My Computer Science & Engineering Department

Our Third Annual Gamecock Computing Symposium was a great success. We are proud to announce that the winner of the student poster sessions was Xiaochuan Fan. The second place went to Nick Stiffler. If you missed the activities, you can view a slideshow of the students' posters by clicking on the image at the right.

The Computer Science & Engineering department is one of 15 academic institutions to join the Building Recruiting And Inclusion for Diversity (BRAID) initiative, from the Anita Borg Institute, to increase the percentage of undergraduate majors that are female and students of color. Each of the departments will receive $30,000 per year for three years to help support their efforts which will leverage the experiences of other successful programs.

JJ Shepherd's research on using video games to help people learn is being featured in this WACHFOX TV news story. He explains:

"We've created education games in the past, but we want to see how to make them better. And how to actually use this where you can augment classrooms, augment therapies. And basically, better people's lives through technology."

Dr. Nelakuditi and his ARENA research lab have received an NSF grant award for their project on "Infrastructure Mobility". This research is exploring how to build and program mobile WiFi access points, on wheels, that change position to improve signal reception. Imagine a small robot that moves within the false ceiling of a large building to provide better signal to its users.

PhD student Karina Liles has been named a GEM Affiliate Fellow by the the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science. GEM's mission is to broaden participation of minorities in STEM fields at the graduate level. Liles works with Dr. Beer in the ART LAB and is studying the use of robots as teaching assistants for middle school educators.

UofSC news has an article, Going into Business, about Krit, a new startup by two of our
Seniors, Andrew Askins and Bill Brower, along with USC alumnus Austin Price. Krit is a is a visual project management tool built around the design process. Go try it out and follow them on twitter at @kritapp.

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."

We would like to welcome our newest assistant professor, Dr. Ioannis Rekleitis to the department. He was previously at McGill University, in Canada, and before that he was a visiting fellow at the Canadian Space Agency. His research focuses on mobile robotics, and in particular multi-robot cooperative localization, mapping, exploration and coverage. He is in office 3A54 and will be teaching CSCE 774 "Robotics Systems" this semester.

We would like to congratulate our very own Dr. Huhns for being elected a AAAI Fellow. The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's Fellows program was started in 1990 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions---usually over at least a ten-year period---to the field of artificial intelligence. Dr. Huhns is recognized "For significant contributions to the field of multiagent systems and its applications in information management and service-oriented computing."

Dr. Tong has been recognized as a 2014 Breakthrough Star and is featured in this @UofSC story where she describes her ongoing research on facial expression recognition.

If we are successful, computers could be used to recognize signs of road rage or intoxication in automobile drivers or to help teach autistic children how to interpret and respond appropriately to facial cues.