My Computer Science and Engineering Department

Jacqueline Schellberg, an undergraduate student in the CSE department, has received a competitive 2022 undergraduate scholarship from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S). She will be honored by MTT-S in June 2022 in Denver, CO.

Only 10 to 11 MTT-S undergraduate scholarships are presented worldwide each year. Past years' fellows came from Australia, Canada, China, Malaysia, Russia, and the USA. For the USA, the scholars are from top institutions, such as the University of California Los Angeles, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, University of Washington, University of Maryland - College Park, Princeton University, etc.

This undergraduate scholarship will support Schellberg's project related to handheld, through-obstruction millimeter-wave imaging on 5G smart devices. The project could enable beyond-traditional-vision applications, such as non-intrusive package inspection and mobile physical security. She has already published a conference article related to the project at the ACM UbiComp 2021.

Schellberg is a rising junior student at USC in Computer Engineering. Her research interests include millimeter-wave imaging and RF motion tracking. She is also the recipient of many other honors and awards, including the ACM UbiComp 2021 Best Poster Honorable Mention, Spring 2022 Magellan Scholar Award, and was invited to participate in the 2021 Grace Hopper Celebration Conference from the CSE department.

Schellberg works under the supervision of Dr. Sanjib Sur, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering.

The IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S) is a transnational society with more than 10,500 members and 190 chapters worldwide. This society promotes the advancement of microwave theory and its applications, including RF, microwave, millimeter-wave, and terahertz technologies.

We report that six of our faculty members have received research awards. They are:

• Yan Tong from Office of Naval Research (ONR)/DOD for "Reliable Perception for Unmanned Maritime Systems"
• Jason Bakos from Savannah River National Lab/DOE for "A Unified Machine Learning Framework for Corrosion Surveillance"
• Amit Sheth 
  • from BMW for "Proactive and Automated Material Control -- BMW" Co-PI Forest Agostinelli
  • from SC Department of Commerce for "Proactive and Automated Material Control -- SC Dept of Commerce" Co-PI Forest Agostinelli
  • from College of Charleston/NASA EPSCoR for "Augmenting Physics-Based Design and Multi-Physics Based Manufacturing with Data Driven Models to Manufacture Advanced Composites Structures with Automated Fiber Placement"
• Srihari Nelakuditi from NSF for "REU Supplement for MRI: Acquisition of Omnipercipient Chamber for Gathering Ground Truth and Enabling Research on Smart and Connected Things"
• Homay Valafar from Pennington Biomedical Research Center/Louisiana State University for "The Smartwatch Pilot Project"

We would like to congratulate Dr. Amit Sheth. He was recently ranked by Research.com as one of the Top Computer Scientists in the world. More specifically, he was ranked:

• #80 in World
• #50 in the U.S.

with a 111 H-Index, 47,049 citations, and 581 publications.

For context, Amit was ranked close to notable Computer Scientists such as Turing Award winner Yan Lecun (#76, #46) and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human AI Institute Li Fei-Fei (#74, #45)

Congratulations to Amit for this well-deserved recognition. We are proud to have one of the world’s Top Computer Scientists in the CSE Department and leading the UofSC AI Institute.

We are proud to announce that Dr. Sanjib Sur has received an NSF Career Award for his project titled "Vision and Learning Augmented D-Band Networking and Imaging".

This project aims to enable the practical adoption of D-band mmWave networks and applications by solving the fundamental challenges in deployment, link adaptation, coordination, and unified networking-imaging. Specifically, the project explores an optical vision and deep learning augmented paradigm by thoroughly understanding the physical properties of the D-band channel, building measurement-driven empirical and learning models, and designing practical, real-time systems. Successful execution of this project would enable the following. (1) A framework for optimal deployment and a “what-if” analysis tool to help optimize the cost and benefits of D-band deployment in both indoor and outdoor environments. (2) Link adaptation and coordination protocols that significantly minimize latency and maximize throughput and efficiency for scalable D-band networking. (3) A unified networking-imaging protocol that reduces disruptions to the throughput and latency and overcomes challenges with the channel specularity to enable high-resolution D-band images. The project will design, build, and empirically validate the proposed systems in a D-band testbed, and th

We are proud to announce that Dr. Qiang Zeng has received an NSF Career Award for his project titled "Towards Secure and Usable IoT Authentication Under Constraints".

