Congratulations to all recipients of the 2023 undergraduate student awards!

Duke CS PhD '22 Kangning Wang, now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Theory Group, received an Honorable Mention for his thesis advised by Kamesh Munagala on "Approximations for Economic Efficiency and Fairness," by the ACM Special Interest Group for Economics and Computation (SIGecom) Doctoral Dissertation Award competition.

Duke Computer Science Assistant Professor Lisa Wills and PhD students Mason Ma and Entropy Xu won the best paper award at 2023 ISPASS (IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software), for their work on PyTFHE, an end-to-end toolchain for developers to easily create and execute their privacy-preserving, fully homomorphic encryption applications at high performance. Says Wills, "The best paper award was judged on paper quality, potential for future impact, and Mason's presentation at the conference. I am very proud of my students and this is Mason’s first paper!"

Assistant Professor Kartik Nayak received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for "CAREER: Scalable Consensus Protocol Design with Accountability and Privacy under Practical Failure Models." Assistant Professor Danyang Zhuo also received an NSF CAREER Award for "CAREER: OS-Managed Remote Procedure Call for Datacenter Applications." NSF's CAREER Award is its most prestigious in support of junior faculty.

Duke Computer Science is now ranked in the top 20 best computer science graduate schools and programs in the country by US News & World Report! Our investments in academic programs, diversity, faculty, research, innovation, and more contributed to our increase in computer science rankings to #20 today from #23 in 2022, and #25 in 2018. In addition, we are #21 in both AI and Theory. Join us!

Duke Computer Science Professor Carlo Tomasi received an Amazon Research Award (ARA) for his "Deep neural network classifiers with margins in input space" research, which aims to achieve resilience to image perturbations by using deep learning predictors with wider decision margins, induced through new parameterizations and training algorithms. Tomasi and 78 other ARA worldwide recipients met rigorous criteria as to scientific content and potential to impact both the research community and society. Said Tomasi, "I am grateful for Amazon's forward-looking bet on our new idea that provides a crucial seed towards sustaining students’ research on this topic."

Dr. Susan Rodger, Duke Computer Science Professor of the Practice and Director of Undergraduate Studies, received ACM's SIGCSE (Special Interest Group CS Education) 2023 Award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education. This award recognizes Dr. Rodger for creating JFLAP software, changing how the automata course is taught, and for helping to bring computing to pre-college students with the Alice programming environment. She also gave a keynote talk at SIGCSE Technical Symposium 2023. Congratulations, Dr. Rodger!

Duke Computer Science Professor Ronald Parr was recently elected as a new Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for significant contributions to reinforcement learning, including the development of foundational hierarchical, least-squares, factored, and feature selection methods. Founded in 1990, AAAI's Fellows Program highlights individuals who achieve unusual distinction in AI. New Fellows were honored at a special awards ceremony during the recent AAAI 2023 Conference.

Duke CS PhD students Haiyang Huang and Yingfan Wang won the John M. Chambers Software Award from the Statistical Computing and Statistical Graphics section of the American Statistical Association (ASA) for their Python package PaCMAP, based on a project with Duke Professor Cynthia Rudin and Assistant Professor Yaron Shaposhnik from University of Rochester's Simon School. The tool's code performs dimension reduction for data visualization, allowing us to see inside high-dimensional datasets by projecting them to 2D.

Three Duke Computer Science students received awards from the Computing Research Association (CRA) for Outstanding Undergraduate Research in 2023. Selected as a Finalist, Zeyu Shen works on the intersection of algorithms, machine learning, and social science with Kamesh Munagala and Brandon Fain. Also selected as a Finalist, Rui Xin works on interpretable machine learning with an emphasis on sparse models with Cynthia Rudin and Margo Seltzer. Awarded an Honorable Mention, William He works on circuit complexity with Ben Rossman and graph algorithm design with Debmalya Panigrahi. Congratulations to all on these prestigious national awards!

