My Computer Science & Engineering Department

Click below to see more photos from our Faculty and Graduate Student Appreciation Breakfast held on Valentine’s Day.

We congratulate our CSE Ph.D. students: Alireza Nasiri, Jing Jin and Steph-Yves Louis from the Machine Learning and Evolution Lab directed by Dr. Hu for winning the second place and $2,000 prize in the Big Data Health Science Case Competition organized by the UofSC National Big Data Health Science Conference, Columbia, SC February 7th-9th 2020. The objective of the case competition is to develop a machine learning or data analytic tool that will accurately identify the culprit chemical for a given patient.

Blakeley Hoffman Payne, Computer Science 2017, is featured in the UofSC News article Getting smart about artificial intelligence.

Three of our CSE faculty members have been honored by the College with awards:

• Dr. Jianjun Hu (first from left) won the Research Progress Award. This award recognizes particularly distinguished performance and accomplishments in the area of research by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member at the rank of Associate Professor in the College of Engineering and Computing.
• Dr. Yiannis Rekleitis (second) won the Young Investigator Research Award. This award recognizes a faculty member at the rank of Assistant Professor for his/her dedication and contributions to the research objectives of the College of Engineering and Computing. 
• Dr. Marco Valtorta (third) won the Joseph M. Biedenbach Distinguished Service Award. This award recognizes outstanding service through the College of Engineering and Computing.

Each year the Faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) award four Outstanding Senior Awards. This process is never easy given the many excellent and accomplished students in our program. This year, we have decided that the 2020 Computer Science and Engineering Outstanding Senior Awards go to:

• Samyuktha Comandur (first from left): Computer Science Outstanding Senior Award.
• Joshua Mulliken (second): Computer Information Systems Outstanding Senior Award.
• Andres Pineda (third): Computer Engineering Outstanding Senior Award.
• Caleb Conner (fourth). Computer Engineering SCSPE Award.

All awardees will be honored at the University Awards Day ceremony. In addition, Conner will be honored at a special awards banquet of the South Carolina Society of Professional Engineers.

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.

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 .