My Computer Science and Engineering Department

Michael Sechrest, Chris King, and Greg Croft, all alumni of the Computer Science & Engineering department, have been awarded the Scientific and Technical Academy Award for SpeedTree. Their software has been used to generate trees for movies such as Avatar, The Avengers, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Iron Man 3, Maleficent, and many others. Full press release: COLUMBIA, SC – SpeedTree®, the virtual vegetation software that has grown to dominate the worldwide visual effects and video game industries since its introduction in 2002, has received a Scientific and Technical Academy Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The announcement may be viewed at http://www.oscars.org/news/21-scientific-andtechnical-achievements-be-h…. A Technical Achievement Award (Academy Certificate) will be presented at a ceremony in Beverly Hills, California, on February 7, 2015, to the three developers of SpeedTree: IDV cofounders Michael Sechrest and Chris King, and Senior Software Architect Greg Croft. The Scientific and Technical awards ceremony, first held in 1931, will be followed on February 22 by the globally-televised Oscars® presentation. "The list of people who made this possible is literally in the thousands," said Mr. Sechrest. "For more than a decade, we have received support, encouragement and invaluable insights from the best artists and engineers in the visual effects and game development industries. These customers, along with the rest of the SpeedTree team, deserve tremendous credit." This isn't SpeedTree's first brush with the Oscars. SpeedTree was featured prominently in 2009's Avatar, which received nine Oscar® nominations and three Oscars. Since then, dozens more movies have added SpeedTree to their special effects, including Oscar-winning and -nominated films like The Great Gatsby and The Wolf of Wall Street, as well as blockbusters like The Avengers, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Iron Man 3, and Maleficent. "SpeedTree is one of countless technologies and innovations that have enriched the cinematic experience for more than a century," observed Mr. King. "We are incredibly humbled by the Academy's recognition of our work. We’re in amazing company." SpeedTree, the 3D tree/vegetation toolkit featured in a growing list of high-end feature films and the best video games since 2002, delivers amazingly natural real-time trees and plants for realtime projects, high-end animations and architectural fly-throughs. SpeedTree includes SpeedTree Modeler, which offers a unique hybrid of hand and procedural modeling options. SpeedTree was created by Interactive Data Visualization, Inc. (IDV), founded in 1999 to develop graphic and visualization tools for a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.speedtree.com. Coverage in The State Newspaper, CEC News. You can view their official press release.

The USC News has a profile of Irene Au, who graduated in 1994 from the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department. Our current CSE department is the result of a merger between the computer part of ECE and the Computer Science department.

She started at Netscape as an interaction designer, went on to Yahoo where she established the company’s user experience and design practice, then joined Google as head of design. With that foundation, Au built her career as a major strategist in the Web industry. Now 20 years after graduating from Carolina, she has taken another career leap as a partner for a venture capital firm, while also purposefully finding a place of balance in her life.

Her linkedin profile .

We are proud to announce that Sanjay Kumar Mahalingam's (MS 2014, Machine Learning and Evolution Laboratory , now at Stitch) team won the $250K Grand Prize at the Dreamforce Hackathon in San Francisco with their OmniKeyboard app. The contestants were given 42 hours build mobile apps that use Force.com, Heroku, or Force.com with Heroku. See videos below.

Award

OmniKeyboard Demo

Our very own Dr. Beer is interviewed for this SC ETV Radio show about her research in the use of robots to help the elderly.

If you have an older parent living on their own, would you feel more comfortable if you had a way to monitor them and their living conditions from afar? Our next guest says she hopes to start testing just such a system soon by installing robot monitors in assisted living centers in the Midlands of South Carolina. Mike Switzer interviews Dr. Jenay Beer.

You can find our more about her research by visiting her ART LAB.

Our Third Annual Gamecock Computing Symposium was a great success. We are proud to announce that the winner of the student poster sessions was Xiaochuan Fan. The second place went to Nick Stiffler. If you missed the activities, you can view a slideshow of the students' posters by clicking on the image at the right. Or, if you just want to jump to your poster, the thumbnails are below.

The Computer Science & Engineering department is one of 15 academic institutions to join the Building Recruiting And Inclusion for Diversity (BRAID) initiative, from the Anita Borg Institute, to increase the percentage of undergraduate majors that are female and students of color. Each of the departments will receive $30,000 per year for three years to help support their efforts which will leverage the experiences of other successful programs. These approaches include expanding outreach to high school teachers and students, modifying introductory CS courses to make them more appealing and less intimidating to students from underrepresented groups, building community among underrepresented students, and developing joint majors in areas like CS and biology to encourage interdisciplinary approaches. Anita Borg Institute press release.

JJ Shepherd's research on using video games to help people learn is being featured in this WACHFOX TV news story. He explains:

"We've created education games in the past, but we want to see how to make them better. And how to actually use this where you can augment classrooms, augment therapies. And basically, better people's lives through technology."

"People want to play games. People don't like to sit there, if they're learning a language, and go through flashcards one after the other. They want to do something exciting and something fun. And if you put together those actions with the message - in other words, what you're trying to teach with it- you end up teaching people and motivating them at the same time. " says Shepherd, a computer science instructor at the University of South Carolina.

