{"id":31350,"date":"2021-03-11T13:39:57","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T18:39:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/?page_id=31350"},"modified":"2025-04-16T16:43:35","modified_gmt":"2025-04-16T20:43:35","slug":"cise-best-student-paper-award","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/programs\/student-programs\/best-paper\/cise-best-student-paper-award\/","title":{"rendered":"CISE Best Student Paper Award Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"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 <\/span>currently enrolled at Boston University who are <\/span>advised by a CISE faculty affiliate at the time of paper submission.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On April 4th, 2025 the Best Student Paper Award winner and finalist were announced and presented their papers to the CISE community.
\nEvent Information: Friday, April 4, 3-4PM at 8 St. Mary’s St, PHO 210.<\/strong><\/p>\n

1st PLACE AWARD<\/h3>\n

Constraint-Conditioned Actor-Critic for Offline Safe Reinforcement Learning<\/a>
\nLead author:\u00a0Zijian Guo<\/strong><\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>PhD candidate of Systems Engineering
\n(Advisor: Wenchao Li<\/a>)<\/p>\n

2nd PLACE AWARD<\/h3>\n

LLMs Cannot Reliably Identify and Reason About Security Vulnerabilities (Yet?): A Comprehensive Evaluation, Framework, and Benchmarks<\/a>
\nLead author: Saad Ullah<\/a><\/strong>, PhD candidate of Electrical and Computer Engineering
\n(Advisor: Gianluca Stringhini<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\n

2024 Winners<\/h3>
<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/p>\n

Finalists: <\/strong><\/p>\n

Hoang Tran \u201cBetter SGD using Second-order Momentum\u201d (NeurIPS 2022) (Advisor: Ashok Cutkosky), Jimuyang Zhang \u201cCoaching a Teachable Student\u201d (CVPR 2023) (Advisor: Eshed Ohn-Bar)<\/p>\n

Mohammad Hammas Saeed \u201cTUBERAIDER: Attributing Coordinated Hate Attacks on YouTube Videos to their Source Communities\u201d (ICWSM 2024) <\/span>(Advisor: Gianluca Stringhini)<\/p>\n

Haoxing Tian \u201cConvergence of Actor-Critic Methods with Multi-Layer Neural Networks\u201d (NeurIPS 2023) <\/span>(Advisors: Yannis Paschalidis & Alex Olshevsky).<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

\n

2022 Winners<\/h3>
<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/p>\n

First Place\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

Rui Liu, PhD Candidate of Systems Engineering. <\/span><\/b>(Advisor: Alex <\/span>Olshevsky<\/span><\/span>). \u201cTemporal Difference Learning as Gradient Splitting<\/span>.” International Conference on Machine Learning, 2021 <\/span>doi: https:\/\/proceedings.mlr.press\/v139\/liu21q\/liu21q.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Second Place\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n

Anthony Byrne, PhD Candidate of Computer Engineering.<\/span><\/b> (Advisor, Ayse Coskun). \u201cMicroFaaS: Energy-efficient Serverless on Bare-metal Single-board Computers.” 2022 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE) doi: 10.23919\/DATE54114.2022.9774688<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Finalists<\/b><\/h3>\n

Salom\u00f3n Wollenstein-Betech, PhD Candidate of Systems Engineering.<\/span><\/b> (Advisors: Christos Cassandras and Yannis Paschalidis). \u201cRouting and Rebalancing Intermodal Autonomous Mobility-on-Demand Systems in Mixed Traf\ufb01c.” <\/span>IEEE Transactions On Intelligent Transportation Systems, Vol. 23, No. 8, August 2022 12263 doi: 10.1109\/TITS.2021.3112106<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Alexander Bulekov, PhD Candidate of Computer Engineering. <\/span><\/b>(Advisor: Manuel Egele)\u00a0 \u201cMORPHUZZ: Bending (Input) Space to Fuzz Virtual Devices.\u201d Proceedings of the 31st USENIX Security Symposium, doi: https:\/\/www.usenix.org\/conference\/usenixsecurity22\/presentation\/bulekov<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

James Queeney, PhD Candidate of Systems Engineering. <\/span><\/b>(Advisors: Yannis Paschalidis and Christos Cassandras) \u201cGeneralized Proximal Policy Optimization with Sample Reuse.” 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), doi: https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/2111.00072.pdf<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

