected as a recipient of this year’s Outstanding Contributions to Post-Baccalaureate, Graduate and Professional Education Award. The honor recognizes faculty who engage post-baccalaureate, graduate, and professional students in a community of intellectual inquiry, who are significant mentors and role models for graduate and professional students, and who develop and promote activities that help students understand the larger context of their intended professions.

Those who receive this prestigious award become members of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers (ADT), which serves the University through various activities and aims to improve teaching and learning. Additionally, the title “Distinguished University Teaching Professor” or “Distinguished University Teacher” is conferred upon the recipient. The award includes a one-time $15,000 award to aid recipients in their strong and enduring commitment to quality education at the University of Minnesota.

Professor Gini is joined by seven other recipients, all of whom were selected through a process administered by the Provost’s Office; final

Professor Gini Receives two distinguished Awards from the u and AAAI

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that rely on his software to optimize the design and manufacturing of airplanes, cars, and engines. Cloud infrastructure companies, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, rely on his partitioning software to intelligently optimize and allocate the placement of data and computations across their data centers. Computer chip designers, such as AMD, Intel, Micron, Samsung, and Qualcomm, use his hypergraph partitioning software to minimize chip area and cost, and to maximize chip speed. E-Commerce and online media streaming companies, such as Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and Comcast use his recommender system technology to identify items such as products, movies, and songs that are most relevant for their customers. Publishers and content management companies such as Elsevier, Thomson-Reuters, Springer, and Yahoo!, rely on his clustering software to organize and extract information from the vast number of documents generated daily.

Six other recipients join Professor Karypis, all whom were honored with a celebratory dinner in early May. The award comes with a $100K grant to be used over the course of five years. Previous winners from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering include Professors Zhi-Li Zhang, John Riedl, Joseph Konstan, Nikos Papanikolopoulos, and Shashi Shekhar.

Please join the Department in extending our heartiest congratulations to Professor George Karypis, who not only received this honor, but also was recently honored with the 2016 Seoul Test of Time Award for his groundbreaking recommender systems research.

Visit the CS&E site for a full list of faculty awards at z.umn.edu/157i.

Professor George Karypis has been selected as a recipient of the Distinguished McKnight University Professorship. This honor recognizes outstanding faculty members who have recently achieved full professor status. Professor Karypis will hold the title “Distinguished McKnight University Professor” for as long as he remains with the University of Minnesota.Professor Karypis was selected for his ongoing work in the areas of high-performance computing and data mining, which are focused on developing novel algorithms grounded in theory and solve important problems across the computing spectrum—from scientific computing to business intelligence, from e-commerce to drug discovery, and more.

Professor Karypis has been hugely successful in bringing his innovative research ideas into practice via a series of software packages that have been incorporated in a very large number of commercial packages and software systems developed at academic institutions and government research labs. Industries and research communities impacted by his work are incredibly diverse. Nearly everyone running large scale computational simulations on supercomputers anywhere in the world uses his graph partitioning software to optimize the runtime of their software. This includes companies like Boeing, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, Rolls- Royce, and Toyota

Professor Karypis Receives Distinguished McKnight University Professorship

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All this experience has contributed to MacDonald rising to his current role as the CSE Director of Information Technology, where he has been tasked with and leads the unification of IT services within the college, a position he is uniquely suited. In this leadership role, he has found areas where departments can collaborate and has helped the College transition to OIT Central Services where appropriate, essentially finding creative ways the College can best use its IT resources.

All in all, MacDonald has provided service to the university above and beyond what was expected, and made many invaluable and pioneering technical contributions to the university as a whole. In addition, an equally significant contribution has been his expertise in staff mentoring and development. Ask his staff: they stay with us for many years because of his leadership, training and support. He knows what it means to stand behind his staff as well as how to buffer the troubles that may occur, either due to politics or funding, so that they can focus on their work. He also encourages them to grow, to be creative in finding solutions to new computing and networking problems. Jim is the rare technical expert who also exhibits excellent managerial skills.

For his career pursuit in bettering IT services at the University, please join CS&E in congratulating Jim MacDonald on this well-earned honor.

Visit the CS&E site for a full list of faculty awards at z.umn.edu/157i.

