STUDENT NEWS

Armisha Roberts

DOCTORAL STUDENT RECEIVES META PH.D. FELLOWSHIP

Armisha Roberts, a Ph.D. student, was named a recipient of the Meta Ph.D. Fellowship. Roberts is one of the 37 selected for the 2022 fellowship, and she is the only recipient from the state of Florida.

“Receiving this fellowship is a blessing,” she said. “I can feel a weight has been lifted off of my shoulders now that I am able to dedicate more time to advancing my research.”

Roberts is a graduate research assistant in the SoundPad (Perception, Application, and Development) lab. Her research interests include 3D audio, artificial intelligence, learning technologies, math education, and Human-Centered Computing (HCC). She is under the advisement of Kyla McMullen, Ph.D., an associate professor.

Her research focuses on understanding how users detect change within a 3D auditory environment. The application area for this research is auditory guidance for first responders to physical targets. The majority of perceptual 3D audio research focuses on localizing stationary sounds. This research advances knowledge on moving 3D sound perception, especially in ambulatory listening scenarios.

“The next steps for me in my research are to conduct a series of experiments to understand the critical sonic components for change detection within the 3D audio space,” Roberts said. “Through understanding what cues are necessary to manipulate for the most favorable results, this will allow my work to be used in real-world settings.”

The Fellowship is a global program designed to encourage and support promising doctoral students who are engaged in innovative and relevant research in areas related to computer science and engineering at an accredited university.

Winners of the Fellowship are entitled to receive two years of paid tuition and fees, a $42,000 annual stipend to cover living and conference travel costs, a paid visit to Meta (formerly Facebook) headquarters for the annual Fellowship Summit, and various opportunities to engage with Meta researchers.

“With this assistance, I am now able to dedicate my time to advancing my research and completing my Ph.D. program,” Roberts said. “I am also looking forward to the relationships I will be able to foster during the annual Meta Ph.D. Fellowship Summit with current Meta researchers and other Ph.D. students as well.”

Roberts is a Gates Millennium Scholar, Buick National Achiever recipient, GEM Fellow, and a UF Graduate Student Fellowship recipient. Roberts has interned with Sandia National Laboratories, Booz Allen Hamilton, IBM, and BP broadening her experience and exposure to industry-based research.

By Allison Logan

GRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP AWARDED TO CISE PH.D. STUDENT

Congratulations to Tyler Hanks, a Ph.D. student, who has been selected for the 2022 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), which recognizes exceptional students who are pursuing full-time research-based master’s and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The NSF GRFP has announced 2,193 Fellows for 2022. Seventeen students at the University of Florida received fellowships. Of the 11 students selected in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, he is the only one chosen from the department.

“I plan to apply my research across a great breadth of scientific domains, specifically those which contribute to space exploration,” Hanks said. “I believe that human space exploration and colonization can serve as an incredible force for the betterment of humanity if done responsibly and sustainably.”

Hanks is currently a first-year Ph.D. student under the guidance of James Fairbanks, Ph.D., an assistant professor. Hanks’ current research is at the intersection of applied category theory, machine learning and scientific computing. He is specifically working on generalizing techniques from neural architecture search to a broader class of scientific modeling problems.

“Receiving this fellowship is such an honor. It grants me financial security for the remainder of my Ph.D. years and increases my academic freedom to pursue research I am passionate about,” he said. “Receipt of this award has also increased my motivation to pursue research that achieves both intellectual merit and positive societal impacts. Overall, I am so happy to have been awarded this fellowship, and I couldn’t have done it without UF’s NSF GRF class or the support of my advisor Dr. James Fairbanks and my mentors Dr. Matthew Klawonn and Dr. Jay Ligatti.”

Hanks joined the computer science Ph.D. program in the fall of 2021, after receiving the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering Dean’s Research Award. After earning his Ph.D., Hanks plans to work in industry for the likes of SpaceX or NASA, where he can directly apply his research and fulfill his dream of contributing to human space exploration.

As the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind, the GRFP has a long history of selecting recipients who achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. The reputation of the GRFP follows recipients and often helps them become lifelong leaders that contribute significantly to both scientific innovation and teaching.

Fellowships provide the student with a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees, as well as access to opportunities for professional development available to NSF-supported graduate students.

By Allison Logan

Tyler Hanks

PAPER NOMINATED AS A BEST JOURNAL PAPER AT IEEE VR

Under natural viewing conditions in virtual reality, there are significant possibilities for violating user privacy, according to a recent paper by doctoral student and lead author Brendan David-John. The paper was written by David-John, Diane Hosfelt, who was a staff research engineer at Mozilla while collaborating on this paper; Kevin R.B. Butler, Ph.D., a professor; and Eakta Jain, Ph.D., an associate professor.

Their paper, titled, “A Privacy-Preserving Approach to Streaming Eye-Tracking Data,” was selected as a best paper nominee for accepted journal papers at the 2021 IEEE VR conference, an international event for the presentation of research results in the broad areas of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality.

The paper describes how eyetracking technology is being increasingly integrated into mixed reality devices and that there are significant possibilities for violating user privacy expectations. The team’s research is targeted at identifying and raising awareness of privacy and security concerns of future technologies, and what the implications could be for new forms of data and sensors.

“Future mixed-reality devices could replace mobile phones as always-on devices that sense the environment around the user and track how the user responds and then interacts with both real and virtual realities,” David-John said. “While we are used to mobile phones that track our location, we as a society are not used to devices that can implicitly track personal information like age, gender, medical conditions, sexual orientation, and emotional responses that could then be used for targeted advertisements, or even more nefarious attacks if data falls into the wrong hands.”

In the paper, the team describes how they are exploring initial solutions for enhancing the privacy of eye-tracking data by reducing the risk of being identified from shared data.

“There is a lot of work to be done in this space before mixed-reality devices and sensors become commonplace in society,” David-John said.

To mitigate such risks, the authors suggest a framework that incorporates gatekeeping via the design of the application programming interface and via software-implemented privacy mechanisms. Their results indicate that these mechanisms can reduce the rate of identification from as much as 85% to as low as 30%.

What does the future hold? For David-John, the answer is twofold. Dr. Jain’s team is working to build collaborations between researchers in mixed reality with those from security and privacy to create better solutions at the intersection of both fields.

“We started this process through a workshop that we conducted at IEEE VR 2021, and we have also presented our insights and perspectives at SOUPS 2021, a top security/privacy conference,” he said.

David-John also plans to “continue establishing privacy for eye-tracking data with my dissertation work by investigating more sophisticated methods for reducing the ability to recognize a user from their eye movements.”

Brendan David-John

By Allison Logan

2021-2022 CISE Scholarship & Award Recipients

The department congratulates the following award and scholarship winners. These students were selected by the awards committee because they have outstanding records of academic performance as well as significant contributions to society.

UNDERGRADUATE GRADUATE

LAC Scholarship

Aaron Bermudez • Jose Cabrera • Santiago Carpio • Thomas Pena • Roberto Edde Verde

Cottmeyer Family Scholarship

Nicholas Bonhoure • Itzel Maldonado • Lily Maloney • Kathleen Tiley

Matthew Martin Memolo Memorial Scholarship

Bhaskar Mishra • Julia Nguyen • Maggie Tieu • Joshua Wonesh

Gartner Group Information Technology Fund

Evan Andresen • Christian Ball • Haohui Bao • Zander Bournand • Gabriel Brosula • Laura Chang • Rahul Chari • Benjamin Cortese • Samantha Gilman • Michael Hayworth • Adam Horton • Emily Kelsey • Andrew Knee • Tom Liraz • Samuel Lonneman • Raghu Radhakrishnan • Adeeb Rashid • Claudia Rubio • Matthew Schrank • Connor Syron • Urmi Thorat • Aaron Upchurch • Zachery Utt • Sophia Vellozzi

L3Harris Corporation Graduate Fellowship

Jeremy Block • Sarah Brown • Anthony Colas • Joseph Isaac • Nicholas Kroeger • Kyle Lo • Michael Perez • Simone Smarr • Jacob Stuart • Daniel Volya

Gartner Group Graduate Fellowship

Yang Bai • Jayetri Bardhan • Aysegul Bumin • Animesh Chhotaray • Pedro Guillermo Feijo Garcia • Amanda Griffith • Pan He • Aruna Jayasena • Yashaswi Karnati • Gloria Katuka • Abhishek Kulkarni • Seth Layton • Chaoyi Ma • Amogh Mannekote • Truc Nguyen • Mahsan Nourani • Marco Oliva • Daniel Olszewski • Zhixin Pan • Neha Rani • Nanjie Rao • Armisha Roberts • Ziyu Shu • Yuchen Sun • Fatemeh Tavassoli • Xiaoyi Tian • Haibo Wang • Heting Wang • Kevin Warren • Haniska Weerasena • Hasini Witharana • Aotian Wu

4 INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS RECEIVE OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

Four students from CISE were the recipients of the Outstanding Achievement Award from the UF International Center. The winners were among 20 students from the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering to receive the award.

Balaji Balasubramani

Balasubramani earned his master’s degree in computer science in December 2021. He is currently a software engineer at Meta.

Ram Kartikeya Boyini

Boyini is pursuing his master’s degree in computer science and is a graduate student researcher at the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research.

Pedro Guillermo Feijoo Garcia

Feijoo Garcia, is a Ph.D. student in the Virtual Experiences Research Group. His research focuses on users’ perceptions and their interactions with virtual humans.

Pan He

He is a Ph.D. student in the UF MALT Lab. His current research is focused on understanding the 3-D motion and structure of a dynamic scene by developing deep learning methods in various environments.