Undergraduate & Graduate Student Awards
Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award: Alex Henniges
Alex Henniges has worked on two projects, both of which represent significant accomplishments in undergraduate research. For an independent study he realized a complex approach for performing operations on temporally-indeterminate data, such as figuring out whether an event that happened sometime between Monday and Thursday with a normal distribution occurred before another event that happened sometime between Tuesday and Sunday with a uniform distribution, to a plausibility of 60%. This required a sophisticated partitioning of the algorithm. Alex also worked on the tXSchema project for his Honors Thesis. He refactored the extensive code for the tXMLLint validator to handle multiple representations of time-varying documents, even when the schema, as well as schemas that were included, were also time-varying.
Outstanding Senior Award (Fall): Loren Chea
Loren Chea started as a political science major, but discovered that he enjoyed computer science even more. A member of the Honors College since his admission to the U of A, Loren volunteered with several youth groups and also worked at IBM as a co-op student. Loren enjoyed his time in the CS department so much that he's decided to stay: he started in the graduate degree program in CS in the spring of 2010.
Outstanding Senior Award (Spring): Jonathan Nation
Jonathan Nation is an outstanding senior who excels at more than just academics. Beyond his nearly-flawless work in the classroom, Jonathan has accumulated a variety of experiences, including an internship in X-ray optics at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and the development of software and hardware for multiple research projects in the UA College of Optical Sciences that led to co-authorship of a conference paper. He also found time to compete on a three-student team in the regional ACM programming contest that earned fourth place.
Graduate Student Research Award: Barry Routree
Barry Rountree was, in the words of Prof. Dave Lowenthal, "the top graduate student in the country" in the area of high-performance, power-aware computing. One of Barry's more noteworthy achievements is the Adagio runtime system for determining bounds on energy savings.
Graduate Teaching Assistant Award: Rui Zhang
In the fall of 2009, Rui Zhang served at the teaching assistant for the CSc 460 (Database Design) class. In this role, Rui was responsible for grading all of the class assignments for the nearly 40 students. He took it upon himself to design and write the capstone team project, and also served as the back-up camera operator for the on-line students.
Graduate Student Outstanding Service Award: Wesley Kerr
Wesley Kerr organized the department's inaugural Graduate Student Research Symposium. A common event in many departments, Wes led our first symposium in the Fall of 2009. He solicited the submissions, organized the reviewers, arranged the presentation of the ten submissions, and coordinated the awards ceremony. Wes' nominator deemed his service to be "indefatigable."
Staff Awards
CoSSAC Outstanding Service Award: Tom Lowry
Tom Lowry has been a one-man show in the last year. He has weathered not one, but two significant staffing loses in Lab: John C and Shanna L. In both cases he has exerted himself to temporarily pick up duties that those folks' vacancies left behind. All this and he has maintained his old job functions as well! Tom's knowledge of networking is essential to the department's research functions and productivity.
Tom presently mentors our newest staff member, Eneida Lima. Without such mentoring, Eneida would never have considered taking on Shanna's old position. Tom is truly a Renaissance man when it comes to CS IT.
Tom is always incredibly responsive to requests from faculty, staff, and students. He often provides extra information in his answers that help educate us. He's extremely friendly, personable, positive, and cooperative.
Faculty Awards
Faculty Outstanding Service Award: David Lowenthal
David Lowenthal joined our department only last January (2009), but has been actively involved from the very start. Over the past year he chaired the Graduate Affairs committee which included revamping the PhD course requirements and instituting the portfolio system, as well running graduate admissions. Dave also chaired the Faculty Advisory Committee.