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April 2025 Newsletter

 

Faculty Awards

UF Research Foundation Professorships Awarded to Multiple FICS Faculty 

Image credit: UF Website
Congratulations to Prabhat Mishra, Ph.D., Professor in the CISE Department, and FICS Research Director, Kevin Butler, Ph.D., for receiving University of Florida Research Foundation Professorships. “These are our most innovative and productive faculty, with a proven record of research and scholarship and the potential for even more success in the future,” said David Norton, UF’s Vice President for Research. This recognition highlights their significant contributions to research and excellence.


Rising Star Award

Image credit: FICS Website
Congratulations to Cátia Silva, Ph.D., ECE Instructional Assistant Professor, on receiving the 2025 Rising Star Award from the UF Center for Teaching Excellence! This award recognizes her commitment to educational improvement and teaching excellence.


Research News

Multiple Papers Accepted at Prestigious NAACL Conference

Image credit: NAACL website
Bonnie Dorr, Ph.D., and her talented team of students have had two research papers accepted to the prestigious Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), set to take place this year in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The first paper, titled “FIDELITY: Fine-grained Interpretable Distillation for Effective Language Insights and Topic Yielding,” showcases a novel approach to interpretable machine learning and language understanding. Dr. Dorr co-authored this work with students Divyansh Singh, Brodie Mather, and Justin Ho, who contributed to developing and evaluating this cutting-edge framework.

The second accepted paper, “DETQUS: Decomposition-Enhanced Transformers for Query-focused Summarization,” presents an innovative method for improving transformer models in summarization tasks, specifically tailored to query-focused use cases. This work was made possible through the collaborative efforts of students Yasir Khan, Xinlei Wu, Sangpil Youm, Justin Ho, Aryaan Shaikh, Jairo Garciga, and Rohan Sharma.

Both projects highlight the groundbreaking research being conducted under Dr. Dorr’s mentorship and underscore the strength of interdisciplinary collaboration in advancing the field of computational linguistics. (Read More)

Student Spotlight

Student Awards

Two Ph.D. students from FICS Research have recently received prestigious honors in recognition of their academic excellence and research contributions. Sri Hrushikesh Varma Bhupathiraju has been awarded the Garner Group CISE Scholarship, while Jennifer Sheldon received the Harris Graduate Fellowship. Both students are advised by Dr. Sara Rampazzi.

Welcome to FICS

Muhammad Ajoad Hasan is pursuing his Ph.D. under the guidance of Dr. Farimah Farahmandi, Associate Director at FICS Research, after receiving his bachelor’s in engineering at Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology. His academic interests lie in hardware security trust and machine learning. Outside the lab, Muhammad enjoys traveling, listening to music, and watching movies.

Khan Thamid Hasan joins FICS Research following his role as a full-time lecturer at Uttara University in Dhaka. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Farimah Farahmandi. His research interests include hardware security and trust, as well as large language models. In his free time, Khan enjoys watching movies and playing football and badminton.