CSE Biweekly Roundup: July - December 2025

July 11:

  • Congratulations to School of CSE CS Ph.D. student Anurendra Kumar on his successful dissertation defense! Co-advised by Associate Professor Xiuwei Zhang and Coulter BME Professor Saurabh Sinha, Kumar defended Decoding Spatial Transcriptomics: Robust Computational Frameworks for Subcellular Spatial Patterns and Contact Mediated Signaling on July 1.
  • Congratulations to School of AE/CSE joint Assistant Professor Elizabeth Qian for receiving the NSF CAREER Award! Qian will use the award to support research developing machine learning methods that learn from multifidelity data.
  • Congratulations to School of CSE Ph.D. student Max Hawkins on his selection to the OMSCS Pre-Doctoral Fellowship program for 2025-2026! The program provides Hawkins support to design and teach a one-credit, pass/fail or audit seminar course. Co-advised by Assistant Professor Spencer Bryngelson and Professor Rich Vuduc, Hawkins will teach “Computing at Scale: The Design, Operation, and Societal Impacts of Data Centers” this fall and a research course in Spring 2026.
  • Congratulations to alumnus Grace Driskill (M.S. CSE-CSE 2025) on her selection to the 2025 All-ACC Outdoor Track and Field Academic Team and the College Sports Communicators (CSC) Academic All-District Team! Driskill was one of 25 Yellow Jackets from the track and field teams selected to the All-ACC team, and one of eight Yellow Jackets selected to the CSC team.
  • School of CSE Assistant Professor Spencer Bryngelson and his group received a DOE ALCC allocation of 495,000 node hours on OCLF Frontier for 2026. The group will use the allocation to collaborate with Sandia National Labs Aeronautical Engineer Ryan McMullen on their project, Multiphase Mixing Induced by Interface Breakup.
  • School of CSE Assistant Professor Helen Xu contributed to this article from Communications of the ACM. Xu discussed a new algorithm for the list labeling problem.
  • Quanta Magazine highlighted research by School of CSE ML Ph.D. student Ben Hoover and his advisor, Professor Polo Chau. The recent article discussed creativity of AI in which Hoover highlighted group work on diffusion models.
  • School of CSE Assistant Professor Qi Tang gave an invited talk on June 26 at the Efficient and Reliable Deep Learning Methods and their Scientific Applications workshop, held June 22-27 at the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery. Tang presented his group’s work on developing structure-preserving machine learning for learning dynamical systems.
  • School of EAS/ECE/CSE joint Professor Felix Herrmann presented work on June 6 at the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) 2025 Workshop on Foundation Models in Geosciences. Herrmann presented his group’s work on Subsurface foundational model with AI-driven Geostatistical Extraction (SAGE), a novel diffusion-based generative modeling approach for synthesizing high-fidelity subsurface velocity models.
  • School of CSE ML Ph.D. student Agam Shah co-authored a paper accepted for presentation at the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2025), occurring Aug. 3-7 in Toronto. Co-advised by Assistant Professor Chao Zhang and Scheller College of Business Professor Sudheer Chava, Shah collaborated with ML Ph.D. student Michael Galarnyk, CS undergraduate student Veer Kejriwal, Research Intern Yash Bhardwal, alumnus Nicholas Meyer (ECE 2022, M.S. QCF 2024), and Stanford University student Anand Krishnan on the work on VideoConviction: A Multimodal Benchmark for Human Conviction and Stock Market Recommendations.
  • School of CSE Ph.D. student ShengYun (Anthony) Peng co-authored a paper accepted for presentation at the 2025 International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025), occurring Oct. 19-23 in Honolulu. The work introduced CompCap, a framework that improves multimodal LLMs with composite captions. Advised by School of CSE Professor Polo Chau, Peng collaborated with Tuft University Ph.D. candidate and Meta intern Xiaohui Chen and Meta researchers Satya Narayan Shukla, Mahmoud Azab, Aashu Singh, Qifan Wang, David Yang, Hanchao Yu, Shen Yan, Xuewen Zhang, and Baosheng He.
  • School of CSE Assistant Professor Helen Xu co-authored a paper accepted for presentation at SC25, occurring Nov. 16-21 in St. Louis. Xu collaborated with UNC Charlotte Ph.D. candidate Abdullah Al Raqibul Islam, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Senior Scientist Aydin Buluc, and University of Delaware Associate Professor Dong Dai on the work that improves SpGEMM performance through matrix-reordering and cluster-wise computation.
  • A paper from School of CSE Assistant Professor Spencer Bryngelson’s group published in the journal Future Generation Computer Systems. Undergraduate students Melody Lee and Sriharsha Kocherla led the work on quantum-resource frugal algorithms for solving CFD problems with Ph.D. students Jack Song and Austin Adams, and School of ME Professor Alexander Alexeev.
  • School of AE/CSE joint Assistant Professor Elizabeth Qian co-authored a preprint posted on arXive. Qian collaborated with Universität Potsdam researchers Josie König and Melina Feitag on the work on dimension and model reduction approaches for linear Bayesian inverse problems with rank-deficient prior covariances.
  • School of CSE Ph.D. student Pavlos Stavrinides first authored a preprint posted on arXiv. Advised by School of AE/CSE joint Assistant Professor Elizabeth Qian, their work presents an ensemble Kalman approach to randomized maximum likelihood estimation.
  • School of AE/CSE joint Assistant Professor Elizabeth Qian is guest editor of the special issue “Reduced Order modeling, Generative AI, and SciML in Digital Twins” in Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (SMO). The issue is accepting submissions until July 31.
  • PACE is offering a virtual consulting session on July 15, 2:00 – 3:45 p.m. Further information and event link can be found at the event website.
  • PACE is offering a virtual clusters orientation on July 16, 10:30 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Further information and event link can be found at the event website.
  • PACE is offering a Python 101 workshop on July 17, 11:00 a.m. – 12:45 p.m. Further information and event link can be found here.
  • PACE is hosting an HPC Machine Learning and Big Data Workshop on July 29-30. Further information and event link can be found at the event website.