My Computer Science and Engineering Department

The iCAS lab, directed by Dr. Ramtin Zand, won the first-place award at the 2024 University Demonstration at DAC, The Chips to Systems Conference for the project titled "HiRISE: High-Resolution Image Scaling for Edge ML via In-Sensor Compression and Selective ROI."

Demo by: Brendan Reidy and Peyton Chandarana, Ph.D. Research Assistants

Project Description: With the rise of tiny IoT devices powered by machine learning (ML), many researchers have directed their focus toward compressing models to fit on tiny edge devices. Recent works have achieved remarkable success in compressing ML models for object detection and image classification on microcontrollers with small memory, e.g., 512kB SRAM. However, there remain many challenges prohibiting the deployment of ML systems that require high-resolution images. Due to fundamental limits in memory capacity for tiny IoT devices, it may be physically impossible to store large images without external hardware. To this end, we propose a high-resolution image scaling system for edge ML, called HiRISE, which is equipped with selective region-of-interest (ROI) capability leveraging analog in-sensor image scaling. Our methodology not only significantly reduces the peak memory requirements, but also achieves up to 17.7x reduction in data transfer and energy consumption.

Paper Authors: Brendan Reidy, Sepehr Tabrizchi, MohammadReza Mohammadi, Shaahin Angizi, Arman Roohi, and Ramtin Zand

Dr. Sanjib Sur has received grant awards for his two projects:

• "Precision Processing of Autonomous Maritime Perception System Data - Phase III" funded by Office of Naval Research (ONR)/DOD
• "Advanced Perception for Autonomous Platforms in the Littorals" funded by Office of Naval Research (ONR)/DOD

Dr. Ramtin Zand (PI) and Dr. Jason Bakos (Co-PI) have been awarded an NSF grant for their project "Cross-Layer Design Automation for In-Memory Analog Computing."

Jamshidi received the Most Influential Paper Award in April at the 19th International Conference on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS) in Lisbon, Portugal. Jamshidi’s paper, “Autonomic Resource Provision for Cloud-based Software,” was submitted, accepted and published just prior to earning his Ph.D. from Dublin City University in Ireland in 2014. It was presented at the 2014 SEAMS Conference in India. See original post for details.

Since 2021, Assistant Professor Vignesh Narayanan has taught in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and is affiliated with the Artificial Intelligence Institute of the University of South Carolina (AIISC) and Carolina Autism and Neurodevelopment (CAN) Research Center. He is passionate about the integration between AI and dynamic systems, and its impact on safety and efficiency for consumers. Narayanan’s research surrounds the interaction between humans and dynamic systems to prevent such systems from unsafe behavior as they change over time. 

Read the full article here.

Graduate students Vedant Khandelwal and Chathurangi Shyalika each received the Best Poster Award at Discover USC.

Dr Sanjib Sur has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) research award for his project titled "Modernizing Underground Mines Operations with Millimeter-Wave Imaging and Networking". You can learn more about his research here and in the article Improving underground mining safety with millimeter wave technology.

"The project aims to address the unique challenges of sensing and networking in underground mining environments by employing millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless, a core technology for 5G and beyond standards. This technology is particularly suited for the harsh conditions of underground mines, such as dust and low light or dark conditions. However, the adoption of mmWave technology in mining is challenging due to reconstructing high-quality 3D maps in complex structures, fusing static and mobile underground real-time maps, and deploying mmWave communication infrastructures. By overcoming these challenges, this project seeks to enhance safety in mining operations, improve operational efficiency through better resource management, navigation, and machinery positioning, and contribute to the national interest by advancing the future of autonomous mining systems."

This year the students in the Senior Capstone course developed 34 apps. There are:

• 15 web applications using technologies such as Django, node, express, Angular, react, Vue, firebase, AWS.
• 14 Android or iOS mobile apps using technologies such as Android Studio, Flutter, React Native, XCode, Firebase.
• 4 desktop games using technologies such as Unity, GameMaker.

You can view their video demos here. If you want a custom-made app, let us know!

We are delighted to share with you that Hem Regmi, a PhD student of Sanjib Sur, has won this year's C.C. Royal Fellowship, one of the Trustee Fellowships from the Graduate School. The competition for these fellowships is fierce, and this is an amazing achievement for both Hem and Sanjib.

