News

Starting the AI and ML Club: A Student Spotlight

How Tanisha Ravindran is Advancing AI Through Undergraduate Research

For Computer Science student Tanisha Ravindran, her research journey began early. Joining the Dependable Data-Driven Discovery (D4) National Research program in her first year on campus, she now leads a team of undergraduate researchers as the only undergraduate mentor.

Her work investigates the reasoning capabilities and common pitfalls of large language models such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot in solving integral calculus-based problems. 

Alumnus Jyotishman Pathak Receives John Vincent Atanasoff Discovery Award

Alumnus Maria Thompson Receives Distinguished Alumni Award

Maria Thompson ('82) was the recipient of the 2025 Department of Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award on October 23, 2025.

Graduate Student Spotlight: Shalini Mutyala

Meet Shalini Mutyala, a graduate student in our Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence program. As she prepares to graduate this December, we had the opportunity to ask her some questions about her time in the program. In this Q&A, she opens up about her experiences, challenges, and the growth she’s experienced along the way.

Undergraduate Student Spotlight: Innovating at HackHarvard

When Rahul Sudev (Computer Science ’26) first learned about HackHarvard, he saw more than just a weekend event. He recognized it as a unique opportunity to challenge himself, collaborate with students across the country, and bring innovative ideas to life. The event, hosted by Major League Hacking, is known for bringing together students for just 36 hours and offering the kind of fast-paced, high-impact environment that entrepreneurial students such as Rahul can thrive in.

Wallapak Tavanapong Named Kingland Professor

Dr. Wallapak Tavanapong, Professor of Computer Science, has been named the next Kingland Systems Professor in Data Analytics or Cognitive Machine Learning in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University.

"I am grateful for the named professorship,” said Dr. Tavanapong. “I look forward to leveraging this opportunity to make a lasting impact for ISU and the state of Iowa. My sincere thanks go to the Computer Science faculty and staff and the leadership team of the Dependable Data-Driven Discovery National Research Traineeship for their support."

Meisam Mohammady Awarded NSF Grant

Assistant Professor Dr. Meisam Mohammady received an NSF grant through the inaugural Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing in Practice (PDaSP) program. This project, titled "A Holistic Privacy Preserving Collaborative Data Sharing System for Intelligent Transportation," addresses the growing need for privacy in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS).

Chunsheng Xin Appointed Department Chair

Dr. Chunsheng (Sam) Xin will start as the new Chair of the Department of Computer Science beginning August 1, 2025. Previously, he was a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Cybersecurity at Old Dominion University (ODU). His research interests include cybersecurity, AI, and advanced wireless technologies.

Mengdi Huai Receives NSF CAREER Award

Assistant Professor Dr. Mengdi Huai received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the highest honor awarded to junior faculty. Dr. Huai’s proposal “CAREER: Enabling Reliable Uncertainty-Aware Decision Making with Unreliable Data” works with conformal inference, a statistical distribution-free and model-agnostic technique that offers statistically rigorous measures of uncertainty for individual predictions, so that it can better handle unreliable data and enhance its effectiveness in real-world uncertainty studies. Dr. Huai is the 9^th faculty member of the department to receive this distinction.

Cyclones at the Cutting Edge: Iowa State Faculty Present at ACL 2025

Iowa State University Computer Science professors Qi Li, Yang Li, and Wallapak Tavanapong, and graduate students, will present four research articles at the 63^rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) from July 27^th to August 1^st. ACL is a leading conference in the field of computational linguistics and natural language processing.

Department Faculty and Students Share Work at ICLR 2025

Faculty members and graduate students from our department recently presented five research articles at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025, one of the premier conferences in machine learning.

Faculty and Staff Receive College and University Awards

Three Department of Computer Science faculty and staff members have received well-deserved awards from Iowa State University and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Wallapak Tavanapong designs and develops new AI-assisted methods that accurately analyze biomedical data. This work could potentially improve computer science and biomedical research practice and patient care. Tavanapong also mentors graduate and undergraduate students who are conducting research in this area.

Regis Kopper: Using Extended Reality to Train First Responders and Doctors

Dr. Kopper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Iowa State University.   His research focuses on using virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), or extended reality (XR), to develop new trainings for first responders and medical professionals.

The Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business, in partnership with the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, will offer a master of financial technology. The degree is a collaboration between the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Finance, and the Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics.

Myra Cohen Receives IEEE TCSE Award

Dr. Myra Cohen, Professor of Computer Science and the Lanh and Oanh Nguyen Chair in Software Engineering, has received the 2025 Barbora Bühnová Leadership Award for Women in Science and Engineering from the IEEE Computer Society Technical Council on Software Engineering. The prestigious award is given to Dr. Cohen for her seminal and innovative research on combinatorial interaction testing and her exceptional record of one-on-one mentoring.

Ali Jannesari Awarded Grant

Dr. Ali Jannesari, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, is a member of the SymphonyLearn team, which has received a €458,000 ($481,330) grant. Dr. Jannesari will participate in a research project on Heterogeneous Data-Centric Learning for the SPRIN-D Challenge "Composite Learning” from the Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation SPRIND in Germany.