52apps is a new company formed by some of our students that is building one new app every week based on users' ideas. They appeared on the local news tonight. Check our their homepage every week to see what new app they built this week, and lend them your support.
Dr. Jason Bakos has received a grant from the state EPSCoR office under their Scientific Advocate Network for the purchase of equipment, like the device shown here, to support his research on Power Efficiency Instrumentation for DSP-Based Supercomputing.
Our objective is to construct a general-purpose heterogeneous parallel computer comprised mostly of these DSPs, and to develop the runtime libraries necessary for them to execute existing scientific codes. This would allow for field portable teraflop-class parallel computers without the need to rewrite application software.
We would like to welcome Dr. Gabriel Terejanu who has joined the department as an assistant professor. He comes to us from the University of Texas, Austin where he was a postdoctoral researcher working on Bayesian model validation in the Center for Predictive Engineering and Computational Sciences (PECOS). His research interests are in the area of uncertainty quantification, information fusion, and decision making under uncertainty.
He has already moved into office 3A50 and will be teaching CSCE 758: Probabilistic System Analysis in the Fall.
Rishi Patel, a CIS major, along with two other USC students, Ian Castrovinci and Dennis Lopez, have just released CloudShouts. CloudShouts is an iphone, and soon to be Android, app that lets you post messages, photos, and have conversations with other people in the same geographic "cloud". Right now there is a USC cloud, along with 10 other University clouds along the Eastern seaboard. So, go download the free iphone app.
From their about page: "CloudShouts was founded by three University of South Carolina students that noticed inefficiencies within their college community. Inspired by foursquare and Localmind, the team strives to solve these inefficiencies by designing their own community-sharing platform. The future of communication is changing fast, and the CloudShouts team is building it."
Dr. Yan Tong, a Computer Science and Engineering assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, College of Engineering and Computing, has received the National Science Foundation's CAREER award. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is NSF's most prestigious award in support of the early career-development activities of junior faculty.
The award will support her research on facial recognition, that is, on developing algorithms that can detect whether a person in a video is smiling, angry, confused, etc. This work is innovative in that it blends both visual and auditory information so the software uses both what it sees and what it hears in the video to determine how the person's face looks like. In more detail:
This project develops a unified multimodal and multialgorithm fusion framework to recognize facial action units such as “lip corner raiser” and “lips apart”, which describe complex and rich facial behaviors. This framework systematically captures the inherent interactions between the visual and audio channels in a global context of human perception of facial behavior. Advanced machine learning techniques are developed to integrate these relationships together with uncertainties associated with various visual and audio measurements in the fusion framework to achieve a robust and accurate understanding of facial activity. It is these coordinated and consistent interactions that produce a meaningful facial display. The basic research in this unified fusion framework can foster advanced computer vision and machine learning technologies with applications across a wide range of fields varying from entertainment to psychiatry to human-computer interaction. An integration of research and education promotes cutting-edge training on human-computer interactions to K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students, especially encourages the participation of women in engineering and computing.The NSF CAREER program recognizes and supports the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. CAREER awardees are selected on the basis of creative career-development plans that effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution and department.
Dr. Barry Markovsky (Sociology) and Dr. Jose M Vidal have received and NSF award for their research project "Web-based Tools for Developing and Accessing Sociological Theory." This project brings together researchers from the Sociology department and the Computer Science and Engineering department in order to design, implement and test a web-based system for developing, improving and disseminating sociological theories across all areas of the discipline.
“I see it as a cross between stackoverflow and the wikipedia, but targeted towards scientists” said Dr. Vidal. “Both of those sites are showing us how an online community can be formed and function successfully to aggregate the knowledge of many individuals. However, they are not without their drawbacks: stackoverflow enforces a very strick question-and-answers format, while the wikipedia actively discourages scientists from contributing on the topics they have the most expertise (their own research). Our system will try to overcome these limitations.” The researchers hope to build a system what will facilitate the development of improved Sociological, and later scientific, theories using proven incentives and knowledge aggregation methods.
Third year Computer Science and Engineering student Jonathan Kilby was recently awarded one of 20 Bridging Scholarships for Study Abroad in Japan. The Bridging Scholarship is a national award that offers $2500 for a semester-long study program or $4000 for a full academic year, for undergraduate students. It is coordinated by the Association of Teachers of Japanese and funded by private foundations and major U.S. corporations.
Jonathan’s interest in Japanese culture and his work toward a Japanese minor influenced his decision to apply for the scholarship, and his strong application helped him beat out a large number of other applicants. Next spring, Jonathan will participate in the USC Global Exchange program to Kansai University in Osaka, Japan, where he will enhance his Japanese skills by taking language and culture classes. He hopes to intern with Sony at one of their Japanese facilities, paving the way for his ultimate goal, to one day live and work in Japan.
For more information about the Bridging Scholarship for Study Abroad in Japan, please visit http://www.aatj.org/atj/studyabroad/scholarships.html.
To find out more about the USC Global Exchange to Kansai University or about USC education abroad opportunities in general, please visit www.studyabroad.sc.edu.
The Free Times newspaper has an article on Desperate Fishwives, an educational game being developed by Dr. Buell, Dr. Heidi Rae Cooley from Media Arts, and their students. The game aims to teach high school and college students the realities of life in a 17th Century English village by having the player take on the role of various village characters.
John Hodgson, a USC computer science graduate student writing the game’s code, takes things a step further, explaining how immersion in an experiential environment could potentially prove more effective than more traditional classroom approaches. “For students who have never lived in a 17th century English village, which is all of them, how will they know what that experience was like? Well, they can have a teacher tell them, and that might convince some; they’ll be able to regurgitate it on a test. Or we can create an experience about what it might have been like. By playing the game they learn the rules — what’s acceptable, what’s not, what people did what things. Nothing is actually told to them, but because of the way the game is designed they have to accept that reality.”Update: The USC news also has an article on this research.
