My Computer Science and Engineering Department

A software vulnerability to Ellucian Banner CVE-2019-8978, reported and discovered by Joshua Mulliken (CIS major), has been in the news a lot (Inside Higher Ed, TrendMicro, Security Week) because of how software updates for this vulnerability have been handled by the Universities who use the software. The news articles also interview Joshua as the author and expert on the vulnerability.

Dr. Jianjun Hu has received a research grant from the National Science Foundation for work on his work in Machine Learning on the project "Thermal Materials Discovery via Deep Learning based High-Throughput Computational Screening".

CEC Young Alumni Board member Olga Agafonova has launched two apps and her career from the skills she learned as a computer science student. Full article here.

Dr. Rekleitis is featured in the article Plastic and Pollution Beware about his research on using underwater robots and autonomous boats to help save the world's waters. More photos available here.

We are happy to announce that Dr. Pooyan Jamshidi, Dr. Jason O’Kane, and Dr. Greg Gay have received a research award from the EPSCoR program, South Carolina and NASA, for their research project "Robust Software Testing of Autonomous Aerospace Robotic Systems Using Transfer Learning."

We are excited to report that Noemi Glaeser (Computer Science Senior) has been named a 2019 NSF Graduate Research Fellow. Also, William Edwards (Computer Science Senior) was selected for an Honorable Mention in this prestigious graduate fellowship competition. The National Science Foundation has awarded 2,050 three-year Graduate Research Fellowships of approximately $138,000 each to outstanding college and university students for the year 2019. Since 1952, NSF has provided fellowships to individuals selected early in their graduate careers based on their demonstrated potential for significant achievements in science and engineering.

Full Press Release

UofSC’s 2019 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Winners and Honorable Mentions One UofSC undergraduate student, two graduate students, and seven alumni have been awarded 2019 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships (GRF). Current South Carolina senior Noemi Glaeser, graduate students Kaitlyn Pilarzyk and Luke Wilde, and alumni Vincent Esposito, Abigail Herschman, Colman Moore, Shrusti Patel, Adrian Perez, Samantha Stewart, and Heather Struckman have all been named NSF GRF Fellows. Two other current students, William Edwards and Sarah Zajovits, as well as three alumni, Justin DuRant, Jonathan Keefe, and Elizabeth Rizor were selected for Honorable Mentions in this prestigious graduate fellowship competition. The National Science Foundation has awarded 2,050 three-year Graduate Research Fellowships of approximately $138,000 each to outstanding college and university students for the year 2019. Since 1952, NSF has provided fellowships to individuals selected early in their graduate careers based on their demonstrated potential for significant achievements in science and engineering.

We are proud to announce that Dr. Pooyan Jamshidi has received an ASPIRE-I research award for his project "Optimizing Energy Consumption of Deep Neural Networks for Intelligent Learning Systems".

The winning team for 2019 Backers and Hackers is Nathan Pavlovsky and Sadegh Sadeghi Tabas (Backer) for their app LineSkip, an app that allows users to bypass long frustrating lines at popular social events like bars, nightclubs, exhibits, museums, sporting events, and other attractions. Users will be able to purchase tickets for a given one-hour time slot and pay for the privilege of cutting the line. Backers and Hackers is a completely student-run initiative organized by the Entrepreneurship Club and the College of Engineering and Computing at USC. The program brings together Columbia’s entrepreneurial community and USC’s mobile app development students to transform app ideas into reality.

Second place went to Russell Burckhalter, Kendrick Dubose, Zac Miller for their app HotSpot, which is an event parking app that lets everyday people rent out their driveways near events like football stadiums to event goers. Event goers can reserve and purchase spots ahead of time, making parking a positive and simple experience instead of a possible nightmare.

Third place to Allen Sanamandra, Ishita Thumati , Sumith K S, Prasad Puttaswamy, Roshan Joseph, Venkat Kotha for their app DailyCook, a mobile app based startup idea which helps individuals interested in cooking to sell their food. The app also provides a platform for food donation thus helping people to find free food around them. Backers&Hackers are co-organized by CSCE546, a mobile app development course at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering. The apps are developed as the final projects for the course. We are always looking for clients/backers and app ideas as final projects for next year's course. If you want an app built for you, for free, or want to collaborate with app development, please contact Dr. Hu (jianjunh A.T sc.edu).

