Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy Award Recipients
The program recognizes the accomplishments of graduates of the college's degree programs.
The Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences established the Outstanding Achievement and Advocacy (OAA) Award program to recognize the remarkable accomplishments of graduates of the college's degree programs and to acknowledge the support of important friends of the college. Awards are presented annually in various categories.
2023 OAA Award Recipients
Outstanding Achievement in Technology Development
For outstanding contributions in building intelligent systems and solutions.
Prasanta Bose '83 MS
Dr. Prasanta Bose is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Cityzenith, where he leads the development of digital twin platform for buildings - enabling architects and builders to interact with the 3D world of the built ecosystems and make data-driven design decisions. He earned his Master’s in computer science from UMass Amherst and his PhD from the University of Southern California. Dr. Bose has had a stellar leadership tenure with ‘blue chip’ names, including aerospace giant Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto. During his tenure, spanning over ten years, he accrued company-wide technical excellence awards and honors while working with highly advanced technologies, autonomous systems, and software as part of cutting-edge DARPA, NASA, and internal R&D projects. His work on leveraging formal validation and verification methods and tools to ensure the safety of Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) satellite control and health management software was the first of its kind in the space industry to address key technical risks of the multi-billion dollar Department of Defense mission-critical system.
As Senior Director of Engineering and Advanced Analytics at Starbucks Technology in Seattle (2015-2020), he spearheaded the vision and deployment of an innovative AI-powered IOT platform for store coffee machines, enabling automation and coffee quality assurance to deliver $400 million a year in cost savings while minimizing operational risks for the world’s biggest coffee-house chain.
Before joining Cityzenith, Dr. Bose was vice president and head of data science at Acuity Technology’s Intelligent Spaces Group, and he co-founded and became chief scientist and CTO at the Silicon Valley-based industrial IoT company Falkonry in 2013.
Outstanding Achievement by a Recent Graduate
For outstanding achievement in information retrieval at an early stage of his career.
Jeff Dalton '14 PhD
Jeff Dalton heads the Glasgow Representation and Information Learning Lab (GRILL), which researches machine intelligence using deep learning approaches in conversational AI, information retrieval (search), information extraction, and natural language processing.
Dalton works on research and systems using large-scale data to improve language understanding and information seeking. He has engineered large-scale systems for web crawling, link analysis, web information extraction, knowledge base construction, and real-time query suggestion.
Dalton’s core research areas include conversational AI, search suggestion, named entity recognition, entity linking and cross-document entity coreference, relation extraction (fact extraction), and knowledge base construction. He has worked on these areas in both academics and industry – search at Twitter, Youtube event detection, web documents at Google and Globalspec, and digital heritage archives in the Million Books Project.
Dalton received his PhD in computer science from UMass Amherst in 2014 and his BS in computer science from Union College in 2004.
Outstanding Achievement in Management
For excellence in leadership and innovation.
Richard Resnick '94 BS
Richard Resnick is the CEO of Cureatr, a national medication management clinic that keeps patients with chronic conditions safe, healthy, and out of the hospital by ensuring that their often-complex medication regimens are carefully managed in concert with their primary and specialty care providers. Prior, he led GQ Life Sciences, a venture-backed software and data company, through a successful turnaround and acquisition in Q4 2016 by Aptean, Inc. He was previously CEO of Harmony Line, Inc., an MIT Media Lab company, where he partnered with the famous composer/technologist Tod Machover to develop and commercialize Hyperscore, a unique software tool to enable anyone to compose music. Prior to Harmony Line, Resnick was the CEO of Mosaic Bioinformatics which he sold to NetGenics in 2000. Resnick was the global bioinformatics software head for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and got his start in genomics working on the Human Genome Project under Eric Lander at the MIT Whitehead Institute, authoring software applications like primer3, still widely in use some 20 years later.
Resnick serves on the Board of NeuroNetworks Fund, a 501(c)(3) venture fund investing in early-stage products that address the unmet medical needs of people with autism, epilepsy, and schizophrenia. He is the chair of the Arts and Sciences Advisory Board at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, partnering with the Dean of Arts of Sciences to enhance and expand their relevance to industry. Resnick frequently gives talks to the public on healthcare, medication management, genomics, and leadership.
Resnick holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, an MS in computer science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and a BS in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.