CRA’s Computing Innovation Fellows Program Supports Postdoctoral Research
Two CICS alumni receive scholarships for two-year fellowships. The college will host a fellowship recipient in the fall of 2021.
The Computing Research Association has announced their cohort of 2021 Computing Innovation Fellows, including College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) graduates Sainyam Galhotra ‘17MS, ‘21PhD and David Tench ‘20MS, ‘20PhD. As part of the fellowship program, CICS will also host Swapna Joshi as a postdoctoral researcher starting this fall.
The Computing Innovation Fellows program aims to address the continued disruption in hiring practices at academic institutions due to COVID-19. This year, a class of 69 researchers will receive sponsorship for two-year postdoctoral research positions in computing, as well as career development opportunities.
Sainyam Galhotra will be hosted by the University of Chicago. In 2019, Galhotra worked as an applied scientist intern for Amazon, where he developed a novel deep-learning based entity linking approach to identify product attributes from search queries. His research focuses on data analytics, with particular focus on entity resolution and social network analysis. His most recent paper, “Adaptive Rule Discovery for Labeling Text Data,” was presented at the 2021 ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data, and he received a best paper award in 2017 from the ACM’s Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. Former CICS Associate Professor Barna Saha, now at the University of California, Berkeley, served as Galhotra’s doctoral advisor.
David Tench will be hosted at Rutgers University following his position as a postdoctoral associate at Stony Brook University, where he taught an algorithms reading group seminar on graph streaming and reconstruction methods. Tench studies computer science theory, particularly graphs and randomized algorithms, and the applications of these topics to real-world problems in areas like external memory, file systems, and networking. He recently worked on the paper “PredictRoute: A Network Path Prediction Toolkit,” which was accepted both by SIGMETRICS 2021 and in the Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems. During his time at CICS, Tench was advised by Professor Andrew McGregor.
Swapna Joshi will be hosted by CICS and advised by Assistant Professor Narges Mahyar. Joshi is currently finishing her doctorate in informatics from the Indiana University Bloomington, where she researches intelligent interactive technology, especially social robots using a community-oriented perspective in real settings. She presented her paper, “Social Robots for Socio-Physical Distancing," at the 2020 International Conference on Social Robotics. From 2019–2020, she worked as a research assistant at the National Science Foundation’s Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier program, and most recently worked at the Toyota Research Institute as a research associate.