We are happy to announce that Dr. Jamshidi, A. Ahmad, and C. Pahl were recipients of a Most Influental Paper Award at the 9th International Symposium of Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems for their paper "Autonomic Resource Provisioning for Cloud-Based Software."

We are proud to announce that Lex Whalen has been awarded the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP). The GRFP is a prestigious award that recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students who have demonstrated the potential to be high achieving scientists and engineers, early in their careers. 

The winners of our Research Symposium were:

• 1st place: Poster #22. Flex-TPU: A Flexible TPU Architecture with Runtime Reconfigurable Dataflow Presenter: Peyton Chandarana
• 2nd place: Poster #2. Rethinking Robust Contrastive Learning from the Adversarial Perspective Presenter: Fatemeh Ghofrani
• 3rd place: Poster #4. MilliCar: Accurate 3D Bounding Box Prediction of Vehicles and Pedestrians in All Weather Conditions Presenter: Reza Tavasoli; Hem Regmi

Katelyn Wyandt has been awarded the prestigious Goldwater scholarship. More than 400 higher education institutions nominate up to four students each academic year for the $7,500 awards meant to encourage undergraduate students to pursue research careers in natural sciences, engineering and mathematics. Katelyn is an Honor's College student and a junior computer science major from Summerville, South Carolina. She as been conducting research since she was a freshman at USC. Read the full article here.

Starting this Fall 2024 the CS Application Area Requirement, and the CS and CIS Liberal Arts Requirements are being replaced by a more relaxed "Electives" requirement. Any USC course can be used to satisfy the new Electives requirement, including CSCE courses (check out CSCE 180: "Artificial Intelligence for All" this Fall) Also, the total number of credits required for a degree has been reduced for the majority of students. The set of required CSCE courses remains the same. See the new CS Major Requirements and CIS Major Requirements for details. 

It starts Fall 2024, so only applies to those graduating in December 2024 or later. You can switch to the new 2024 requirements if you want. Just ask your Advisor to do it. It will mean you have more freedom with your electives and will need fewer or the same number of credits to graduate.

Students presented the papers below at the  Empowering Machine Learning and Large Language Models with Domain and Commonsense Knowledge (AAAI-MAKE 2024) AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford University. Download papers here.

• Yuxin Zi, Kaushik Roy, Vignesh Narayanan, and Amit Sheth presented their paper titled "Exploring Alternative Approaches to Language Modeling for Learning from Data and Knowledge"
• Kanak Raj, Kaushik Roy, Vamshi Bonagiri, Priyanshul Govil and Krishnaprasad Thirunarayanan:
  "K-PERM: Personalized Response Generation Using Dynamic Knowledge Retrieval and Persona-Adaptive Queries".
• Kaushik Roy, Alessandro Oltramari, Yuxin Zi, Chathurangi Shyalika, Vignesh Narayanan and Amit Sheth:
  "Causal Event Graph-Guided Language-based Spatiotemporal Question Answering"

We are proud to announce that Dr. Ramtin Zand has received an NSF CAREER award for his research on "Heterogeneous Neuromorphic and Edge Computing Systems for Realtime Machine Learning Technologies". 

This project aims to harness the combined capabilities of neuromorphic and edge computing to forge a heterogeneous machine learning system. Its primary goal is to enable computer vision and language models on resource- and energy-constrained devices at an unprecedented scale. It focuses on several key aspects: (1) developing hybrid models that merge the energy efficiency, temporal sparsity, and spatiotemporal processing of spiking neural networks with the global processing of transformer models for complex large-scale computer vision tasks, (2) creating a methodology to deploy large language models on edge devices by employing system-level innovations such as computational graph modifications, custom kernels, and mathematical refactoring, (3) designing a flexible edge artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator to overcome hardware limitations hindering real-time implementation of large transformer models at the edge, (4) seamlessly integrating a heterogeneous system of mobile processors, edge AI accelerators, and neuromorphic hardware for a comprehensive end-to-end solution. Throughout the project, rigorous investigation delves into critical trade-offs between bandwidth, accuracy, performance, and energy consumption.

Also see this article about Dr. Zand and his research.