My Computer Science and Engineering Department

We congratulate two of our students for winning 2015-16 SPARC graduate research grants. They are Karina Liles for her project "Meeting students educational needs by engaging students in multiplication practice with a social robot" and Xiao Lin for the project "Computational Tool for identifying branching type of hyphal growth models". You can view the full list of winners.

Dr. Jenay Beer has received a research award for her project titled "Usability of Self-Directed Online Training Intervention for Chinese Dementia Caregivers" from the Environment and Health Group/NIH. You can find her research papers in the Assistive Robotics and Technology Lab (ART Lab) website.

We recently hosted a third grade class field trip for students from Saint Joseph Elementary School. They asked lots of great questions as they learned about human-robot interaction from Dr. Jenay Beer, as you can see.

We congratulate the following students for receiving the Magellan Scholar undergraduate student research award. In the Fall 2015 Omar Ansari, Noel Raley, Theodore Stone, Nathaniel Stone, Audrey Talley, Nick Weidner, and Ashleigh Williams received the award, while in the Spring 2016 the recipients were Austin Pahl and Steven Dao. Undergraduate research is strong in the CSE department. If you want to get involved in research just ask any professor in the department about it. The full list of winners and more details on each award are available here. Omar Ansari is featured in this USC news article.

USC Entrepreneurship Club Partners with Computer Science Department to Execute App Creation Project proclaims SCETV article. Students in CSCE 590: Mobile App Development will be implementing ideas submitted by students in the USC Entrepreneuship Club. If you miss that deadline, you can always submit your ideas to our Capstone project class.

The article Inside IBM: The Inventors Who Are Creating the Era of Cognitive Computing features our own Jeremy Greenberger (BS in CS, 2014) and his work creating the future:

Jeremy came to IBM just 1 1/2 years ago with a freshly-minted BS in computer science from the University of South Carolina. But, already, he’s making his mark as a prodigious ideas man. He has submitted 60 invention ideas for internal IBM review, of which 18 have so far been approved for patent applications and 6 have been submitted to the US PTO.

Jeremy is also featured on Young inventor sets out to shape the future.

Dr. Jenay Beer gave the above presentation in last year's TEDxPeachtree.

We are happy to report that Philip Conrad, a Senior in Computer Science, along with Benjamin Davis, a PhD student in Structural Engineering, have been awarded second place in the USC Proving Ground competition. They proposed a security system and app that alerts users when there is an intruder. See video below.

Our CyberSecurity teams have returned from UConn's CyberSEED competition and have done very well! The CTF team participated in Symantec's Professional CTF scenario and came in 6th place this year. We were competing with teams from all over the country and have blown our placement from last year (13th) out of the water in a very close competition. This year's scenario was an insecure bank, complete with a real ATM and debit card forgery. This year's team members were Collin Morrell (Team Captain), Adam Formenti, Nate Fuller, and Nick Connon. We also sent a team to take place in the new Social Engineering competition as well. They came in 8th place in what sounded like a very difficult contest. They were required to breach a simulated company through insecure HR, helpdesk, web portal, email and telephone practices. This competition very clearly demonstrated that people are the biggest security vulnerabilities any company has. The Social Engineering team members were Yasemin Pak (Team Captain), Dakota Jones, Clay Norris, and Abhishek Bottu. Please help us congratulate our competition teams! We are very proud of what they have accomplished.

We would like to welcome our newest faculty member Dr. Gregory Gay. He received is PhD in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. His research interests are in software engineering and automated testing techniques. He is currently teaching CSCE 740: Software Engineering. USC news has an interview with him.

USC's new video campaign features alumni from this department, Chris King and Michael Sechrest, and describes how their software for making trees won them an Oscar at the Academy Awards.

Dr. Jason O'Kane has received an NSF research award for his project entitled "Why is automating the design of robot controllers hard, and what can be done about it?" This project seeks to bring together new techniques for filtering and planning to improve reasoning and analysis steps employed during robot design. By understanding those parts of the design process that are typically conducted by hand and by asking which parts can be practically automated, the research has the potential to assist practitioners by scaling up the problems tackled, optimizing systems automatically, and ultimately freeing designers from low-level detail and elevating their use of time.

Dr. Gabriel Terejanu has received an NSF research award for his project is entitled "SciLAF: Scientific-based Learning Assessment Framework for Student Knowledge Tracking". The project addresses the fundamental challenge of assessing individual student's knowledge in cornerstone engineering classes with high student-to-faculty ratios. The goal is to develop a computational assessment framework that easily integrates into an instructor's routine efforts to track student knowledge, suggest remedial interventions, and guide future examinations.

Dr. Jason Bakos has received an award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR)/DOD for a project on the "Development of Universal Controller Architecture for SiC Based Power Electronic Building Blocks". Visit his homepage to learn more about his research.

Dr. Rekleitis, Dr. Beer, and Dr. O'Kane have received an award from the NSF for their project "A Heterogeneous Team of Field Robots for Research into Coordinated Monitoring of Coastal Environments". The award will support the acquisition of a multi-robot team that can operate in coastal environments. Project Abstract:

This infrastructure proposal supports the acquisition of a multi-robot team suited for operations in coastal environments. The robot team consists of two underwater vehicles (AUVs), three surface vehicles (ASVs), as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs): two fixed-wing UAVs and two quadrocopters. The target domain is the coastal waters of South Carolina. In several applications such as environmental monitoring, homeland security, resource utilization, and contamination tracking, there is a need to track a mass of water, record a set of properties, such as salinity, temperature, presence of different substances, and also record the position and boundaries of the said body. The proposed infrastructure will enable computing research for addressing the above problems. This project revolves around enabling research on several CISE research fields at the University of South Carolina, including algorithmic development for multi-robot coordination, path-planning and state estimation; planning under uncertainty; sensor fusion from different modalities; and human-robot interaction.

Dr. Jianjun Hu has received a grant award from the South Carolina Department of Transportation for his Data Mining and Analytics for Transportation Management project. This project will analyze large existing data sets concerning the usage and maintenance of equipment at the South Carolina Department of Transportation. The effort will assess SCDOT repair shop capability needs, capacity, skills, and tools/equipment. The analysis is expected to yield correlations and insights about the equipment, so that it can be maintained more effectively and at lower cost. The work will be performed by a team of graduate students in computer science and engineering under the direction of Dr. Hu.