My Computer Science & Engineering Department

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.

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.
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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.

We would like to congratulate:

• Utkarshini Jaimini (PhD Student)
• Revathy Venkataramanan (PhD Student)
• Ananya Banerjee (Intern)

who have been selected to participate in the CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women. They are all part of our AI Institute.

Dr Sheth is interviewed in this episode of the Innovation on Main Podcast.

We are happy to announce that Dr. Song Wang has received research awards for two different projects: "SnowVision: A Machine Learning-Based Image Processing Tool for the Study of Native American Paddle Designs" is funded by the SC Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR)/NEH, and "Dendroid Core Detection and Tracking for Directionally Solidified Ni-Based Alloys" is funded by UES, Inc./AFRL/DOD .

Dr. Austin Downey (Mechanical Engineering) and Dr. Jason Bakos have received a research award from the National Science Foundation for their project " A Programming Model and Platform Architecture for Real-time Machine Learning for Sub-second Systems".

The department held it's 1st Annual Halloween Graduate Student and Faculty Appreciation Brunch on October 30. It was great to see everyone in a more social setting! We enjoyed getting to know our students better over breakfast and we look forward to our next social. Click below to see more photos from the event.

We are excited that Dr. Amit Sheth has joined us this Fall and brought with him the Artificial Intelligence Institute. The institute, created under the recent excellence initiative, is led by Prof. Amit Sheth, a researcher, educator and entrepreneur. With a proven leadership record of creating world-class research centers and funding record (> $33 million), Sheth launched three companies by licensing his university-developed technologies and advised 30 PhDs who now have highly successful careers in academia, industry research and entrepreneurship.