Computer running slow? Think you have a virus? No problem! On October 12, 2013, the student chapter of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) will hold Fix-IT at USC. This free event is open to the entire Columbia community. It will be held at the Swearingen Engineering Center (301 Main. St.) from 9a.m. to 3p.m. Services include virus and spyware removal, operating system installation, hardware diagnostics, general troubleshooting, and simple software installation. We can service laptops, desktops, Mac, Windows, and Linux. A few disclaimers: We will try to solve any problem you are having to the best of our abilities, but some problems may be out of our purview. Also, if you want us to install an operating system for you, then you will need to supply the CD with the software and the installation key.

We will be having a meeting on Wednesday September 25th. The meeting will have a guest speaker. The speaker is David Grim of Allen & Associates of America, Inc. The company he is representing is an I.T. Staffing company for the Charlotte, Columbia, and Greenville area. He will be reviewing resumes in advanced so if you would like a professional to review your resume send a digital copy todavid@allenassociates.net. He has asked for it in a .doc or .docx format. He will also give a short presentation on the listed topics. Send Resumes to david@allenassociates.net. Please do not send them to me.

• How to improve your chances of success in the I.T. market.
• What skills are in demand.
• How to improve your resume so you can be more appealing to companies. (In a stack of resumes, ours are ALWAYS picked first.)
• Interviewing tips. (Don’t think this can be covered too much.)
• Interview & lead tracking (Organizing the search)

Thanks, Benjamin Morgan Chair of ACM@USC

Featuring:

• State of the CSE Department
• Brief Overviews of Faculty Research (One-Minute Madness! Each CSE faculty member has 1 minute and 1 slide)
• Poster Presentations by Graduate Students

When: Friday, September 13, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m. Where: Amoco Hall, Swearingen Engineering Center, 301 Main Street, Columbia This is your opportunity to learn about the world-class research underway in computing at the University of South Carolina. The research extends from the theory of computing to practical aspects, such as smart-phone apps. It includes computer vision, bioinformatics, multiagent systems, Bayesian reasoning, wireless networking, information security, quantum computing, and robotics. The symposium is also an opportunity to meet the students conducting this research.

First Name	Last Name	Poster Title
Sergey	Aganezov	On pairwise distances and median score of the three genomes under DCJ
Mingzhe	Du	Wikitheoria: Web-based Tools for Developing & Accessing Sociological Theory
Xiaochuan	Fan	A Fuzzy Edge-Weighted Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation Model for Image Segmentation
Nan	Gao	Genetic Algorithm for RMP
Yang	Gao	Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiply on the Texas Instruments C6678 Digital Signal Processor
Dazhou	Guo	SVM Based Automatic T1 Weighted MRI Chronic Stroke Brain Lesion Detection Pipeline
Bryan	Haines	Research Experience for Veterans Simulation Software for Renewable Integration
Junaed Bin	Halim	Bringing MIMO Power Saving Feature in 802.11n EWLAN: An SDN Approach
Shizhong	Han	Facial Action Units Recognition through Quality based Multi-Algorithm Fusion
Jie	Huang	Secure Caching Architecture for Mobile Cloud
Ani	Kish	Dynamic Partitioning of Data for Workflow Compositions
Yuewei	Lin	Imporved Background Subtraction for Detecting Objects with Infrequent Motions
Xiao	Lin	Sequential Experimental Design
Jhih-Rong	Lin	Identification of regulation of nuclear import by post-translational modification (PTM) within/adjacent nuclear localization signal (NLS) based on NLS-import receptor interaction
Ping	Liu	Facial Expression Analysis with Deep Learning
Rufeng	Meng	SkyEye: Local Traffic Map
Hossen	Mustafa	Detecting Evil Twin Access Point Attack in Wireless Hotspots
Krishna	Nagar	Accuracy, Cost and Performance Tradeoffs for Set-wise Floating Point Accumulation
Bridgette	Parsons	NurseView: Agent-Based Simulation for Nursing Administration
Muhammad	Sakib	Revealing Fast-Flux Mothership
Dhaval	Salvi	Document Image Analysis: Document Image Retification and Handwritten Text-Segmentation
Ibrahim	Savran	Large-scale Pairwise Sequence Alignments on a Massively Parallel GPU Cluster
RoxAnn	Stalvey	Information Security in High School
Jing	Tian	Text Independent Handwriting Identification Using Leap Motion Controller
Jiting	Xu	Approximate Bayesian Computation Based on Progressive Correction of Gaussian Components
Fan	Zhang	Real Time Optical Flow on Multicore Embedded DSP
Kang	Zheng	Paragon: A Digital Collation System
Youjie	Zhou	Multiscale Superpixels and Supervoxels via Hierarchical Edge-Weighted Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation
Jun	Zhou	Finding the lost treasure by comining PMAG and GAST
Lingxi	Zhou	Genome Inferring based on Median Problem of Maximum Likelihood of Gene Adjacencies

