My Computer Science and Engineering Department

We welcome Dr. Rasha Karakchi as a new Instructor for the CSE Department. She received her PhD in 2020 from UofSC. She will be teaching CSCE 240: Advanced Programming Techniques and CSCE 313: Embedded Systems this semester.

We would like to welcome Dr. Qi Zhang who joins us this Fall as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Zhang received his PhD. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2020. His research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence and reinforcement learning. You can learn more about it in his research website. He will be teaching "CSCE 580: Artificial Intelligence" this semester.

We welcome Dr. Biplav Srivastava as a new Professor in the CSE Department. Dr. Srivastava comes to us after two decades at IBM in the roles of a Research Scientist, Distinguished Data Scientist and Master Inventor. His research interests are in Neuro-Symbolic Computing, Collaborative Assistance, Trusted AI, and Applications to Smart City using Open and Sensor Data. Learn more about him at his research website. He will be teaching "CSCE 771: Computer Processing of Natural Language" this semester.

We would like to welcome Dr. Forest Agostinelli to the CSE department. He joins us as an Assistant Professor this semester. Dr. Agostinelli received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. His research interests are in the areas of deep learning, reinforcement learning, search, with applications to the natural sciences. You can learn more about it at his research website. He will be teaching "CSCE 790: Deep Reinforcement Learning and Search" this semester.

Dr. Sheth and Dr. Valafar presented the following videos for the CRA Virtual Conference 2020.

• Computational Modeling, Homayoun Valafar
• Monitoring Health & Social Impact of Policy Decisions, Amit Sheth.

Dr. Lannan Luo has received a research grant from the Ntional Science Foundation (NSF) for her project titled "Semantics-Oriented Binary Code Analysis Learning from Recent Advances in Deep Learning". See abstract here

Dr. Jason Bakos and co-PI Austin Downey (Mechanical Engineering) have received a research award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their project "Machine Learning on the Edge for Real-Time Microsecond State Estimation of High-Rate Dynamic Events." See abstract here.

See this news article about Dr. Hu's research in deep learning for materials discovery.

Dr. Qiang Zeng has received a research award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his research project "Hardware-in-the-Loop and Remotely-Accessible/Configurable/Programmable Internet of Things (IoT) Testbeds". See abstract here.

UofSC Big Data Health Science Center (BDHSC) – one of the recent UofSC Excellence Initiatives – have been awarded a $1,252,550 grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop a state-wide data-driven system to fight COVID-19 in South Carolina. The multidisciplinary investigation team for this project are led by Dr. Xiaoming Li and Bankole Olatosi and includes BDHSC faculty members from the Arnold School of Public Health, College of Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering and Computing (Neset Hikmet and Jianjun Hu), and School of Medicine-Columbia. Dr. Hu will be responsible for helping the development of the mobile app, databases, and data analytics. Read more details at https://www.sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/public_health/about/news/2020…

We are proud to announce that Abby Delnoce has won the DoD SMART Scholarship. You can read her full story in the article: CSE student becomes fourth Gamecock to ever receive DoD SMART Scholarship.

Manas Gaur (Ph.D. student @ AI Institute) gave an invited talk on "Knowledge-infused Learning for Healthcare". Watch it here.

Dr. Sanjib Sur and Dr. Srihari Nelakuditi, and their co-authors have acquired funding from the UofSC Office of Research for their ASPIRE proposal titled "In-Home Mobility Impairment Assessment and Feedback using 5G Wireless Signals and Voice-Assistants".

We congratulate the following Computer Science undergraduate students for receiving a Magellan Scholar Award for Summer-Fall 2020.

• William Hobbs: Applying Artificial Neural Networks to Computer-Based Dyslexia Screenings
• Niharika Pandala: Computational Modeling of the Structure of SARS Coronavirus Nonstructural Protein 1
• Ishrat Singh: Low-latency Nonlinear Time Series Analysis and Prediction Using Multilayer Perceptrons

We are happy to announce that Liang Zhao has received a SPARC Graduate Research grant for work on "Scene Text Detection in Historical Marine Corp Videos" under Dr. Song's supervision.

At the AI Institute of the University of South Carolina, my colleagues and I have processed more than 700 million social media posts since the beginning of March and more than 700,000 news articles about the COVID-19 pandemic. We are monitoring these information sources to capture the evolving human experience in the U.S. during the pandemic. We have found troubling indications of a growing mental health crisis and an increase in social ills such as substance abuse and gender-based violence.

From "We’re measuring online conversation to track the social and mental health issues surfacing during the coronavirus pandemic" by Dr. Sheth.