Award Ceremony 2013

Overall Outstanding Graduate Student | Lei Li

Ricardo Koller (Advisor:Tao Li): During his graduate study at FIU, Lei has published 23 papers including 1 book chapter, 8 journal papers, and 14 conference paper. His publication list includes:

1 first-author journal paper in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems
4 first-author conference papers in top conferences including ACM SIGIR 2011 (acceptance rate 17%), ACM CIKM 2012 (acceptance rate 13%), ACM WSDM 2013 (acceptance rate 12%), and ACM CIKM 2013 (acceptance rate 17%).
He also did summer interns at Xerox research in 2011 and 2012 and has filed 5 patent applications.

Best Graduate Student Research | Liang Tang

Liang has published 8 papers for the current year (after August 2013) including 5 first-author conference papers, 1 first-author journal paper, and 2 other journal papers. These paper includes:

1 first-author paper at IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE)
1 full paper at ACM SIGKDD 2013, the best conference in data mining
2 full papers at ACM CIKM 2013, a top conference in data mining and knowledge management with an acceptance rate of 16.7%
1 full paper at IEEE IM 2013, a top conference in network management with an acceptance rate of 27%
His work on optimizing system monitoring configurations based on the incident ticket resolutions has made practical impacts and been incorporated into IBM products. In October 2013, he has been selected as an invited student speaker to present at IBM 2013 Services Research Symposium at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Liang had a very successful summer internship (Research Intern in Applied Relevance Sciences) at LinkedIn in Summer 2013 and received a full-time job offer to join LinkedIn in 2014.

Outstanding IT Student | Sriyah Bissoon

Sriyah Bissoon has worked as a Web Developer, Website Administrator, and Intranet administrator for seven years. She also manages departmental help desks and provides training and support for other employees. She helped design a lobby tracking system which was later implemented in all of her company branches. She has worked full time, raised a family, and completed her Bachelor Degree in IT, all while maintaining a grade point average of 3.74.

Outstanding CS Student | Raul Garcia

In addition to keeping an excellent academic records since he joined FIU, Raul has gone above and beyond his academic duties and made major contributions to the Florida Public Hurricane Loss Model (FPHLM). Raul has proven his constant willingness to go beyond his duties. His achievements and contributions have spun his normal duties as an undergraduate student and he has demonstrated his strong IT and CS knowledge and project management and leadership skills. The high degree of effort and dedication immersed in his contributions and accomplishments are exposed by the fact they he is a minority student who emigrated from Cuba a couple of years ago. We are very lucky to have Raul Garcia in our School.

Best Technical Staff | Catherine Hernandez

Catherine Hernandez is our Lab Coordinator, she manages the business services of our Technology Group. She has worked for FIU for almost 20 years. She has held many roles in our Technology Group. Currently, she works with our faculty to keep the flow of new technology moving into our labs by recommending and purchasing the workstations, servers and networking products we use every day. She understands not only how the technology works together but how to make FIU work to get things done. She has demonstrated her abilities by working with Facilities on key projects such as our new faculty offices on the second floor, 3rd floor conference room and renovation of our seminar room in ECS 235. Her knowledge of the ever changing University business policies and procedures makes her an invaluable asset for getting jobs done. We applaud Catherine for her tireless efforts to improve our school. Thank you Catherine!

Excellence in Teaching | Jill Weiss

Jill’s record of teaching over the past year has been exceptional, according to her annual evaluation by our school’s former director. She earned an average student evaluation score of 4.76 on a scale of 1 to 5. She earned exceptionally high marks for her knowledge of the subject matter.

Jill taught over 1,600 students, which is among the most for any faculty member at the university. It is remarkable that she achieves such high evaluations from such a large and diverse population. Through excellent preparation for her classes, Jill is able to stimulate interest from her students, even though the subject matter is challenging for them and the class size is large.

With great pleasure, we give this well-deserved award to Jill Weiss.

Excellence in Research | Niki Pissinou

Dr. Niki Pissinou’s research record over the past year includes one book chapter, one journal paper, and three conference papers. These publications are in the first rate journals and conferences. Her book chapter “Multimedia Computer Graphics and Broadcasting Part I” is a hot topic published by Springer Verlag Publication Company. The forthcoming IEEE Transaction in Computer journal paper is an impact driven paper. She was awarded one new grant from NSF REU program. She has two Ph.D. students, three independent study students and several Master students. In her career, Dr. Pissinou has published over two hundred and fifty research papers in peer reviewed journals, conference proceedings and books chapters on networking, telecommunications, distributed systems, mobile computing, security and aspects of nontraditional data management including co-editing over four texts in the area of mobile and wireless networking and systems and over fourteen IEEE and ACM conference volumes. Widely cited in books and research papers, her research has been funded by NSF, DHS, NASA, DOT, DoD, state governments and industry. She has graduated over nineteen Ph.D. students who now hold positions in academia, federal government and industry. Dr. Pissinou has served as the general and technical program chair on a variety of ACM and IEEE conferences. She also served on hundreds of IEEE and ACM program committees, organizing committees, review panels, advisory boards, editorial boards etc. She has served as an editor of many journals including the IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering. She also has been the founder of many professional forums, including the ACM GIS. Dr. Pissinou has given keynote talks at various events and served as consultant to industry. Her achievements have been recognized by her peers, who have given her several awards and honors, including best paper awards.

Excellence in Service | Xudong He

Dr. Xudong He serves as the chair of the Graduate Committee, and in this role, has been in charge of our extensive revisions to the PhD Qualifying Exam. He has been a PhD Qualifying Exam committee member for many students, and in the past year alone, evaluated nearly 100 PhD applications. He is also a member of five PhD committees, and currently supervising one PhD student. We believe this to be outstanding service to FIU.

Excellence in Student Mentoring | Raju Rangaswami

Dr. Rangaswami is currently supervising 6 Ph.D. students and one undergraduate. In the past, he mentored a total of 6 Ph.D. students, 7 master student, and 18 undergraduates. Many of his students graduated with honors and joined top industry companies such as VMware, Fusion-io, and Ultimate Software. His students also won prestigious awards such as IBM Ph.D. Fellowship and FIU Worlds Ahead Graduate Award.