News Headlines
Neall, Sivakumaran, Xiao receive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships
April 22, 2026
Undergraduate computer science majors Ashley Neall, Nithin Sivakumaran, and Hanqi Xiao were awarded National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. Neall was awarded in the field of electrical and electronic engineering, while Sivakumaran and Xiao were awarded in the field of artificial intelligence.
Exploring the frontier between minds and machines
April 20, 2026 | Carolina Arts & Sciences Magazine
Assistant Professor Raghavendra Pothukuchi designs brain-computer interfaces to study the brain’s activity, treat diseases and more. He sees his research on brain-computer interfaces as a way to connect to people and serve society.
Learning to reprogram the immune system to slow the progression of ALS
April 14, 2026
The UNC Computational Immunology (CompCy) Lab, led by Assistant Professor Natalie Stanley, is using computational methods to learn more about how neurodegenerative diseases progress, with the end goal of informing therapeutic treatments that could improve and extend life for patients.
UNC team earns Best Paper Honorable Mention at ACM CHI 2026
April 8, 2026
UNC VisuaLab researchers Chin Tseng, Arran Wang, Ghulam Quadri, and Danielle Szafir received a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at the 2026 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), the leading conference on human-computer interaction. Their paper tackles how to effectively represent categorical data in visualizations.
UNC-Chapel Hill Earns Top National Rankings for Graduate Education [Computer Science Tied for 27th]
April 7, 2026 | UNC News
The U.S. News and World Report released its rankings of graduate programs for 2026, and UNC-Chapel Hill graduate programs once again ranked highly. The Department of Computer Science retained its ranking of tied for 27th in the nation and tied for 13th among public universities.
New Rowhammer attacks give complete control of machines running Nvidia GPUs
April 2, 2026 | Ars Technica
Assistant Professor Andrew Kwong demonstrated a GDDRHammer attack, which allows an attacker to induce bit flips on some GPUs to gain read/write access to all of the CPU’s memory, resulting in complete compromise of the machine.
Five College faculty receive 2026 Tanner awards
April 2, 2026 | UNC News
UNC gave Tanner Awards for inspirational teaching of undergraduate students to five faculty members, including Associate Professor Montek Singh of the Department of Computer Science and Assistant Professor Neil Gaikwad, who has a primary appointment in the School of Data Science and Society and a joint appointment in Computer Science.
Taking AI to the movies
April 2, 2026 | UNC College of Arts and Sciences
Computer science graduate student Luchao Qi designs tools that can help filmmakers produce realistic special effects.
Cho earns 2026 Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award
March 30, 2026
Doctoral alumnus Jaemin Cho received the Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award for his dissertation, “Modular and Interpretable Multimodal AI for Improved Generation and Evaluation.” The Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award recognizes “the highest level of graduate student scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill, highlighting the original and innovative work of our doctoral candidates and graduates.”
A visit from a pioneer in Medical Image Computing
March 26, 2026 | DTU Compute
DTU Compute welcomed UNC Professor Stephen M. Pizer, widely regarded as one of the founders of medical image computing. His reason for visiting was straightforward: to share the methods he has spent three-quarters of a lifetime developing and to meet researchers who can take them further.
Meaningful gift “changes the equation” for computer science graduate students
March 23, 2026 | Carolina Arts and Sciences Foundation
Jack Wallace (’78) has made a transformational gift to the computer science department with the creation of the John S. Wallace ’78 Graduate Student Fellowship Fund. The fund will include immediate support as well as a deferred commitment to help CS graduate students by funding fellowships, travel, and research experiences. Once fully endowed, the gift will fund a graduate student fellowship, enabling the department to recruit exceptional talent and offer unparalleled learning opportunities.
Alumna brings budding business to Chapel Hill
March 23, 2026 | UNC News
Jillian Kinkeade ’19 and husband Mitchell turned the frustration of losing one AirPod into a fast-growing business called TheRightOne. They recently relocated the company to 200 W. Franklin St. to capitalize on the entrepreneurial energy of a community very familiar to her as a Carolina alumna.
Reading the Game
March 19, 2026 | UNC Research
As a computer scientist at UNC-Chapel Hill and a former college basketball player at Dartmouth, Assistant Professor Gedas Bertasius is creating AI-driven tools to review footage, analyze action, and deliver personalized coaching for learning any skill — from basketball to cooking. “AI is not just about making machines better,” he says. “How can we develop technology to make people better?”
He’s bringing change to the delivery app industry’s Doorstep
March 17, 2026 | UNC Communications
Patel is the chief technology officer for Doorstep, a New York City-based company he co-founded with Emory University graduate Shashwat Murarka. Doorstep provides precise indoor and outdoor tracking for last-mile delivery services, integrating with delivery driver apps to track movements inside buildings — all the way to a customer’s doorstep. Patel started building the technology for Doorstep during his senior year at Carolina.
Waymo comes to Charlotte—the safety and security behind autonomous driving cars on our roads
March 16, 2026 | WFAE 90.7 Charlotte
Associate Professor Sridhar Duggirala was part of a discussion on Charlotte Talks with Mike Collins about the expansion of Waymo to Charlotte, N.C. and the future of autonomous corporate vehicles on public streets.
