To recognize the remarkable accomplishments of graduates of the School's degree programs and to acknowledge the support of important friends of the school, the School established the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Computer Science Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy Award (OAA) program. This year's recipients are:
- Outstanding Achievement in Education: Laura K. Dillon (UMass Amherst CS MS '81, Ph.D. '84), Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University
- Outstanding Achievement in Management: Wayne W. Duso (UMass Amherst CS BS '85), General Manager, AWS New Cloud Initiatives at Amazon.com
- Outstanding Contributions to Society: Arthur I. Karshmer (UMass Amherst CS MS, '74, PhD '78), a Professor and Department Chair in the School of Management's Department of Analytics and Technology at the University of San Francisco
- Outstanding Achievement in Technology Development: Rakesh (Teddy) Kumar (UMass Amherst CS Ph.D. '92), Director of the Vision Technologies Center at SRI International
- Outstanding Achievement by a Young Alum: Jennifer Neville (UMass Amherst CS BS '00, MS '04, Ph.D. '06), Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Purdue University
- Outstanding Achievement in Entrepreneurship: Aaron St. John (UMass Amherst CS BS '03, MS '05), Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of HitPoint Studios
- Outstanding Achievement in Research: Richard S. Sutton (UMass Amherst CS MS '80, Ph.D. '84), Professor and iCORE Chair in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta
The Graduate Student Award* Recipients are:
- Outstanding Dissertation Award: Michael Bendersky (Ph.D. '12)
- Outstanding Dissertation Award: Gary B. Huang (Ph.D. '12)
- Outstanding Synthesis Award: Aditya Kumar Mishra
- Outstanding Synthesis Award: Anand Seetharam
- Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award: William T. Billings
- Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award: Jessica Newman
The Undergraduate Student Award* Recipients are:
- Exemplary Achievement in Computer Science: Caleb Raitto
- Achievement in Artificial Intelligence: Nicolas Ioannou
- Achievement in Computer Science: Priscilla Briggs
- Achievement in Computer Science: Gal Shenar
- Achievement in Information Management: Jeffrey Pezzone
- Achievement in Interdisciplinary Study: Anthony Battaglia
- Achievement in Interdisciplinary Study: Steven Tenaglia
- Achievement in Systems: Andrey Izotov
- Achievement in Theory: Alexander Bristol
* The Graduate and Undergraduate Student Awards are sponsored by Yahoo!
We hope that you will join us in celebrating the accomplishments of our 2013 award recipients. The OAA Banquet will be held on Friday, May 3, 2013 in the Massachusetts Room of the Mullins Center.
More on OAA 2013.