My Computer Science and Engineering Department

Professor Chin-Tser Huang, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, recently received an NSF grant for his project titled Dynamic Early Filtering of Botnet Garbage Traffic".

Currently in the Internet there is an increasing number of unwanted, unsolicited "garbage" packets mainly generated by botnets, which can launch Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks, worm attacks, and spam. These garbage packets are allowed to traverse the Internet to cause severe traffic burdens, waste communication resources, and disrupt the Internet's normal functions. Such packets need to be discarded as close to their sources as possible to increase the availability and reliability of the Internet.

This project aims to address the above problem by establishing a comprehensive and sustainable architecture that coordinates the routers in the Internet to filter out botnet garbage packets from Internet traffic as early as possible. The architecture comprises four major components: rule generation component, rule dissemination component, rule management component, and rule security component. The objective is to investigate and quantify the tradeoff between the saved bandwidth originally consumed by the garbage traffic and the throughput slowdown introduced by the routers' extra filtering overhead, and find optimal solutions under the tradeoff function. The evaluation plan will use benchmarks developed under various traffic traces and network topologies to evaluate the performance of the developed algorithms and technologies, and derive insights on how far and wide the filtering rules should be disseminated and installed under different attack scenarios in order to optimize the performance.

The Computer Science and Engineering and its ACM Student Chapter played host to the first Columbia Code Camp right here in the Swearingen building. The event is organized by the Columbia Enterprise Developers Guild and is a meeting of local and invited software developers where they can learn from each other how to use the latest technologies.

By all accounts the event was a major success with over 160 people in attendance. The rooms in Swearingen were filled to capacity and over $10,000 in swag (including two Backberry devices, one XBox Elite, more than 80 books, and many software licenses) was given away. The agenda included talks on technical topics such as LINQ to SQL Tricks and Tips, Parameter sniffing, Silverlight, iPhone SDK, Windows Presentation Foundation as well as general talks on career and wages.

The event was made possible in part by our ACM Student Chapter and other student volunteers who helped visitors find their way around Swearingen and coordinated the use of the facilities.

Below are a few photos from the event. You can view more by visiting the Columbia CodeCamp's flickr page.

The Magellan Scholar program was created to enrich the academic experience of USC's undergraduates through research opportunities in all disciplines from science, technology, and medicine, to theatre, music, and art. By providing access to faculty mentoring relationships and a professional research experience, this program enables students to creatively explore their interests at a more in-depth level than can be attained in the classroom. The Magellan Scholar program provides opportunities for undergraduates to build a competitive edge in the job market.

We are proud to announce that three of our undergraduates have received Magellan scholarships this Winter, they are:

• Amadeo Bellotti
• Travis Robert Taylor
• Alexander C. Wong

This week is Computer Science Education week, a time when the Computer Science educators in the nation try to draw attention to the ever-increasing market demand for software developers as contrasted by the decreasing focus in Computer Science at the high school level. A press release from the National Science Foundation highlights the problem:

Only 16,622 high school students entering college take the Advanced Placement (AP) computer science exam, according to the College Board that administers the AP tests. Compare that with the over 230,000 students who took the AP Calculus AB exam and the over 360,000 students took the U.S. History AP exam, and the neglect of computer science at the K-12 level comes into the focus.

Meanwhile, market demand for computer science majors continues to grow. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report on employment projections software engineers are among the top 30 occupations with highest employment growth (34%) for the next decade, as are network systems and data communication analysts (53%).

Here in the CSE department we have, for the past couple of years, been reaching out to high school students via the Enhanced Learning Experience (ELE) program. ELE is a collaboration between the Outreach program and our department. Dr. Donn Griffith and Ms. Jennifer Illian coordinate visits of large groups of high school students to the University.

Once the students arrive at USC, Dr. Csilla Farkas coordinates their visit to our department. In a typical visit the students start the morning by enjoying several presentations that have been specially developed by the faculty to be engaging and accessible to high school students. In these presentations they learn about the basics of Computer Science (Dr. Vidal), Robots (Dr. O'Kane), Wireless Networks (Dr. Xu), Network Security (Dr. Farkas), and other topics.

The high school students are then joined for lunch by some of our faculty and students. Finally, they spend their afternoon in our game programming lab where they learn how video games are made and get to test their skills by playing some of the video games developed by our students in our games programming class.