Faculty Recruiting Support CICS

Graduate fellowships and scholarships awarded

NSF Graduate Research Fellowships

Tiffany Liu received a 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. Liu is in her second year in the UMass Amherst CS doctoral program. She graduated from Smith College with a B.S. in Engineering Science and Computer Science in May 2012. David Belanger and Rick Freedman received Honorable Mention in the 2013 NSF Fellowship competition.

The competitive fellowship provides three years of support for graduate study leading to research-based masters or doctoral degrees and is intended for students who are in the early stages of their graduate study.

CS Endowed Scholarships presented

Yunmeng Ban, a first year doctoral student, is the first recipient of the 2013 Jim Gray Scholarship in Computer Science. She is interested in data management, database systems, distributed systems, and data mining. Ban received a B.S. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (top 3%). Previously she worked in the Software & Solutions Group (Hadoop Team) at Intel Corporation.

Doctoral student Daniel Garant is the first recipient of the Victor Lesser Graduate Scholarship in Artificial Intelligence. He is interested in data mining and information retrieval. Garant received a B.S. in Mathematics and one in Applied Computer Science at Keene State College in 2013. He was vice president of KSC's Computer Science Club and the CS honor society, Upsilon Pi Epsilon.

Li Yang Ku, a first year doctoral student, received the 2013 Robin Popplestone Fellowship in Robotics & Artificial Intelligence. He received an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California Los Angeles in 2011 and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the National Chiao Tung University in 2008. Ku is interested in robotics and vision research. Ku spent the past two years at HRL working in the Information & Systems Sciences Lab which is responsible for NASA Robonaut2's vision module.

Juston Moore received the 2013 Paul Utgoff Memorial Graduate Scholarship in Machine Learning. Prior to joining the Ph.D. program this fall, Moore was an M.S. student in the School. He is a research assistant in the Machine Learning and Data Science Laboratory and is advised by Assistant Professor Hanna Wallach. Moore received a B.S. in Computer Science (with highest honors) from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Tuition Awardees

The School of Computer Science initiated a tuition award program after the International Programs Office discontinued its program. The 2013 tuition award recipients are Jeffrey Geevarghese, Jisoo Lee, Ashish Jain, Karthik Kannappan, Eswer Kishore Kumar, and Vijay Pasikanti.