Cheers, Michael Huhns, Professor and Chair Department of Computer Science and Engineering

There will be an ACM student chapter meeting tomorrow (Wednesday) September 4, at 7pm, in SWR 2A17. For more info checkout their facebook page.

Details here.

COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Subrahmanyam Bulusu Marine Science Program & Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences University of South Carolina Date: April 25, 2013 Time: 1400-1500 (2:00pm-3:00pm) Place: Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge) Abstract Salt plays an important role in our daily lives. True, salt makes our food tastier, but perhaps its most significant role is as an ingredient in Earth's climate. A measurement of sea surface salinity, or the concentration of salt at the ocean’s surface, gives us vital information on global ocean circulation and how fresh water moves between the ocean and other reservoirs through the water cycle, the process by which water circulates from the ocean, to the atmosphere, to the land, and then back to the ocean. In the past, researchers assumed that salinity did not play a significant role in the dynamics and thermodynamics of the oceans because it has little variation ind the global oceans. Salinity and temperature together affect the density of seawater, and its circulation. Though temperature has been measured extensively, both in-situ and remotely sensed, salinity observations have been lacking. Regular in-situ salinity measurements have been restricted to just a small fraction of the oceans. Most of these measurements have been by ships-of-opportunity along major shipping lines. Due to these limited measurements, basin-scale processes and variability studies that require the incorporation of salinity data have been a challenge. The launch of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite in November 2009, and the United State’s NASA and Space Agency of Argentina’s (CONAE; Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales) Aquarius/ Satellite de Aplicaciones Cientificas (SAC)-D satellite mission in June 2011, opened a new era for providing global oceans salinity observations, which will improve our understanding of salinity variability and dynamics. SMOS has been designed to observe soil moisture over the Earth's landmasses and salinity over the oceans. Aquarius/SAC-D science objectives seek to provide high quality salinity data that will help enhance the study of ocean circulation, the global hydrological cycle, climate variability, land processes, land use, soil moisture, natural hazards, health applications, cryosphere, etc. Dr. Subrahmanyam (Subra) Bulusu is an Associate Professor, with appointments in the Marine Science Program and the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of South Carolina. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Southampton, UK in 1998, did two-year postdoctoral work at the Florida State University, and then became Research faculty at FSU until 2005. He joined USC in August, 2005 as an Assistant Professor and became an Associate Professor with tenure in 2009. Since his arrival at USC, he has established a state-of-the art Satellite Oceanography Laboratory in the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences. Last year he was appointed as the USC campus Director for the NASA/SC Space Grant Consortium. He was awarded the prestigious Breakthrough Rising Star designation at USC in 2013.

Our speaker will be Jeff McElroy. Many of you know Jeff as a member of our IAB. Jeff has also started a number of highly successful high tech companies. Presently he is a principal of Bang! Technologies which specializes in helping entrepreneurs start high tech companies. Jeff is a good speaker and has had a number of interesting experiences that he will talk about. Jeff was a student here in the 1980s. At that time he persuaded Prof Hillborn in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department to let himself and another student do an Individual Study class to build a “car” to compete in the IEEE SoutheastCON hardware contest. This was our first entry into that contest which later became the basis for the capstone project in both the Electrical and the Computer Engineering programs. Following graduation one of his first companies was formed to develop a cell phone assistant using voice recognition. The basic idea was that you could use your phone as a personal secretary. For example you could ask your phone to “call Joe Smith” and it would look up the number and make the connection (this was 25 years ago, long before the iphone) or you could ask it to make a note of something said during the conversation so you wouldn’t forget it.

COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Lantao Liu Department of Computer Science and Engineering Texas A&M University Date: April 11, 2013 Time: 1400-1500 (2:00pm-3:00pm) Place: Swearingen 1A03 (Faculty Lounge) Abstract Like humans, multiple robots need to collaborate with each other to accomplish certain missions efficiently. Task allocation (or assignment) is an important component for building multi-robot systems that behave as a coordinated whole. This talk will cover two settings in which coordination methods using task allocation techniques are effective; the two settings bring together ideas from different fields: distributed AI, operations research, graph theory, high performance computation, and economics. Specifically, I will introduce two decentralized task assignment methods: (1) a multi-level assignment decentralization framework based on matrix partitioning in order to cluster the strongly related robot-tasks pairs, and (2) a task-swap based assignment algorithm with many unique features that are particularly suitable for distributed multi-robot task allocation. Furthermore, I am also going to discuss how the classic assignment algorithms can still be extended to solve new problems in the multi-robot domain, e.g., how the combinatorial assignment algorithm itself can be extended to tackle the task allocation involving uncertainty; and how the matching bigraph data structure of the assignment algorithm can be manipulated to solve the robotics routing and formation control problems. Lantao Liu is a Ph.D. candidate (with dissertation successfully defended) in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. Liu works on developing coordination methods for multiple robots. His dissertation was on task allocation problems. Liu also works on estimating and analyzing the properties of swarm systems, motion planning for robotics, and protein folding in computational biology. Recently, Liu has been awarded the prestigious Texas A&M University Dissertation Fellowship and the Chinese Government Scholarship for outstanding students abroad, which is based on nominations by Chinese embassies worldwide. Liu graduated with highest honors (academic silver medalist) from the Department of Automatic Control at Beijing Institute of Technology in 2007.

COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Jingjin Yu Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Date: April 4, 2013 Time: 1330-1430 (1:30pm-2:30pm) Place: Swearingen 2D05 (Former Staff Lounge) Abstract As we know, Kalman filters, given their effectiveness in handling probabilistic events, play an important role in the processing of probabilistic sensor information, such as point clouds gathered from laser scanners. However, not all data is amenable to probabilistic analysis - some problems induce inherently combinatorial data structures. For these problems, a combinatorial filtering approach is necessary. In this talk, I discuss two such robotics (sensor fusion) problems. The first problem generalizes visibility-based pursuit-evasion games and seeks to maintain the distribution of hidden targets that move outside the field-of-view of the pursuers while a sensor sweep is being performed. Observing that key events happen only when the shadow region (all points invisible to the sensors) changes combinatorially or when targets pass in and out of the field-of-view, we can significantly reduce the amount of sensor information that we store, without discarding any useful information for computing the distribution of the hidden targets. This allows us to "live" inside a erived information space, which gives rises to efficient algorithms. These filtering algorithms provide critical information for tasks such as counting, herding, pursuit-evasion, and situational awareness in general. Next, we study the problem of using sparse, heterogeneous sensors to verify the stories (i.e., path samples) of agents (robots or people). Since there are two sets of data, the combinatorial filter for this problem can be built in two ways: Using a filter (an automaton) built from sensor data to process the story or using a filter built from the story to process the sensor data. Both approaches lead to dynamic programming based (optimally) efficient algorithms. In addition to exact path inference, our method also applies to approximate path inference that allows errors in the story. Besides immediate applicability toward security and forensics problems, the idea of external verification is promising in complementing design time model verification. Jingjin Yu received a B.S. in materials science and engineering from USTC, Hefei, China (1998). He holds M.S. degrees in chemistry (University of Chicago, 2000), mathematics (University of Illinois at Chicago, 2001), and computer science (University of Illinois at Urbana Champain, 2010). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include robotics and control theory.