CSE Director of Information Technology Jim MacDonald has been selected as a recipient of the 2016 President’s Award for Outstanding Service. This award recognizes faculty and staff who have provided exceptional service to the University, its schools, colleges, departments and service units.MacDonald was selected because he has been instrumental in introducing, shaping, and nurturing groundbreaking information technology and support services. He has spent a lifetime putting technology trends to use and playing a critical role in the installation and testing of cutting-edge experimental computing equipment.

Starting as an undergraduate student, MacDonald began his career working in computer support in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science where he was able to spot coming technological trends and implement them to the benefit of the greater university community. He was a pioneer in the development of the university’s first local-area network that linked together the computers in CS&E. MacDonald’s foresight led him to develop and manage the IT infrastructure of the former Army High-Performance Computing Research Center, which involved connecting its network to the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute’s network and US West’s network (now Qwest).

In addition to these successful projects, MacDonald has continued to provide exceptional services for many entities, from our students to the U.S. Government. Among many initiatives, he developed high-performance computer labs and classrooms that offer thousands of undergraduate and graduate students state-of-the-art software and equipment, and he has been a “first-responder” to high-level cyber-attacks, collaborating with the FBI when necessary to track hackers and set up more rigorous security measures.

CSE IT Director Jim MacDonald Receives President’s Award

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Hecht Receives NSF CAREER AwardAssistant Professor Brent Hecht received the prestigious National Science Foundation’s (NSF) CAREER award. The award supports junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research. Hecht received the award for his proposal, titled “Understanding and Addressing Geographic Inequalities in Location-Aware Technologies,” which outlines a series of research projects that seek to ensure that location-aware technologies are both more effective and equally benefit all types of areas. The award will allow Hecht to continue this research towards better understanding this phenomenon and developing algorithms and systems to address it.

Knights Awarded $4M for Microbiome ResearchAssistant Professor Dan Knights received a large grant from the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) research project grant program (R01). Knights received the grant for his project, “MAGIC: Microbiome, Antibiotics, and Growth Infant Cohort,” which models microbiome development in infants to detect early defects and identify new therapeutic targets to reduce obesity and allergy rates. The $4M NIH grant will help support Knights and his team in their efforts to improve precision medicine using the human microbiome, including innovative approaches to DNA sequencing and data analysis.

CS&E Professors Win Int’l Award for ResearchProfessors George Karypis, Joseph Konstan, John Riedl (posthumous), and former University of Minnesota Ph.D. student Badrul Sarwar received the 2016 Seoul Test of Time Award at the World Wide Web Conference in Montreal for their groundbreaking research on recommender systems. The award recognizes research that have been shown to be particularly influential over many years. They received the prestigious award for their paper entitled “Item-based collaborative filtering recommendation algorithms,” which was presented at the

International World Wide Web Conference in 2001. The research is now regarded as the pioneering scholarly reference for recommender systems. Last year’s award was given to Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, for their world-changing paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” presented in 1998.

Papanikolopoulos Receives RAS Leadership AwardProfessor Nikolaos Papanikolopoulos was honored with the George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ (IEEE) Robotics & Automation Society (RAS). The award recognizes outstanding contributions of an individual for his or her exceptional leadership, innovation and dedication that benefit the Robotics and Automation community. The Robotics & Automation Society praised Papanikolopoulous “for his leadership, innovation, and dedication in RAS conference activities.” Only two Saridis Leadership awards are given out annually by the RAS.

Roumeliotis Honored by IEEE and GoogleProfessor Stergios Roumeliotis has been named an IEEE Fellow. He is being recognized for his contributions to visual-inertial navigation and cooperative localization. In particular, his research on spacecraft navigation for NASA using cameras and inertial sensors has recently found numerous applications, such as virtual reality and indoor wayfinding on cell phones, tablets, wearables, and robots.

Additionally, Professor Roumeliotis was a recipient of a Google Faculty Research Award, which are one-year awards structured as unrestricted gifts to support the research of world-class permanent faculty members at top universities around the world.

