My Computer Science and Engineering Department

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.

This year the students in the Senior Capstone course developed 35 apps either for industrial clients, for USC members, or for themselves. There were:

• 14 web applications using technologies such as Django, node, express, Angular, react, .NET, dialogflow, firebase, AWS, Unity.
• 19 mobile apps (17 run on Android, and 2 on iOS) using iOnic, react native, flutter, firebase, augmented reality.
• 2 desktop games built with Unity

You can watch video demonstrations and see screenshots of all the apps right now! If you are interested in having students build an app for you, note that we are looking for clients for next year.

Dr. Chin-Tser Huang provides expert opinon on cybersecurity issues in an article on USA Today: Could the NFL draft be hacked? Virtual draft poses new cybersecurity challenges, also on cbs sports.

We proudly report that Kevin Gagnon has received the Algernon Sydney Sullivan award. This honor recognizes college students of noble character who have acted as humble servants to others by putting service of others before self-interest. The award is presented each year by more than 70 colleges and universities within the American South. At the University of South Carolina, the award is presented each year to the most outstanding senior female and senior male student. You can learn more about Kevin here and here.

Our graduate students are busy organizing workshops. Ugur Kursuncu is the contact organizer for CySoc2020: International Workshop on Cyber Social Threat, and Manas Gaur is in the contact organizing committee for KiML2020: International Workshop on Knowledge-infused Mining and Learning.

The deadline to apply for the CSE Department’s John H. Fain Scholarship has been extended to June 1. This scholarship is for upper division Computer Information Systems (CIS) and Computer Science (CS) majors planning to become entrepreneurs. Interested applicants must thoroughly read criteria for the award; if they meet the initial criteria, then they must complete and submit the John H. Fain Scholarship Application by June 1. View criteria and application here

Hunter Damron, a junior in CS, has received an honorable mention for the Computer Research Association’s 2020 Undergraduate Researcher Award. Read the full story here.

Dr. Jason Bakos has received a research award from the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL)/DOE for his project titled "A Unified Machine Learning Framework for Corrosion Surveillance and Quality Control in Additive Manufacturing."

We are proud to announce that Dr. Ioannis Rekleitis has received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for his project titled "Enabling Autonomy via Enhanced Situational Awareness for Underwater Robotics". This is the NSF's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. See also a more detailed article about this.

Click below to see more photos from our Faculty and Graduate Student Appreciation Breakfast held on Valentine’s Day.

We congratulate our CSE Ph.D. students: Alireza Nasiri, Jing Jin and Steph-Yves Louis from the Machine Learning and Evolution Lab directed by Dr. Hu for winning the second place and $2,000 prize in the Big Data Health Science Case Competition organized by the UofSC National Big Data Health Science Conference, Columbia, SC February 7th-9th 2020.

The objective of the case competition is to develop a machine learning or data analytic tool that will accurately identify the culprit chemical for a given patient. The provided dataset has a list of 311 chemicals and 79 corresponding signs and sympotoms and a list of ~1,000,000 patient records. There are total 19 teams from around the nation. The Big Data Case Competition is intended to provide enthusiastic teams of graduate and senior undergraduate students with the opportunity to apply their knowledge to the analysis of big datasets in healthcare. Participating teams will be given the same business problem, datasets and access to software to solve a challenging problem using a data analytics approach. Each participating team will analyze the case and data sets provided by the sponsoring company. During this period, the teams must identify the most prominent issues facing the company and develop a strategy to address these key issues in order to help companies achieve their goals. Team members will work together to present their methods and analysis results at the Big Data Health Science Conference. A panel of industry and academic experts judge the presentations based on teams’ use of the full analytics process, from framing the problem to methodology selection, data use, model building and innovation.

Blakeley Hoffman Payne, Computer Science 2017, is featured in the UofSC News article Getting smart about artificial intelligence.

Three of our CSE faculty members have been honored by the College with awards:

• Dr. Jianjun Hu (first from left) won the Research Progress Award. This award recognizes particularly distinguished performance and accomplishments in the area of research by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member at the rank of Associate Professor in the College of Engineering and Computing.
• Dr. Yiannis Rekleitis (second) won the Young Investigator Research Award. This award recognizes a faculty member at the rank of Assistant Professor for his/her dedication and contributions to the research objectives of the College of Engineering and Computing. 
• Dr. Marco Valtorta (third) won the Joseph M. Biedenbach Distinguished Service Award. This award recognizes outstanding service through the College of Engineering and Computing.

Congratulations to all! We are proud of your phenomenal contributions to the Department, College, University, and professional communities. In the coming days, we will announce these awards on our website with some pictures of the winners accepting their awards at the CEC Faculty Meeting. You can view more photos of the event.

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 2020 Computer Science and Engineering Outstanding Senior Awards go to:

• Samyuktha Comandur (first from left): Computer Science Outstanding Senior Award.
• Joshua Mulliken (second): Computer Information Systems Outstanding Senior Award.
• Andres Pineda (third): Computer Engineering Outstanding Senior Award.
• Caleb Conner (fourth). Computer Engineering SCSPE Award.

All awardees will be honored at the University Awards Day ceremony. In addition, Conner will be honored at a special awards banquet of the South Carolina Society of Professional Engineers You can find more detailed coverage on the College News page. .

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

• Stephen Baione: Ensemble of Many Weak Defenses: Defending Deep Neural Networks Against Adversarial Attacks
• Blake Edwards: Multi-stage Compression of Deep Neural Networks through Pruning and Knowledge Distillation
• Shayon Ghoshroy: Deep Residual Learning for Computational Identification of Amino Acids
• Clio Lang: Is the Lesson Learned? A Study on Dissemination of Fake News in 2016 and 2020 Presidential Elections
• Christian Loftis: Genetic programming based Symbolic Regression for Material Thermal Conductivity Prediction
• Tien Nguyen: How Well Can the Robot Swim: Quantifying the Performance of Aqua_Nav
• Julian Rachele: Expanding upon REDCRAFT and REDCAT for Analyzing and Characterizing Proteins from Residual Dipolar Couplings
• Naga Venkata Sai Satti: MassBLAST: An Automated and Convenient Webtool for Genome-Wide Sequence Analysis

We congratulate Hunter Damron for receiving an Honorable Mention for the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for 2020. This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.