As the new year begins, the Department of Computer Science is proud to announce two of our faculty members are the leading the program committees of two major research conferences in 2018.

First up is the ACM HotMobile 2018 conference, Stony Brook University professor Aruna Balasubramanian is the program chair for this conference taking place from February 12-13. ACM HotMobile 2018 is the 19th International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications.

The conference features a series of “highly selective, interactive workshops focused on mobile applications, systems and environments, along with underlying state-of-the-art technologies”. With a small small workshop format, it’s ideal for processing and discussing new directions in the computer science realm or controversial approaches. The range of papers accepted at the conference focus primarily on applications and systems, along with proposing “new directions of research, advocate non-traditional approaches to old (or new) ideas or generate controversy and discussion.”

Professor Jie Gao serves this year as a co-chair for the program committee at the International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN).

This conference, taking place from April 11-13 in Porto, Portugal, is a leading annual forum on research in networked sensing and control. IPSN will bring together researchers from academia, industry and government to present and discuss recent advances in both theoretical and experimental research.

“IPSN is a prestigious and highly competitive conference for distributed sensing and control,” Gao said. “It has been an important forum for this community to exchange exciting ideas and research progresses.”

The conference’s scope includes “signal and image processing, information and coding theory, databases and information management, distributed algorithms, networks and protocols, wireless communications, collaborative objects and the Internet of Things, machine learning, mobile and social sensing, and embedded systems design.”

According to Samir Das, Interim Chair of the Department of Computer Science, these are both “highly visible conferences in the field of mobile computing and sensor networks”. In a recent announcement he congratulated Balasubramanian and Gao on their visible and important roles in planning these research events. He also mentioned in his announcement that Professor Anshul Gandhi held a similar position as general co-chair of the popular distributed systems conference, Middleware 2017, held in December 20

About the Researchers

Jie Gao is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science. She earned a PhD from Stanford University and her research focuses on algorithms, computational geometry, and networks (sensor, wireless, and social).  Gao spent a year at the Center for the Mathematics of Information at the California Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and IBM Fellowship. In addition to the ATD and NeTS projects, Gao is also working with students on a number of social contagion and influence studies which examine behavioral changes and influence.

Aruna Balasubramanian recently won a $500,000 NSF NeTS grant. She currently leads a multidisciplinary team that includes computer science and psychology researchers Samir Das, Gregory Zelinsky and Dimitris Samaras. The quartet co-authored the grant, Improving Web User Experience Using Eye Gaze, which is based on the use of an individual’s eye gaze as a signal for the user’s consumption of Web objects.

-          Joseph Wolkin