SPRING 2026

Warm regards,

Christian Skalka

Chair and Professor
Department of Computer Science

This year, Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne was honored with two prestigious awards from the international network science and complex systems community.

At the annual meeting of the German Physical Society (DPG) this past March, Dr. Hébert-Dufresne was presented the Young Scientist Award for Socio- and Econophysics. Awarded annually to a scientist under the age of 40, the honor recognizes “outstanding original contributions that use physical methods to develop a better understanding of socio-economic problems.”

Last month, Dr. Hébert-Dufresne was named the 2026 recipient of Erdős–Rényi Prize by the Network Science Society (NetSci). Widely regarded as the field’s top honor for early-career researchers, the Erdős–Rényi Prize is awarded annually to a young scientist for “outstanding achievements in network science and contributions to the interdisciplinary development of the field.”

UVM Complex Systems Institute Director Peter Dodds and his team of researchers published a landmark new study in Science Advances that challenges decades of conventional thinking about how language works. By analyzing billions of words across real-world texts, the researchers found that language isn’t primarily organized around emotion—as widely believed for more than 70 years—but instead around something even more fundamental: safety.

The study—which has far-reaching implications—found that language consistently favors expressions associated with safety over those associated with danger, suggesting that communication may be deeply rooted in our need to navigate risk, signal stability, and support survival.

Along with Dodds, who served as senior author, the study features contributions from an interdisciplinary group of UVM researchers, including postdoctoral fellow Julia Zimmerman, Assistant Professor Juniper Lovato, postdoctoral associate Shawn Beaulieu, VCSI data research engineer Michael V. Arnold, and Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Chris Danforth.

Computer Science Professor and Department Chair Chris Skalka and Associate Professor Joe Near were tapped this past year to join a new DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) initiative that will take advantage of their particular strengths in data privacy and cybersecurity. Titled PWND2: Provably Weird Network Deployment and Detection, the project seeks to aid those living under oppressive regimes where internet access is curtailed or censored and online activity is closely monitored.

Coding prowess took center stage once again in the Davis Center’s grand Maple ballroom as the annual Computer Science Fair returned this past fall with over 90 unique projects competing for top honors in 4 different categories, along with two new prizes introduced this year. The scope and breadth of this year's innovative projects spanned a diverse and exciting range of applications, including wellness programs, game design, productivity trackers, music, research tools, and much more.

Each category was judged by a panel comprising faculty and local industry representatives, with prizes awarded as gift cards for first, second, and third place. In addition, event sponsor Beta Technologies awarded two teams with an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of their South Burlington headquarters.

Assistant Professor Juniper Lovato’s research on the complex and multifaceted role of ethics in the swiftly evolving digital landscape encompassing AI was featured this past fall in an episode of UVM's award-winning Across the Fence program. Lovato spoke with host Amy Findley on the work she and her team of student researchers in the Vermont Complex Systems Institute are doing as they explore a wide range of topics, including data ethics, fairness, accountability, transparency, the science of stories, and open-source digital ecosystems.

18 interdisciplinary teams of computer science and business students were dispatched throughout Innovation Hall this semester for an 8-hour collaborative sprint to solve open-ended real-world problems and compete for $5,000 in prizes by building a project from scratch during the 3rd annual UVM Hackathon.

Organized by SWiCS (the Society of Women in Computer Science ), CS Crew, and CEMS, the event featured over 100 students of all skill levels working together to develop unique solutions in response to prompts inspired by real-world scenarios. This year’s challenges included developing a platform to improve the financial literacy of college students and recent grads, building a sustainable technology solution that can help individuals, businesses, or communities reduce their environmental impact, and creating an AI-powered solution for frontline workers to meet them where they are — on the job and on the go.

Professor Josh Bongard was interviewed this past April for an IEEE Spectrum article that highlighted recent exciting developments in “Neurobots”—essentially living robots with Nervous Systems. Bongard, a pioneering researcher in AI-designed biological robots, is a frequent collaborator of Tufts University biologist Michael Levin, who was one of the authors of the study published earlier this year and profiled in the IEEE Spectrum article. Together, they co-founded the nonprofit Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms and the commercial startup  Fauna Systems to advance biobot-related technologies. (Color enhanced neurobot image by Haleh Fotowat)

Our Computer Science Senior Spotlight for 2026 featured Jes Bennett, who, along with her degree in computer science, earned a Master's of Arts in Teaching (MAT). When Bennett joined Lisa Dion’s Girls Who Code program in their sophomore year, they discovered more than an interest, but a calling. The program helped to shape Jes’s trajectory at UVM, where they added a Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) in Secondary Education Program and was awarded a scholarship through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Robert Noyce Scholarship Program, which strives to address the shortage of qualified K-12 STEM educators teaching in underserved and underrepresented schools in the U.S. 

Why do some ideas catch fire? An interdisciplinary team of researchers, including Professor Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Assistant Professor Juniper Lovato, and VT EPSCoR Postdoctoral Research Associate, Giulio Burgio, introduced a new mathematical model for “self-reinforcing cascades”— processes where the thing being spread, whether a belief, joke, or virus, evolves in real time and gains strength as it spreads —in a recently published study in the Physical Review Letters.

The UVM researchers developed the theory along with colleagues from the Santa Fe Institute (Sidney Redner, PhD; and Paul Krapivsky, PhD) and the University of Limerick (James P. Gleeson, PhD).

This past April, senior lecturer Lisa Dion partnered with Vermont Research Open-Source Program Office (VERSO) Program Director Kendall Fortney and IBM senior technical staff member Susan Malaika to pilot a week-long hackathon in Dion’s Advanced Programming class. At a kick-off event, IBM Research senior technical staff member and open-source developer BJ Hargrave (picture above) introduced students to IBM’s Granite agent, a family of open-source, enterprise-grade AI foundation models designed for institutional and business applications. Throughout the week, students worked in teams to design and build their projects before presenting them for judging at a wrap-up event.

UVM’s newest supercomputer, IceCore, is here—ushering in a new era of discovery across campus. With 100 petaflops of GPU power—a 25-fold increase over previous capacity—IceCore will transform research at UVM, enabling breakthroughs in fields such as artificial intelligence, medicine, computational modeling, robotics, climate studies, and more. As part of the Vermont Advanced Computing Center’s (VACC) mission to drive high-impact, multidisciplinary research and academic opportunities, IceCore is more than a technology upgrade—it’s a catalyst for collaboration.

Across the Department of Computer Science, faculty researchers such as Nick Cheney, Juniper Lovato's, Peter Dodds, Josh Bongard, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne are harnessing the power of IceCore to advance ground-breaking studies and further enhance the undergraduate and graduate student research experience.

Learn more about their research and the power of IceCore 

For their last class of the semester, UVM’s Girls Who Code (GWC) club was treated to a morning of robotics demonstrations from graduate electrical and mechanical engineering students. First launched in 2017 by senior lecturer Lisa Dion, the Girls Who Code club is part of an international nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing women's participation in computer science through educational programs spanning middle school through college. Despite the name, the popular club is open to all—boys are always welcome—and meets on campus every Saturday during the semester, with lessons organized around a central theme and led by a UVM undergraduate instructor.