Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Duke computer science professor and privacy expert, spoke on “Public Use Data Products and Privacy Protection: Experiences from the Front Lines” at the AAAS Annual Meeting.

Vahid Tarokh, the Rhodes Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics, was named a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Vincent Conitzer, who was recently elected as a new AAAI fellow. Officially inducted at the AAAI 2019 conference, Conitzer is Kimberly J. Jenkins University Professor of New Technologies, Professor of Computer Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.

FICO recently announced winners of the inaugural explainable machine learning challenge. Duke Computer Science received the FICO Recognition Award for going above and beyond expectations with a fully transparent global model and a user-friendly dashboard. Duke's team included Cynthia Rudin, Chaofan Chen, Kangcheng Lin, Yaron Shaposhnik, Sijia Wang, and Tong Wang.

Congratulations to Owen Astrachan and then-undergraduate joint authors Landon Cox, Garret Mitchener, and Geoffrey Berry. They were recently nominated for the SIGCSE Top 10 Symposium Papers of All Time Award for "Design patterns: an essential component of CS curricula."

Doctoral candidate Brandon Fain was selected as a 2019 Teaching Award Recipient. This is well-deserved recognition for his outstanding efforts. It's a highly competitive award, and he was chosen from a large pool of university-wide nominees. Congratulations!

Jeff Forbes, Associate Professor of the Practice of Computer Science was recently awarded a substantial grant through a partnership with Siegel Family Endowment. The grant funds a project originating in an October 2018 ACM report, "Lighting the Path: From Community College to Computing Careers.”

Bob Wagner, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Duke University, passed away in December 2018. Bob joined the Department of Computer Science at Duke in 1978 and retired in 2007. Over the span of three decades, he served the department in multiple capacities. He was well known for his foundational work in algorithms and complexity, especially string algorithms.

Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Ios Kotsogiannis will unveil a revolutionary system to build databases that manage sensitive data about individuals when they present their paper "Architecting a Differentially Private SQL Engine" at the biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research on Jan. 14, 2019.

Congratulations to Shalin Shah and John Reif who recently won the 2018 Best Presentation Award for their paper “Temporal DNA Barcodes: A Time-Based Approach for Single-Molecule Imaging” at DNA24: 24th International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming.

Three Duke students received awards from the Computing Research Association (CRA) for Outstanding Undergraduate Research: Runliang (Oscar) Li - Finalist, Hui (Frederick) Xu - Honorable Mention, and Rohith Kuditipudi - Honorable Mention. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Kamesh Munagala and joint authors Yu Cheng, Kangning Wang, and Nick Gravin (Shanghai UFE). They recently won the Best Paper Award for "A Simple Mechanism for a Budget Constrained Buyer" at WINE 2018: The 14th Conference on Web and Internet Economics.

Bruce M. Maggs, the Pelham Wilder Professor of Computer Science, has been named an ACM Fellow for his contributions to the development of content distribution networks and the theory of computer networks. As a fellow, Maggs joins a select group of the top 1% of ACM professional members. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society.

Congratulations to Aaron Lowe and Pankaj Agarwal for winning the 2018 Best Paper Award at the 26th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems in November.

Five Duke University faculty members, including Krishnendu Chakrabarty, and one staff member have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Duke researchers like Vince Conitzer, Kimberly J. Jenkins University Professor of New Technologies and Professor of Computer Science discuss how AI can help decision making.

Could a computer write sonnets convincing enough to fool people into thinking they were written by human poets rather than machines? One Duke team created an algorithm to find out.

Duke University recently hosted global technology leader and trailblazer, Dr. Sandra Johnson. As the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in computer engineering in the US, Dr. Johnson inspired a crowd on November 8. 

In recognition of his teaching excellence, Associate Professor Ashwin Machanavajjhala received the 2018 David and Janet Vaughn Brooks Award from Duke University’s Trinity College. 

With an endless onslaught of news and opinion pounding us from traditional outlets, blogs and social media, fact-checking helps a weary public determine which political claims are accurate and which ones aren’t. A fact-checking app being developed by a team lead by Jun Yang and and Bill Adair will rely on a database of fact-checks that were published by organizations such as The Washington Post, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. The database grew out of an earlier partnership between the Reporters’ Lab and Google.

