LiU team won prize in 11th DIMACS Implementation Challenge

In a collaboration between Oleg Burdakov at the Mathematics department (MAI) and Jonas Kvarnström and Patrick Doherty at IDA, the LiU team won the prestigious Implementation Challenge in solving Steiner tree problems. Their algorithms were based on their theoretical results on optimality conditions previously published. The challenge was organized by DIMACS. The Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) is a collaboration between Rutgers University, Princeton University, and the research firms AT&T, Bell Labs, Applied Communication Sciences, and NEC. Internationally recognized key experts in solving Steiner tree problems participated in the challenge. The LiU team was the best in solving hop-constrained directed Steiner tree problems. This branch of the competition was also considered one of the most difficult. Funding for this unique cross institute collaboration was due in part to ELLIIT and CADICS, two of LiU's strategic research centers.
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Saab rewards security research

The Åke Svensson research stipend this year goes to Simin Nadjm-Tehrani, professor of Computer Science at Linköping University. Simin Nadjm-Tehrani receives the award for her research breakthroughs on the development of dependable computing for safety-critical applications, and for her work on communication availability and reliability in the event of crises that threaten the public safety.
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Award for extraordinary achievements

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences awards Professor Arne Jönsson for extraordinary contributions to the school's undergraduate or graduate eduction. He was praised for his pedagogical contributions, cognitive-science program leadership and ability to inspire other teachers pedagogically.
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LiU Team Won Humanoid Robot Cooking Competition

After an exciting final round FIA Robotics from Linköping University won the Humabot 2014 cooking competition for humanoid robots. The competition took place in Madrid and was the first of its kind. 8 teams from all over the world competed in carrying out three predefined tasks in a kitchen.
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2014 Wilkes Stipendium award

The second instance of Wilkes stipendium, a prize given to a female computer science/engineering or IT student that has a distinguishing record has been awarded to Sara Bergman, who studies in the second year of the computer science and engineering program. The 2014 prize was awarded in the IDA Autumn lunch meeting.
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IDA Alumni won the UIST 2014 Lasting Impact Award

Per Ola Kristensson has, together with his supervisor Shumin Zhai, won the prestigious prize ACM User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) Lasting Impact Award, which is given to authors of a paper pubished at UIST at least ten years ago, and which has had a significant impact not only within human-computer interaction, but also in research fields outside human-computer interaction and in the society at large.

The prize was won for a paper written when Per Ola was a doctoral student at IDA ten years ago: Kristensson, P.O. and Zhai, S. 2004. SHARK2: a large vocabulary shorthand writing system for pen-based computers. Shumin Zhai, now at Google, was at that time a visiting professor at IDA and employed by IBM, which together with SICS East Swedish ICT (former Santa Anna IT Research Institute) funded the research.

The motivation reads: "Awarded for its scientific contribution of algorithms, insights, and user interface considerations essential to the practical realization of large-vocabulary shape-writing systems for graphical keyboards, laying the groundwork for new research, industrial applications, and widespread user benefit".

Per Ola was also recently recognized by the MIT Technology Review as one among the world's most innovative young researchers under the age of 35 and he is now the leader of a research group within Intelligent Interactive Systems at Cambridge University in England.

Follow the first Wilkes award winners!

Tova Linder (Information Technology program) and Lisa Nilsson Ax (Computer engineering program) who were awarded the 2013 Wilkes stipendium commenced their trip to USA with a visit to NY with a tour at Columbia university, Phoenix for participation in the Grace Hopper conference, and Mountain view to visit Google. The prize was initiated by John Wilkes (Google, USA) in connection with the IDA 30 years celebration when he visited LiU and will be awarded regularly in the future. Impressions from the first trip can be found at #IDAgirltrip and in a blog.

The department's founder honoured

Professor Emeritus Erik Sandewall has had a pioneering role at Linköping university and our department, as the first professor in computer science in Sweden, and one of the founders of the department. The traces left behind and the road ahead are visualised in a statue that was raised to honour Erik Sandewall and the birth of computer science in Sweden.
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First year of the new MSc programme

The first group of students on the pioneering 5 year Computer Science and Software Engineering program have now finished their first academic year. The program has attracted a large number of applicants also for the second intake and several new courses with a focus on project-based learning are being developed.

Human-Robot Interaction for Semi-Autonomous Assistive Robots

The PhD dissertation by Marcus Mast addresses current shortcomings of autonomous service robots operating in domestic environments by considering the concept of a semi-autonomous robot that would be supported by human remote operators whenever the robot cannot handle a task autonomously.
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Master Thesis Prize 2013

The annual prize for the best Master and Bachelor thesis defended in 2013 was awarded by Computer Society during a ceremony where the DataSaab society also awarded stipendia to high school students and teachers. Three theses by Simon Andersson (IDA), Martin Danelljan (ISY), and Lina Lagerberg jointly with Tor Skude (IDA), won this year's prize in a tight competition.

The thesis nominations this year were as follows:
Simon Andersson, Magnus Suther and Albin Englund (in the Bachelor thesis category), Daniel Carlsson, Martin Danelljan, Lina Lagerberg and Tor Skude, Fredrik Säveros, Javier Marian Santos, and Eriks Zaharans (in the Master thesis category). The full text of all the theses can be found in the LiU e-press.
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Daniel de Leng winner of SAIS Master's Thesis Award 2014

Daniel de Leng, now a PhD student at IDA, is the winner of the Swedish AI Society's prize for best AI Master's Thesis 2014. The title of the thesis is "Extending semantic matching in DyKnow to handle indirectly-available streams". Supervisors were Fredrik Heintz and Patrick Doherty and examiner Professor John-Jules Meyer, at Utrecht University.
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Performance-aware Component Composition for GPU-based Systems

Recent disruptive changes in computer hardware (transition to multi-/manycore and heterogeneous architectures) have led to a crisis in computer software; programming for modern parallel systems is tedious, error-prone and hardware specific.

In his PhD thesis, Usman Dastgeer investigates component-based programming techniques to specify and process parallel programs structured into components. A component models a computation with an interface that describes how this computation can be used/invoked, and it encapsulates, usually, multiple implementations that model different ways to carry out that computation on same or different types of execution units, such as CPU cores or GPUs. As part of his thesis work, he designed and implemented three prototype frameworks to demonstrate how such components can suitably be specified, and how automated implementation selection and memory management mechanisms can lead to better programmability, portability and performance.
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Celebrating women in computer education programs

The annual national conference for female students in ICT educational programs (Datatjej) was held in Linköping with the participation of 120 girls from 12 universities. The program covered networking events, technical talks and a great party!
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