Feifei Li has won the Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGMOD 2016 conference (the 35th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data), for the paper titled “Wander Join: Online Aggregation via Random Walks”. The paper is co-authored with Bin Wu, Ke Yi, and Zhuoyue Zhao. This paper designs a novel approach to perform online aggregation for queries involving joins over multiple tables in large databases, which is an important problem for enabling interactive queries and data analytics for big data.

The annual SIGMOD conference is the most prestigious conference on database systems and large-scale data management, and is a highly selective venue of publications. The conference brings researchers and practitioners working in the field of database systems and big data management from universities, research institutions, and companies from the world. This year’s SIGMOD conference has attracted over 1000 attendees.

Conference website http://sigmod2016.org/

Uri Weiser (PhD ’81), a University of Utah computer science graduate and emeritus professor in the electrical engineering department at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology was presented with the prestigious 2016 Eckert-Maulchy Award for his leadership and pioneering work in high-performance processors and multimedia architectures.

“The University of Utah and especially professor Al Davis had a lot to do with this award. Professor Davis taught me to look for new directions without fear – as he does in his own life,” Weiser said. “The environment in Utah was excellent as was the informal and open interactions with professors. The search for the “road not taken” was rooted deeply in the computer science department, and I got some of it,” Weiser says.

The Eckert-Mauchly Award is known as the computer architecture community’s most prestigious award. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE Computer Society honored Weiser at the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) in Seoul, Korea.

Award link

Following this year’s convocation ceremonies the School of Computing hosted a graduation reception honoring its 2016 graduates. Students and families were invited to attend the lunch giving them an opportunity to mingle and congratulate one another. During the event the Ross Whitaker, Director of the School of Computing along with other faculty members took a moment to congratulate the graduates and recognize several individuals with special awards.

School of Computing Outstanding Teaching Award
Erin Parker

School of Computing Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award
Matthew Turner

Computer Science Outstanding Undergraduate Senior Award
Kallie Bracken

Computer Engineering Outstanding Undergraduate Senior Award
Jonathan Whitaker

CS/Entertainment Arts and Engineering Outstanding Undergraduate Senior Award
Nicolas Goller
Ngan Nguyen