Computer science Ph.D. student recognized at two national conferences

A research poster submitted by computer science Ph.D. student Laleh Ghalami was awarded at two recent conferences, earning a first-place finish in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Student Research Competition and second place at the STARS Computing Corps Celebration. Both events were held in September in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ghalami's poster, "A Parallel Approximation Algorithm for Scheduling Parallel Identical Machines," proposed a parallel approximation algorithm for the problem of scheduling jobs on parallel identical machines to minimize makespan. This is the first practical parallel approximation algorithm for the problem that maintains the approximation guarantees of the sequential PTAS and it is designed for execution on shared-memory parallel machines.

The Student Research Competition was part of the 2017 ACM Tapia Conference which gathers undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals to celebrate diversity in computing.

STARS Computing Corps is a national community of regional partnerships with a mission to grow the technology workforce. The STARS Celebration is an event for college students and faculty who are interested in broadening participation in computing.