We congratulate our faculty who received the following research awards:

• Christian O'Reilly, "Neonatal autonomic nervous system dysfunction as a predictor of autism spectrum disorder in preterm infants", (NIMH)/NIH, and "Cholinergic regulation of amygdalar circuits in emotional memory", (NIMH)/NIH.
• Biplav Srivastava,  "Demonstrating a Compact Foundation Model for Planning-Like(PL) Tasks for Next Generation Trusted Applications", NSF.

Ph.D. students, from Dr. Sanjib Sur's lab,  Zhuangzhuang Gu, Hem Regmi, and Reza Tavasoli, and Ryan Titus (USC Med Student, presenter) won the second place award at 2025 Discover USC Medical Scholar poster session.

We would like to announce the receipt of the following grants in the new year. Congratulations to everyone!

Pooyan Jamshidi, "Modular Performance Modeling and Analysis for Multi-Component Distributed ML Systems", Carnegie Mellon University/NSF.

Ramtin Zand: "Precision Processing of Autonomous Maritime Perception System Data - Phase III", Office of Naval Research (ONR)/DOD. Also "Advanced Perception for Autonomous Platforms in the Littorals", Office of Naval Research (ONR)/DOD.

Homayoun Valafar,  "South Carolina IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research Excellence (SC INBRE) - Bioinformatics Core (BIPP) - Year 5 of 5", National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH. Also "SC IDeA Networks of Biomedical Research (SC INBRE): Increasing Data Science Capacity", National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH

The iCAS Lab, directed by Dr. Ramtin Zand, has just published an outreach audiobook on the science communication channel, SciPod! 

The audiobook highlights a recently awarded NSF CAREER project: "Heterogeneous Neuromorphic and Edge Computing Systems for Realtime Machine Learning Technologies." Tailored for a general audience, it emphasizes the potential broader impacts of the research, particularly in real-time sign language translation.

The audiobook is available on all major streaming services. We invite you to listen and reach out to Dr. Zand at ramtin@cse.sc.edu if you are interested in collaborating to advance real-time AI and ML technologies for assistive applications and beyond! The iCAS Lab is also looking to recruit undergraduate research assistants for this exciting project!

Link to Audiobook: Dr Ramtin Zand | A Hybrid System for Real-Time Sign Language Translation • scipod.global

Computer science doctoral candidate Aakriti Adhikari is making this technology a reality through her dissertation. With next generation wireless networks looking to merge high-speed data connectivity with sensing, Adhikari’s work focuses on reconfiguring existing 5G and beyond at-home networking devices with sensing capabilities to enable healthcare applications. Read full article here.

Computer Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Forest Agostinelli has received a nearly $350,000, three-year National Science Foundation grant to study the use of heuristic (experimental) search and machine learning to solve complex pathfinding problems. Agostinelli’s project is expected to advance artificial intelligence (AI) techniques that solve problems faster or find approximate solutions. Read full article here.

We are proud to report the following new research awards received by our faculty:

• Csilla Farkas, "Department of Defense Cyber Scholarship Program 2024-2025", funded by Department of Defense (DOD)
• Forest Agostinelli, "Scalable Learning in Heuristic Search", funded by National Science Foundation (NSF)
• Amit Sheth, "Enhancing the Security and Mitigating Bias in Vision Language Models to Combat Hateful Image Generation and Detoxify Hateful Images", funded by National Science Foundation (NSF)

Professor Vignesh Narayanan from the Artificial Intelligence Institute of the University of South Carolina recently started an NSF-funded research project that aims to understand the vulnerabilities of learning-based controllers and enhance an understanding of possible cyberattacks.  Read full article here.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Ramtin Zand has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to study computing systems for real-time machine learning technologies. Zand’s five-year, nearly $600,000 project is expected to produce smaller, faster and smarter machine learning computing systems for use in real-world applications without reliance on large servers. Read full article here.

Forest Agostinelli gave a Master Class at the 17th International Symposium on Combinatorial Search (SoCS) on Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, and Heuristic Search. The one-hour talk covered his research group’s advancements in the combination of machine learning and heuristic search and its application to problems such as the Rubik’s cube, quantum algorithm compilation, and reaction mechanism prediction.

A Better Assessment provides a quick history of Dr. Agostinelli's work.