Congratulations CGSW 7.0 Best Paper and Best Presenter Winners
Congratulations to all participants of our 7th annual CISE Graduate Student Workshop (CGSW 7.0). This year’s event, held January 15th at Boston University, was a spectacular day highlighting the caliber and diversity of research being conducted by our graduate students.
Organized by students for students, CGSW provides a forum for students to share their original research and hone their communication skills. This year’s symposium offered participating students the opportunity to compete for a Best Paper or Best Presenter award, with various criteria taken into consideration in the selection of candidates. The event also included three plenary industry speakers from Amazon, MIT Lincoln Laboratory and start-up Optimus Ride.
“This is an important event for our PhD candidates,” says CISE Director, Professor Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, SE, BME). “Developing an ability to effectively communicate your research results is quite important, affecting how widely they will be adopted and their eventual impact. It is particularly hard to do when speaking to people outside one’s discipline. The goal of this event is to provide students with the opportunity to practice these communication skills in a comfortable and fun atmosphere.”
Adds Christos Cassandras, Head of the Division of Systems Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, “Having followed this (CGSW event) over the years, I am impressed at how it has improved in terms of presentation quality by our students. I personally found it more intellectually rewarding than sessions in some of our conferences. I also thought that the inclusion of three plenaries from local industry was a great idea – not only were the talks very informative but they also provide a networking opportunity.”
CGSW 7.0 student research presentations were held at the BU Photonics Center followed by an award reception that evening at the BU Castle. CISE thanks the CGSW 7.0 Student Organizer team for putting together a terrific event: Andrew Cutler (PhD ECE candidate), Arian Houshmand (PhD SE candidate), Zihuan Qiao (PhD Statistics candidate), Zachary Serlin (PhD ME candidate).
Best Paper Award Winners
First Place – Zachary Serlin (Advisor: Calin Belta) Li, X., Serlin, Z.,Yang, G., & Belta, C. (2019). “A formal methods approach to interpretable reinforcement learning for robotic planning.” Science Robotics. 4. eaay6276. 10.1126/scirobotics.aay6276.
Second Place –Charles Saunders (Advisor: Vivek Goyal) Saunders, C., Murray-Bruce, J. & Goyal, V.K. “Computational periscopy with an ordinary digital camera.” Nature 565, 472–475 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0868-6
Third Place (tie) – Leila Delshadtehrani (Advisors: Manuel Egele & Ajay Joshi) Delshadtehrani, L., Canakci, S., Zhou, B., Eldridge, S., Joshi, A., & Egele, M. “PHMon: A Programmable Hardware Monitor and Its Security Use Cases” Accepted for publication in the 29th USENIX Security Symposium, Boston, MA, August 2020
Third Place (tie) Taiyao Wang (Advisor: Yannis Paschalidis) Convergence of Parameter Estimates for Regularized Mixed Linear Regression Models, Taiyao Wang, T., & Paschalidis, I.C. Presented at the CDC 2019, Nice, France Dec. 11-19, 2019
Best Presenter Award Winners
First Place – Samuel Pinto (Advisor: Sean Andersson): “Optimal Multi-Agent Persistent Monitoring of the Uncertain State of a Finite Set of Targets”
Second Place – Iman Abdalla (Advisor: Thomas Little): “Dynamic FOV Tracking Receiver for Dense Optical Wireless Networks”
Third Place – William Blair (Advisor: Manuel Egele) “Hash After Free (HaF): An Asynchronous Defense Against Use After Free Exploits through Lightweight libc Instrumentation”
See the CGSW 7.0 Agenda.