Duke Computer Science Professor Debmalya Panigrahi and colleagues give the first improvement in the all-pairs max-flow, or APMF, problem in over 60 years.

Duke CS faculty (including Kartik Nayak, Xiaowei Yang, and Fan Zhang) and students had 5 research papers at the recent flagship ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) Nov. 7-11. Michael Reiter and collaborators won the 2012 Test-of-Time Paper Award, and Bruce Maggs and collaborators won the Best Paper Honorable Mention. Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Neil Gong served as Program Committee Track Chairs. Current/former students/paper authors included: Waqar Aqeel, Jinyuan Jia, Shihan Lin, Hongbin Liu, Yupei Liu, and Rui Xin.

Duke CS-Economics double major Qi Xuan Koo won a Rhodes Scholarship, based on high academic achievement, personal integrity, and leadership potential. A Karsh International Scholar from Malaysia, Khoo researched developing ML predictive models for COVID infection based on wearables data, assisted professors investigating US Medicare fraud, analyzed county COVID-19 policies, and built an NC data pipeline for domestic violence shelters while at Duke. He's also a Woodman Scholar at Duke Economic Analytics Lab and an Arete Effective Altruism Fellow. Congratulations!

Assistant Professor Pardis Emami-Naeini joined Duke Computer Science in September. An engaged educator who's committed to helping young researchers find their own groove in the fast-changing world of computer science, she says "As I’m teaching, I’m learning.” Dr. Emami-Naeini looks forward to mapping new territories at the intersection of her research priorities: people, technologies, and policies.

Bruce Donald, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and professor in biochemistry and colleagues developed RESISTOR, an algorithm that uses protein structure-based computational design to predict how mutations in enzymes will affect a drug’s efficacy, especially when treating cancer. Cancer tumors often develop resistance to treatment, but this algorithm can predict those resistance mutations in advance, which could lead to better drug development and treatment plans.

While advancing the science of data and leveraging its multidisciplinary nature, new faculty member Jian Pei is also a fierce advocate of making sure the playing field is level for everyone.

Duke CS and Biochemistry Associate Professor Alberto Bartesaghi and a research team including partners from the Duke Human Vaccine Institute (DHVI) received a federal grant of >$27M over 5 years from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Dr. Bartesaghi co-directs the Structural Biology Core at the newly formed Duke Center for HIV Structural Biology (DCHSB), leading the development of computational techniques to enable the visualization of dynamic HIV-antibody assemblies at molecular resolution.

Merrell Patrick, who helped establish the Department of Computer Science at Duke, passed away recently. Duke University flags will be lowered today in his honor.

Duke CS Associate Professor Sudeepa Roy has won the 2022 VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award for her work on helping users to understand query results, and on generating explanations for the underlying computations. This award specifically recognizes a researcher who has demonstrated database research impact through a specific technical contribution of high significance since completing their PhD degree. The VLDB endowment awards ceremony and presentations will be held on Sept. 8, 2022 at the 48th International Conference on Very Large Databases in Sydney, Australia (and hybrid), where Sudeepa will give a talk titled "Toward Interpretable and Actionable Data Analysis with Explanations and Causality."

Duke CS undergrads Jenny Huang, Gaurav Parikh, and Albert Sun won the American Statistical Association (ASA) Data Challenge Expo this year! Coached by Cynthia Rudin and Lesia Semenova, the students' paper on Public Transit Policies to Promote Equitable Urban Mobility suggested that urban mobility and unequal commute data can guide policymakers to enact appropriate policies that enhance the accessibility of public transportation for everyone. Huang and Parikh presented their research at the Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) on August 7 in Washington, DC. Congratulations!

Duke CS Assistant Professor Kartik Nayak and Yale CS Assistant Professor Fan Zhang received several grants from the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization supporting the open-source blockchain technology that powers Ethereum. These grants will fund research to advance the Ethereum ecosystem: Disentangling Transaction Privacy and Consensus in Ethereum (Nayak and Zhang); Catching the ephemeral: Understanding blockchains through mempool data (Zhang and Nayak); and Improving Ethereum Communication Efficiency through Accountability and Flexible Quorums (Nayak).