\n

2021 Winners<\/h3>
<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/p>\n

First Place (tie)<\/b><\/h3>\n

Sheila Seidel, PhD Candidate, ECE.\u00a0<\/span><\/b>(Advisor: Vivek Goyal). \u201cTwo-Dimensional Non-Line-of-Sight Scene Estimation from a Single Edge Occluder.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging<\/em>, vol. 7, pp. 58-72, 2021,\u00a0<\/span>doi: 10.1109\/TCI.2020.3037405<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ali Siahkamari, PhD Candidate, ECE.<\/span><\/b>\u00a0(Advisor, Brian Kulis). \u201cPiecewise Linear Regression via a Difference of Convex Functions.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning.<\/em>\u00a0PMLR 119:8895-8904,\u00a02020\u00a0<\/span><\/a>119:8895-8904,\u00a02020.<\/p>\n

Finalists<\/b><\/h3>\n

Beliz Kaleli, PhD Candidate, ECE.<\/span><\/b>\u00a0(Advisors: Gianluca Stringhini, Manuel Egele). \u201cTo Err.Is Human: Characterizing the Threat of Unintended URLs in Social Media.\u201d\u00a0Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (<\/em>NDSS)<\/em>\u00a02021. Session 3A-4<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

James Queeney, PhD Candidate, SE.\u00a0<\/span><\/b>(Advisors: Yannis Paschalidis, Christos Cassandras) \u201cUncertainty-Aware Policy Optimization: A Robust, Adaptive Trust Region Approach.\u201d\u00a0Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence\u00a0(AAAI-21) 5930<\/a><\/em>.<\/span><\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Artin Spiridonoff, PhD Candidate, SE.<\/span><\/b>\u00a0(Advisors: Yannis Paschalidis, Alex Olshevsky)\u00a0 \u201cRobust Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient-Push: Asymptotically Optimal and Network-Independent Performance for Strongly Convex Functions.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Journal of Machine Learning Research<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>JMLR. 21(58):1\u221247, 2020<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

\n

2020 Winners<\/h3>
<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/p>\n

First Place \u2013 Zachary Serlin\u00a0<\/strong>(Advisor: Calin Belta)\u00a0Li, X., Serlin, Z.,Yang, G., & Belta, C. (2019). <\/em>\u201cA formal methods approach to interpretable reinforcement learning for robotic planning.\u201d Science Robotics. Dec 2019: <\/span>Vol. 4, Issue 37, eaay6276 <\/span><\/em>DOI: 10.1126\/scirobotics.aay6276<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Second Place \u2013Charles\u00a0Saunders<\/strong>\u00a0(Advisor: Vivek Goyal) Saunders, C., Murray-Bruce, J. & Goyal, V.K. \u201cComputational periscopy with an ordinary digital camera.\u201d\u00a0Nature<\/em>\u00a0565,\u00a0<\/strong>472\u2013475 (2019) doi:10.1038\/s41586-018-0868-6<\/a><\/p>\n

Third Place (tie) \u2013<\/strong>\u00a0Leila Delshadtehrani\u00a0<\/strong>(Advisors: Manuel Egele & Ajay Joshi) Delshadtehrani, L., Canakci, S., Zhou, B., Eldridge, S., Joshi, A., & Egele, M. \u201cPHMon: A Programmable Hardware Monitor and Its Security Use Cases\u201d,\u00a029th USENIX Security Symposium<\/em>, Boston, MA, August 2020. USENIX paper\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Third Place (tie)<\/strong>\u00a0Taiyao Wang<\/strong>\u00a0(Advisor: Yannis\u00a0Paschalidis)\u00a0Convergence of Parameter Estimates for Regularized Mixed Linear Regression Models, <\/em>Wang, T., & Paschalidis, I.C. Presented at the\u00a0CDC 2019<\/em>, Nice, France Dec. 11-19, 2019<\/p>\n

\n

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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.\u00a0 On April 4th, 2025 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15670,"featured_media":35828,"parent":32408,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/no-sidebars.php","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31350"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15670"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31350"}],"version-history":[{"count":51,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42121,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/31350\/revisions\/42121"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/32408"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cise\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}