We welcome Alberto Bartesaghi as Associate Professor of Computer Science, Biochemistry, and Electrical & Computer Engineering. Read about him in Duke's new faculty member profiles.

Computer scientist and statistician Rebecca Steorts has been developing state-of-the-art statistics and machine learning techniques to help human rights groups take on the grim task of tallying Syria's war dead.   

Graduate student awards for 2017-18 were presented at the 2018 annual departmental meeting.

A person stepping forward to donate a kidney can set off a chain that saves dozen of lives. An article in Quartz features  work by Vince Conitzer and his colleagues in AI, economics, and philosophy.

An article by Vincent Conitzer, "Natural Intelligence Still has its Advantages," appears in the Wall Street Journal.

Vincent Conitzer has been awarded an NSF grant titled "RI: Small: Designing Preferences, Beliefs, and Identities for Artificial Intelligence." Total funding is $400,000.

Bruce Donald was honored at a 60th birthday tribute organized by his former students. More than 50 colleagues, students, and postdocs gathered at Duke Gardens for what was a full day of talks followed by dinner, some from as far away as California, New York, France, Switzerland and China.  

Congratulations to recipients of the 2018 undergraduate student awards which were presented at commencement ceremonies on May 13.   

The Department congratulates our newest graduates who were awarded degrees for 2017-18 at commencement ceremonies on May 13.  Article | Photos

Tianyu Wang (G) has been named to the inaugural cohort of Energy Data Analytics PhD Student Fellows.  

We welcome Jennifer Schmidt, who joins the Department as the Chair's Assistant.

We welcome Luke Westfield who joins the Department as an IT Analyst.

Frank Starmer, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, has won the Duke School of Medicine's 2018 Distinguished Faculty Award. Med School | Local Paper

The inaugural Computer Science Undergraduate Project Showcase celebrated student inquiry in computer science. Students presented 22 posters on projects from mentored research, class projects, and independent work.  More | Photos

The Salisbury Post recounts challenges overcome by recent graduate Samantha Washko.   

A paper co-authored by Debmalya Panigrahi has been selected as an honorable mention for the Best Paper Award at WWW 2018. The paper is titled "Minimizing Latency in Online Ride and Delivery Services."  

Bruce Donald has been awarded an R01 grant from the NIH entitled "Computational Structure-Based Protein Design."  Total funding will be $1,403,624 over 4 years.  

Vince Conitzer participated in a Duke conference designed to  explore promising uses of AI and the challenges they pose in administering diverse governmental functions involving science, technology, health and intellectual property. Conference site | Video

Congratulations to Ashwin Machanavajjhala, who has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure.

Amanda Randles has been named the recipient of the 2017 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for developing HARVEY, a massively parallel circulatory simulation code capable of modeling the full human arterial system at subcellular resolution.  ACM | People of ACM | Duke BME

Duke undergraduates reach out to the Durham community with Mobile Citizens, an after-school program that enables middle school students to build mobile apps.  

Cynthia Rudin and Sudeepa Roy have been awarded a Duke Energy Initiative Grant for their project titled "Enabling Better Energy Decisions Through Better Interpretable Causal Inference Methods for Personalized Treatment Effects." The project's goal is to improve our ability to make policy decisions and understand energy use by making casual inference.

Co-first authors Seyed Majid Zahedi (G) and Qiuyun Llull, and Benjamin Lee won the HPCA Best Paper Award for a processor allocation framework that uses Amdahl’s Law to apportion resources fairly among data center users.  

Guillermo Sapiro has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He works on theory and applications in computer vision, computer graphics, medical imaging, image analysis and machine learning.  Pratt | DukeToday

Asa Royal (U), a CS major and student researcher in the Duke Reporters' Lab, uses computer skills to fight the problem of fake news.  

Yuan Deng (G) has been awarded a 2018 Google Fellowship for his project titled "Algorithms for Improved Game-Theoretic Solutions.” Google created the PhD Fellowship Program to recognize and support outstanding graduate students doing exceptional research in Computer Science and related disciplines.  

Pranav Warman, a sophomore double majoring in computer science and biology, has been named a 2018 Barry M. Goldwater Scholar by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program.

A paper co-authored by Jeff Chase received the USENIX 2018 FAST Test of Time Award. The paper is titled "Designing for Disasters." The award recognizes papers that have had a lasting impact on their field.  

