SIGBITS January 2019

Shue Research in the News

Work by Craig Shue on developing a new technology to protect companies and computer users from damaging and expensive malware attacks received wide-spread media coverage including Marketplace-The Numbers, Scienmag, Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, San Antonio Express, Le Lezard (France), and the Houston Chronicle.

Shue Malware Defense

Mello-Stark Election Work in the News

Work done by Suzanne Mello-Stark and two WPI students was referenced in a Time Magazine article "Russia Wants to Undermine Trust in Elections. Here's How Rhode Island Is Fighting Back."

TIME Article: Risk Limiting

Solovey Making News

Work by Erin Solovey and her research team using computer science and neuroscience tools to improve personalized learning environments was carried by numerous national and international media outlets.

Solovey Research

Channel 3 "Worcester News Tonight" aired an interview with her about the project.

WNT Interview

She was appointed as Deputy Editor for the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS), after serving on the editorial board for five years.

She had a paper accepted. R. Liu, A. Sarkar, E.T. Solovey, S. Tschiatschek (2019). Evaluating Rule-based Programming and Reinforcement Learning for Personalizing an Intelligent System. In Proc. of the 2019 on IUI Workshop on Explainable Smart Systems.

Rundensteiner Featured Work, PhD and Publications

The work of Elke Rundensteiner was featured in more than 80 media outlets, including Marketplace, The Numbers (public radio), Scienmag, Renewable Energy World North America, The Oklahoman, and Telemundo Lubbock. She is leading a team of students in building a new type of software to help businesses make sense, in real time, of the deluge of data they receive. The research is funded by a three-year, $499,753 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Rundensteiner Research Tool

Her PhD student, Abhishek Mukherji, successfully defended his dissertation on "Pattern Mining and Sense Making for Enhancing User Experience Analytics." He is employed at Raytheon as Senior Engineer.

Caitlin Kuhlman, Maryann Vanvalkenburg and Elke Rundensteiner, FARE: Diagnostics for Fair Ranking using Pairwise Error Metrics, WORLD WIDE WEB Conference 2019, San Francisco, ACCEPTED.

Caitlin Kuhlman, Maryann Vanvalkenburg, Diana Doherty, Malika Nurbekova, Goutham Deva, Zarni Phyo, Lane Harrison and Elke Rundensteiner, ``Evaluating Preference Collection Methods for Interactive Ranking Analytics'' 2019 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'19), ACCEPTED.

Zhongfang Zhuang, Xiangnan Kong, Elke Rundensteiner, AMAS: Attention Model for Attributed Sequence Classification, SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM19). Calgary, Canada, May 2-4, 2019. ACCEPTED.

Tabassum Kakar, Xiao Qin, Cory Tapply, Derek Murphy, Daniel Yun, Oliver Spring, Elke A. Rundensteiner, Lane Harrison, Thang La, Sanjay K. Sahoo and Suranjan De, MedViz: Visual Analytics for Medication Error Detection, IVAPP, No 4, full paper, 2019. ACCEPTED. Selected among top candidates for IVAPP 2019 best paper award.

Xiao Qin, Lei Cao, Elke Rundensteiner and Samuel Madden, Scalable Kernel Density Estimation-based Local Outlier Detection over Large Data Streams, EDBT'2019. ACCEPTED.

Yizhou Yan, Lei Cao, Sam Madden, Elke Rundensteiner, SWIFT: Mining Representative Patterns from Large Event Streams, VLDB'19/PVLDB, Vol 12, Los Angeles, CA. ACCEPTED.

Liang Zhang, Noura Alghamdi, Mohamed Eltabakh, and Elke Rundensteiner, TARDIS: Distributed Indexing Framework for Big Time Series Data, Int. Conf. on Data Engineering 2019, Macau, China, April 2019. ACCEPTED.

Zhongfang Zhuang, Xiangnan Kong, Elke Rundensteiner, Jihane Zouaoui, and Aditya Arora, Deep One-Shot Learning on Attributed Sequences, full paper, IEEE Big Data, Dec 2018.

Susmitha Wunnava, Xiao Qin, Tabassum Kakar, Elke Rundensteiner and Xiangnan Kong, Deep Learning Strategies for Automatic Detection of Medication and Adverse Drug Events from Electronic Health Records, AMIA 2018 Annual Symposium, Poster, Presented Nov. 6, 2018.

Recent News from Pinciroli​

Carlo Pinciroli had two papers accepted at the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Jayam Patel, Xu Yicong, Carlo Pinciroli. Mixed-Granularity Human-Swarm Interaction. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics Automation (ICRA2019).

Luca Carlone, Carlo Pinciroli. General Robot Co-design: Beyond the Monotone Case. 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics Automation (ICRA2019).

His PhD student Jayam Patel passed his qualifier exam.

Fichera MQP Team Work Accepted at Conference

Loris Fichera and one of his SCREAM (Superelastic Continuum Robot for Endoscopic Articulation and Manipulation) MQP team (K. O'Brien, Z.R. Boyer, C.T. Brolliar, B.G. Mart, T.L. Carroll) just got a paper accepted at the 2019 Design of Medical Devices conference. The paper "Towards Flexible Steerable Instruments for Office-based Laryngeal Surgery" presents initial work towards the development of novel miniaturized (diameter < 2mm) steerable instruments for endoscopic surgery in the larynx. This is work is a collaboration between WPI and Brigham and Women’s Voice Center.

Recent Work by Korkin​

Work by Dmitry Korkin on studying complex diseases and developing computational tools for precision medicine published in two recent papers has recently been featured in RNA-Seq Blog and the press-release has been published in a number of national media outlets. The work has been supported by two new grants funded by National Institute of Health and AbbVie.

Roberts Presents Paper on Live Coding

Charlie Roberts presented a paper "Live Coding Ray Marchers with Marching.js" on a ray marching library he developed at the 2019 International Conference on Live Coding in Madrid, Spain. He also performed live-coded electronic music using the creative-coding environment he authored, Gibber, as part of a conference Algorave.

Wills Studies Computer Science Tenure-Track Faculty Hiring

Work by Craig Wills on "Analysis of Current and Future Computer Science Needs via Advertised Faculty Searches for 2019", was published in the Computing Research News.

Wills CRN Article

Gennert Offers Course on Humanoid Robotics

Mike Gennert is teaching a new course, RBE 595 Special Topics: Humanoid Robotics. Students are learning about robotic dynamics, control, and interaction. They will have the opportunity to engage in projects to program WPI's Atlas robot in simulation and real-robot-life. How cool is that?!

Computer Science Holiday Open House

The annual Computer Science Holiday Open House was hosted by department faculty and staff in The Commons in Fuller Labs. A holiday buffet of food and refreshments was served. The open house was a celebration of both the holidays as well as the end of the semester and term.