CS+, our popular 10-week summer research program exclusively for Duke undergrads, recently concluded with an in-person symposium. CS+, Data+, Code+ and Climate+ Program participants also presented their creative and innovative research projects in a poster session. Over 100 students participated in the 2022 + programs, 49 posters were displayed and > 2/3 of students participating in + programs study CS.

NSF awarded Duke a $1.5 M grant to advance cybersecurity efforts as part of the $25.4 M Secure and Trustworthy Computing (SaTC) "Frontier" research program. With Indiana University as the lead institution, James B. Duke CS/ECE Distinguished Professor Mike Reiter is PI and Yale's Fan Zhang is Co-PI of the multi-institution and multi-disciplinary Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC) project at Duke. Researchers' goal is to provide solutions for protecting data-in-use, like training ML models on private data and across cloud and edge systems.

NSF awarded a new STEM Education Postdoctoral Research Fellowship $1M+ grant over three years to The Alliance for Identity-Inclusive Computing Education. Duke Professor of the Practice of CS and Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies Dr. Nicki Washington is the PI, and co-PIs are Dr. Shani Daily, Professor of the Practice of ECE and CS and Dr. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, James B. Duke Distinguished Sociology Professor. With three postdocs supporting Duke-related activities, AiiCE-PRF's goal is to increase the number of postdocs from historically underrepresented groups in computing and the number of postdocs performing identity-inclusive computing education research.

Associate Professor Ashwin Machanavajjhala, PhD student Yuchao Tao, and their collaborators at HKUST (including former Duke CS PhD grad Ke Yi), won the Best Paper Award in Data Management at SIGMOD 2022. Professor Pankaj Agarwal and collaborators won the Test-of-Time PODS Paper Award. Overall, Duke CS faculty and PhD students presented 7 research papers at the ACM SIGMOD PODS 2022 conference.

Dr. Cynthia Rudin was nominated as a 2021-22 Chron15 Pioneer. Duke Chronicle readers identified leaders, pioneers and icons that make positive change in the community. Rudin, also the director of Duke's Interpretable ML Lab, was selected for her innovative research and design of interpretable forms of AI, and her approach to ML which has generated breakthrough results. Rudin's national recognition includes the 2021 AAAI Squirrel AI Award and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Congratulations to all recipients of the 2022 undergraduate student awards!

Congratulations to Dr. Cynthia Rudin, Duke Earl D. McLean, Jr. Professor of CS, ECE, Statistics, Math, Biostats & Bioinformatics on being named a 2022 Bass Chair. One of only four Duke Professors selected for this honor, Rudin is recognized for demonstrating excellence in both teaching and research.

Professors Nicki Washington and Shani Daily were selected as 2021 co-recipients of the Dean’s Diversity Award, which recognizes how diversity drives excellence in research, teaching, advising, mentoring, and service. Their leadership of the Cultural Competence in Computing (3C) Fellows Program and the Alliance for Identity-Inclusive Computing Education (AIICE) is transforming participation and perspectives in computing.

Robert Calderbank, Ph.D., Charles S. Sydnor Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Math, ECE, and Physics; Director of the Rhodes Information Initiative, and Associate of the Duke Initiative for Science and Society, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The Academy was founded in 1780 to honor excellence and national leadership in academia, the arts, industry, public policy and research.

Three Duke CS students received NSF Graduate Research Fellowships: Jerry Liu, who also just received the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, worked with Dr. Cynthia Rudin and will pursue a PhD in computational mathematics at Stanford. ECE-CS student Alex Oesterling worked with Dr. David Smith and Dr. Guillermo Sapiro, and will pursue a PhD in computer science at Harvard, focusing on algorithmic fairness and trustworthy AI. Andy Zhang, whose CS mentor was Dr. Bruce Donald, will pursue a PhD program in applied mathematics at Princeton. Congratulations to all!

