Dr Xu and her research team have discovered security vulnerabilities in the sensors of cardiac defibrillators and pacemakers. She explains:

As researchers, it's our responsibility to always challenge the common practice and find defenses for vulnerabilities that could be exploited before unfortunate incidents happen. We hope our research findings can help to enhance the security of sensing systems that will emerge for years to come.

Jason Rikard and Jonathan Mayhak, two recent graduates from this department, have just released Grubbly, a website and iphone app (Android coming soon) where you can find local food specials. Currently it only covers Columbia but plans are to expand to nearby cities. The app is featured in the State Newspaper. Also, check out their blog.

We congratulate our two Magellan Scholars award winners for this Semester: Connor Bain who will be working on Utilizing Activity and Context Recognition to Mitigate Distractions from Smartphones and Casey Cole who is working on Developing Databases, Web-interfaces and Visualization Tools for Computational Material Discovery.

We congratulate Daniel Grier, an undergraduate double-majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics, for being awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for attending graduate school (list of winners). The 3-year fellowship covers tuition at any University and provides a stipend of $30,000/year.

Mateusz Czarnocki, a second-year Computer Information Systems major, received $5,000 from the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship program to study abroad in Poland this spring. This will be combined with two additional scholarships awarded to Matt, including the USC Knight Scholarship. With the help of financial aid, Matt, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, will be able to live and study in his home country.

Dr. Michael Huhns has received an IBM Faculty Research Award to conduct research into cloud computing and virtualization. He will be investigating mechanisms whereby cloud and virtualization users can share their cloud resources across institutions in the Southeast. The mechanisms will leverage OpenStack, OpenFlow, and other standard protocols for cloud computing. The expected outcome of the effort is that it will be easier to deploy and manage applications across integrated clouds.

We congratulate Casey Cole for winning a Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates award. She is building a webapp for storing and easy retrieval of doping experiment results, visualizing trends in these results, as well as developing regular expression-based text analysis tools to automatically extract doped materials information from research papers.

Dr. Srihari Nelakuditi, along with Dr. Romit Roy Choudhury at Duke University, is a recipient of the prestigious Google Faculty Research Award for their project titled "Google Glass meets Smartphones: Recognizing Humans without Face Recognition" which proposes to identify individuals based on their clothes and motion patterns when seen via Google Glass. This New Scientist article describes their research, and has been picked up by many media outlets and USC News. See video.