Award Ceremony 2021

Dr. Niki Pissinou

Dr. Pissinou had an excellent year in teaching, contributing both inside and outside the classroom.

Her students are highly enthusiastic about her courses, and the educational value of her work.

Dr. Kianoosh Boroojeni

During the academic year, Dr. Boroojeni really helped us meet the teaching demand, as he taught 12 udergraduate courses with 604 enrollments and 2 graduate courses with 27 enrollments. During the summer, he added an extra 6 undergraduate courses taught with 302 enrollments and 12 graduate courses with 442 enrollments.

He is rated as an outstanding teacher and received an overall SPOT score of 4.67 across 411 responses. His students also made very highly positive comments.

Dr. Leonardo Bobadilla

Dr. Bobadilla mentored 3 Ph. D. students, 3 M.S. students, and 1 undergraduate student this year, while serving in 10 Ph.D. dissertation committees. Dr. Bobadilla co-authored 4 journal articles in Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Robotics where he had two articles, and the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering. He also authored or co-authored 4 conference papers.

This year was a very productive year in terms of research funding for him, as he received 3 new awards as PI from DOD, NSF NRI, and NSF EAGER grant, totaling over $1.3M.

Dr. Monique Ross

Dr. Ross mentored 6 Ph.D. students, all of which were funded through her external grants, as well as 12 undergraduates, and served in 15 Ph.D. Dissertation Committees. She co-authored 3 journal articles in the Journal of Engineering Education, Journal of Computing in Higher Education, and ACM Transactions on Computing Education and other conference publications.

She was PI on 6 active grants totaling more than $1.7M, and Co-PI on 4 grants, totaling more than $3.9M. More importantly, she received 6 new grants this year. The University recognized her talents, presenting her the FIU Top Scholar Award for Research and Creative Activities.

Dr. Patricia McDermott-Wells

Dr. Patricia McDermott-Wells provided outstanding service to the School, our students and our community this past year. She served on the University’s Academic Integrity Committee, where her efforts have been instrumental in providing a framework for Faculty and the University concerning academic integrity and educating our students on the life-long repercussions of errors in judgement when under academic pressure.

She was also an integral part of the KFSCIS Academic Integrity Committee serving as the committee Chair. Her work on the Tutoring Committee, and DAP Committees has also been excellent as she has provided many essential changes. Her work as Subject Area Coordinator (App Dev) and as a Faculty Liaison for the FIU STARS program has provided our students with excellent resources that have led us to higher graduation rates.

Dr. Mark Finlayson

Dr. Finlayson took on many responsibilities this past year, including serving as the School’s Associate Director, but always kept his research and students foremost in his priorities. He mentored 11 Ph.D. students and co-advised another, while also mentoring 5 undergraduate students.

Through his mentorship, he graduated 3 Ph.D. students, this past year, an outstanding achievement. He also served in 7 Ph.D. Dissertation Committees and one Master’s Thesis Committee.

Maria Eugenia Presa-Reyes

• Maria Eugenia is a Ph.D. candidate and a Center of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) Fellow, under the direction of Dr. Shu-Ching Chen. Her research focuses on addressing many data science challenges and proposes a deep learning-based intelligent data analytics platform.
• In 2020-2021, she published/accepted 3 journal papers in ACM Computing, IEEE Trans. on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (TGRS), and Environmental Modelling & Software. She has also published 4 conference papers, including 2 at IEEE Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval.
• Since she joined KFSCIS, she has published 17 research papers, including 6 journals, 10 conference papers, and 1 demo paper. It includes two ACM Computing Surveys papers and one TGRS paper.
• She has received several awards, including the CRA-W fellowship, to join Grad Cohort in 2018 and 2019. In 2018, she was awarded a Student Scholarship to attend the Grace Hopper Conference. She also received a Summer Research Program Internship with the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. She took a lead role in NIST’s TRECVID (TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation) competition, where her team’s solution won First Place in the Disaster Scene Description and Indexing (DSDI) track “O” runs in 2020 and First Place in the DSDI track (regardless of training datasets utilized) in 2021.
• Congratulations to Maria Eugenia!

Ahmed Imteaj

• Ahmed is currently a graduate assistant in the solid lab under the supervision of Prof. M. Hadi Amini, and he has made exemplary progress in his research work after joining the KFSCIS Ph.D. program in 2018.
• During his Ph.D., Ahmed has published 5 journal papers and authored 11 conference papers, which have been published in top journals and IEEE/ACM conferences including IEEE Internet of Things Journal, ICMLA’20, ACM BuildSys/SenSys’20, Mobiquitous’19, Elsevier, Frontiers, Electronics, and Springer. Ahmed presented his research in 7 different conferences that broadly represent KFSCIS and FIU to the wide research community. His paper at IEEE Internet of Things journal on Federated Learning for Resource-constrained IoT Environments has been among Popular papers for the months of September and October 2021.
• Ahmed’s research also led to a funded grant proposal that benefited from the resource-constrained federated algorithms.
• Ahmed has received the best paper award at CSCI’19, as well as ranked second at FIU 2021 Graduate Student Appreciation Week (GSAW) Scholarly Forum. Ahmed is also the lead author of a book published by Springer, and recently he was invited to the FIU Book Authors Recognition 2021. Ahmed’s mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students at FIU has led to several publications in refereed journals and conferences.
• Ahmed was also active in multiple service activities, such as publicity chair of AML-IoT FLAME’20 and Ubicomp-CPD’20, Technical program committee member of EmergencyComm’20, AML-IoT FLAME’21, BIM’21, FIU NSF Summer REU and RET Site Mentor and Instructor.
• Congratulations to Ahmed!

