My Computer Science & Engineering Department

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.

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.

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.

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?