My Computer Science & Engineering Department

UofSC Big Data Health Science Center (BDHSC) – one of the recent UofSC Excellence Initiatives – have been awarded a $1,252,550 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop a state-wide data-driven system to fight COVID-19 in South Carolina. The multidisciplinary investigation team for this project are led by Dr. Xiaoming Li and Bankole Olatosi and includes BDHSC faculty members from the Arnold School of Public Health, College of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering and Computing (Neset Hikmet and Jianjun Hu), and School of Medicine-Columbia. Dr. Hu will be responsible for helping the development of the mobile app, databases, and data analytics.

We are proud to announce that Abby Delnoce has won the DoD SMART Scholarship. You can read her full story in the article: CSE student becomes fourth Gamecock to ever receive DoD SMART Scholarship.

Manas Gaur (Ph.D. student @ AI Institute) gave an invited talk on "Knowledge-infused Learning for Healthcare". Watch it here.

Dr. Sanjib Sur and Dr. Srihari Nelakuditi, and their co-authors have acquired funding from the UofSC Office of Research for their ASPIRE proposal titled "In-Home Mobility Impairment Assessment and Feedback using 5G Wireless Signals and Voice-Assistants".

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

• William Hobbs: Applying Artificial Neural Networks to Computer-Based Dyslexia Screenings
• Niharika Pandala: Computational Modeling of the Structure of SARS Coronavirus Nonstructural Protein 1
• Ishrat Singh: Low-latency Nonlinear Time Series Analysis and Prediction Using Multilayer Perceptrons

We are happy to announce that Liang Zhao has received a SPARC Graduate Research grant for work on "Scene Text Detection in Historical Marine Corp Videos" under Dr. Song's supervision.

At the AI Institute of the University of South Carolina, my colleagues and I have processed more than 700 million social media posts since the beginning of March and more than 700,000 news articles about the COVID-19 pandemic. We are monitoring these information sources to capture the evolving human experience in the U.S. during the pandemic. We have found troubling indications of a growing mental health crisis and an increase in social ills such as substance abuse and gender-based violence.

From "We’re measuring online conversation to track the social and mental health issues surfacing during the coronavirus pandemic" by Dr. Sheth.

This year the students in the Senior Capstone course developed 35 apps either for industrial clients, for USC members, or for themselves. There were:

• 14 web applications using technologies such as Django, node, express, Angular, react, .NET, dialogflow, firebase, AWS, Unity.
• 19 mobile apps (17 run on Android, and 2 on iOS) using iOnic, react native, flutter, firebase, augmented reality.
• 2 desktop games built with Unity

You can watch video demonstrations and see screenshots of all the apps right now!

If you are interested in having students build an app for you, note that we are looking for clients for next year.

Dr. Chin-Tser Huang provides expert opinon on cybersecurity issues in an article on USA Today: Could the NFL draft be hacked? Virtual draft poses new cybersecurity challenges, also on cbs sports.

We proudly report that Kevin Gagnon has received the Algernon Sydney Sullivan award. This honor recognizes college students of noble character who have acted as humble servants to others by putting service of others before self-interest. The award is presented each year by more than 70 colleges and universities within the American South. At the University of South Carolina, the award is presented each year to the most outstanding senior female and senior male student. You can learn more about Kevin here and here.