You are invited to join the first Women in Computing event of this school year. Pizza will be provided and everyone - all genders and majors is welcome! Topic: Computing Survival Guide When: Tuesday, September 4th, 7 pm to 8 pm Where: Room 2277, IBM Innovation Center/Horizon 2 (the building next to Strom Thurmond Fitness Center that has the IBM logo on the side). Here is a link to this location on Google Maps (https://goo.gl/maps/GwCroqGrfoS2) The main agenda of this first event is to welcome the Class of 2022. The upperclassmen will share advice and are happy to answer questions from the underclassmen about computing, engineering, or USC life. Hope to see you all soon!

DISSERTATION DEFENSE Author : Hongkai Yu Advisor : Dr. Song Wang Abstract Fast and accurate characterization of fiber micro-structures plays a central role for material scientists to analyze physical properties of continuous fiber reinforced composite materials. In materials science, this is usually achieved by continuously cross-sectioning a 3D material sample for a sequence of 2D microscopic images, followed by a fiber detection/tracking algorithm through the obtained image sequence. To speed up this process and be able to handle larger-size material samples, we propose sparse sampling with larger inter-slice distance in cross sectioning and develop a new algorithm that can robustly track large-scale fibers from such a sparsely sampled image sequence. In particular, the problem is formulated as multi-target tracking and Kalman filters are applied to track each fiber along the image sequence. One main challenge in this tracking process is to correctly associate each fiber to its observation given that 1) fiber observations are of large scale, crowded and show very similar appearances in a 2D slice, and 2) there may be a large gap between the predicted location of a fiber and its observation in the sparse sampling. To address this challenge, a novel group-wise association algorithm is developed by leveraging the fact that fibers are implanted in bundles and the fibers in the same bundle are highly correlated through the image sequence. Tracking-by-detection algorithms rely heavily on detection accuracy, especially the recall performance. The state-of-the-art fiber detection algorithms perform well under ideal conditions, but are not accurate where there are local degradations of image quality, due to contaminants on the material surface and/or defocus blur. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) could be used for this problem, but would require a large number of manual annotated fibers, which are not available. We propose an unsupervised learning method to accurately detect fibers on the large scale, which is robust against local degradations of image quality. The proposed method does not require manual annotations, but uses fiber shape/size priors and spatio-temporal consistency in tracking to simulate the supervision in the training of the CNN. Due to the significant microscope movement during the data acquisition, the sampled microscopy images might be not well aligned, which increases the difficulties for further large-scale fiber tracking. We design an object tracking system which could accurately track large-scale fibers and simultaneously perform satisfactory image registration. Large-scale fiber tracking task is accomplished by Kalman filters based tracking algorithms. With the assistance of fiber tracking, the registration error is minimized via a physics optimization model embedded with fibers' 3D trajectory constraints. To evaluate the proposed methods, a dataset was collected by Air Force Research Laboratories (AFRL). The material scientists in AFRL used a serial sectioning instrument to cross-section the 3D material samples. During sample preparation, the samples are ground, cleaned, and then imaged. Experimental results on this collected dataset have demonstrated that the proposed frameworks yield significant improvements in large-scale fiber tracking and detection, together with improved image registration. Date : June 25th , 2018 Time : 8:30 am Place : Meeting room 2267, Innovation Center

DISSERTATION DEFENSE Author : Sharaf Malebary Advisor : Dr. Wenyuan Xu Abstract The rapid advancement in wireless technology along with their low cost and easy to deploy have been attracting researchers academically and commercially. Researchers from private and public sectors are investing into enhancing the reliability, robustness, and security of radio frequency (RF) communications to accommodate the demand and enhance lifestyle. RF base communications -by nature- are slower and more exposed to attacks than a wired base (LAN). Deploying such networks in various cutting-edge mobile platforms (e.g. VANet, IoT, Autonomous robots) adds new challenges that impact the quality directly. Moreover, adopting such networks in public outdoor areas make them vulnerable to various attacks (regardless of the attacker motive). Therefore, the quality and security of the communications cannot be neglected especially when developing outdoor wireless applications/networks. While some wireless applications and platforms aim to provide comfort and infotainment, others are more critical to protect and save lives. Thus, the need for mobile broadband connections has been increased to accommodate such applications. The FCC took the first step to regulate and assure the quality when using these technologies by allocating spectrums and issuing standards and amendments (e.g. IEEE802.11a, b, g, n, and p) to deliver reliable and secure communications. In this dissertation, we introduce several problems related to the security and quality of communications in outdoor environments. Although we focus on the ISM-RF bands UHF and SHF (licensed and unlicensed) and their applications nevertheless, the concept of propagating signals through the air for communications remain the same across other bands. Therefore, problems and solutions in this work can be adopted and applied to different wireless technologies with respect to environment and mobility. Date : June 13th , 2018 Time : 10:00 am Place : Meeting room 2267, Innovation Center

