PhD Students

Congratulations to Sumit Jha’s PhD student Sunny Raj for his excellent work in the NIPS/Google Adversarial Defense competition, where he took 14th place out of 108 teams.

The IEEE Orlando Section (http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r3/orlando/) presents Graduate Scholarship Awards each calendar year.

Congratulations to Khurram Soomro, a PhD student in Computer Science, who won first place in the doctoral competition (for CECS) at the graduate research forum for: Action Localization in Videos through Context Walk.

Congratulations to Afshin Dehghan, who received the 2014/2015 Computer Science Ph.D. Student of the Year Award. In addition, congratulations to Rahmatollah Beheshti and Solmaz Gurkan, who were tied for First Runner Up.

Congratulations to PhD Student Alvaro Velasquez, whose undergraduate Honors thesis has been selected as the first place winner for the Outstanding Thesis Award at the 2015 Founder’s Day Honors Convocation. This is the first time that a CS Division student has placed first since 2008!

Congratulations to Haroon Idrees, Nolan Warner, and Mubarak Shah for having their paper “Tracking in dense crowds using prominence and neighborhood motion concurrence” (Image and Vision Computing, volume 32 (2014), pp. 14-26) featured as a selected paper this week on the main SIGGRAPH website’s front page (http://www.siggraph.org/). This website attracts about 50,000 visitors per month.

On October 24, at the Gala banquet during the ACM Multimedia Conference, it was announced that Computer Science Ph.D. student Behnaz Nojavanasghari, along with coauthors Mubarak Shah (Trustee Chair Professor) and Subhabrata Bhattacharya (also from UCF), Tao Chen (Columbia University), Dong Liu (Columbia University), and Shih-Fu Chang won second place in the Grand Challenge “Where is Beauty?”

CS students Zhongkai Han, Syed Zain Masood, Jason Hochreiter, and Spencer Fonte received an honorable mention for the best student paper award at the 2013 10th IEEE International Conference and workshops on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG) for their paper (co-authored by Dr. Marshall Tappen)

Congratulations to Emily Sassano on being awarded an NSF fellowship. Emily is one of our recently admitted PhD students working with Dr. Sumit Jha.

Congratulation to Dr. Shaojie Zhang’s student, Peter Tonner, who won the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities (ABRF) Poster Award.