My Computer Science and Engineering Department

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.

The paper titled  "Expressive and Flexible Simulation of Information Spread Strategies in Social Networks Using Planning," by Bharath Muppasani, Vignesh Narayanan, Biplav Srivastava, Michael N. Huhns, has been selected for the Best Demo Award at AAAI-24. AAAI is a top AI conference and was held over the past week.

The work enables detailed simulations of opinion evolution and strategic interventions using planning. Designed to enhance human-AI collaboration, the framework supports the creation of strategies that facilitate a deeper understanding and informed engagement with the opinion evolution in networks. It was selected from 30 demos, which themselves were selected from a pool of 97 submissions. You can read the poster and watch the video presentation.

We congratulate our three graduate students who took first place in a national data science competition held on January 26-28th this year: Sankalp Jajee, Gaurav Kumar, and Supriya Nayanala.

This competition has been organized by Big Data Health Science Center annually for the past five years. This year, the competition featured 30 teams from 17 universities in the US: University of South Carolina, Arkansas State University, Boston University, Central Washington University, College of Charleston, Dartmouth College, Duke University, Louisiana State University, Middle Tennessee State University, Minnesota University-Duluth, Oklahoma State University, University of Louisville, University of Memphis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of West Florida, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University. Read more about this event and our students' accomplishments.

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 2024 Computer Science and Engineering Outstanding Senior Awards go to:

• Anna Michelitch: Computer Science Outstanding Senior Award
• Musa Azeem: Computer Engineering Outstanding Senior Award
• Valerie Duffey: Computer Engineering SCSPE Award
• Terry Hancock: Computer Information Systems Outstanding Senior Award

awardees will be honored at the University Awards Day ceremony.

University of South Carolina is collaborating with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute Consortium to develop science-based and empirically backed guidelines and standards for AI measurement and policy, laying the foundation for AI safety across the world. This will help ready the U.S. to address the capabilities of the next generation of AI models or systems, from frontier models to new applications and approaches, with appropriate risk management strategies. Please see the announcement, the members list which is the who's who in the nation, quotes from participants, and the scope of the consortium.

The original members participating from the University are: Engineering - Csilla Farkas, Michael Huhns, Vignesh Narayanan, Amit Sheth, Biplav Srivastava (PI), Dezhi Wu; Journalism - Brett Robertson; Law - Bryant Walker Smith.

Jessica Bradshaw and Caitlin Hudac in the Department of Psychology are collaborating with Christian O’Reilly, a computer science and engineering faculty member, to search for potential patterns and markers of ASD and more. Read the full article here.

Checkout this list of new AI-related courses in the College of Arts and Sciences, which you can take as electives.

Imagine driving at night in heavy fog without having to worry about not seeing the car or a pedestrian in front of you. Or a physician monitoring a patient’s rehabilitation without any visits to the doctor’s office.

Computer Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Sanjib Sur’s research team is working toward designing and implementing innovative systems and technologies with advanced wireless and mobile infrastructure to help improve individuals’ health, safety and convenience.  Read the full story here.

Please join us in celebrating Dr. Huhns' recent recognition by receiving the 2023 Technical Community on the Internet (TCI) Distinguished Service Award. Dr. Huhns has been an influential member of our CSE family as well as an influential member of the broader scientific and engineering community. I have certainly learned a lot from him during my tenure at USC and can personally attest to the accuracy of this award. This is a well-deserved recognition. Well done, and we are proud to have you as a colleague. 

Portia Plante knew she wanted to teach computer science from an early age, but her path to academia was not straightforward.

“My mom was an elementary school teacher, so I grew up sitting in her classroom all the time. When I got older, I would teach the kids how to make websites,” Plante says.

At that time, the demand for teachers in Canada, where Plante spent the first part of her life, was low. So, she chose to pursue a stable career in the software development industry. After earning a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, she accepted a role at Microsoft as a program manager, which brought her to the United States.

Read the full story here.

The following papers written by our AI Institute members were accepted for presentation at the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing:

• Counter Turing Test (CT^2): AI-Generated Text Detection is Not as Easy as You May Think - Introducing AI Detectability Index (ADI). Megha Chakraborty, S.M Towhidul Islam Tonmoy, S M Mehedi Zaman, Shreya Gautam, Tanay Kumar, Krish Sharma, Niyar R Barman, Chandan Gupta, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Amit P. Sheth, Amitava Das.
• The Troubling Emergence of Hallucination in Large Language Models - An Extensive Definition, Quantification, and Prescriptive Remediations. Vipula Rawte, Swagata Chakroborty, Agnibh Pathak, Anubhav Sarkar, S.M Towhidul Islam Tonmoy, Aman Chadha, Amit P. Sheth, Amitava Das.
• FACTIFY3M: A benchmark for multimodal fact verification with explainability through 5W Question-Answering. Megha Chakraborty, Khushbu Pahwa, Anku Rani, Shreyas Chatterjee, Dwip Dalal, Harshit Dave, Ritvik G, Preethi Gurumurthy, Adarsh Ashok Mahor, Samahriti Mukherjee, Aditya Pakala, Ishan Paul, Janvita Reddy, Arghya Sarkar, Kinjal Sensharma, Aman Chadha, Amit P. Sheth, Amitava Das.

The acceptance of these papers at EMNLP, a leading conference in NLP, is a testament to the high quality of research being conducted at the AI Institute. The papers address important and challenging problems in NLP, and their findings have the potential to significantly advance the state of the art in this field.

"I am passionate about computer science because I can use my skills to work on new and beneficial applications for society. In the SyReX lab under Dr. Sanjib Sur, I study the applications of 5G networks and devices for pedestrian/vehicle detection to enhance the functionality of autonomous vehicles. In this case, my research contributions can help implement a system that would reduce the loss of life due to traffic accidents." 

Pictured here: A deep learning-based approach for developing a system to detect pedestrians based on camera (top) and millimeter wave (red circuit board) data. Low visibility is simulated within the plastic cube using a fog machine.

Read the rest here.