Aditya Paul, Duke Computer Science/ECE double major with a Math minor, won the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship. This national award is based on academic merit and supports students who show promise of being part of the next generation of research leaders. Paul plans to earn a doctorate in electrical engineering, conduct research in quantum information systems and algorithms, and teach at a university. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Duke Computer Science, ECE, Statistics, Biostats and Math Professor Cynthia Rudin who was recently elected as a new Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) for groundbreaking and pioneering work on interpretable machine learning and trustworthy AI. New Fellows were honored at a special virtual ceremony during the AAAI 2022 Conference. Rudin also received the 2022 AAAI Squirrel AI Award for pioneering socially responsible AI and the prestigious 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship which supports her work to promote transparent, interpretable, socially responsible AI with an open-ended funding award.

Duke CS/Math Professor Bruce Donald's students use TikTok videos in his CS230 Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science class to illustrate complex mathematical and computer science concepts from Turing’s halting theory or computability to transcendental numbers. CS major Rhea Tejwani said, “In class, we were learning about a lot of big ideas and complex problems, so trying to compress them into a clear and concise 60-second video really helped me understand those topics.” The students' CS230 TikToks now have over 17K views.

Duke Associate Professor of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, CS, Math, and Statistics Anru Zhang is the recipient of the 2022 Tweedie Award from the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. Recognized as a leading early career researcher in statistical science with this prominent and prestigious international award, Zhang will present the Tweedie New Researcher Invited Lecture at the upcoming 2022 IMS New Researchers Conference. Congratulations!

James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Computer Science Bruce Donald, his students, and collaborators at the University of Connecticut discovered how a single mutation in MRSA has such a large impact on antibiotic resistance. Now they can use computational strategies to develop better drugs to fight Staph infections.

Duke ECE, Computer Science, BME, and Math Professor Guillermo Sapiro has been elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), among the highest professional honors to be accorded an engineer. He was recognized for 3 decades of transformative contributions to the theory and practice of imaging which have significantly affected a wide range of fields. Congratulations!

Governor Roy Cooper honored Duke Computer Science Professors Dr. Shani Daily and Dr. Nicki Washington, among others as NC Black STEM leaders during Black History Month for their critical, innovative work focused on helping their communities. Cooper said that NC is a stronger state thanks to the contributions of many talented Black leaders in STEM fields and that "As we celebrate their achievements, we must also work to break down barriers."

Duke Computer Science doctoral student Zhi Chen won an award in the Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) and Quality and Productivity (Q&P) 2022 Student Paper Competition of the American Statistical Association. The paper was entitled "How to See Hidden Patterns in Metamaterials with Interpretable Machine Learning" and co-authors include Duke professors Cynthia Rudin and Cate Brinson, and Caltech collaborators Alexander Ogren and Professor Chiara Daraio. Zhi is advised by Professor Cynthia Rudin.

Duke University Distinguished Professor of New Technologies and Professor of Computer Science, Economics, and Philosophy Vincent Conitzer and coauthor Professor Tuomas Sandholm of CMU received the 2022 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award for their highly-cited, seminal paper entitled "Computing the optimal strategy to commit to." Their paper set the basis for computing optimal leader strategies in security games, leading to impactful work with real-world applications and establishing a strong mechanism design community. Congratulations!

Duke University's 3C (Cultural Competence in Computing) Fellows Program was awarded 2022 Program of the Year by The Collaborative Network for Engineering and Computing Diversity (CoNECD), an American Association of Engineering Education (ASEE)-affiliated conference. Director and Professor Nicki Washington, PhD; Professor Shaundra Daily, PhD; and PhD Student Cecilé Sadler will receive this award during the CoNECD 2022 conference in February. 3C Fellows is a cohort-based professional development program that helps computing faculty, staff, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and professionals learn more about identity, intersectionality, racism, bias, and discrimination with a goal of making computing more equitable and inclusive.

