Congratulations, Dr. Liu!

Another UC Irvine doctoral student, Songyu (Alfred) Liu, successfully passed his doctoral defense this week, co-advised by Mike Goodrich and me. Alfred came to UCI in 2020, initially working with cognitive scientist Mark Steyvers, who has a joint appointment in computer science. Their work eventually turned into a 2024 publication, “Combining Human and AI Strengths in Object Counting under Information Asymmetry”, in the 12th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (2024), but in the meantime Alfred decided that he preferred topics that were more directly computational, and switched to working with Mike Goodrich (and eventually me). The three topics of his doctoral dissertation are reconstructing graphs from shortest path queries (the sort of information you might obtain from the Unix ping command), connections between different graph width parameters, and graph drawing, and are represented in an overlapping way by the three publications that Alfred combined to form his…