Alvin Lebeck serves as Program Co-Chair for the 24th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS 2019). ASPLOS is the premier forum for multidisciplinary systems research spanning computer architecture and hardware, programming languages and compilers, operating systems and networking.

We welcome Ashlee Long, who joins the department as a staff assistant.

Kristin Stephens-Martinez joined Duke’s Computer Science faculty in January as an assistant professor of the practice. She brings a range of experience in software engineering, computer networking, human-computer interface, data science, education, and information visualization.

AiFi, a company founded by CS alumni Steve Gu and Ying Zheng, announces the availability of its checkout-free solution for retailers.

As numbers and facts continue to accumulate in today’s world of big data, a growing challenge is how to sift through the reams of data for relevant discoveries. Enter Sudeepa Roy, assistant professor of computer science. Roy is a database researcher who is creating new ways to help mine enormous data sets for meaning.

An algorithm trained to decide which patient receives a donor kidney wins AAAI 2018 Student Paper Award.  Rachel Freedman (AB '17) and Vincent Conitzer are co-authors. 

Missy Cummings presented at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about the benefits and risks of artificial intelligence (AI).

Cynthia Rudin writes about scrapping secret proprietary algorithms in decisions about bail, sentencing, and parole in favor of transparent machine-learning algorithms such as CORELS.

A core principle of computer architecture for fast computing is the principle of locality. Adopting a similar principle for DNA computing, John Reif and students Hieu Bui, Shalin Shah, Reem Mokhtar, Tianqi Song, and Sudhanshu Garg show that a significant improvement in computing time is possible by using the principle of locality. More in ACS Nano Journal.

Debmalya Panigrahi has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled "CAREER: New Directions in Graph Algorithms." Total funding will be $515,998 over 5 years. The award will support Panigrahi's research into fundamental problems in graph algorithms seeking generic solutions for core algorithmic challenges in modern networks: efficiency at scale, uncertainty and impreciseness of network requirements, and correlation effects. This is NSF's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty.

The Washington Post reports on a new AP Computer Science course that Owen Astrachan was instrumental in developing. The course was created in an effort to broaden the demographic base of students in computer science.

Anna Lowegard, a CBB student in the Donald Lab, was recently awarded a PhRMA predoctoral fellowship in informatics. Informatics awards support career development of scientists engaged in research that significantly integrates state-of-the-art information technology developed with advanced biological, chemical, and pharmacological sciences.

The Department welcomes Kristin Stephens-Martinez, who has joined CS as an Assistant Professor of the Practice of Computer Science

Sophomore Carter Zenke (U) and senior Tanner Johnson (U) created the Mobile Citizens after-school program in Durham to broaden participation in computer science. In the program, middle schoolers develop their own apps.  

Duke hosted the 2017 annual ACM Regional Programming Contest on November 11. There were six Duke teams. The Duke team Wing placed highest, taking 4th place overall out of 171 teams. Wing team members were Liang Lyu, Yunhao Qing, and Yikai Wu. 

David Kotz (G '91) has been appointed interim provost at Dartmouth.

The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the early successes and challenges of The Duke Technology Scholars Project (DTech), a career-training program that seeks to increase gender diversity in the technology industry.  

Eddy Cue (AB ’86), Apple’s senior vice president of internet software and services met with Duke Technology (DTech) Scholars in an effort to inspire more Duke women undergrads to choose careers in computer science and electrical & computer engineering. Duke Today article

Graduate student awards for 2016-17 were presented at the annual departmental meeting.  Article  | Meeting Photos

CS welcomes Georgia Tse (U '17), who has joined the department as a Program Coordinator.

We welcome Samuel Kamau, who has joined CS as the Administrative Manager.

Eddy Cue (AB '86), Apple’s Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services, will give a special talk at Duke on September 29. Eddy earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Economics from Duke in 1986. He joined Apple in 1989. CS is co-hosting the talk with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and DTech.

Bruce Donald has been awarded a new R01 grant from the NIH entitled "Deep Topological Sampling of Protein Structures." Total funding will be $1.2M over 4 years.

In response to the strain that increased demand for computer science classes has imposed on a small faculty, CS Chair Pankaj Agarwal plans to enhance the department through collaborations with other departments, as well as pursuing initiatives for enhancing minorities' involvement in computer science.

