Please see the attached pdf flyer for the iPhone mobile application "Ward One: Community, Histories, and Memories," a demonstration of which will take place on Wednesday, April 22, 1630-1800 (4:30-6pm) at Booker T. Washington Auditorium. "Ward One" was developed by students enrolled in the Critical Interactives (2015) course led by Drs. Buell and Cooley.

Dear CSE Students and Faculty, On April 17, 2015 in Amoco Hall at 4:30 the Computer Science and Engineering Department will hold its Awards Day ceremony. Please come early at 3:30 Alumnus John Hodgson of Blizzard Entertainment will give a talk entitled “Games? Serious Games?” on Friday, April 17, 2015, in Swearingen 1C01, Amoco Hall. Manton M. Matthews

COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina John Hodgson Blizzard Entertainment Date: April 17, 2015 Time: 1530-1630 (3:30-4:20pm) Place: Swearingen 1C01 (Amoco Hall) Abstract There are "games" (some of which are "computer games"), and there are "serious games. What is meant by these terms? And are they the right terms? We will talk about why the term "serious game" might be a bad term. We will discuss how the values and purpose of video games informs their design and how the work of computer scientists and media artists can converge in the design and production of videogames. John Hodgson is a Technical Designer at Blizzard Entertainment, a position he has held since 2012. Following a B.S. degree in Computer Science, he received an M.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, with a thesis, "Desperate Fishwives: A Study in Applied Game Design," supervised by Dr. Heidi Rae Cooley and Dr. Duncan Buell and partially funded by an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (IATDH), with support from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. At Blizzard, Mr. Hodgson designs and implements game elements and systems, interfacing between design and software development disciplines on the upcoming game Heroes of the Storm.

Dr. JJ Shepherd is one of the organizers of Indie Bits.

RSVP: http://goo.gl/forms/7agL1IGGw6

Visit POSSCON.org

COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Alberto Quattrini Li Department of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Bioengineering Politecnico di Milano Date: April 10, 2015 Time: 1450-1605 (2:50-4:05pm) Place: Swearingen 2A05 Abstract Exploration of initially unknown environments through the deployment of multirobot systems is an effective technique for many real-life applications, including map building and search and rescue. One of the most important and challenging aspects that could significantly impact system autonomy and performance is the decision about where to go next (exploration strategy) and about which robot goes where (coordination method) given current knowledge of the environment. In this talk, I will present some results that contribute to the study, the design, and the evaluation of some aspects of such a decision-making process. In the first part, I will show a method for studying the optimal behavior obtainable by an exploring robot with limited and discrete visibility in a given environment represented as a grid. Further, I will present a worst- and average-case analysis of some exploration strategies used in practice on a graph-based environment. In the second part, I will present a multirobot exploration system based on semantic information, which contributes to improve the online exploration performance. In the third part, I will discuss how to improve the experimental assessment of multirobot exploration systems, specifically by calculating the competitive ratio of some online exploration strategies and by systematically assessing some important factors affecting the exploration process, through repeatable experiments. The long-term endeavor is to contribute to make robots more efficient and autonomous, by shifting from the "how to go there?" to the "where to go?" paradigm. Alberto Quattrini Li received a M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering (2011) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering (2015) from the Politecnico di Milano (Italy), working with Professor Francesco Amigoni. In 2014 he was a visiting scholar in the Robotic Sensor Networks Lab (led by Professor Volkan Isler) of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research belongs to the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Agent Systems, and Robotics, and mainly focuses on the design and analysis of decision-making techniques in robotics exploration.

RSVP: http://goo.gl/forms/7agL1IGGw6

THESIS DEFENSE Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina Candidate: Aniqua Z. Baset Advisor: Dr. Wenyuan Xu Date: Monday, April 6, 2015 Time: 9:00am Place: Swearingen, 3A00 (Dean’s Conference Room) Abstract Modern Home Automation (HA) systems handle all aspects of daily home living. Security breaches in these systems, therefore, can affect the homeowners in various ways, ranging from creating harassments to causing physical harm. As HA systems become a common feature of modern households, the robustness of these systems against external attack demand a thorough study. In this work, we explore the vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art HA systems and, study their potential effect on the privacy and security of the homeowners. We investigated the Control4 and SmartThings HA systems as typical representatives of the HA systems available in the market. The devices in these systems communicate wirelessly using the ZigBee protocol, a prominent wireless technology in the HA field. Therefore, our study and findings can be extended to a wide range of HAs in the market. We discovered several vulnerabilities in the systems that allowed us to execute eavesdropping, spoofing and DoS attacks. We observed that it is possible to infer the types, location and activities of the devices in the home exploiting the uncovered vulnerabilities, which may lead to tracking homeowners’ activities and routine. We were also able to control home devices by injecting spoofed messages. In the end, we discussed some defense strategies that can mitigate the security and privacy risks of the HA systems we studied as well as the HA systems in general.

WIC meeting. April 2nd, 6pm, room 3A75: Raghav Badiger, Entrepreneur and Start up Guru. More Information.