Prof. Amit P. Sheth Abstract: While Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others engage in OpenAI discussions of whether or not AI, robots, and machines will replace humans, proponents of human-centric computing continue to extend work in which humans and machines partner in contextualized and personalized processing of multimodal data to derive actionable information. This talk describes how maturing towards the emerging paradigms of semantic computing (SC), cognitive computing (CC), and perceptual computing (PC) provides a continuum through which to exploit the ever-increasing and growing diversity of data that could enhance people’s daily lives. SC and CC sift through raw data to personalize it according to context and individual users, creating abstractions that move the data closer to what humans can readily understand and apply in decision-making. PC, which interacts with the surrounding environment to collect data that is relevant and useful in understanding the outside world, is characterized by interpretative and exploratory activities that are supported by the use of prior/background knowledge. Using the examples of personalized digital health and a smart city, we will demonstrate how the trio of these computing paradigms form complementary capabilities that will enable the development of the next generation of intelligent systems. For background: http://bit.ly/PCSComputing. Biography: Prof. Amit Sheth (http://knoesis.org/amit) is an Educator, Researcher, and Entrepreneur. He is the LexisNexis Ohio Eminent Scholar, a Fellow of both IEEE and AAAI, and the executive director of Kno.e.sis-the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing at Wright State University. Kno.e.sis has ~75 researchers, including 15 faculty and ~60 funded students. In World Wide Web technology, it is placed among the top 10 universities in the world based on its 10-yr impact. He has founded three companies and continues to advise/direct startups in semantics and healthcare; several commercial products and deployed systems have resulted from his research. Taalee/Semagix, founded in 1999 developed the first knowledge driven semantic search product, similar to the one popularized in 2013 by Google’s knowledge graph enhanced semantic search. He is one of the 100 most cited computer scientists (h-index 98). Some of the recent themes he coined/popularized include smart data (2004), citizen sensing (2008), semantic perception (2008), and continuous semantics (2008). His former students are exceptionally successful as academics in research universities, researchers in industry, and successful entrepreneurs; average citations for his first 18 past PhD students exceed 1,800 (http://j.mp/Kimpact). Thursday, May 3, 9:30 am – 10:30 am 1400 Storey Innovation Center

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The Center for Advanced Analytics and Applied Innovation is hosting speakers Mark Parzyngat, Program Director at IBM Blockchain, and Ben Davis, Chief Technology Officer at Moondog Animation Studio. Tech talks will follow the induction ceremony of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the Computing honor society. Jim Stritzinger, Director of the Center for Advanced Analytics and Applied Innovation, is organizing this event.

Over the past few months, 18 mobile app ideas have been developed in conjunction with the computer science department. We are hosting a showcase competition for the 18 teams. Why Attend?

• Free Food and Refreshments
• Networking with Entrepreneurs
• Explore New Ideas
• Competitive Entrepreneur Competition

Details?

• Date: Wednesday, April 18th
• Time: 5pm-8pm
• Location: Sonoco Pavillion (Darla Moore School of Business), 1014 Greene St, Columbia, SC 29208
• Cost: None... the event is free and open to the public

Event Itinerary?

• 5:00 Registration
• 5:00 - 6:00 Networking, looking at displays
• 6:00 - 6:30 Opening remarks, Speech, Judges Deliberate
• 7:00 Awards Ceremony, Continued networking
• 8:00 Event Ends

Got Questions? Email: exec@eclubsc.com Visit our website: www.eclubsc.com How do I reserve my free ticket? Click here!

It is our pleasure to invite you to ColaHacks, USC's first student hackathon, taking place Saturday, April 14th from 9am-9pm at the Zone at Williams-Brice Stadium. Participation is limited to 160 students so if interested, please register as soon as possible at www.colahacks.com. Registration is free and open to all undergraduate/graduate students currently attending USC. Major League Hacking (MLH) defines hackathon as an invention marathon. Anyone who has an interest in technology attends a hackathon to learn, build and share their creations over the course of a weekend in a relaxed and welcoming atmosphere. You don’t have to be a programmer, and you certainly don’t have to be a Computer Science major. All you need is a passion for solving unique challenges our generation faces and a love for technology. ColaHacks gives students almost 12 hours to work on a project they feel betters Columbia, SC in some way; be it an app, website, or any other technology. Teams of students (1-4) will then demo and present their ideas to judges for the chance to compete for cash prizes as well as other gifts and awards. There are many reasons you should want to attend a hackathon, but here are just a few benefits that ColaHacks will be offering:

• Free catered food and refreshments all day long
• Awards of up to $750, as well as gifts such as Google Homes, Amazon Echos, 3D printing pens and more!
• Door prizes and giveaways
• Opportunities to network with students and technologists in the local area
• Growth in technical skills, presentation abilities, and leadership.
• Access to engineers and recruiters from top local tech companies, including 52Inc, Swampfox, Boeing, AgFirst, and more
• If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to the organizing team at colahacks@gmail.com. Make sure to register soon at: www.colahacks.com. Thank you for your time, and we look forward to seeing you on April 14!

Best, ColaHacks 2018

Organizers

Colahacks is being organized by two of the Unversity of South Carolina's largest CS organizations: UofSC's Chapter of the Assocation of Computing Machinery and Women in Computing. Both clubs strive to provide out of the classroom learning experiences for students.