My Computer Science & Engineering Department

We are proud to announce that De’Aira Bryant, a Senior undergraduate student working in Dr. Jenay Beer’s Assistive Robotics and Technology Lab (ARTLab), has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Fellowship. The fellowship provides financial support of $34,000/year for any 3 year period over the next 5 years. De’Aira’s selection as an NSF Graduate Fellowship awardee is a tremendous accomplishment. Congratulations De’Aira!!

This NY Times article describes research by Dr Wenyuan Xu and colleages at the University of Michigan into how to maliciously control a phone's accelerometer using sound waves.

In their paper, the researchers describe how they added fake steps to a Fitbit fitness monitor and played a "malicious" music file from the speaker of a smartphone to control the phone’s accelerometer. That allowed them to interfere with software that relies on the smartphone, like an app used to pilot a radio-controlled toy car.

The video below explains their research.

Dr. Song Wang has received a research grant award from the National Science Foundation for his project entitled "Algorithm Development for Reconstruction of Design Elements". This is an interdisciplinary study between archaeology and computer science to develop and disseminate a program that can identify the full artistic design from fragmented cultural heritage objects. Specifically, it will develop the algorithm to identify the designs of the carved wooden paddles of the Southeastern Woodlands from unearthed pottery sherds.

Dr. Marco Valtorta has received an award from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to work on the Co-Arg: Cogent Argumentation System with Crowd Elicitation project, lead by George Mason University. This project aims to improve the quality of intelligence analysis reports. Dr. Valtorta's work will develop a probabilistic reasoning component to complement the Wigmorean argument structures used as the main representation in the Co-Arg project. Argument structures will be translated into Bayesian networks, thus uncovering subtleties and complexities, such as evidence-induced dependencies, synergistic effects, and antagonistic effects, which will be resolved by analysts or via crowdsourcing.

Dr. Gabriel Terejanu has received a research award from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA)/USDA for his project, "TOXIMAP: Computational Framework for Prediction of Geographical and Temporal Incidence of Mycotoxins in US Crop Fields". This project will develop a general predictive modeling framework for calculating aflatoxin occurrence in US crop fields before harvest, and package this knowledge in a user-friendly predictive web/mobile interface for generating nation-wide and real-time aflatoxin hazard maps. This project has the potential to change certain behaviors in crop management to improve food safety.

Dr. Jason O’Kane and Dr. Jenay Beer have received a grant from the National Science Foundation to help create a Research Experiences for Undergraduates site for Applied Computational Robotics. This work will have significant impact by involving talented undergraduate students from around the southeast in robotics research projects here at USC. This experience will encourage these students to pursue graduate studies and research-oriented industry positions. We are proud of your efforts. Congratulations! Visit reu.cse.sc.edu to learn more and apply to this program.

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. After much deliberation, we have decided that the 2017 Computer Science and Engineering Outstanding Senior Awards go to:

• Computer Engineering Outstanding Senior Award: Conor Campbell
• Computer Engineering SCSPE Award: Rickey Ward
• Computer Science Outstanding Senior Awards: Austin Pahl and Victor Reynolds
• Computer Information Systems Outstanding Senior Award: Caitlin Brock

All awardees will be honored at the USC Awards Day ceremony. In addition, Rickey will be honored at a special awards banquet of the South Carolina Society of Professional Engineers.

Dr. Gregory Gay has received an NSF Research award for his project on Understanding The Role of Software Test Adequacy Criteria in Search-Based Test Generation. This work aims to help improve automated software testing in industry.

We are proud to announce that Rukia Brooks (CS major) was chosen as an International Game Developers Association (IGDA) Scholar for 2017.
As a Scholar she will receive an all-access pass to the Game Developers Conference, a mentor for professional development, studio tours, and other benefits. The Game Developers Conference is a professional development conference for those involved in the games industry.

The inaugural Black Women in Computing Conference (BWIC) was held on January 6-8, 2017 at Howard University in Washington D.C. The theme of the conference was, “Honoring our past, celebrating our present, and looking into our future.” BWIC provided a venue to discuss, advance, and celebrate the intersectionality of race and gender in computing. The conference committee had the goals of catalyzing community between black women in computing, nurturing personal and professional growth, and discussing salient themes facing the group in society. Speakers ranged from North Carolina State’s Dr. Fay Cobb Payton, to White House representative Lisa Gelobter, to image activist Michaela angela Davis.

Karina Liles, a PhD candidate in computer science, and De’Aira Bryant, an undergraduate senior in computer science, attended the conference on behalf of the University of South Carolina’s College of Engineering and Computing. Liles is a graduate student advisor for the Minorities in Computing at USC student group and Bryant is the current president of the group.