Six computer science students have won awards and fellowships for research work at Columbia SEAS. They include undergraduates Sahar Hasan and Ian Vo, and graduate students Miklos Bergou, Charles Han. Patrick Lee, and Snehit Prabhu.
Sahar Hasan ’10, and
Ian Vo ’09, were selected for Honorable Mention in the 2008 Outstanding Undergraduate Award competition held by the Computing Research Association, made up of more than 200 North American academic departments of computer science, computer engineering, and related fields.
Hasan worked with Professor Gail Kaiser on a project accepted for presentation at SIGCSE 2009, the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. The paper is entitled “Retina: Helping Students and Instructors Based on Observed Programming Activities.” Vo wrote a paper titled “Quality Assurance of Software Applications Using the In Vivo Testing Approach,” which has been submitted for publication.
Miklos Bergou MS’07, PhD’10 (left), a graduate student in the Columbia Computer Graphics Group advised by Assistant Professor Eitan Grinspun, received an Autodesk research fellowship award. Bergou investigates the simulation and direction of physical systems, numerically modeling real-world objects and the interactions between them. His research seeks out principled and efficient discrete models that mirror the key geometric properties of the physical system.
Charles Han PhD’10 (right), also in the computer graphics group, received an ATI fellowship for 2008-2009. ATI's highly selective panel grants between four and six fellowships each year to outstanding doctoral students studying a broad range of topics spanning computer graphics, multimedia, chip or system design, or related research. Han’s research focuses on finding principled representations and efficient algorithms that operate well across a wide range of visual scales.
Patrick P.C. Lee PhD’08 (left), coauthored the paper “Opportunistic Use of Client Repeaters to Improve Performance of WLANs,” which received the best paper award at ACM CoNext 2008, a major networking conference in Madrid. Lee co-authored the paper with CS associate professors Vishal Misra and Dan Rubenstein, along with Victor Bahl, Ranveer 
Chandra and Jitendra Padhye of Microsoft Research, and Yan Yu of Google. Lee is currently doing post-doctoral work with Professors Don Towsley and Weibo Gong at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He will join the Chinese University of Hong Kong as an assistant professor in Fall 2009.
Snehit Prabhu (right), a Ph.D. student advised by Professor Itsik Pe'er, won a Microsoft Research and Live Labs Ph.D. fellowship. Prabhu's research involves the application of computational models to high throughput DNA sequencing. Snehit developed a method to analyze DNA from pooled sets of individuals, using error-correcting codes to identify each person. The work has been accepted to RECOMB 09 and selected as one of four papers considered for the Genome Research special issue for the conference.
