CICS Honors Recipients of 9th Annual Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy Awards
On Friday, April 28, the College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst celebrated the recipients of the college's ninth annual Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy (OAA) Awards. The OAA banquet was held at the UMass Amherst Marriott Center on the 11th floor of Campus Center.
Photos from 2017 Awards Banquet
The CICS OAA Awards recognize the remarkable accomplishments of graduates of the college's degree programs and acknowledge the support of important friends of the college.
Bruce Croft, dean of the College of Information and Computer Sciences, and James Allan, chair of the faculty, provided welcoming remarks. Between the presentation of awards, distinguished professor Jim Kurose, assistant director of the National Science Foundation for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate, delivered a speech titled, "Computing Research and Education: What's National is Local."
Leon Osterweil, professor emeritus and chair of the OAA committee, presented the following 2017 OAA awards to six CICS alumni:
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Outstanding Contributions to Society: Shashi Buluswar (UMass Amherst CS MS '95, PhD '02) CEO, Institute for Transformative Technologies
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Outstanding Achievement in Research: Jamie Callan (UMass Amherst CS MS '87, PhD '93) Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
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Outstanding Achievement in Management: Rajesh Jha (UMass Amherst CS MS '90) Executive Vice President, Microsoft Office Group
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Outstanding Achievement in Entrepreneurship: Tareef Kawaf (UMass Amherst CS, Math '94) President, RStudio
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Outstanding Achievement in Technology Development: Brian Kettler (UMass Amherst CS BS '87) Chief Scientist, LM Fellow, Lockheed Martin
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Outstanding Achievement by a Young Alum: Sarah Osentoski (UMass Amherst CS PhD '09), Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, Mayfield Robotics
Additionally, during the awards, J. Elliot Moss, graduate program director, presented the Outstanding Graduate Student awards to Stephen Giguere and Sofya Vorotnikova (synthesis project), Adarsh Rangaiah and Garrett Bernstein (teaching assistant), and to recent Ph.D. alumni Charlie Curtsinger and Pengyu Zhang (doctoral dissertation).