My Computer Science & Engineering Department

USC News has published an article, Can't hack this, describing SC Cyber, a statewide cybersecurity initiative led by USC, funded by a $1.5 million grant from the state Department of Commerce and announced by Gov. Nikki Haley in February.

Csilla Farkas, associate professor in computer science and engineering, has long understood the need for cybersecurity to protect against such attacks. Hired in 2000, she has led the development of cybersecurity education at the University of South Carolina and serves as director of the university’s Center for Information Assurance Engineering. The center is a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance and Cyber Defense Education (an achievement first earned in 2010 and bestowed jointly by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security); it earned the same designation for research in 2014.

Dr. Jenay Beer is part of a team, lead by Nursing professor Karen McDonnell , which has been awarded a two-year grant to study ways to improve the survival rates of lung cancer patients. The grant is funded by the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation and will allow for the creation of a statewide network that will survey existing support systems and identify gaps in patient coverage in the state. Lung cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in S.C. and is also the leading cause of cancer deaths. More information on the official announcement.

We are proud to announce that Nathaniel Stone and Theodore Stone, both undergraduates, won the first prize in the undergraduate category of the Student Research Competition at ACM MobiCom 2016. Their research poster is titled "Assessing Header Impacts in Soccer with Smartball". It represents one of the many possible Internet of Things applications that Computer Science researchers are investigating. You can click on their poster on the right to see a larger view.

Dr. Gabriel Terejanu is part of a group of researchers that have received a $2M NSF grant for the creation of a "Center for a Sustainable Water, Energy, and Food Nexus (SusWEF)". The other investigators on the project are
Nelson Cardona-Martinez (UPR), Juan Lopez-Garriga (UPR), Maria Curet-Arana (UPR), and Andreas Heyden (USC).

Our Computational Biology Research lab, headed by Dr. Valafar, has been awarded a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH for their project entitled "South Carolina IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (SC INBRE) Bioinformatics."

Dr. Xu's research was featured in Forbes Hackers Fool Tesla Autopilot Into Making Obstacles 'Disappear'.

We congratulate Dr. Ioannis Rekleitis for receiveing an NSF research award for his project titled "Enhancing Mapping Capabilities of Underwater Caves using Robotic Assistive Technology"

This project develops robotic assistive technologies to improve mapping capabilities of underwater caves. The project enables the practical construction of accurate volumetric models for water-filled caves. The technology of this robotic system can also be deployed on underwater vehicles enabling the autonomous exploration of caves and other underwater structures. Furthermore, the data and software, released under an open-source license, enable researchers to test algorithms on computer vision, state estimation, and sensor fusion, in challenging environments. The project integrates research and education through training graduate and undergraduate students and enhancing several graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of South Carolina.

Dr Jianjun Hu has received an equipment award from NVIDA corporation for his project on Breast Cancer Diagnosis with Deep learning based image and microarray analysis.

The main purpose of this project is to develop and apply methods in deep learning to solve problems in the emerging field of computational pathology of breast cancer using both large scale of histopathology images and microarray datasets. This project may lead to the development of novel data-driven diagnostic tools for cancer detection, risk prediction, and diagnosis.

We congratulate Melissa Plakyda for being awarded a Upsilon Pi Epsilon Scholarship.