Xi He (G) has been awarded a Google 2017 Fellowship. Her project is titled "Private Mobility Data Publication, Integration." The fellowship begins on September 1.  

The department is pleased to announce the appointment of Pankaj K. Agarwal as department chair effective August 15. Agarwal is the RJR Nabisco Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics. He joined Duke as an assistant professor in computer science in 1989. He served as department chair 2004-2010.  

Jun Yang has agreed to serve as an Associate Chair of the department for a three year term effective August 15, 2017. Besides assisting Pankaj Agarwal with many of chair's responsibilities, Yang also will be leading some of the department's strategic initiatives.

Cynthia Rudin and colleagues are training computers to build statistical models to predict future criminal behavior, called recidivism, that are just as accurate as black-box models, but more transparent and easier to interpret.  

Ben Burchfiel (G) and his thesis advisor have developed new technology that enables machines to make sense of 3-D objects in a richer and more human-like way.

A two-week Adventures in Alice Programming workshop to teach middle school and high school teachers how to program and to integrate programming into their disciplines was led by Susan Rodger and five undergraduates: Natalie Huffman (Duke), Jonathan Kuo (Duke), Erich Narten (UNC Charlotte), Jack Wrigley (Amherst College), and Vicki Zhang (Duke).

Duke students are participating in DTech, a partnership between the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering designed to attract and retain women in computing studies and create a pipeline of women into industry.

Rong Ge has received an award from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled "AF: Large: Collaborative Research: Nonconvex Methods and Models for Learning: Towards Algorithms with Provable and Interpretable Guarantees." Total funding will be $499,998, for 5 years starting June 1. Abstract

The Department congratulates our newest graduates who were awarded degrees for 2016-17 at commencement ceremonies on May 14. Article | Photos

Vincent Conitzer participated in a Duke in DC panel on the coming effects of artificial intelligence on the job market.  

Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Sam Haney (G) work to ensure that Census statistics can be mined for insights about the nation without leaking private information about individuals.  

Congratulations to recipients of the 2017 undergraduate student awards which were presented at commencement ceremonies on May 14.

ACM has named Owen Astrachan recipient of the 2016 Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for three decades of innovative computer science pedagogy and inspirational community leadership in broadening the appeal of high school and college introductory computer science courses.  

Ashwin Machanavajjhala has received the IEEE ICDE 2017 Influential Paper Award for his 2006 paper "L-diversity: privacy beyond k-anonymity."

Department Chair Ron Parr and CS faculty hosted a reception for CS alumni during Duke's 2017 Alumni Reunion. The reception featured remarks by Owen Astrachan and Landon Cox on their latest efforts to incorporate mobile technologies into our undergraduate curriculum, and a discussion of the new DTech Scholars Program by Monica Jenkins.  Photos

CS welcomes Tonya Mozingo-Ware (S) who has joined CS as Assistant to the Chair.

Alvin Lebeck is the inaugural editor of Computer Architecture Today, the recently-launched ACM SIGARCH blog whose mission is to inform the broad computing community about current activities, advances and future directions in computer architecture.  

Algorithms, like humans, can discriminate. Cynthia Rudin addresses this problem by creating publicly available tools for transparent algorithms.

With the quip "The doctor said it might help me quit," Vincent Conitzer won the New Yorker's weekly contest in which readers send in suggested captions. Conitzer felt drawn to this cartoon because his three-year-old son is going through a shark phase.

Progress in artificial intelligence has been rapid in recent years. Vincent Conitzer discusses concerns about AI's impact on human societies.  

Cynthia Rudin, a rising star in the field of machine learning, focuses on writing algorithms that are easily interpretable by human experts for practical tasks like predicting energy grid reliability or diagnosing sleep apnea. She holds a dual appointment in Computer Science and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Vincent Conitzer is one of three winners of Blue Sky Awards sponsored by CCC (Computing Community Consortium) for his paper "Moral Decision Making Frameworks for Artificial Intelligence."

Duke's involvement in Google's Capacity program, designed to address dramatic increases in undergraduate Computer Science enrollments, has resulted in new approaches to the engagement of women and underrepresented students and increased access to peer mentoring.  

Rupert Freeman (G) has been selected to receive a Facebook Fellowship for the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 academic years.  

We welcome Alison Hriciga, who has joined CS as the Graduate & Financial Assistant.