Interrante Appointed Director of CCSProfessor Victoria Interrante was appointed Director of the Center for Cognitive Sciences (CCS). This university-wide center represents 24 University departments and 9 colleges, serving as the foundation for cognitive science

research at the University of Minnesota. The Center’s primary mission continues to be the facilitation of interdisciplinary research and teaching in cognitive science. Professor Interrante’s research into applying insights from visual perception and cognition has allowed her to collaborate with colleagues from a wide variety of fields. This interdisciplinary approach to her research will help CCS continue the success of its mission. Congratulations to Professor Interrante and good luck to her and CCS as she embarks on this new leadership role.

Shekhar Elected to CRA BoardProfessor Shashi Shekhar was recently elected a member of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors. CRA’s mission is to enhance innovation by joining with industry, government and academia to strengthen research and advanced education in computing. The CRA Board of Directors is a distinguished group of leaders in computing research from academia and industry. CRA board members address major issues affecting the computing research community and shape the community’s responses and actions. The Board provides the membership for standing committees, such as the Government Affairs, Snowbird Conference, Taulbee Survey, CRA-W, Education, Computing Community Consortium committees.

Please visit cs.umn.edu/news for a full listing of CS&E’s latest news.

Prof. Victoria Interrante

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requires precise knowledge suited for well-versed computer science students that tap into their understanding of advanced algorithms.

In addition to getting the chance to compete head-to-head with other top programming teams around the world, the competition gives students an opportunity to practice skills they will need for their future careers in the tech industry.

“ACM-ICPC is a great opportunity for students to learn algorithm/data structures—one of the most important/fundamental subjects in computer science,” said Shinohara. “It is also a great way to prepare for coding interviews that all computer science students need to go through to get jobs.”

The World Finals were hosted by Prince of Songkla University from May 15 – 20, 2016 in Phuket, Thailand. There, the team competed with the world’s brightest problem-solvers where they finished as this year’s top Big Ten school, placing 84th overall.

The team’s success at the World Finals has led them to taking on a leadership role in U of M’s programming community.

“The Benchwarmers not only act as mentors for all University of Minnesota teams,” said Nelson, “but they organize informational sessions and practice sessions prior to competitions. They have been driven to continue representing the U at the word finals stage.”

Led by CS&E Undergraduate Advisor, Luc Nelson, U of M’s Team Benchwarmers has advanced to the 40th Annual ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals for the second year in a row.Students Stephen Lucas Knutson, Hidenori Shinohara, and Bat-Orgil Basaikhan qualified by being one of only three teams to advance to the finals after a regional competition held in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in October, 2015.

The IBM-sponsored event is the premiere global programming competition, which challenges teams of university students with complex, real-world problems that must be solved within a five-hour deadline.

“The competition definitely is not easy,” said team member Shinohara. “More than 200 teams participate, and the problems always require a lot of observation, deep understanding of the subject, and, obviously, very good coding skills.”

Competitors race against the clock, collaborating to rank problem difficulty, deduce requirements, design test beds, and ultimately build software systems that solve the problems. Each problem

Team Benchwarmers Advance to ACM ICPC World Finals by Mark Rapacz

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From L to R: Hidenori Shinohara, Lucas Knutson, Bat-Orgil Basaikhan

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In addition to more formal initiatives, the group organizes and participates in a number of community-building and informational gatherings. They were part of a large documentary-screening put together by Women Who Code that attracted over 150 women from all parts of the Twin Cities technology community. Before that, ACM-W co-hosted a pizza party and screening of the movie Hackers with ACM.

Under its new leadership, ACM-W is doing what it can to let the university know who they are and what they plan to do. To organize and plan events, ACM-W holds a weekly officers meeting, open to everyone, on Wednesdays at 3:30pm in the lower level of the Keller Hall Atrium. This is followed by a study session from 4:30pm – 6:00pm. For each session, the CS&E Department provides two teaching assistants knowledgeable of coursework from the introductory Computer Science courses. There is food, conversation, and it is open to all students.

“We want the student body to know that ACM-W exists and why ACM-W exists,” said Phan. “Anyone who supports our mission is welcome to our events and meetings to find out more about us.”

Visit ACM-W’s website at acmw-umn.org for more information.

isolated,” said faculty advisor Amy Larson. “We provide an arena where members feel academically supported, while fostering a network of women who share their unique experiences with one another.”

One way the group supports women in computer science is by setting up a mentorship program comprised of students, industry professionals, and faculty. Each student is paired with an industry professional or faculty member within the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CS&E) and another student that is further along in the Computer Science program.

