My Computer Science & Engineering Department

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.

• 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

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?

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".

The University of South Carolina is initiating a search for the Director of the new Artificial Intelligence Institute. The pan- University Institute is expected to draw core or affiliated faculty from almost all colleges. The College of Engineering and Computing is well positioned to support this University-wide Institute and is in the midst of expanding its tenured and tenure-track ranks by over 40 faculty members.