Muhammad Haseeb

• Muhammad Haseeb is a Ph.D. candidate at the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences (KFSCIS), Florida International University (FIU). He is also a Graduate Research Assistant at the KFSCIS, FIU working under the supervision of Dr. Fahad Saeed.
• His doctoral research focuses on the design of novel high performance computing algorithms and techniques for scalable acceleration of computational proteomics analyses on supercomputing machines.
• Haseeb has worked as an Application Performance Intern at the National Energy Research and Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL).
• Prior to his PhD career, Haseeb worked as a senior software engineer at Mentor Graphics Corporation and hold a BSc. Engineering in Electrical Engineering from University of Engineering and Technology (UET) Lahore.
• Congratulations to Muhammad!

Zachary Schreiner

• Zack joined The Bioinformatics Research Group as a junior and almost immediately was conducting research at a graduate level. He conducted machine learning research that has produced two potential publications, having contributed the entire methods and part of the results section for one of them.  He has built his own software packages, producing critical results for these papers, which included applications in microbiome analysis, a new and upcoming area vital to human health.
• His performance in our discipline is top-notch. His in-major (CS) GPA is nearly perfect
• He is motivated with a creative mind.
• He has developed software for maze solving and voice recognition.
• Zachary has served our department as a student learning assistant for eight courses and has been a member of the UPE CODE committee for the past three years.  He has also worked with Broward County high school students through the ACE mentor program.
• His design team won first place four years in a row at this competition.
• Congratulations Zachary!

Daniela Agueros

• Daniela is an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant for COP2210 this semester working with Richard Dr. Whittaker.
• She is the VP of the Women in Cybersecurity FIU chapter and was the secretary the year before.
• Her passion for helping others, leadership skills, and pleasant personality have made Daniela a valuable contributor to the KFSCIS community-building mission.
• She is a panther role model and never stops to explore opportunities to improve herself then share her experiences.  Daniela received a partial scholarship to attend the WiCyS national conference.
• She had a full-time job as an intern in Summer 2021, but she was still made sure that the WiCyS Chapter was active.
• Congratulations to Daniela!

Robert Szabo

• Robert has been a STARS tutor continuously since the Fall of 2020, covering a total of 15 different CS and IT courses.  Most notably, he tutored every semester in Dr. McDermott-Wells CGS 2518 Computer Data Analysis course, which is a service course open to all majors with enrollments as high as 250 students in some semesters.  It took exceptional patience to work with non-computer literate students in that course. Students consistently expressed how helpful Robert was, and how much they appreciated his ability to meet them at their level of proficiency.
• Robert was visiting family in Hungary when the pandemic occurred and was unable to return back to the U.S. for a very long time.  That did not deter him in any way – he continued to work as a STARS tutor despite the significant time zone differences.
• Robert personified the high level of service to others along with personal excellence that is the hallmark of our STARS organization.
• We are proud to call Robert one of our very own!

Sydney Sheran

• As we all know, Sydney Sheran is our key system administrator who keeps office computers and laptops humming and our printers printing!
• Sydney has worked diligently for the Technology Team for over six years.
• He is always ready to step up and help. His calm professional demeanor, patience, friendly attitude, and excellent teaching skill are appreciated by all he serves.
• We want to acknowledge his important work to maintain our Windows-based computers with updates, security patches and operational improvements. His work in our open labs keeps our students happy and connected to the resources they need.
• During this challenging period Sydney worked with closely with faculty and staff to resolve the many problems with Outlook, Zoom and the myriad of applications we use every day to stay connected and productive.
• And if that is not enough, he makes a delicious afternoon Cafecito!
• Thanks for all that you do Sydney!

Amanda Rodriguez

• Although Amanda is our most novice advisor on the team, she has displayed in the last year and a half a determination and dedication to continual growth through professional development opportunities and learning from others.
• The positive feedback that we receive from her students is a testament to her commitment to academic advising and the care that she places into each of her advising interactions.
• We are proud to have Amanda on our team and look forward to her professional growth at KFSCIS.
• Congratulations Amanda!

Dr. Scott Graham

• Dr. Graham is the Assistant Director, Research, for FIU’s KFSCIS, Managing Co-Director of FIU’s NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Knowledge Enablement (I/UCRC CAKE), and Associate Director, Coordination & Strategy, of FIU’s NSF Center for Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) Center for Aquatic Chemistry and Environment (CAChE).
• He has also served as Program Coordinator for FIU SCIS’s NSF PIRE and CREST awards. As Assistant Director for Government Relations of FIU’s High Performance Database Research Center and Managing Co-Director of I/UCRC CAKE, he has assisted in overseeing projects totaling over $55 million.
• All of his skills and experience make him extremely adept at assisting faculty in preparing proposals, keeping track of proposal deadlines and requirements for awarded grants, and helping us prepare project budgets, while pushing the University’s Office of Research and Economic Development in getting our proposals completed accurately, efficiently and submitted on time.
• Despite the tremendous pressures on him, Dr. Graham is always available to assist and displays an absolutely positive, “let’s do this!” attitude that makes it a joy to work with him.
• Congratulations, Scott!