Bruce Donald, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Math and Chemistry and professor of biochemistry, has received a five year, $2.9M Established Investigator Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) for computational and experimental studies of protein structure and design. “This project concentrates on two interlocking themes: protein structure and design,” says Donald. “The design of new therapeutics can alleviate mortality, morbidity, and human suffering.”

Duke’s Center for Computational Thinking (CCT) enables computational education by incorporating computer-related content into courses throughout the university. Duke Computer Science Chair Jun Yang says that exposure to computational thinking is important for all students “not just to prepare our students to survive in this new world, but to help them to lead.”

Dr. Helen Li, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at Duke University, has been named an ACM Fellow for her contributions to neuromorphic computing and deep-learning acceleration. As a fellow, Dr. Li joins a select group of the top 1% of ACM professional members recognized for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest and most prestigious society of computing professionals.

Two optional MS concentrations ‒ Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning and Cybersecurity ‒ are coming soon in Fall 2022!

Three Duke Computer Science students received awards from the Computing Research Association (CRA) for Outstanding Undergraduate Research in 2022. Selected as a Runner-up, Norah Xinyu Tan worked on quantum computing/information theory, coding theory, and signal processing with Robert Calderbank and Jianfeng Lu. Awarded an Honorable Mention, Jerry Liu is interested in incorporating domain knowledge into black box deep learning methods, including work in computer vision and NLP with Cynthia Rudin. Also awarded an Honorable Mention, Zeyu Shen works on algorithmic problems such as algorithmic fairness and MCMC algorithms with Kamesh Munagala and Holden Lee. Congratulations to all on these prestigious national awards!

Duke Computer Science Professor Dr. Nicki Washington is developing a new formula for equality in the tech industry: Disrupting the policies, practices and points of view standing in the way of marginalized computer science students. What if we could use computer science to combat systemic racism?

Duke CS and Physics major Yasa Baig received the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, awarded to exceptional American students to pursue graduate studies in the UK. Duke President Vincent Price said that "This great honor reflects [his] extraordinary contributions here on campus and beyond,” as well as his commitment to service, innovation, and principled leadership. Baig also received the Goldwater Scholarship earlier this year. Congratulations!

Duke Computer Science, ECE, Statistics, and Biostats Professor Cynthia Rudin won the 2022 $1M Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). This award recognizes Rudin for her “pioneering scientific work in the area of interpretable and transparent AI systems in real-world deployments, the advocacy for these features in highly sensitive areas such as social justice and medical diagnosis, and serving as a role model for researchers and practitioners.” Congratulations!

Dr. Bing Xie, Duke CS PhD '17 (advisor Professor Jeff Chase) was selected by the IEEE Computer Society as a winner of the IEEE-CS Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing (TCHPC) Early Career Researchers Award for Excellence in High Performance Computing (HPC). This award recognizes her outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting HPC contributions. An HPC research scientist at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Dr. Xie's computer systems research results have been presented at multiple major conferences and published in many journals.

Ingrid Daubechies, Duke Distinguished Professor of Math and ECE was recently profiled in the NYT Magazine. Her pioneering study of mathematical structures known as wavelets facilitated the use of data compression in electronic apps like smartphones and MRI machines. She is also renowned as a barrier-breaking role model for successful female mathematicians. Duke CS, ECE, Statistics, and B&B Professor Cynthia Rudin calls her "the deus ex machina adviser" and Daubechies' partner is Duke CS Professor Robert Calderbank.

Duke recently received 2 large grants totaling almost $12 M from the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) as part of its new Impact of Genomic Variation on Function (IGVF) Consortium. Duke Statistical Science, Math, and Computer Science Professor Sayan Mukherjee is among the leaders of the Duke Predictive Modeling Center. One of seven such centers, it recently received a $3.2 M award.