Carnegie Mellon University
April 15, 2020

Liang tapped for NSF Fellowship

By Josh Quicksall

Kyle Liang, PhD student in Software Engineering, was among those selected as a 2020 NSF Graduate Student Fellow.

The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) was created to help ensure the vitality and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who are pursuing full-time research-based master's and doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The GRFP provides three years of support for the graduate education of individuals who have demonstrated their potential for significant research achievements in STEM.

Liang, a first year student in the Software Engineering PhD program, is working alongside faculty Jonathan Aldrich (ISR) and Robert Iannucci (ECE) on the design of TickTalk, a novel programming language that enables domain experts to easily produce software which honors stringent constraints on synchronization, power, communications, and more - with particular applications in IoT technologies.

“Kyle has been proactive in forging a new research direction for improving the engineering of Internet of Things (IoT) applications”, notes Aldrich. Pointing to his prior work on mobile imaging of water samples to detect pathogens as well as his current work on TickTalk, Aldrich believes the future is nothing but bright for the young researcher. “[His] research has the potential to make a major impact on the IoT research community, as well as the nascent IoT software industry. Not only does this work make the construction of apps that improve the quality of our lives much easier, but with our planned deployment of IoT sensor networks to applications such as environmental monitoring, his work could impact major societal issues as well!”