My Computer Science & Engineering Department

During October 16—19 the CSE Department will be moving to the new M. Bert Storey Engineering and Innovation Center building. The second floor will house CSE faculty offices, research labs, and the main office. The first floor will house additional research labs and a large (70-capacity) classroom. With the Integrated Information Technology department on the first floor and IBM on the third floor, the Storey Innovation Center will become the hub of all Computing and IT for USC.

We are happy to welcome Dr. Lannan (Lisa) Luo to the Department. Dr. Luo received her PhD from Penn State University. Her research mainly focuses on software and systems security, including mobile security, IoT security, malware analysis, vulnerability analysis, programming languages, software engineering, and deep learning. She is teaching CSCE 813: Internet Security and recruiting Ph.D. students, master students, summer interns, and visiting scholars to join her lab.

We are happy to welcome Dr. Yonghong Yan to the faculty of the CSE department. Dr. Yan received his PhD. from the University of Houston. His research research interests focus on parallel and high performance computing, parallel programming models and compilers, computer architectures and systems. He will be teaching CSCE 790, a graduate special topics course, this semester for any graduate students interested in learning about parallel and high performance computing.

We are proud to announce that De'Aira Bryant and Blakeley Hoffman have each been awarded a GEM National Consortium Fellowship. Both Bryant and Hoffman were selected by Adobe Systems Incorporated, where they will complete the internship component of the fellowship. The GEM program seeks to enhance the value of the nation's human capital by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups at the master's and doctoral levels in engineering and science. The fellowship provides a stipend, tuition assistance, and a paid summer internship in 2017. More than 4,000 GEM Fellowships have been awarded since the program's inception 41 years ago.

Dr. Hu has collaborated with Professor Xiaoming Li (PI) in Health Promotion, Education & Behavior and other USC faculty members to secure an NIH Funded project entitled "Big Data Analytics of HIV Treatment Gaps in South Carolina: Identification and Prediction" and is funded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)/NIH.

Dr. Yan Tong has received a research grant award from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) for "NSF-EPRI: Innovative and Ultra-efficient Evaporators to Realize Cost-effective Desalination”. This project aims to relieve the water-energy-food issues facing the US and the world by substantially reducing the cost of sea water desalination, making it possible to obtain massive freshwater from seawater. Yan's group will develop a fully automatic vision-based technique to detect droplets and to estimate the individual droplet departure frequency and size by non-rigid image registration and onsite-calibration. This vision-based technique is essential to reduce massive data from high-speed optical images to assure a consistent data reduction process.

We are looking for clients for next year's Capstone course. If you want an app build for you, for free, click that link.

This year our Capstone students worked on 31 different projects, which included

• 16 mobile apps,
• 12 web applications,
• 2 desktop apps,
• and 1 device driver.

They used a range of different technologies, including Android, iOS Objective-C, meteor.js, ionic, react, react native, Angular, Django, vaadin, Polymer, Google App Engine, Firebase, MVC .NET, Windows C#, Unity VR and many more. Please visit our Capstone 2017 Video Showcase to view video demonstrations of the projects and visit their websites.

The winning team for this year's Backers and Hackers is Mingxiang Zhu, Tieming Geng, and Hongrui Zhang for their app connect2icu, a secure mobile app to assist families while their child is in a neonatal or pediatric intensive care unit. 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.

We are happy to report that Xian Wu, a PhD student in CSE working in the ART Lab, has received the Two Thumbs Up award. Two Thumbs Up awards were created to recognize faculty and staff members across campus who have made a significant difference in a student’s experience at the University of South Carolina. The recipients of these awards are nominated by students with registered with the Office of Student Disability Services.

We congratulate the following undergraduate students who have received a USC Magellan award in the last year, they are Emma Drobina, Judson James, Abraham Khan, Liudas Panavas, Harrison Engoren, Noemi Glaeser, Caleb Kisby, Briana Luckey, Jonathan Senn, Charles Daniels, De'Aira Bryant, Bethany Janos, Molly Carlson. Their respective research topics are shown below. You can also view the full list of winners and instructions for applying.