Join us in congratulating the following undergraduate students who have been selected for the Annual CS Departmental Awards - 2024. These outstanding students have carried out excellent research in addition to excelling in their course work. Each recipient receives $1000 and a recognition certificate.
Hagerty Award: Anika Kumar
Anika is a CS Major who is participating in the capstone program and has taken advanced courses in quantum computing. She is a member of the team that is building the world’s first tableau-based quantum program simulator for higher-dimensional quantum states. Such a simulator is based on algebras that were recently formalized. These higher-dimensional states are currently an important area of study because quantum computers naturally have these higher dimensional states, and there is potential that such higher dimensional states enable more efficient error correction. A simulator based on these algebras is a critical research tool for validating proposed error correction schemes. The work has been accepted to appear at the Young Architect Workshop at ASPLOS 2024. Nominated by Prof. Yipeng Huang.
Novielli Award: Daniel Elwell
Daniel is a CS and math major. He has been working as an Arrests Research Assistant under Prof. Sudarsun Kannan. He has demonstrated remarkable expertise in investigating the efficiency of systems and OS-level optimization techniques for machine learning inference. Daniel has completely optimized Meta’s widely used deep-learning recommendation system (DLRM) by 80% by reducing memory and storage overheads and by parallelizing them. He has served as the sole developer for a voxel-based raytracing engine optimized for real-time performance (DoonEngine). Nominated by Prof. Sudarsun Kannan.
Novielli Award: Joe Doerr
Joe Doerr is a CS major and Cognitive science major. He has been working on reinforcement learning with applications to robotics. Has already published research papers in the area of machine learning and optics during an internship at the University of Central Florida. His work under Prof. Kostas Bekris will soon be submitted for a publication. Nominated by Prof. Kostas Bekris.
Magidson Award: Enver Aman
Under the supervision of Prof. Karthik CS, Enver proved the NP-hardness of a variant of MAXCUT, which completes a systematic and simple proof of NP-hardness of k-means problems when k=2. The paper is being submitted to the European Symposium on Algorithms. Enver also has been working with Prof. Karthik CS and Pasin Mauranasi from Google on a notorious problem from 1980s: Approximating the Euclidean k-center problem beyond factor 2 in polynomial time. He has already made progress on a special case where the input point lie on the integer lattice, which could potentially result in a solid SODA submission, which is a top conference venue in Algorithms. Nominated by Prof. Karthik CS.
Magidson Award: Tej Shah
Tej Shah is a BAIT and CS major. He is working under the supervision of Prof. Qiong Zhang large language models and its connection to human cognition. Tej has also secured internal nomination at Rutgers for both Marshall and Churchill Scholarships. Nominated by Prof. Qiong Zhang.