My Computer Science & Engineering Department

Prof. Duncan Buell has been awared a research grant for his project "History Simulation for Teaching Early Modern British History," by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Several of our undergraduate Magellan scholarship students have also won special mentions for their Discovery Day presentations on their research. They are:

• Matthew Zimmermann, Breland Miley, and Will Reade, who won first prize for their presentation of their project Personal Automated Scheduling System
• Jason Isenhower, won second prize for his poster presentation Using Smartphones to Monitor Wireless Network Health

Our very own Duncan Buell, shown at center on the photo, appeared on this article on the Post and Courier about the voting machines used here in South Carolina. From the article:

Duncan Buell, University of South Carolina computer science and engineering professor (center), said South Carolina uses the identical voting system that has been discredited in Ohio. He joined Vic Rawl (left) and state Democratic Party Executive Committee member Kay Koonce in a panel discussion about voting machines Thursday at North Charleston City Hall.

Wenyuan Xu has a new project entitled "Portable Devices to Monitor Electric and Gas Meters (PDM)," which is being funded by Pinnacle Consulting LLC.

The fragile regions in mammals’ genomes that are thought to play a key role in evolution go through a "birth and death" process, according to new work by University of South Carolina and University of California-San Diego researchers.

The study, published in the journal Genome Biology, could help researchers identify the current fragile regions in the human genome – information that may reveal how the human genome will evolve in the future.

A meeting will be held on 7 December 2010 at USC with statewide participation via video or conference call to organize a South Carolina chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association. All K-12 teachers of computer science and information technology especially, and other interested parties from the computing community, are encouraged to attend and/or participate. More details can be found at bit.ly/sccsta.

Through a recent University of South Carolina project, students from the business and computer science and engineering schools have teamed up to develop a unique social networking website known as “BottleMi.com”. This website, designed by your very own fellow classmates, could possibly be the next Facebook or Twitter.

Dr. Robert Cannon, distinguished professor emeritus, has been named a Fellow of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), an award bestowed upon him "for his leadership in the orderly transition of computing accreditation into ABET operations; and for his commitment to diversity through the development of ABET's Policy Statement on Diversity." More information can be found on the ABET press release.

Three of our graduate students have won university grants to travel to conferences to present their research! The result will be great experience for them, increased visibility for USC by their presence at these conferences, increased visibility for their advisors, and recognition locally for their research. Congratulations to:

• Mr. Achraf El Allali and his advisor Dr. John Rose for "International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology"
• Ms. Laura Boccanfuso and her advisor Dr. Jason O'Kane for "International Conference on Social Robotics"
• Mr. Yiwei Zhang and his advisor Dr. Jijun Tang for "IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine"

The ACM Student Chapter at USC held its first Fix-IT Day on Sunday the 25th where student volunteers helped to fix computers brought in by anyone who wanted to attend. The event received wide publicity, with articles written about it in The State newspaper and a news segment on WISTV.

“The event was a great success. We helped an estimated 200 or more number of people,” recalled Dr. Valafar, a Computer Science professor who coordinated the event. “We are still receiving phone calls from the community inquiring whether we will have any more events like this. We received participant from as far as Charlotte and several of smaller rural communities in SC that do not have extensive computer shops,” he added.