The project seeks to improve IoT authentication and deliver novel approaches, algorithms, techniques, and systems through the following thrusts. Thrust 1: Authentication for UI-Constrained Devices. A protocol that supports mutual authentication, over an insecure wireless channel, to establish trust between a UI-constrained device and the user to support authentication for heterogeneous IoT devices. Thrust 2: Authentication for Distance-Constrained Devices. A highly usable approach enables secure authentication between an IoT device and the user even when they are multiple meters apart, which has applications ranging from drone delivery to ride sharing. Thrust 3: Authentication for Operation-Constrained Devices. For traditional objects retrofitted with zero-UI sensor nodes, AI-assisted implicit authentication enables recognizing a user without requiring any explicit authentication operations. In sum, the research seeks to substantially advance IoT authentication and foster a variety of IoT applications.

Dr. Sanjib Sur is excited to share that their MilliDrone poster by Ian C. McDowell and Rahul Bulusu, both CSE undergraduates, has won the Best Poster Runner-Up Award at the ACM HotMobile'22. Ian and Rahul did a fantastic job pitching the poster!

We congratulate the following Computer Science/Engineering undergraduate students for receiving a Magellan Scholar Award for Spring 2022.

• Ian McDowell and Rahul Bulusu with the project "Drone-based Multimodal Surveying for Outdoor 5G Millimeter-Wave Picocell Placement"
• Cassidy Carter for "Detection and discovery of structural motifs in crystal materials using quotient graphs"
• James Seekings for "Attention Tracking for Intuitive Robot Tutors using Neuromorphic Computing"
• Edward Sitar for "5G Millimeter-Wave Enabled At-Home Human Silhouette Estimation"
• Corinne Smith for "A network of UAV deployable sensor packages for monitoring hydraulic parameters during severe weather events"
• Lexington Whalen for "The Wordification Project"

We are to announce the following research awards received by CSE department faculty:

Dr. Yan Tong received an award from Clemson University/SCRA for the project "Modernizing South Carolina Manufacturing Assets to Enable Industry 4.0"

Dr. Chin-Tser Huang received an award from Clemson/USDOT for the project "A Machine Learning-Assisted Framework for Determination of Performance Degradation Causes and Selection of Channel Switching Strategy in Vehicular Networks"

Dr. Casey Cole received an award from the US Department of Education (USDE) for the project "University of South Carolina – Transition to Teaching Residency"

Collaborative project between the AI Institute, College of Nursing, and Prisma Health develops virtual assistant to facilitate mental health care.

CSE alumnus De’Aira Bryant is featured in the following Amazon Science article "How De’Aira Bryant found her path into robotics":

The computer scientist recently finished her second internship at Amazon, where she worked on a new way to estimate the human expression on faces in images.

Dr. Jijun Tang has received a research award for the project "Algorithmic Analysis of Cell Slide Images Using Machine Learning" from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH.

Dr. Homay Valafar has received the following research awards:

• “South Carolina IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (SC INBRE) - Bioinformatics Core (BIPP) - Year 2 of 5”  from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH
• “Targeting important behaviors for weight loss through the use of social gaming and points: The Social Pounds Off Digitally (Social POD) study” from the National Institute of Diabetes & Digestive & Kidney Diseases (NIDDK)/NIH.

Dr. Amit Sheth has received the following research awards:

• "RII Track 2 FEC: Enabling Factory to Factory (F2F) Networking for Future Manufacturing" from the National Science Foundation (NSF)
• "Actionable Sensemaking Tools for Curating and Authenticating Information in the Presence of Misinformation during Crises" from Ohio State University (OSU)/NSF
• "Improving mosquito control methodologies through development of technology-driven traps and artificial intelligence guided detection of mosquito breeding habitats" from the National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases.

We would like to welcome Dr. Vignesh Narayanan as a new Assistant Professor to our Computer Science and Engineering department. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Missouri University of Science and Technology (2017), a M.Tech.in Control Systems from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra, India (2014) and a B.Tech. Electrical and Electronics Engineering, SASTRA University, India, (2012).

His research is in the areas of dynamical systems and networks, data science and learning theory, and computational neuroscience. Visit his homepage to learn more.

We welcome Dr. Christian O’Reilly as a new Assistant Professor to our Computer Science and Engineering department. Dr. O'Reilly received his B.Ing (electrical eng.; 2007), his M.Sc.A. (biomedical eng.; 2011), and his Ph.D. (biomedical eng.; 2012) from the École Polytechnique de Montréal.

His main interests are related to better understanding the brain across spatial and temporal scales in order to address complex neurodevelopmental issues such as autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. The methods he uses include analytical techniques (e.g., EEG source reconstruction, functional connectivity) and modeling (e.g., point neurons, morphologically-detailed neurons, neural masses), as well as the combination of these two approaches through Bayesian model-driven analyses. He is further interested in novel ways to empower the study of neuroscience through AI and to empower AI through biologically inspired neural networks