“Our mentoring groups are small, but they’re meant to be small,” said Larson. “It gives our members a chance to get academic advice, professional guidance, and participate in periodic check-ins.”

Beyond mitigating the gender gap, many issues women in technology face are more nuanced. Because of this, most ACM-W activities are geared toward providing a space where women can develop ideas surrounding these issues.

“It has been really reaffirming to know that others have similar stories,” said Phan. “Talking with other women has helped me think critically about the challenges we face and what can be done about it.”

by Mark Rapacz

The University of Minnesota chapter of Association for Computing Machinery for Women (ACM-W) has been awarded a $5,000 grant from the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). The grant has been used to establish a successful mentorship program, sponsor weekly study sessions, and host community-building and informational gatherings.ACM-W’s new student officers, President Thanh Mai Phan and Web Master Shannyn Telander, have taken on a large share of the group’s responsibilities this semester. Despite the extra work they do on top of their studies, they passionately pursue ACM-W’s goal of helping support and bring women into the tech field.

“It is important that everyone has the opportunity to contribute,” said Phan. “If our professional goal is to make technology that everybody uses, the field cannot be dominated by one particular group of people.”

ACM-W does face significant challenges in promoting retention of women in computer technology. The industry is largely dominated by men, which makes it less welcoming for young women looking to pursue a degree or career in computer science.

“Here at the U, it is about 14% women and 86% men for undergrads,” said Telander. “I joined ACM-W hoping to become friends with more women in the major because it can be kind of intimidating when you look at the gender gap.”

This is why the grant has been so beneficial. It gives ACM-W the means to face these challenges.

“The grant has helped the ACM-W support women in the department so they do not feel

Energized by Grant, AcM-W Plans to Grow

ACM-W worked in a supportive role with the NCWIT and Professor Maria Gini to put together their first-ever undergraduate Women in Computer Science Dinner that took place in McNamara Alumni Center. Over 70 current and prospective members enjoyed the evening.

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Ali Wins Two Best Paper AwardsPh.D. student Reem Ali was recently honored at two spatial computing events for her work on connected cars. Her paper, “Future Connected Vehicles: Challenges and Opportunities for Spatio-temporal Computing,” received the second Best Vision Paper Award at the 23rd ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2015). In addition, Reem’s paper, “Discovering Non-compliant Window Co-Occurrence Patterns: A Summary of Results,” was one of four best papers at the 14th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases (SSTD 2015).

Ludwig Receives Best Paper AwardPh.D. candidate Michael Ludwig received the Best Student Paper award at the Electronic Imaging: Measuring, Modeling, and Reproducing Material Appearance Conference (MMRMA). Ludwig worked with Professor Gary Meyer and served as lead author. His paper, titled “Effects of Mesoscale Surface Structure on Perceived Brightness,” presented the details and analysis of a psychophysical user study investigating how people perceive and interpret surfaces with minute geometric detail.

Undergrads Honored by CRA for ResearchCS&E students Kesha Hietala and Zhengqi Li were recently recognized with the honorable mention distinction by the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) 2016 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for Ph.D.-granting institutions. The award recognizes undergraduate students who show outstanding research potential in the area of computing research. For her research, Hietala compared the compiling efficiencies between two languages, looking at the produced code for a sampling of programs, while also working security-oriented projects during several internships. Li has been working with the Multiple Autonomous Robotics System Lab (MARS) on Google’s Project Tango to find ways to provide location-based information where acess to GPS is unavailable, such as underwater or indoor environments, while also working on a novel image stitching pipeline for the Robotics Sensor Network.

Student Start-Ups Win 2016 Acara ChallengeFour CS&E students received top division honors in the 2016 Acara Challenge, which is the University of Minnesota’s impact venture competition that rewards and supports student teams that are developing solutions to address global, social, and environmental challenges. With the award, students will have the opportunity and resources to develop their innovative business solutions. Founder of Mobineo Kate Kuehl (B.A.) and her team, which includes CS&E students Kevin Thomsen (M.S.) and Jack O’Leary (B.S.), won for their project, a software company that develops surveying equipment to better track land claims, while Rachel Sobel and her team won for MobiLite, an affordable and portable light and energy system that enables additional cellphone functionality for urban slum residents in India.

