The University of Utah’s School of Computing was ranked in the top quarter of the nation’s schools for its research productivity, according to the latest statistics from CSRankings.org, which tracks the number of research papers computer science department faculty have presented at top conferences each year.

The U’s School of Computing was ranked 26th out of 106 schools for the average number of papers presented each year for the last 10 years. The rankings are based on data from DBLP, a database of open bibliographic information on major computer science journals and proceedings.

“Being ranked 26 out of 106 programs is certainly a pleasure, but it’s not a surprise to us,” said Ross Whitaker, the U’s School of Computing director. “This is quantitative ranking based on faculty productivity, and the numbers don’t lie. We have an extremely productive faculty who are leading some of the best research groups in the country in a range of disciplines from systems and networking, NLP, machine learning and data science, to robotics and visualization.”

According to this year’s rankings, the top three research institutions were Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

CSRankings.org compiles its rankings from the number of computer science publications presented at the most prestigious and impactful publication venues, according to the site.

A University of Utah team led by School of Computing assistant professor Zvonimir Rakamaric won three gold and a silver medal in the 6th International Competition on Software Verification.

In the competition, teams from around the world submited software tools designed to automatically find bugs in other software. A tool is awarded points for the bugs it finds. There were about 30 teams that competed this year. A summary of the results can be read here. https://sv-comp.sosy-lab.org/2017/results/results-verified/

“Our win is a result of great teamwork, each team member played a key role in our success,” said School of Computing doctoral student Shaobo He, who is a member of the team.

Team SMACK http://smackers.github.io/, which includes students from the University of Utah, competed in five categories and won three gold and a silver medal this year. U students on the team include: He, Montgomery Carter, Dietrich Geisler and Jiten Thakkar. The team also included members from Imperial College London, Microsoft Research and Bell Laboratories.

“While our SV-COMP team spans three continents and includes researchers from both academia and industry, the majority of the competition work was done by team members at the University of Utah,” said Rakamaric. “Our students worked especially hard over the past several months to improve SMACK, and their perseverance paid off.”

IEEE Micro magazine has a special issue every year where they identify the best 12 published architecture papers of the year (top picks) and the next 12 best (honorable mentions). The selection is done with a full review process and an in-person PC meeting. Mahdi Bojnordi’s HPCA’16 paper on the Memristive Boltzmann Machine was selected as a top pick. Another paper, led by grad student Ali Shafiee, advised by Rajeev Balasubramonian and Vivek Srikumar, on machine learning accelerators was selected as an honorable mention. Congrats to all the authors!

The University of Utah’s School of Computing undergraduate team took second place overall at the 2016 Super Computing Student Cluster Competition. There were 14 teams that participated from all over the world.

Hari Sundar and Mary Hall coached this year’s team through a special topics course this fall. The team received significant support from the Center for High Performance Computing, especially Brian Haymore. Congratulations to the following students: Mark Baranowski, Braden Caywood, Hannah Eyre, Janaan Lake, Kevin Parker, and Kincaid Savoie.

“The students are juniors and seniors, and many came with little or no prior experience working in high-performance computing. They worked hard throughout the semester and for 48 hours straight at the competition to compete at the highest level for this honor,” said Mary Hall, Professor in the School or Computing.

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