Sabita Acharya received the prestigious "Fifty for the Future" award from the Illinois Technology Foundation.

The annual event, Fifty for the Future®, continues to build awareness of the talent of tomorrow for the Illinois technology ecosystem. The program, currently in its 10th year, recognizes the best and brightest technology students in the state. (illinoistechfoundation.org)

Rachel Harsley, Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, was selected as the Golden Torch Award recipient for Graduate Student of the Year by the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). NSBE is one of the largest student-run organizations in the United States with more than 30,000 members world-wide. The award is based on academic achievement, extracurricular activities, and personal accomplishments and demonstrated leadership in engineering or other technical fields. Each year, through the Golden Torch Awards, NSBE honors individuals, companies, and institutions that have produced a consistent body of highly distinguished work, served as role models for others, and advanced opportunities for African Americans within their industry. The awards ceremony will take place this Spring in Kansas City, MO at the NSBE National Convention.

Additionally, Rachel was awarded an ACM-W fellowship to attend the ACM SIGCSE 2017 conference in Seattle, WA (March 2017). There, Rachel will present the paper "Interactions of Individual and Pair Programmers with an Intelligent Tutoring System for Computer Science" (Rachel Harsley, Davide Fossati, Barbara Di Eugenio and Nick Green).

The NLP lab recently received the best paper award at the IADIS International Conference on Educational Technologies (ICEduTech) 2015 in Santa Catarina, Brazil. The paper, "Student Behavior with Worked-out Examples in a Computer Science Intelligent Tutoring System", is part of ongoing research with the ChiQat-Tutor intelligent tutoring system. The authors are, Nick Green, Davide Fossati, Barbara Di Eugenio, Rachel Harsley, Omar AlZoubi, and Mehrdad Alizadeh.

Nick Green (second from right), Computer Science PhD student, received the prestigious "50 for the Future" award from the Illinois Technology Foundation. This award is designed to recognize and honor the most promising technology students in Illinois.

The ITF Fifty for the Future® mobilizes academia and industry to support students across Illinois universities who aspire to greatness in the field of technology. In its 8th year, this event will honor Illinois students who have proven determination and foresight through their education and deeds in the application and development of technology. (illinoistechfoundation.org)

Lin Chen successfully defended his PhD thesis, titled: "Towards Modeling Collaborative Task Oriented Multimodal Human-human Dialogues"

His committee included: Barbara Di Eugenio (advisor), Milos Zefran (ECE, UIC), Jason Leigh (UHawai'i Manoa), Piotr Gmytrasiewicz (UIC CS), Joyce Y. Chai (CSE Michigan State University)