Xiang Li and Monamie Banerjee were awarded the University of Florida Informatics Institute (UFII) Graduate Student Fellowship for 2017. UFII offers six or seven fellowships each year.

Li is a Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) Ph.D. student working in the Optima Network Science lab under the supervision of My Thai, a CISE professor. Li received a master’s degree from the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science in the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing in 2012. She also received a master’s degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering at UF. Her research interests include online social networks, network vulnerability, algorithms and security in Smart Grid.

Li’s UFII Fellowship award will support her project titled “Modeling and Dynamic Analyzing for Multiplex Social Networks.”

Banerjee is a CISE Ph.D. student working in the Computer Vision, Graphics, and Medical Imaging lab under the supervision of Baba Vemuri, a CISE professor. Banerjee received her master’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata, India, in 2012. Her research interests include differential geometry, machine learning, pattern recognition, image processing, signal processing, bioinformatics and artificial intelligence.

Banerjee’s UFII Fellowship award will support her project titled “Robustness and Sparsity of Representation in Statistical Analysis of Manifold-valued Data with Applications to Neuroimaging & Computer Vision.”