Two CSE Grad Students Receive Rackham Centennial Spring/Summer Fellowship Awards

PhD candidates Hector J. Garcia and Vahed Qazvinian have been selected to receive 2012 Rackham Centennial Spring/Summer Fellowship Awards from the Rackham Graduate School. In celebration of the Graduate School’s 100th anniversary, the award is designed to enable graduate students enrolled in a Rackham program to work on research, scholarly, or creative projects in collaboration with faculty mentors during the Spring/Summer 2012 term to advance progress towards the degree and their future impact as “Michigan Graduate Students in the World.”

Mr. Garcia works with Professor Igor Markov. HIs overall research goal is to design efficient tools that identify and analyze potential advantages and pitfalls in emergent quantum information processing technologies. To this end, he designed Quipu — a novel quantum-circuit simulator that takes advantage of speed-ups offered by group-theory techniques. Quipu simulates practical fault-tolerant quantum circuits that are currently beyond the scope of state-of-the-art simulators. Furthermore, a parallel version of Quipu would facilitate distributed simulation of quantum circuits on large commodity clusters.

Mr. Qazvinian works with Professor Dragomir Radev. His research is focused on exploiting online collective content contributions to build better summarization and decision support systems. His work, which has a wide range of applications from automatic survey generation to rumor detection in online social media, has resulted in more than 15 papers, published in top NLP and AI conferences such as ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, and AAAI. Vahed has also been involved in a number of other projects including the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO).