My Computer Science & Engineering Department

We congratulate the following Computer Science undergraduate students for receiving a Magellan Scholar Award for Spring 2020.

• Stephen Baione: Ensemble of Many Weak Defenses: Defending Deep Neural Networks Against Adversarial Attacks
• Blake Edwards: Multi-stage Compression of Deep Neural Networks through Pruning and Knowledge Distillation
• Shayon Ghoshroy: Deep Residual Learning for Computational Identification of Amino Acids
• Clio Lang: Is the Lesson Learned? A Study on Dissemination of Fake News in 2016 and 2020 Presidential Elections
• Christian Loftis: Genetic programming based Symbolic Regression for Material Thermal Conductivity Prediction
• Tien Nguyen: How Well Can the Robot Swim: Quantifying the Performance of Aqua_Nav
• Julian Rachele: Expanding upon REDCRAFT and REDCAT for Analyzing and Characterizing Proteins from Residual Dipolar Couplings
• Naga Venkata Sai Satti: MassBLAST: An Automated and Convenient Webtool for Genome-Wide Sequence Analysis

We congratulate Hunter Damron for receiving an Honorable Mention for the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for 2020. This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

We would like to congratulate:

• Utkarshini Jaimini (PhD Student)
• Revathy Venkataramanan (PhD Student)
• Ananya Banerjee (Intern)

who have been selected to participate in the CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women. They are all part of our AI Institute.

Dr Sheth is interviewed in this episode of the Innovation on Main Podcast.

We are happy to announce that Dr. Song Wang has received research awards for two different projects: "SnowVision: A Machine Learning-Based Image Processing Tool for the Study of Native American Paddle Designs" is funded by the SC Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR)/NEH, and "Dendroid Core Detection and Tracking for Directionally Solidified Ni-Based Alloys" is funded by UES, Inc./AFRL/DOD .

Dr. Austin Downey (Mechanical Engineering) and Dr. Jason Bakos have received a research award from the National Science Foundation for their project " A Programming Model and Platform Architecture for Real-time Machine Learning for Sub-second Systems".

The department held it's 1st Annual Halloween Graduate Student and Faculty Appreciation Brunch on October 30. It was great to see everyone in a more social setting! We enjoyed getting to know our students better over breakfast and we look forward to our next social. Click below to see more photos from the event.

We are excited that Dr. Amit Sheth has joined us this Fall and brought with him the Artificial Intelligence Institute. The institute, created under the recent excellence initiative, is led by Prof. Amit Sheth, a researcher, educator and entrepreneur. With a proven leadership record of creating world-class research centers and funding record (> $33 million), Sheth launched three companies by licensing his university-developed technologies and advised 30 PhDs who now have highly successful careers in academia, industry research and entrepreneurship.

We are happy to welcome a new faculty member, Dr. Ramtin Zand, this Fall. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida. His research interests involve Hardware Design for Machine Learning Systems, Neuromorphic Computing, Emerging Nanoscale Electronics including spintronic devices, Reconfigurable and Adaptive Computer Architectures, and Low-Power and Reliability-Aware VLSI Circuits. His office is Room 2211 at the Storey Innovation Center.

This is Dr. Matt Thatcher, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. I want to make you aware of an excellent opportunity available to you – the Bachelor’s/Masters Accelerated Program.

This is a combined B.S./M.S degree program available to undergraduate students in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) with 90 or more hours earned toward their baccalaureate degrees. Students accepted into this program must have a minimum overall GPA of 3.40 and at least 3.40 in the course work taken in CSE. Up to 12 credit hours at the 500 level or above may be applied toward both the B.S. and M.S. degree requirements; this means that with one additional year of study you will leave USC with both a B.S. and an M.S. degree!