Graduate Student Ying Meng has been awarded an Operational Machine Learning (OpML) '19 Diversity Grant that provides registration fee coverage and travel support for the conference.

This year the students in the Senior Capstone course developed 34 apps either for industrial clients, for USC members, or for themselves. The technologies used were:

• 15 web applications: Django, node, express, Angular, react, ASP, firebase, websockets.
• 12 mobile apps: Android, iOS, iOnic, react-native, flutter
• 3 desktop applications: Windows, Java, Python
• 2 OculusGo apps: Unity
• 1 Alexa skill
• 1 Computer Engineering project

You can watch video demonstrations of all the apps, or come watch the live demos on Tuesday, April 30. We are also looking for clients for next year.
 

Dr. Lisa Luo has received a research award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her research project "A Malware-Inspired Approach to Mobile Application Repackaging and Tampering Detection." This project is looking at ways to add repackaging detection capability into Android and iOS apps, so that the phones will be able to detect if an installed app has been tampered with. Abstract

Mobile application ("app") repackaging is a severe threat to the flourishing mobile market and numerous users. 97% of the top paid Android apps and 87% of the iOS ones have been repackaged. Besides, it is one of the most common ways of propagating mobile malware. Existing countermeasures mostly detect repackaging based on app similarity measurement, which tends to be imprecise when obfuscations are applied to repackaged apps. Moreover, they rely on a centralized party, typically the hosting app store, to perform the detection, but many alternative app stores fail to commit proper effort to piracy detection. This research aims at an effective defense against app repackaging, and will result in substantial progress in tackling malware propagated via repackaged apps. It will help mitigate attacks such as ransomware or DDoS launched from repackaged apps. It will also help reduce the massive monetary loss of legitimate app developers. Industrial collaborations ensure rapidly translate scientific discovery and technical knowledge into beneficial commercial products. Educational resources from this project, including course modules on mobile security and malware detection, will be disseminated through a dedicated web site. This research will foster new research and education opportunities at University of South Carolina. Students from underrepresented groups will participate in the project. This research is to explore a decentralized scheme that adds repackaging detection capability into the app to be protected, such that the host devices are made use of to conduct detection when the app is running. The main challenge is how to protect the repackaging detection code from attacks. The team of research proposes a novel malware-inspired approach to handling the important mobile app repackaging problem. The team will explore a creative use of logic bombs, which are regularly used in malware: the trigger conditions are constructed to exploit the differences between the attacker and users (in terms of hardware, sensor values, and inputs), such that a bomb that lies dormant on the attacker side will be activated on the user side. The repackaging detection code, which is packed as the bomb payload, is executed only if the bomb is activated. (2) Unlike many conventional software tampering detection techniques that try to conceal the detection code, by leveraging various methods used in malware this design is non-stealthy, which means that the detection code is not hidden, yet still resilient to attacks. (3) The proposed system also aims to detect code tampering, which occurs when malicious code is inserted and hence implies extraordinary dangers. (4) The decentralized repackaging/tampering detection is proposed to be used for crowdsourced malware information collection to fight against malware propagation. (5) Finally, the team is to address how to prevent the proposed techniques from being abused by malware authors.

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Jianjun Hu has received a research award from the South Carolina EPSCoR/IDeA/(NSF) Commission on Higher Education (SC CHE) for his project titled "Deep Learning for Discovery of Noncentrosymmetric Materials with Second-order Nonlinear Optical Behavior".

Dr. Jason O’Kane has received a grant award from the National Science Foundation for his research project titled "Planning Coordinated Event Observation for Structured Narratives ". This research studies how to direct a team of robots to obtain video footage to produce clips that trace a dramatic story arc. It is an examination of how such systems might achieve goals that people consider to be abstract or high-level. The video below explains some of their work, or read the article Could robots make a documentary about a 5K race?

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 2019 Computer Science and Engineering Outstanding Senior Awards go to:

• Computer Engineering Outstanding Senior Award: James Coman
• Computer Engineering SCSPE Award: Wylie Gunn
• Computer Science Outstanding Senior Award: Charissa Pichai
• Computer Information Systems Outstanding Senior Award: Michael Afrin

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

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Jason Bakos has received a research award from the Savannah River National Laboratory/DOE for his project titled "Data Analysis, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning".