Congratulations to Graduating Students Liia, Shirdon, Xueqing, Zexuan!

Four ASEers, Liia Butler, Shirdon Gorse, Xueqing (Susan) Liu, and Zexuan Zhong, are going to graduate the end of this Fall 2019 or this Summer 2019, congratulations!

Liia will continue her PhD career in the Illinois ASE group. Shirdon will join Uber. Xueqing will make a career choice soon. Zexuan will become a PhD student at Princeton starting this fall.

The Illinois ASE group held a farewell meeting for them. They shared invaluable moments and advice to other ASEers.

From left to right, first row: Liia, Zexuan, Tao, and Xueqing(Susan); second row: Neil (Zirui), Zhilei, Linyi, Wenyu, Shirdon, Jonathan, and Zhengkai.

Wish them all the best in their future career!

ASE Group Celebration for End of Academic Year

Illinois ASEers had a wonderful celebration for End of 2018-19 Academic Year!

We (almost) cracked this escape room.

Had an awesome potluck party, table tennis & board games!

Congratulations to Zexuan and Zhengkai for Achievements in ICPC 2019 World Finals!

The 2019 ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest) World Finals was held from March 31 to April 5, 2019 in Porto, Portugal.

Zexuan Zhong, an ASE MS student, attended the event as the team member of University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Zhengkai Wu, an ASE PhD student, is a co-coach of the team.

In Pre-competition Challenge on Neural Networks, the team ranked second among all teams! Zhengkai won the Coaches' Challenge!

In the main competition, the team solved 4 problems out of 11.

Congratulations to Zexuan, Zhengkai, and University of Illinois team!

Illinois ASE Group Hosted Industrial Visitor from Facebook

On September 7, Alex Gyori from Facebook arrived at Champaign and visited the Illinois ASE group. Alex and the ASE students had fruitful discussion.

Alex Gyori is a research scientist on the Core Systems team at Facebook in Seattle. His research interests are in improving the reliability of distributed systems. Prior to joining Facebook, Alex received his PhD from Illinois CS in 2017, advised by Prof. Darko Marinov.

First row: Xueqing, Alex, Wing, Siwakorn (Ping); second row: Zelin, Owolabi, Ziang, Zexuan, Linyi, Liia, Yue (From left to right)

Illinois ASE student participated in CRA Graduate Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD Grad Cohort)

CRA Graduate Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD Grad Cohort) was held on March 16-17 in San Diego, CA. One Illinois ASE Ph.D. student, Wing Lam, attended in this iteration of the Grad Cohort Workshop, which was the first gathering of its kind hosted by CRA. Wing also presented a poster titled "A characteristic study of bug reports" during the workshop (see https://cra.org/events/urmgradcohort/#agenda_PDF for more details). The workshop aimed to increase representation of minorities in computing research by building and mentoring nationwide communities through their graduate studies and is modeled on the highly successful CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop for Women.

CRA Graduate Cohort for Underrepresented Minorities and Persons with Disabilities (URMD Grad Cohort)

(Credit: https://cra.org/crn/2018/04/expanding-the-pipeline-cra-urmd-grad-cohort-fosters-a-diverse-and-inclusive-generation-of-computing-researchers/)

Congratulations to Siwakorn (Ping) and Zexuan for securing the 1st place in UIUC ICPC Spring Coding Contest!

Team ASEVeterans, formed by two current ASE members, Siwakorn (Ping) Srisakaokul and Zexuan Zhong, won the first place in the UIUC ICPC Spring Coding Contest held on April 7 by being the only team who solved all 13 ACM ICPC-level coding challenges. They were also the first to come up with correct solutions for 8 of the problems.

Siwakorn (Ping) is currently a third-year PhD student. He competed in ACM-ICPC World Finals 2016 by being in the first place at Chicago regional contest as part of the UIUC team. Zexuan is currently a first-year MS student. He also competed in ACM-ICPC and won Gold Medals at Changchun and Chicago regional contests.

Scoreboard at the end of the contest

Ping and Zexuan working together

Well done,  Siwakorn (Ping) and Zexuan!

Congratulations to Zexuan for his accepted papers at AAAI 2018 and NL4SE 2018

Zexuan Zhong, a first-year graduate student and Illinois ASEer, authored two accepted papers:

CoLink: An Unsupervised Framework for User Identity Linkage
Zexuan Zhong, Yong Cao, Zaiqing Nie, and Mu Guo.
Accepted at The Thirty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2018)

Generating Regular Expressions from Natural Language Specifications: Are We There Yet?
Zexuan Zhong, Jiaqi Guo, Wei Yang, Tao Xie, Jian-Guang Lou, Ting Liu, and Dongmei Zhang.
Accepted at Workshop on NLP for Software Engineering (NL4SE 2018) co-located with AAAI 2018
(Co-authored with Wei Yang, another ASEer)

Zexuan interned at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA) when he was an undergraduate student at Peking University. He worked with Dr. Yong Cao and Dr. Zaiqing Nie during his internship.

(Zexuan @ MSRA)

Congratulations to Zexuan!