Three papers from Ben Lee’s and Alvin Lebeck’s research groups were selected for honorable mention as IEEE micro top picks in computer architecture for 2016.

Andrew First (U '10) has been named one of Forbes 30 Under 30 - Enterprise Technology (2017). First was a Compsci-ECE double major who co-founded Leanplum.  

Yan Chen's (G) paper, "Differentially Private Regression Diagnostics," has been selected as one of the best papers at the International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM) 2016.

FanWide, a social sports app created by Symon Perriman (U '07) and his team, has gone nationwide. FanWide connects fans of the same team and organizes viewing parties.

Carlo Tomasi, Iris Einheuser Professor of Computer Science, has been named an ACM Fellow for his contributions to computer vision. As a fellow, Tomasi joins a select group of the top 1% of ACM professional members. ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society.

Alvin Lebeck has been elevated to IEEE Fellow in recognition of his contributions to memory hierarchies and energy-efficient and parallel computing. Less than 0.1% of voting IEEE members are selected annually for elevation to fellow status. This is IEEE's highest honor.

John Reif and Tianqi Song (G) have created an analog DNA circuit that can add, subtract and multiply as the molecules form and break bonds. SciWorks | Article

Graduate student awards for 2015-16 were presented at the annual departmental meeting.

Jun Yang and Brett Walenz (G) have created the iCheck website for checking the accuracy of congressional voting claims. Article | iCheck site

Xi He (G), Nisarg Raval (G), and Ashwin Machanavajjhala won the VLDB 2016 Best Demonstration Award for "VisDPT: Visual Exploration of Differentially Private Trajectories."

The Computing Research Association (CRA) published a set of short videos to explain the benefits of pursuing a PhD in Computer Science. Mac Mason (G '14), Susanna Ricco (G '14), and Tiffany Chen (U '06) were featured. On YouTube: Mason and Ricco talk about their work in robotics and vision at Google | Chen talks about her work in bioinformatics at Cytobank

A fast and power-efficient processor developed by Dan Sorin and George Konidaris opens up new opportunities for robots and autonomous vehicles.

Sudeepa Roy has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for a project entitled "CAREER: FIREFLY - Rich Explanations for Database Queries." Total funding will be $550,000 over 5 years. This award will support Roy's research into providing automatic explanations to help a range of people harness Big Data more efficiently. This is NSF's most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars.

Vince Conitzer sees a need to set up the right incentives to attain the goals of Microsoft CEO Nadella's 10 new rules for artificial intelligence.

A two-week Adventures in Alice Programming workshop to teach K-12 teachers how to program and to integrate programming into their disciplines was held. It was led by Prof. Susan Rodger, teacher Chari Distler, and Duke undergraduates Carolyn Sun, Ademola Olayinka (U) and Anh Trinh (U). In addition to programming 3D virtual worlds, the teachers got a chance to step into a real virtual world, the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment. Photos

Landon Cox, Ashwin Machanavajjhala, Animesh Srivastava (G), and other Duke computer scientists have developed software that helps prevent inadvertent disclosure of trade secrets and other restricted information within a camera's field of view by letting users specify what others can see.

George Konidaris, Dan Sorin, and CS students Will Floyd-Jones (U) and Ying Qi (U) have introduced a specially-designed computer processor for motion planning that can plan up to 10,000 times faster than existing approaches.

Congratulations to Kamesh Munagala, who has been promoted to professor.

The Department congratulates our newest graduates who were awarded degrees for 2015-16 at commencement ceremonies on May 15. Article | Photos

Congratulations to recipients of the 2016 undergraduate student awards which were presented at commencement ceremonies on May 15.

Carlo Tomasi has been named the Iris Einheuser Professor of Computer Science in recognition of his seminal contributions to computer vision, effective July 1, 2016. A distinguished professorship such as this is the highest honor Duke can award its faculty members.

The rapidly growing field of computational social choice, at the intersection of computer science and economics, deals with the computational aspects of collective decision making. This handbook, written by thirty-six prominent members of the computational social choice community and co-edited by Vincent Conitzer, covers the field comprehensively. Amazon

Songchun Fan (G), Seyed Zahedi (G), and Ben Lee's paper, "The Computational Sprinting Game," has been selected as the best paper in ASPLOS 2016.