U of M’s ACM Hosts Large HackathonU of M’s chapter of the ACM hosted its annual competition, “Minne-Hack.” As the largest hackathon in the Twin Cities, it brings young tech-minded students to the U for a weekend of friendly competition. More than 250 students from 35 different schools teamed up to compete. Teams had 24 hours to solve problems related to three areas: environment, health, and automation. Everything from apps to games were created by the teams. The overall winner of the 2015 event was “Muse Birds,” a U of M team that created a video game you play using brain waves.

Wang Wins Best Dissertation AwardPh.D. student Huahua Wang has won the University of Minnesota Graduate School’s “Best Dissertation Award” in Physical Sciences and Engineering for 2016. Wang received the award for his dissertation “Large Scale Optimization for Machine Learning,” in which he developed scalable and faster algorithms to better digest big data. His Ph.D. work has made significant contributions to the development of large-scale optimization algorithms in both theoretical and practical realms.

2016-17 Doctoral Dissertation FellowsFive Computer Science and Engineering Ph.D. students have been named doctoral dissertation fellows for the 2016-2017 school year. The Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship is a highly competitive fellowship that gives the University’s most accomplished Ph.D. candidates an opportunity to devote full-time effort to an outstanding research project by providing time to finalize and write a dissertation during the fellowship year. CS&E congratulates these outstanding students on this accomplishment:

Please visit cs.umn.edu/news for more student highlights.

Benjamin Heintz Advisor: A. Chandra

Patrick Plonski Advisor: V. Isler

Shaden Smith Advisor: G. Karypis

Dimitrios Zermas Advisor: N. Papanikolopoulos

Quian Zhao Advisor: J. Konstan

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Students work through the night at ACM’s Minnehack, the largest hackathon event in the Twin Cities. The event was hosted at the University of Minnesota.

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The University of Minnesota’s Software Engineering Center and DevJam hosted the 11th annual CodeFreeze symposium in February, 2016.

This year the theme of the symposium was disruptive innovation. In the past 15 years, internet-based technology has substantially disrupted travel, insurance, music and entertainment distribution, publishing, and a variety of other industries. More recently, big data has changed the way people search, navigate, and interact with one another.

By bringing in renowned professionals in their respective fields, the conference looked at past “disruptions” and ahead at technologies that are likely to be disruptive, such as the ubiquity of the internet of things, the maker movement, tele- and personalized medicine, and new programming languages and tools.

During an engaging opening keynote address, Director of Intel Emergent Systems, Ray Arell, spoke about his long-time experience working within a Fortune 100 company.  Serial

entrepreneur, Larry Lukis, told a number of business venture stories that culminated in his founding of Proto Labs, his “third-time charmed” venture that has risen to be one of the top-ranked companies by Forbes.

In the afternoon, participants were invited to engage in any one of the five interactive breakout workshops that included presentations from Pivotal, Mozilla, Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, U of M professor Michael McAlpine, and University of St. Thomas professor Justin Grammens. Topics ranged from 3-D printed bionic nano materials to applying a design mindset to health care.

The final event of the day was a first for the CodeFreeze team and one of its most ambitious activities to date.  Founder of XOBXOB, Robert Gallup, led the 275+ attendees through a maker workshop.  During an interactive session, participants explored the principles behind the maker movement by working with LightBlue Beans, which are Arduino boards that can be wirelessly programmed over Bluetooth.

Open house & Code FreezeOur Tenth Biennial Open House was held in November, 2015, and provided a glimpse of what technology leaders are thinking in their respective areas. The free, day-long event featured exhibits highlighting current departmental research group activities and provided a unique opportunity for attendees to network with fellow researchers, local industry representatives, and faculty and students from the department.

In addition to 70+ research exhibits that were on display throughout the day, the morning events included a welcome from Dean Steven Crouch, the State of the Department by Department Head Mats Heimdahl, and a keynote address from Chief Information Officer of Optum, Mike Connly. The afternoon session saw the awarding of Distinguished Alumni

Awards to Purdue University Professor Anantha Grama and former CEO of Proto Labs Inc. Brad Cleveland.

Late afternoon, attendees were invited to participate in either a hands-on workshop with Professor Svetlana Yarosh exploring maker technologies, or a panel discussion with local industry leaders during which they discussed the opportunities and challenges of bringing computer scientists into non-traditional technology companies.

