My Computer Science & Engineering Department

The film Ward One: Reconstructing Memory captures the enduring memories of former residents of Ward One, a Columbia neighborhood lost to urban renewal, along with the efforts of faculty and students at the University of South Carolina to preserve their stories. It shows students in our Critical Interactives course building a mobile app that brings this past back to life.

We would like to congratulate our Discovery Day winners. Omar Ansari won a first place award for his poster "The use of remote telepresence in collegiate classrooms to facilitate eLearning". Steven Dao and Austin Pahl won a first place award for "Enhancing Interactor Experience in the Ward One App". Nicholas Weidner won second place for "Underwater Cave Mapping using Stereo Vision". Blakeley Hoffman won second place for "Cooperative Set Function Without Communication". Theodore Stone and Nathaniel Stone won an honarable mention for "Correlating a Smart Soccer Ball’s Impact Acceleration to Impact Force". Adel Alamri won an honarable mention for "Speech Signs - Signing with Children."

Below are the video demos for the 2016 Senior Capstone project class. This year we had 6 Android apps, 9 web applications, 1 ionic app, 1 Unity 3D game, 1 desktop application, and 1 voting machine hack. The live demos will be on May 3 at our Capstone Demo Day. You can also see the video playlist on youtube. If you are interested in letting our students build an app for you, see the prospective client information page which explains how to send us your idea.

Dr. Gabriel Terejanu, along with Dr. Sourav Banerjee (Mechanical Engineering), Dr. Anindya Chanda and Dr. Robin Kloot (Environmental Health Sciences), has received an award from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)/USDA for a data collection project with the title "Using Cover Crops and Soil Health to Reduce Crop Stress and Aflatoxin Contamination". As part of this project the researchers will deploy a sensor network to collect environmental data from a cornfield in collaboration with a local farmer. The data will be used to develop and demonstrate a predictive framework for calculating aflatoxin occurrence in South Carolina cornfields prior to harvest.

Congratulations to all our winners! See Album on G+ or Album on facebook.

We are happy to announce that Yuewei Lin, one of our graduating Ph.D. students and also this year’s department Outstanding Graduate Researcher, just received a 2015 "National Award for Outstanding Self-financed Chinese Students Studying Abroad" by China Scholarship Council. The cash prize amount is $6,000. This award was founded by the Chinese government with the purpose of rewarding the academic excellence of self-financed Chinese students studying overseas, encouraging them to return or serve the motherland in various forms, showing the government's care to self-financed Chinese students.

We are happy to announce that Maribeth Bottorff has received the Caroliniana Leadership Award. This award recognizes senior undergraduate students who have been the tireless, behind the scene workers that every successful activity or organization needs. They are leaders through their actions and contributions to the Carolina community. Maribeth is a Computer Science major with a minor in Chemistry and has made significant contributions to the Women in Computing Group, the CSE Student Advisory Council, and the Grace Hopper Conference trip. She will receive her Bachelor's degree this semester and has accepted a job at Google.

Featured on this scetv post. You can read about how the Collaborative Demo Day was a success.

The USC Cyber Defense Team placed second at the 2016 Palmetto Cyber Defense Competition in Charleston on April 10, 2016. This annual competition between eight SC colleges and universities is designed to challenge the students to keep a virtual network of computers and devices secure while a "red team" of computer attackers is trying to compromise them. In this year's scenario, the students were tasked with defending a medical supply company's digital assets while maintaining business operations (delivering medical supplies to four virtual hospitals by deploying a fleet of supply trucks through an online interface.) They also had to perform digital investigations of malicious files using forensic techniques.

We are proud to announce the winners of the Outstanding student awards for this year. The undergraduate winners are:

• Theodore Stone, Computer Engineering Outstanding Senior,
• Michael Brunson, Computer Engineering SCSPE Award,
• Myndert Papenhuyzen, Computer Science Outstanding Senior,
• Jared Piedt, Computer Information Systems Outstanding Senior.

The Graduate winners are:

• Yuewei Lin, Outstanding Graduate Researcher,
• Nick Stiffler, Outstanding Graduate Instructor.