Dr. Sitaram Asur and Dr. Duygu Ucar have won Computing Innovation Fellowships , sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and developed by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) and the Computing Research Association (CRA). These one to two year fellowships are extremely competitive, with fewer than 12% of 526 applicants receiving the award this year (fewer than 5% for international students). Both students were a part of the Data Mining Research Laboratory (DMRL) and were advised by Professor Srinivasan Parthasarathy.
Sitaram, whose research interests are in Data Mining, and Social Network Analysis, received his PhD in June 2009. His thesis, titled "A Framework for the Static and Dynamic Analysis of Interaction Graphs", targeted the analysis of social interaction graphs where he developed algorithms to capture the interplay among structure, behavior and evolution of these graphs. He will take up this fellowship and plans to continue his research on these and related topics at the Social Computing Laboratory at HP Laboratories under the guidance of Dr. Bernardo Huberman (Senior HP Fellow and Director).
Duygu, whose research interests are in Computational Systems Biology and Data Mining, will receive her PhD in August 2009. Her thesis, titled "Constructing and Analyzing Biological Networks for Knowledge Discovery", examined algorithms for integrating, constructing and suitably analyzing biological networks including protein interaction networks and gene regulatory networks. She will take up this fellowship and join the University of Iowa where she will focus on the systems biology of gene regulation under the aegis of Professor Kai Tan .
The Computer Science and Engineering department would like to congratulate these students on this excellent achievement and wishes them continued success in their future endeavors.