Dr. Nelakuditi and his ARENA research lab have received an NSF grant award for their project on "Infrastructure Mobility". This research is exploring how to build and program mobile WiFi access points, on wheels, that change position to improve signal reception. Imagine a small robot that moves within the false ceiling of a large building to provide better signal to its users. Abstract

Mobile computing has traditionally implied mobile clients connected to a static infrastructure. This project breaks away from this point of view and envisions the possibility of injecting mobility into infrastructure. The PIs envision a WiFi access point on wheels that moves to optimize desired performance metrics. Movements need not necessarily be all around the floor of a home or office, neither do they have to operate on batteries, or connect wirelessly to the Internet. At homes, they could remain tethered to power and Ethernet outlets while moving in small areas (perhaps under the study table). In offices of the future, perhaps APs could move on tracks installed on top of false ceilings. The cloud could perhaps coordinate their mobility based on how users move within the environment, or how traffic and interferences change in the network. This project explores the viability of this vision and will present thorough measurements from various home/office environments. Initial measurements with moving WiFi APs in residential and enterprise environments exhibit promise. Analysis finds that complex multipath characteristics of indoor environments cause large fluctuations in link quality even when the antenna moves in the scale of one foot. Mobile APs can leverage this spatial variation by relocating to a pixel that is strong for its own clients and yet weak from its interferers. When multiple APs are coordinated by a central controller, the motion paths of the APs need to be jointly planned to optimize global network parameters. Heuristics will be developed that first assume the knowledge of AP locations; based on the outcome of this heuristic, the assumption might be relaxed. The project will also consider client mobility and how APs adapt to them, perhaps based on the quality of channel changes available from channel state information (CSI) in today's WiFi cards. If mobility proves to offer additional gains despite the advances in current technologies, robotic wireless networking might become an important and exciting direction of the future.

PhD student Karina Liles has been named a GEM Affiliate Fellow by the the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science. GEM's mission is to broaden participation of minorities in STEM fields at the graduate level. Liles works with Dr. Beer in the ART LAB and is studying the use of robots as teaching assistants for middle school educators. As reported by CEC news article

A computer science and engineering doctoral student at The University of South Carolina recently received an honor that will hopefullyplace her among the country’s most desirable engineering graduates in the future. The National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, Incorporated named Karina Liles a GEM Affiliate Fellow. GEM’s mission is to broaden participation of minorities in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields at the master’s and doctoral levels. The national organization assists companies throughout the United States in providing graduate fellowships to minority students from communities where such talent is largely untapped. Liles is from Bennettsville, South Carolina. She received her undergraduate degree in computer science from Spelman College and then earned a Master of Education in Educational Technology from USC before beginning her doctoral study in the USC College of Engineering and Computing. “In high school, I began developing computer games for my three year old sister to help her learn her letters and colors, “ said Liles. “I quickly realized that I enjoyed working with computers and had a talent for it. I knew I needed a formal education which is where my true passion for computers, robots and technologies blossomed.” Liles now works alongside Dr. Jenay Beer in the Assisted Robotics and Technology (ART) Lab in the Department of Computer Science andEngineering. Her research is focused on creating and using robots as teaching assistants for middle school educators. She is also assisting with the programming of a robot to help music therapists who work with children with special learning needs. “We are certainly not trying to replace classroom teachers or therapists but rather, we hope the robots can assist these professionals. Students of all ages seem to be interested in the robots and respond to them with enthusiasm. We hope that helps in the learning process.”

UofSC news has an article, Going into Business, about Krit, a new startup by two of our Seniors, Andrew Askins and Bill Brower, along with USC alumnus Austin Price. Krit is a is a visual project management tool built around the design process. Go try it out and follow them on twitter at @kritapp.

Our Computational Biology Research lab, headed by Dr. Valafar, has been awarded a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH for their project entitled "South Carolina IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (SC INBRE) Bioinformatics."

We would like to welcome our newest assistant professor, Dr. Ioannis Rekleitis to the department. He was previously at McGill University, in Canada, and before that he was a visiting fellow at the Canadian Space Agency. His research focuses on mobile robotics, and in particular multi-robot cooperative localization, mapping, exploration and coverage. He is in office 3A54 and will be teaching CSCE 774 "Robotics Systems" this semester.

We would like to congratulate our very own Dr. Huhns for being elected a AAAI Fellow. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Fellows program was started in 1990 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions---usually over at least a ten-year period---to the field of artificial intelligence. Dr. Huhns is recognized "For significant contributions to the field of multiagent systems and its applications in information management and service-oriented computing."

Dr. Tong has been recognized as a 2014 Breakthrough Star and is featured in this @UofSC story where she describes her ongoing research on facial expression recognition.

If we are successful, computers could be used to recognize signs of road rage or intoxication in automobile drivers or to help teach autistic children how to interpret and respond appropriately to facial cues.

WISTV news has featured Dr. Farkas in a story about the security of local government websites.

These protocols provide authentication which is based on the digital certificate for the server. As well as agreeing on a cyber suite that can be used to protect the communication, provide confidentiality and integrity.

Last week, three of our cyber defense team members competed in an international online contest, the US Cyber Challenge's CyberQuests 2014. This was an individual event, and each of our students placed in the top 100. Although the totals aren't announced yet for this year, last year, more than 1400 students competed in this contest. Congratulations to: Yasemin Pak: 19th place, Alex Cummings: 20th place, Catharine West: 71st place.