The day ended with a celebratory reception for former Department Head Vipin Kumar who was honored for his ten years of tireless service to the department and his being named University of Minnesota Regents Professor.

A Glimpse of CS&E Tech on the Horizon

Disruptive Innovations at CodeFreeze 2016

Top: A student tries out VR for the first time at the Open House.Bottom: An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used for research.

Top: CodeFreeze brought nearly 300 attendees to McNamara Alumni Center for a day filled with presentations, workshops, and discussions around its theme Disruptive Innnovations.Bottom: Participants programmed their LightBlue Bean to flash light patterns, detect motion, and more during Gallup’s workshop.

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Alumni Spotlight: Mukund Desphande

Mukund Deshpande has been spending a lot of time thinking about big data for big business, but before he became the head of analytics at one of the fastest growing companies in India, he was a Ph.D. student here at the University of Minnesota where he was an advisee to Professors George Karypis and Jaideep Srivastava.“I was fortunate to work with Mukund when I was starting my academic career as a young Assistant Professor,” said Professor Karypis. “Mukund was a model Ph.D. student. Smart, hard-working, driven, and with a knack for identifying important problems and coming up with innovative solutions.”

After graduating in 2003, Mukund joined Oracle in their supply chain scheduling and optimization group in the Bay Area. He was with them for about four years where he cut his teeth as a lead developer.

“Oracle was a great experience on how to build and, more importantly, ship a product,” said Mukund. “Among other things, the experience provided me the opportunity to apply some things I had learned as a researcher at the U of M.”

By 2007, Mukund returned to India, his home country, to join Persistent Systems as an architect. Headquartered in Pune, Persistent Systems is a rising star on the Indian IT scene. As a founding member of the Business Intelligence Group, Mukund’s goal for the first four years was to build expertise around business intelligence and offer strategies to other projects within the company. Once big data jumped on the scene in 2011, however, his focus was exclusively drawn to that. From there, he pulled together insights from all his experiences to form and lead Persistent Systems’ “Analytics Practice”, where he finds himself today.

What were your early experiences with computing that inspired you growing up and convinced you to pursue computer science as a career?I received my bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineer and I really enjoyed the curriculum, but one thing that always bothered me about mechanical engineering was that you needed access to lot of things to get anything done. This was especially true about 20 years back. You needed raw material and machinery. Compared to that, computer science was liberating. All that was needed was access to a computer and you could do wonderful things on that. I know all that has changed now with all the advances in 3D-CAM printing, but at that time it was easy to make that choice.

What is one of your fondest memories from your time at the U of M?Minnesota was the first place I landed after reaching the United States so it will always be special. Furthermore, I met my wife at the U of M. I think I learned a great deal in each area there—academic and research. In academics and coming from a very regimented education system in India, the choice and freedom provided by the U of M was amazing—not to mention the ability to chart out your own academic path. However, the best time I had was doing research. I still cherish the time spent at the Digital Technology Center and the Army High-Performance Research Center, working with a small set of peers all pursuing similar goals. The ups and downs of the graduate life—I still remember the late nights frantically finishing papers to meet an already extended deadline. Another aspect I enjoyed at the U of M was teaching. I was a TA for the first few years. The recitation sections were the ones that gave me a good taste of what teaching was all about.

What drew you to data mining as opposed to the other fields within computer science?Before arriving to the United States, I worked for six months on a product that was focused on information retrieval. I thought it was an interesting area and clearly had a lot of promise. Luckily, the U had several faculty

who were focused on data mining. Also, when I started my graduate studies someone told me that it was better to work in an upcoming field than an established field as the problems are plenty and it is a lot easier to make a mark.

What are some of the challenges you currently face in leading the application of data mining and analytics practices at a successful software development company?The skills-gap in the area of analytics is the biggest challenge I face. This problem is compounded by rapid evolution of the field and the plethora of new technologies coming out. Nurturing and retaining talent is one of the top focuses for me right now. Another challenge in the field is that there is a wide gap between when companies started pursuing analytics, especially in Silicon Valley who are way ahead of the curve in terms of analytics. Some others are just starting their analytics journey.

