Announcing the Inaugural Kahlert Impact Prize Honorees
We are proud to recognize the inaugural recipients of the Kahlert Impact Prize.
The Kahlert School of Computing offers the Kahlert Impact Prize to two graduate students who, whether through research or service, show a track record of success and a compelling story of the high impact of their work. Honorees receive a scholarship of $2,000 each.
Amit Samanta
PhD Student
Amit works in the area of system design and implementation. His recent work has focused on serverless computing platforms, which are often deployed by large cloud services. Cloud workloads demand massive resources, and they are often dynamic and unpredictable. Amit’s contributions improve resource utilization while targeting performance and sustainability metrics.
Amit has published many papers at top systems conferences, earning him multiple awards. He has collaborated with industry professionals on some of his work. A key novelty is the deployment of scheduling algorithms that consider cutting-edge technologies like persistent or disaggregated memory. More recently, the carbon footprint of cloud platforms has come under scrutiny – Amit’s ongoing work explores carbon-aware and sustainability-aware network routing schemes. Amit has a long track record of service to his research community, including engagement in program committees, artifact evaluation committees, and event organizing.
Maitrey Mehta
PhD Candidate
Maitrey works to expand the impact of AI to low-resourced languages. While most recent large language model advancements (like ChatGPT) are evident for English, progress in other languages has languished. Maitrey has focused on his native language of Gujarati, with hopes that it provides a roadmap to extend AI technologies to the many other languages spoken by the world’s population.
Maitrey’s vision is to give every human the right to interact with technology in one’s native language. To achieve this, he focuses on a key ingredient for developing this technology: data. Data is the fuel that powers modern LLMs, and there is an unfortunate data disparity across languages. His research aims to find efficient methods to close this resource gap. Maitrey contributed the first semantically annotated dataset in the Gujarati language that also captures cultural nuances. Subsequently, this dataset has been used to create dependency treebanks and other basic language tools like parsers and taggers. Maitrey has collaborated with industry and other groups on campus. He has helped the research community by serving on program committees and through mentorship roles. Among many talks on AI, he has also presented to an audience of veteran business owners at the 7th Annual Utah Veteran Business Conference in 2023.
2025 Data Science & AI Day Sees Over 200 Attendees, Keynote Speaker from Nvidia
Friday, January 24, in the A. Ray Olpin Student Union Ballroom. 229 students, faculty members, University staff members, and attendees from the general public gathered in the A. Ray Olpin Student Union ballroom on Friday, January 24, for The Utah Center for Data Science’s annual Data Science & AI day.
Keeping Us Posted
The event began with 10 research poster presentations from current students sharing their knowledge with peers and professors alike. Simultaneously, partners with University Career Success hosted a Data Science & AI Career Fair, connecting students with professionals across the Silicon Slopes as they prepare to enter the workforce.
Keynote Speaker: Professor Dieter Fox of Nvidia & U Washington
The public has witnessed huge advances in generative artificial intelligence, including large language models, chatbots, and image and video generation tools. How has this progress impacted robotics?
This is the question that Dieter Fox, Senior Director of Robotics Research at Nvidia and University of Washington Professor, captivated the attendees while addressing during his keynote. Professor Fox identified large scale data as a primary ingredient to recent advances in generative AI. He then proposed several directions for generating large scale data for robot learning, focusing on his work in using large scale, parallelized simulation as the primary tool to enable massive data generation. He also discussed how this could be combined with human demonstrations. His keynote concluded by demonstrating exciting recent advances achieved using these techniques and gave his thoughts on how neural network architectures should evolve to further their use in robotics.
Research Highlights
The afternoon session culminated with research highlights from across the University who have practically applied data science & AI within their work.
Assistant Professor Ziad Al-Halah's (Kahlert School of Computing) section "AI in Computer Vision" regarded spatial features in the audio-visual medium.
Associate Professor Xiaoyue Cathy Liu's (Civil & Environmental Engineering) section "DS of Human Mobility" discussed AI applications for traffic patterns and safety.
Research Assistant Professor Shiqi Yu (Physics and Astronomy) closed out the day's presentations with her "ML for Astronomy" section.
