My Computer Science and Engineering Department

We are pleased to announce that one of our undergraduate students, Connor Bain, has received a Goldwater Scholarship. The Goldwater Scholarship is awarded nationally to sophomores and juniors pursuing bachelors’ degrees in natural sciences, mathematics, or engineering and who intend to pursue a career in research and/or college-level teaching. Connor has been active in the ARENA. You can read the official announcement.

Dr. Jenay Beer has received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education and Georgia Tech for her project on "Telerobotics Research". The goal of this research is to understand how robots can help older adults with disabilities. The proposed robots work like "Skype on wheels" allowing a person to remain connected with his friends and family. Her lab has already acquired some exciting new technologies:

• Double robot
• Suitable Technologies Beam
• Aldebaran NAO robot

The full abstract of the project follows:

Age-related functional declines and secondary conditions can result in mobility and participation restrictions that can put individuals aging with disability at risk for further loss of functional capacity and social isolation. The purpose of this project is to understand the requirements of robotics interventions to compensate for loss of maintaining activity and social interaction among older adults with disabilities. Specifically, we are interested in the use of telerobots used for social communication. These types of robots function a lot like "Skype on wheels", and may provide opportunity to older adults to remain better connected with friends, family, and healthcare professionals. Specific aims of this project are to: 1) understand the barriers and facilitators to telerobot acceptance for older adults with disabilities and age-related declines; 2) assess the usability of a telerobot, and determine the characteristics necessary to enable older adults with hearing loss and age-related mobility limitations to control a telerobot; and 3) determine the effectiveness of telerobotic exercise interventions for enhancing exercise outcomes and social connectedness. The project will produce evidence to support the use of telerobots for interactive exercise interventions as well as recommendations for the design of telerobotic technologies.

The Code-A-Thon was a great success by all accounts! Great projects and great participation. There were 12 teams that entered, so competition was stiff, and the winners were:

• 1st Place: Muhammad Nazmus Sakib, Hossen Mustafa, Junaed Bin Halim, and Daniel Pade for their app to do Personal Scheduling.
• 2nd Place: Sujan Pakala, Lingxi Zhou, Yang Song, and Jie Huang for their website on Shopping for Groceries Economically.
• 3rd Place: Daniel Vu, Tyler Wagner, and Mathew Velasquez for their app on Searching for Items You Own.

Congratulations to all entrants!! And special thanks to Barb Ulrich, Randi Baldwin, Ronni Wilkinson, Dr. Tang, and Sherri Altizer for the logistics, and to Boeing IT for their generous sponsorship.

We are proud to announce the following winners of the CSE Annual Undergraduate Awards:

• The award of Outstanding Senior in Computer Information Systems goes to Gergely A. Uszkay.
• The award of Outstanding Senior in Computer Science goes to Logan M. Hood.
• The award of Outstanding Senior in Computer Engineering goes to Jonathan L. Kilby.
• The South Carolina Professional Engineers' Award in Computer Engineering goes to Maximus R. Brandel.

Dr. Huang provides tips on preventing security breaches.

Two of our graduate students, Mr. Muhammad Nazmus Sakib working at SPID and Mr. Junaed Bin Halim working at ARENA, have won the 2013-2014 SPARC Graduate Research Grants from the Office of the Vice President for Research. Congratulations to both of them!

We would like to congratulate three of our undergraduate students for winning Magellan awards. They are Jilbert Ogunji for his project titled "Cost Effective Method of Validating and Improving Computationally Modeled Protein Structures", Jared William Piedt for his project "Gamecock Mobile: Increasing Student Productivity Through Mobile Applications.", and Earron Twitty for "Development of an Integrated Software Package for Analysis of Structure and Dynamics of Biomolecules from RDC Data."

We are proud to announce that Dr. Duncan Buell has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This is one of the highest honors awarded to any scientist. It is bestowed upon AAAS members who have made scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.

We would like to congratulate Tamara Nicole Richardo Nurse, Shannon Hood, Ming Wong, and Michael T. Brunson, II for being chosen to join the IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu Honor Society. The IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu Honor Society at the University of South Carolina honors excellence in engineering by recognizing the leaders of today and tomorrow in the areas of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, Computer Information Systems, and Computer Engineering. On November 19th, 2013, eight students were inducted into the Delta Phi Chapter of IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu. The ceremony was held in the Electrical Engineering Conference Room in Swearingen Engineering Center. Congratulations to Eta Kappu Nu’s newest members: Tamara Nicole Richardo Nurse Shannon Hood Amanda Elliot Ming Wong Joshua Slice Michael T. Brunson, II Jeffrey M. Baker Matthew Watke The University of South Carolina established the Delta Phi Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu on May 17, 1962, and the chapter was recently reactivated last year. The chapter now has 16 undergraduate students, 1 graduate student, and 1 faculty member. Eta Kappa Nu is the Honor Society for the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering. In 2010 IEEE and Eta Kappa Nu merged to form IEEE-HKN. The organization currently has about 200 university chapters and thousands of student members. After graduation, members can continue their association with IEEE-HKN.

Our new Applied Computing Minor was featured in a TV news segment. In the video, Dr. Huhns explains how everyone can benefit from knowing the basics of cybersecurity and computing.
From the article:

Dr. Huhns says of his computer science and computer engineering majors, "My department produces fewer than 100 students each year that understand computing and something about security, and there are probably ten times as many jobs as that available, and we can't come close to filling the demand." You would think students would be lining up to go into the field. He says every graduate has multiple job offers from across the country, and the lowest starting salary that any of them has accepted was $60,000 a year.

Our ACM student group held their annual Fix-IT Day this weekend in which they were able to send 121 people home very happy that their computers were now in working order. The students removed malware (including some rootkits), applied patches, and installed free firewall and virus-protection systems. They not only fixed the computers, but also educated the people in how to maintain their computers themselves. We would like to thank our ACM student members for providing this great service to the Columbia community. You can view a slideshow of photos from the event.

Dr. Buell made an appearance on the IT Minute podcast. In this interview he talks about how computer programming is used in different types of scholarly research.

We are pleased to announce that Mr. Nick Stiffler, one of our PhD students, has received an Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) Special Recognition Scholarship Award ($1,250) for his outstanding research and academic record in computing. UPE is the international honor society in the computing and information disciplines. Congratulations, Nick!

Our Second Gamecock Symposium was an even larger success than the first one. The first prize winner was Mr. Hossen Mustafa, and the second prize winner was Mr. Fan Zhang. Congratulations! All the students did a great job presenting their research. Below is a slideshow with some images from the event: Even more photos can be found in this google+ album.

Our Computational Biology Research lab, headed by Dr. Valafar, has been awarded a grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH for their project entitled "South Carolina IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (SC INBRE) Bioinformatics (Year 4 of 5)."