CISE Best Student Paper Award Competition
The CISE Best Student Paper Award competition was established to promote student research and recognize the scientific quality of research being conducted by CISE students. The opportunity is open to all students currently enrolled at Boston University who are advised by a CISE faculty affiliate at the time of paper submission.
On April 4th, 2025 the Best Student Paper Award winner and finalist were announced and presented their papers to the CISE community.
Event Information: Friday, April 4, 3-4PM at 8 St. Mary’s St, PHO 210.
1st PLACE AWARD
Constraint-Conditioned Actor-Critic for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning
Lead author: Zijian Guo, PhD candidate of Systems Engineering
(Advisor: Wenchao Li)
2nd PLACE AWARD
LLMs Cannot Reliably Identify and Reason About Security Vulnerabilities (Yet?): A Comprehensive Evaluation, Framework, and Benchmarks
Lead author: Saad Ullah, PhD candidate of Electrical and Computer Engineering
(Advisor: Gianluca Stringhini)
2024 Winners
Finalists:
Hoang Tran “Better SGD using Second-order Momentum” (NeurIPS 2022) (Advisor: Ashok Cutkosky), Jimuyang Zhang “Coaching a Teachable Student” (CVPR 2023) (Advisor: Eshed Ohn-Bar)
Mohammad Hammas Saeed “TUBERAIDER: Attributing Coordinated Hate Attacks on YouTube Videos to their Source Communities” (ICWSM 2024) (Advisor: Gianluca Stringhini)
Haoxing Tian “Convergence of Actor-Critic Methods with Multi-Layer Neural Networks” (NeurIPS 2023) (Advisors: Yannis Paschalidis & Alex Olshevsky).
2022 Winners
First Place
Rui Liu, PhD Candidate of Systems Engineering. (Advisor: Alex Olshevsky). “Temporal Difference Learning as Gradient Splitting.” International Conference on Machine Learning, 2021 doi: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/liu21q/liu21q.pdf
Second Place
Anthony Byrne, PhD Candidate of Computer Engineering. (Advisor, Ayse Coskun). “MicroFaaS: Energy-efficient Serverless on Bare-metal Single-board Computers.” 2022 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE) doi: 10.23919/DATE54114.2022.9774688
Finalists
Salomón Wollenstein-Betech, PhD Candidate of Systems Engineering. (Advisors: Christos Cassandras and Yannis Paschalidis). “Routing and Rebalancing Intermodal Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems in Mixed Traffic.” IEEE Transactions On Intelligent Transportation Systems, Vol. 23, No. 8, August 2022 12263 doi: 10.1109/TITS.2021.3112106
Alexander Bulekov, PhD Candidate of Computer Engineering. (Advisor: Manuel Egele) “MORPHUZZ: Bending (Input) Space to Fuzz Virtual Devices.” Proceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium, doi: https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentation/bulekov
James Queeney, PhD Candidate of Systems Engineering. (Advisors: Yannis Paschalidis and Christos Cassandras) “Generalized Proximal Policy Optimization with Sample Reuse.” 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), doi: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.00072.pdf
2021 Winners
First Place (tie)
Sheila Seidel, PhD Candidate, ECE. (Advisor: Vivek Goyal). “Two-Dimensional Non-Line-of-Sight Scene Estimation from a Single Edge Occluder.” IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, vol. 7, pp. 58-72, 2021, doi: 10.1109/TCI.2020.3037405.
Ali Siahkamari, PhD Candidate, ECE. (Advisor, Brian Kulis). “Piecewise Linear Regression via a Difference of Convex Functions.” Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR 119:8895-8904, 2020 119:8895-8904, 2020.
Finalists
Beliz Kaleli, PhD Candidate, ECE. (Advisors: Gianluca Stringhini, Manuel Egele). “To Err.Is Human: Characterizing the Threat of Unintended URLs in Social Media.” Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2021. Session 3A-4.
James Queeney, PhD Candidate, SE. (Advisors: Yannis Paschalidis, Christos Cassandras) “Uncertainty-Aware Policy Optimization: A Robust, Adaptive Trust Region Approach.” Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-21) 5930.
Artin Spiridonoff, PhD Candidate, SE. (Advisors: Yannis Paschalidis, Alex Olshevsky) “Robust Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient-Push: Asymptotically Optimal and Network-Independent Performance for Strongly Convex Functions.” Journal of Machine Learning Research JMLR. 21(58):1−47, 2020.
2020 Winners
First Place – Zachary Serlin (Advisor: Calin Belta) Li, X., Serlin, Z.,Yang, G., & Belta, C. (2019). “A formal methods approach to interpretable reinforcement learning for robotic planning.” Science Robotics. Dec 2019: Vol. 4, Issue 37, eaay6276 DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.aay6276
Second Place –Charles Saunders (Advisor: Vivek Goyal) Saunders, C., Murray-Bruce, J. & Goyal, V.K. “Computational periscopy with an ordinary digital camera.” Nature 565, 472–475 (2019) doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0868-6
Third Place (tie) – Leila Delshadtehrani (Advisors: Manuel Egele & Ajay Joshi) Delshadtehrani, L., Canakci, S., Zhou, B., Eldridge, S., Joshi, A., & Egele, M. “PHMon: A Programmable Hardware Monitor and Its Security Use Cases”, 29th USENIX Security Symposium, Boston, MA, August 2020. USENIX paper
Third Place (tie) Taiyao Wang (Advisor: Yannis Paschalidis) Convergence of Parameter Estimates for Regularized Mixed Linear Regression Models, Wang, T., & Paschalidis, I.C. Presented at the CDC 2019, Nice, France Dec. 11-19, 2019