My Computer Science & Engineering Department

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.

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.

We are proud to announce that Theodore Stone and Nathaniel Stone have been selected as SIGCOMM student scholars to attend the ACM's 50 Years of the ACM Turing Award Celebration event.

We are happy to announce that Rasha Karakchi has received a SPARC Graduate Research grant for work on "A Special Purpose Compiler and Processor for Pattern Recognition" under Dr. Bakos' supervision.

We are proud to announce that De’Aira Bryant, a Senior undergraduate student working in Dr. Jenay Beer’s Assistive Robotics and Technology Lab (ARTLab), has been awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Fellowship. The fellowship provides financial support of $34,000/year for any 3 year period over the next 5 years. De’Aira’s selection as an NSF Graduate Fellowship awardee is a tremendous accomplishment. Congratulations De’Aira!!

This NY Times article describes research by Dr Wenyuan Xu and colleages at the University of Michigan into how to maliciously control a phone's accelerometer using sound waves.

In their paper, the researchers describe how they added fake steps to a Fitbit fitness monitor and played a "malicious" music file from the speaker of a smartphone to control the phone’s accelerometer. That allowed them to interfere with software that relies on the smartphone, like an app used to pilot a radio-controlled toy car.

The video below explains their research.

Dr. Song Wang has received a research grant award from the National Science Foundation for his project entitled "Algorithm Development for Reconstruction of Design Elements". This is an interdisciplinary study between archaeology and computer science to develop and disseminate a program that can identify the full artistic design from fragmented cultural heritage objects. Specifically, it will develop the algorithm to identify the designs of the carved wooden paddles of the Southeastern Woodlands from unearthed pottery sherds.

Dr. Marco Valtorta has received an award from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to work on the Co-Arg: Cogent Argumentation System with Crowd Elicitation project, lead by George Mason University. This project aims to improve the quality of intelligence analysis reports. Dr. Valtorta's work will develop a probabilistic reasoning component to complement the Wigmorean argument structures used as the main representation in the Co-Arg project. Argument structures will be translated into Bayesian networks, thus uncovering subtleties and complexities, such as evidence-induced dependencies, synergistic effects, and antagonistic effects, which will be resolved by analysts or via crowdsourcing.