Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) Spring 2016 Newsletter Spring 2016 | Page 5

Project Spotlight: Keith Vertanen Secures Google Faculty Research Award Who better to partner with than the world’s leading developer of the Android mobile operating system with an estimated net worth of over $107.4 billion? Dr. Keith Vertanen knew this when he submitted his proposal for a Google Faculty Research Award late last year. What he didn’t know was that his proposal would be one of 151 funded by this highly competitive grant. Google explains that its Faculty Research Awards Programs aim to “identify and support world-class, permanent faculty pursuing cutting-edge research.” In his project titled “Less is More: Investigating Abbreviated Text Input via a Game,” Dr. Vertanen will work directly with Google researchers and engineers to deploy his mobile app, Text Blaster, in the Android app store with the intent of collecting a multitude of data, from many users, over long-term use. His team will then use the data to answer four questions: • • • • What sorts of abbreviations, a priori, do users think they should use? How do users change the degree and nature of their abbreviations in response to recognition accuracy? Can we train users to drop parts of their text intelligently in order to aid the decoder? Can we leverage the abbreviation behaviors observed to improve decoder accuracy? Text Blaster provides a platform to not only investigate abbreviated input, but also answer a host of other open research questions in text entry. Data collected via Text Blaster will be released as a public research resource. Dr. Vertanen’s grant will cover tuition for a graduate student and provide the opportunity to work directly with Google. Focus on Education: Zhaohui Wang Awarded NSF Grant for Student Travel Zhaohui Wang is the principal investigator on a project that received a $25,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant is titled “NSF Student Travel Grant for 2016 IEEE International Conference and Computer Communications” (IEEE INFOCOM). This grant will support a total number of 25 graduate students based in the United States to attend IEEE INFOCOM 2016. The travel awards will target graduate students, in particular women and under-represented minority students. Priority will be given to the students who will benefit from attending this conference but have limited travel funds. Society Leadership Bo Chen Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems Philart Jeon Associate Editor, MIT Presence: Teleoperations and Virtual Environments Timothy Havens Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems Min Song Director of Conference Operations, IEEE ComSoc General Chair, INFOCOM 2016 Member, INFOCOM Standing Committee TPC Vice-Chair, GLOBECOM 2015 EiC, EAI Transactions on Wireless Spectrum Shiyan Hu ACM Distinguished Speaker Founding Co-Chair, IEEE Technical Committee on Cybernetics for Cyber-Physical Systems Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on CAD Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics Guest Editor, IEEE Transactions on Computers G VW7BVF