What is it about computer science that keeps you excited and motivated for the future? I work in the field of analytics and this field has taken great strides, especially in the last few years. At the same time, if you look at most people and companies, their decision-making is still ad hoc. Very few take advantage of big data or perform data analysis. In my view, one of the challenges in front of us is to radically simplify analytics to make it accessible to everyone. This not only involves user experience challenges but also technology challenges to make data collection and data analysis automated.

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able to remotely kill the engine of a Jeep while it was on the road.

“The level of autonomy is a game changer because now we have situations where there’s no human in the loop,” Dr. Whalen explained. “This adds an entirely new dimension, especially with self-driving cars and commercial autonomous drones on the horizon. You have a real potential for damage if someone hacks into these systems.”

Building a Better DroneDr. Whalen is part of a broad multi-company and university research team that includes experts from Rockwell Collins, DARPA, Boeing, Galois Inc., Draper Labs and Data61.

“What we’re interested in is whether we can build a platform from the ground up that’s functionally equivalent to a modern vehicle, but is also secured from attacks,” said Dr. Whalen.

DARPA has divided their research into two main teams: a ground team and an air team. Dr. Whalen is part of the air team whose job is to investigate rotorcraft (helicoptors and drones), and use advanced operating systems, architecture description languages, programming languages, and verification technologies to build security into the vehicle.

“We at the U work as the integrator. Working closely with Rockwell Collins, we define the architecture of the vehicle,” said Dr. Whalen. “For example, a car that can be hacked through its radio Wi-Fi interface is poorly architected. We specify all the pieces of software and hardware and determine which ones are critical or non-critical, then make sure that none of the non-critical things can affect the critical things except in very well-defined ways.”

This led Dr. Whalen’s team to work with UAVs ranging from hobbyists’ remote-controlled quad copters to Boeing’s 32-foot autonomous military helicopter called Little Bird.

“For the quad copter, our system controls all functions of the copter—everything it does. For the Boeing vehicle, it controls

the communication stacks—all the communications in and out of the Little Bird. Eventually, it will run the entire flight control computer, so our system will actually be flying the vehicle.”

The Keys Are Partitioning and VerificationThe idea behind creating a hack-proof system revolves around what researchers call partitioning. Partitioning is a way to separate or wall-off portions of an operating system that’s controlling the computer.

“Essentially, what we want to do is figure out a good architecture, then build these very strong walls between critical and non-critical things so that, if by some chance the non-critical stuff gets hacked, it doesn’t leak across the partitioning barrier.”

The other part is verification of the critical software. One way that hackers break into systems is through a buffer overflow, in which an attacker can inject malicious code into the system by sending in a malformed program input. Galois Inc. developed a programming language called Ivory that is both very efficient and does not allow programmers to write code that contains buffer overflows or other memory errors. In addition, it performs formal verification on critical components to make sure that they meet security requirements.

The scope and complexity of the project is huge. Not only does the team need to look at all the research currently out there, but the team also implements their systems into vehicles with an ultimate goal of deploying their work commercially and militarily. This

ambition has led the team to seek rigorous testing.

“We’ve been working with a ‘Red Team’ from Draper Labs who act as White Hat hackers. They break into government installations and explain where the vulnerabilities are.”

As part of the project, Dr. Whalen and his research counterparts gave the Red Team all of their design documentation, source code and system images, and three months to hack it. Red Team didn’t succeed. After this test, they gave the Red Team greater access, and, again, they were unable to hack it.

The Future of AutonomyIf the research team continues this successful trajectory, Dr. Whalen hopes to see many of the team’s ideas open up to broader use.

“A lot of these ideas are going to transition, and hopefully some of the tools we have constructed as well,” said Dr. Whalen. “I’d like to see this technology make it out there.”

These technologies have the potential to make future systems significantly safer and more secure, especially as unmanned drones and autonomous automobiles are starting to enter the commercial sphere.

“Boeing is going to be using this for sure in the Little Bird, and it is going to be deployed in a real production vehicle in the near term. We’ve been in discussions with Amazon, and, of course, DARPA is interested,” said Dr. Whalen.

Please visit msse.umn.edu for more information about the Master of Science in Software Engineering Center.

“Unhackable Drone” (continued from page 1)

Michael Shick (CC 2.0)

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