Spring Semester 2025
Welcome back, students! We’re looking forward to a new semester of innovation and discovery with you all. Have a great first week of the semester 📚🎓💡
School of Computing Alum Reflects on Time at University and Pixar in His Book “Managing the Unmanageable”
From the Cradle of Computer Graphics at the University of Utah to Pixar Animation Studios, my 50+ year professional career has been a parabola of many groundbreaking projects, as well as startup companies—some that have become household names, including Brøderbund Software, Gracenote/SONY, and others. It has been an exciting and rewarding journey not only because of the bleeding edge technology and innovative products I worked on, but also due to the privilege of working with, managing, and leading people in these companies. I reflect on part of this journey in this article and my book “Managing The Unmanageable”.
Remembering Frank Stenger
Frank Stenger, a Kahlert School of Computing emeritus faculty member, passed away on October 23, 2024. Frank joined the Department of Computer Science at Utah in 1989 and retired from the School of Computing in 2008.
Frank spent 20 years teaching and conducting research in the School of Computing, prior to joining the School he spent 20 years as a professor in the Department of Mathematics here at the University of Utah. He received an undergraduate degree in engineering at the University of Alberta (Engineering--Physics, with emphasis on Electrical Engineering), continuing at the University of Alberta he received Masters degrees in Electrical Engineering (Servomechanisms) and in Mathematics (Numerical Analysis), and a Ph.D. in Mathematics (Computational Asymptotics).
During his lifelong career, he produced a large body of original research in the development of algorithms, in areas “less traveled on” by other researchers, such as computational approximation, solution of nonlinear equations, Sinc methods; these yield novel methods for solving partial differential and integral equations. He also developed algorithms for non-destructive viewing of a part of a human being, and for determining whether the vote count at a voting center is fraudulent. He was an extremely productive scholar, publishing more than 200 papers and multiple books. Frank also lectured in over 20 different countries.
Frank was born in Hungary, and after WWII, he lived in East Germany, then in West Germany, then in Canada, finally landing in the United States after completion of his course studies.
There will be a celebration of Frank’s life on November 23, 2024.
Kahlert School of Computing Faculty Pavel Panchekha and Ganesh Gopalakrishnan Receive NSF Grant Valued at Over $1M
Assistant Professor Pavel Panchekha and Professor Ganesh Gopalakrishnan have received a multi-institutional Community Infrastructure for Research in Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CIRC) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a research project expected to improve real-world numerical software packages by allowing them to operate faster and more reliably across platforms.
The collaborative research project, “Workbench for Reliable and Efficient Numerics”, has received a continuing grant valued at $1,998,953 ($1,158,953 for Utah; the collaborating efforts are lead by Professors Cindy Rubio-González at the University of California Davis and Zachary Tatlock at the University of Washington). This will allow Panchekha and Gopalakrishnan as Principal and Co-Principal Investigators to create a workbench for scientists and engineers to better address numerical issues in their day-to-day work.
“Numerical issues are issues caused by the gap between mathematical (real) numbers and the number representations used on computers, like floating point. Ultimately, this gap makes it difficult for scientists and engineers to develop software that does numerical computation accurately and runs reliably and efficiently on a variety of hardware and software platforms,” states the project abstract. “Over the years, the research community has studied these issues and developed a number of tools that make developing numerical software easier, but these tools have become difficult to use together.”
The project builds on existing FPBench standardization and interoperability efforts to address the complexities of real-world numerical workflows. The outcomes of this research project are expected to simplify this process for national laboratories, industry members, and academics alike, as well as build community between these sectors through initiatives such as community meetings, workshops, and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs).
Numerical computing is behind scientific simulations, engineering calculations, and financial models. It's also at the core of high-tech advances like artificial intelligence. "We're always demanding that our programs are faster, more capable, and more reliable. There are really exciting advances in the last few years in how we do that for numerical programs, and this grant is about taking those advances and putting them, via newly designed tooling, in the hands of users," said Prof. Panchekha. He plans to build on his experience working with scientists at national labs and researchers in industry to make numerical work easier. "It's all about bringing software, and the researchers behind it, together to make something people can use," he added.
To view the full award abstract from NSF.gov, click here.