Two CSE instructors received honorable mentions from UC Riverside's Academy of Distinguished Teachers (ADT) on May 20th. Kelly Downey was awarded an honorable mention for the Lecturer Award, and Harini Venkatesan was awarded an honorable mention for the Graduate Student–Postdoc Instructor of Record Award. Link: https://academyteachers.ucr. edu/ (see "Awards")
A paper co-authored by Prof. Karamouzas received a Best Paper Award at the 2026 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games (I3D 2026), held at Lucasfilm in San Francisco. The paper, "Gen-C: Populating Virtual Worlds with Generative Crowds," is authored by Andreas Panayiotou, Panayiotis Charalambous, and Ioannis Karamouzas. i3dsymposium Link: https://i3dsymposium.org/2026/ awards.html
UC Riverside is drawing press attention for its findings on the safety and reliability of AI agents. The ICLR paper, "Just Do It!? Computer-Use Agents Exhibit Blind Goal-Directedness," was led by UCR Ph.D. student Erfan Shayegani, working with CSE faculty members Yue Dong and Nael Abu-Ghazaleh. The work introduces BLIND-ACT, a benchmark of 90 tasks...
Dr. Ben Stewart (BCOE) and Prof. Faloutsos (CSE) are part of a multi-institutional team that has secured a $4M grant from the Department of Education to develop the Civic Openness, Reasoning, and Engagement (CORE) Incubator. Led by Susan Hackwood (UCR/CCST) and involving researchers from George Mason University and the National Science Policy Network (NSPN), this...
A collaborative team including CSE PhD student Ashley Pang, Associate Professor Paea LePendu, Professor Mariam Salloum, and Professor Neftali Watkinson, along with Northeastern University's Professor Carla Brodley, has received the Best Paper Award at the 2026 ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE TS). Their award-winning paper, "Creating a Second Pathway to Computing Majors,"...
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering is proud to share that CSE Distinguished Professor-Emeritus Laxmi Bhuyan has been awarded the UCR Emeriti Association Distinguished Emeriti Award. This prestigious honor recognizes emeriti faculty who have set a high standard of achievement in research, teaching, or service during their years since retirement. Professor Bhuyan’s continued contributions...
Recently, the Spring team announced new null-safety features in the latest Spring Boot release. These improvements prominently rely on NullAway, a static-analysis tool developed by Professor Manu Sridharan and his research group. Spring Boot Framework, as used by millions of Java applications, now recommends NullAway for build-time nullness checking to help developers eliminate NullPointerExceptions and...
Researchers from CSE, Professor Yue Dong and her PhD student Haz Sameen Shahgir, have developed BiRNA-BERT, a new RNA language model capable of processing full-length RNA sequences without the truncation limitations seen in prior models. This breakthrough allows the model to handle long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in their entirety, achieving state-of-the-art performance in lncRNA interaction...
Professor Mingxun Wang was recognized on the Clarivate Analytics 2025 list of Highly Cited researchers list - which selected one out of every 1000 researchers . Dr. Wang was selected for his contributions in the cross discipline category. He joins five other faculty at UC Riverside that have also made the list. Read about all...
PhD student Zhuocheng Shang earned first place in the prestigious ACM SIGSPATIAL Graduate Student Research Competition (SRC) held in Minneapolis, MN. The award-winning research focuses on scalable satellite data processing, analysis, and visualization, with important applications in precision agriculture, including crop monitoring, yield prediction, and soil management.
The Computer Science and Engineering Department is proud to announce the recipients of this year's Laxmi Bhuyan Fellowship! This prestigious award recognizes excellence in research among our students. Congratulations to the 2025 Fellowship Recipients: Xiangyun Ding (Advisor: Yan Gu) Jingyao Zhang (Advisor: Elaheh Sadredini) Dawon Ahn (Advisor: Vagelis Papalexakis) Each awardee receives a $2,000 stipend...
Professor Rajiv Gupta and Nael Abu-Ghazaleh received an NSF grant titled “SHF: Small: Scalable and Versatile Evolving Graph Analytics” will support work to substantially advance the state of the art of evolving graph analytics.
Professor Heng Yin and his student Lian Gao received the Distinguished Paper Award in the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA) 2025, for their paper titled "BinDSA: Efficient, Precise Binary-Level Pointer Analysis with Context-Sensitive Heap Reconstruction”.
CSE Professor Ahmed Eldawy has received the Ten-Year Influential Paper Award at ICDE 2025, alongside Professor Mohamed Mokbel from the University of Minnesota, for their groundbreaking 2015 paper, "SpatialHadoop: A MapReduce Framework for Spatial Data." This prestigious award honors a paper that has stood the test of time and made a lasting impact a decade...
CSE Professor Emiliano De Cristofaro and his student Georgi Ganev received the Distinguished Paper Award in IEEE Security and Privacy 2025. The paper is titled 'The Inadequacy of Similarity-based Privacy Metrics: Privacy Attacks against "Truly Anonymous" Synthetic Datasets'.
Silas Richelson is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering who studies theoretical computer science, cryptography, and security. His CAREER project will explore the subtle connection between the mathematical discipline "pseudorandomness" and "codes", which are the main gadgets which enable error-free communication across a noisy channel. The broad goal of the work is to...
Amey Bhangale received his CAREER award titled "CAREER: Analytic and Algebraic Methods in Approximating CSPs and Their Applications". The project aims to develop optimal approximation algorithms for a broad class of problems known as constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs).
CSE student Dawon Ahn won the Best Short Presentation Award for the paper titled "Global and Local Structure Learning for Sparse Tensor Completion". The paper was presented as part of the Doctoral Forum at the IEEE BigData 2024 conference that took place in Washington DC during December 15-18 2024.
