My Computer Science & Engineering Department

The CSE department's cybersecurity research and NSA designations as a National Academic Center of Excellence are critical pillars of the initiative. If you are interested, see our Information Assurance Specialization and Certificate of Graduate Study in Information Assurance and Security.

We congratulate two of our students for winning 2015-16 SPARC graduate research grants. They are Karina Liles for her project "Meeting students educational needs by engaging students in multiplication practice with a social robot" and Xiao Lin for the project "Computational Tool for identifying branching type of hyphal growth models". You can view the full list of winners.

Dr. Jenay Beer has received a research award for her project titled "Usability of Self-Directed Online Training Intervention for Chinese Dementia Caregivers" from the Environment and Health Group/NIH. You can find her research papers in the Assistive Robotics and Technology Lab (ART Lab) website.

We recently hosted a third grade class field trip for students from Saint Joseph Elementary School. They asked lots of great questions as they learned about human-robot interaction from Dr. Jenay Beer, as you can see.

We congratulate the following students for receiving the Magellan Scholar undergraduate student research award. In the Fall 2015 Omar Ansari, Noel Raley, Theodore Stone, Nathaniel Stone, Audrey Talley, Nick Weidner, and Ashleigh Williams received the award, while in the Spring 2016 the recipients
were Austin Pahl and Steven Dao. Undergraduate research is strong in the CSE department. If you want to get involved in research just ask any professor in the department about it.

USC Entrepreneurship Club Partners with Computer Science Department to Execute App Creation Project proclaims SCETV article. Students in CSCE 590: Mobile App Development will be implementing ideas submitted by students in the USC Entrepreneuship Club. If you miss that deadline, you can always submit your ideas to our Capstone project class.

The article Inside IBM: The Inventors Who Are Creating the Era of Cognitive Computing features our own Jeremy Greenberger (BS in CS, 2014) and his work creating the future:

Jeremy came to IBM just 1 1/2 years ago with a freshly-minted BS in computer science from the University of South Carolina. But, already, he’s making his mark as a prodigious ideas man. He has submitted 60 invention ideas for internal IBM review, of which 18 have so far been approved for patent applications and 6 have been submitted to the US PTO.

Dr. Jenay Beer gave the above presentation in last year's TEDxPeachtree.

We are happy to report that Philip Conrad, a Senior in Computer Science, along with Benjamin Davis, a PhD student in Structural Engineering, have been awarded second place in the USC Proving Ground competition. They proposed a security system and app that alerts users when there is an intruder. See video below.

Our CyberSecurity teams have returned from UConn's CyberSEED competition and have done very well! The CTF team participated in Symantec's Professional CTF scenario and came in 6th place this year. We were competing with teams from all over the country and have blown our placement from last year (13th) out of the water in a very close competition. This year's scenario was an insecure bank, complete with a real ATM and debit card forgery. This year's team members were Collin Morrell (Team Captain), Adam Formenti, Nate Fuller, and Nick Connon.

We also sent a team to take place in the new Social Engineering competition as well. They came in 8th place in what sounded like a very difficult contest. They were required to breach a simulated company through insecure HR, helpdesk, web portal, email and telephone practices. This competition very clearly demonstrated that people are the biggest security vulnerabilities any company has. The Social Engineering team members were Yasemin Pak (Team Captain), Dakota Jones, Clay Norris, and Abhishek Bottu.