Carolina AI framework gives education researchers a powerful new lens on student collaboration
March 10, 2026
As part of the NSF AI Institute for Engaged Learning, a team from UNC Computer Science is leveraging advancements in AI to help researchers analyze collaborative problem solving in K-12 classrooms. The team has built an automated framework—called EngageVP—that can analyze the rich, multimodal data generated during collaborative learning activities, giving education researchers a powerful new instrument for studying how students learn together.
Trust SARHAchat with your reproductive health questions
March 4, 2026 | UNC Communications
Computer Science assistant professor Tianlong Chen and has been working with Kandyce Brennan from the UNC School of Nursing to create a socially responsible chatbot to provide health education without replacing clinicians.
Alumna Maegan Clawges ’15 is a creative force at Google, YouTube
February 23, 2026 | UNC College of Arts & Sciences
When Maegan Clawges ’15 realized that community was the key to her confidence in coding, she wasted no time extending that network to other Tar Heels by founding Pearl Hacks, a hackathon rooted in inclusivity, creativity and mentorship. As Pearl Hacks celebrates its 12th anniversary this year, Clawges is hitting big milestones, too. Initially joining YouTube’s art department as the first creative engineer, she recently moved teams to help integrate AI into Google Search results. She shares how her time at Carolina shaped her early career.
Learning from Language Lab receives $160k for LLM research
February 18, 2026
The Learning from Language Lab, led by Assistant Professor Shashank Srivastava, was awarded $160,000 by Coefficient Giving to pinpoint the neural circuitry that underpins human-like ‘Chain-of-Thought’ reasoning in large language models.
UNC Computer Science showcases foundational AI research powering discoveries across Carolina
February 16, 2026
CoreAI Discovery Day, the department’s inaugural AI research showcase, filled Sitterson Hall with researchers from across the university — faculty members from chemistry, geography, philosophy, pharmacy, psychiatry, and radiology alongside computer scientists, graduate students, UNC alumni, and even Chancellor Lee Roberts. The event supports the chancellor’s mission to strengthen interdisciplinary partnerships and position Carolina as a leader in the new era of AI.
Sivakumaran, Xiao earn Honorable Mentions for CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award
January 22, 2026
Computer science majors Nithin Sivakumaran and Hanqi Xiao were selected as Honorable Mentions for the Computing Research Association’s 2025-2026 Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award (URA). Both students work in the Multimodal Understanding, Reasoning, and Generation for Language Lab, led by Distinguished Professor Mohit Bansal.
UNC CS closes 2025 with 40 AI research papers across 4 conferences
January 12, 2026
In the final three months of 2025, UNC CS researchers from 11 research groups presented 40 publications across four conferences related to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing: NeurIPS, EMNLP, COLM, and ICMI. The published research covers large language models, vision-language models, object reconstruction, and even security in large reasoning models.
Bansal named ACL Fellow
January 7, 2026
Professor Mohit Bansal was named a 2025 Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics for significant contributions to multimodal NLP foundations, faithful language generation and summarization, and model interpretability methods.
UNC CS alumnus Sheel Patel (’24) one of two Tar Heels in Forbes 30 Under 30
December 17, 2025 | Carolina Alumni Review
2024 UNC CS alum Sheel Patel is the co-founder of Doorstep, a company that provides precise indoor and outdoor tracking for last-mile delivery services. He was named to the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 in Transportation and Aerospace list.
Skill learning in the Age of AI
December 10, 2025
AI has rapidly improved the ability of machines to learn tasks, but Assistant Professor Gedas Bertasius believes that it can help humans learn tasks, too. His research is creating a future where expert knowledge and guidance can be made available anywhere in the world using AI.
Teaching faculty power UNC Computer Science’s growth and impact
December 8, 2025
UNC Computer Science fills more than 9,000 course seats every year. So how does it still feel personal? The answer lies with 10 teaching faculty members who have built a culture where students are not just taught — they are seen.
UNC CS Leads in AI: Ranked #8 by CSRankings in AI, NLP, and Computer Vision since 2024
November 9, 2025
U.S. News & World Report ranked UNC CS #26 in AI (#14 among public universities), while CS Rankings ranked UNC CS #17 for research publications in AI, machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing.
Patil named 2025 Google PhD Fellow
November 7, 2025
Doctoral student Vaidehi Patil received a Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning and ML Foundations, worth up to $85,000 per year for two years. The fellowship funds her work to make deep learning models more safe and responsible for real-world applications.
UNC CS fall hackathons draw more than 850 students
November 5, 2025
This fall, UNC Computer Science hosted two major hackathons that brought together more than 850 students from UNC and beyond. The Carolina Data Challenge and HackNC gave students from all majors the chance to build projects, learn new skills, and connect with industry sponsors, and both events received more project submissions than ever before!
Jordan receives mentoring award for guiding students beyond the classroom
October 30, 2025
Professor of the Practice Kris Jordan earned the 2025 Faculty Mentor to Undergraduate Student Mentees Award. Jordan was praised for his ability to recognize and nurture student potential, to build community within the computer science program, and to go above and beyond as a teacher.
