Computer Science Senior Christopher Casey Cipriano wins the Tirrell
Award for Distinction in Undergraduate Research.

The Tirrell Award for Distinction in Undergraduate Research is an
annual award established by the College of Engineering to recognize
graduating seniors who have shown excellence and promise as
researchers during their academic careers. Christopher Casey Cipriano,
a graduating senior from the Computer Science Department at UC Santa
Barbara, is the first recipient of this award for his work on
sp-multicasting in the hypercube, chord and binomial graphs (UCSB CS
Tech. Rep. 2009-09). This problem has applications in computational
biology (minimal phylogenies), networks, and multiprocessor
scheduling.

The main contribution was to simplify all the previous results and
then generalize them to the more recent problems. This work is
co-authored with his advisor, Professor Teo Gonzalez. Their
contribution is the result of more than 160 hours of research meetings
plus many more hours of individual research, web search, and computer
programming from spring 2008 to spring 2009. In the words of his
advisor “I have been a professor since 1975, and only a couple of
previous undergraduate students would have been able to do this
research work.” Improving the work of three research teams, including
two distinguished computer scientists, is considered a major research
accomplishment, especially for an undergraduate student.

Congratulations Casey!