My Computer Science and Engineering Department

We congratulate our CSE Ph.D. students: Alireza Nasiri, Jing Jin and Steph-Yves Louis from the Machine Learning and Evolution Lab directed by Dr. Hu for winning the second place and $2,000 prize in the Big Data Health Science Case Competition organized by the UofSC National Big Data Health Science Conference, Columbia, SC February 7th-9th 2020.

The objective of the case competition is to develop a machine learning or data analytic tool that will accurately identify the culprit chemical for a given patient. The provided dataset has a list of 311 chemicals and 79 corresponding signs and sympotoms and a list of ~1,000,000 patient records. There are total 19 teams from around the nation. The Big Data Case Competition is intended to provide enthusiastic teams of graduate and senior undergraduate students with the opportunity to apply their knowledge to the analysis of big datasets in healthcare. Participating teams will be given the same business problem, datasets and access to software to solve a challenging problem using a data analytics approach. Each participating team will analyze the case and data sets provided by the sponsoring company. During this period, the teams must identify the most prominent issues facing the company and develop a strategy to address these key issues in order to help companies achieve their goals. Team members will work together to present their methods and analysis results at the Big Data Health Science Conference. A panel of industry and academic experts judge the presentations based on teams’ use of the full analytics process, from framing the problem to methodology selection, data use, model building and innovation.

Blakeley Hoffman Payne, Computer Science 2017, is featured in the UofSC News article Getting smart about artificial intelligence.

Three of our CSE faculty members have been honored by the College with awards:

• Dr. Jianjun Hu (first from left) won the Research Progress Award. This award recognizes particularly distinguished performance and accomplishments in the area of research by a tenured or tenure-track faculty member at the rank of Associate Professor in the College of Engineering and Computing.
• Dr. Yiannis Rekleitis (second) won the Young Investigator Research Award. This award recognizes a faculty member at the rank of Assistant Professor for his/her dedication and contributions to the research objectives of the College of Engineering and Computing. 
• Dr. Marco Valtorta (third) won the Joseph M. Biedenbach Distinguished Service Award. This award recognizes outstanding service through the College of Engineering and Computing.

Congratulations to all! We are proud of your phenomenal contributions to the Department, College, University, and professional communities. In the coming days, we will announce these awards on our website with some pictures of the winners accepting their awards at the CEC Faculty Meeting. You can view more photos of the event.

Each year the Faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) award four Outstanding Senior Awards. This process is never easy given the many excellent and accomplished students in our program. This year, we have decided that the 2020 Computer Science and Engineering Outstanding Senior Awards go to:

• Samyuktha Comandur (first from left): Computer Science Outstanding Senior Award.
• Joshua Mulliken (second): Computer Information Systems Outstanding Senior Award.
• Andres Pineda (third): Computer Engineering Outstanding Senior Award.
• Caleb Conner (fourth). Computer Engineering SCSPE Award.

All awardees will be honored at the University Awards Day ceremony. In addition, Conner will be honored at a special awards banquet of the South Carolina Society of Professional Engineers You can find more detailed coverage on the College News page. .

We congratulate the following Computer Science undergraduate students for receiving a Magellan Scholar Award for Spring 2020.

• Stephen Baione: Ensemble of Many Weak Defenses: Defending Deep Neural Networks Against Adversarial Attacks
• Blake Edwards: Multi-stage Compression of Deep Neural Networks through Pruning and Knowledge Distillation
• Shayon Ghoshroy: Deep Residual Learning for Computational Identification of Amino Acids
• Clio Lang: Is the Lesson Learned? A Study on Dissemination of Fake News in 2016 and 2020 Presidential Elections
• Christian Loftis: Genetic programming based Symbolic Regression for Material Thermal Conductivity Prediction
• Tien Nguyen: How Well Can the Robot Swim: Quantifying the Performance of Aqua_Nav
• Julian Rachele: Expanding upon REDCRAFT and REDCAT for Analyzing and Characterizing Proteins from Residual Dipolar Couplings
• Naga Venkata Sai Satti: MassBLAST: An Automated and Convenient Webtool for Genome-Wide Sequence Analysis

We congratulate Hunter Damron for receiving an Honorable Mention for the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for 2020. This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding research potential in an area of computing research.

We would like to congratulate:

• Utkarshini Jaimini (PhD Student)
• Revathy Venkataramanan (PhD Student)
• Ananya Banerjee (Intern)

who have been selected to participate in the CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women. They are all part of our AI Institute.

We are happy to announce that Dr. Song Wang has received research awards for two different projects: "SnowVision: A Machine Learning-Based Image Processing Tool for the Study of Native American Paddle Designs" is funded by the SC Department of Natural Resources (SCDNR)/NEH, and "Dendroid Core Detection and Tracking for Directionally Solidified Ni-Based Alloys" is funded by UES, Inc./AFRL/DOD .

Dr. Austin Downey (Mechanical Engineering) and Dr. Jason Bakos have received a research award from the National Science Foundation for their project " A Programming Model and Platform Architecture for Real-time Machine Learning for Sub-second Systems".

The department held it's 1st Annual Halloween Graduate Student and Faculty Appreciation Brunch on October 30. It was great to see everyone in a more social setting! We enjoyed getting to know our students better over breakfast and we look forward to our next social. Click below to see more photos from the event.

We are excited that Dr. Amit Sheth has joined us this Fall and brought with him the Artificial Intelligence Institute. The institute, created under the recent excellence initiative, is led by Prof. Amit Sheth, a researcher, educator and entrepreneur. With a proven leadership record of creating world-class research centers and funding record (> $33 million), Sheth launched three companies by licensing his university-developed technologies and advised 30 PhDs who now have highly successful careers in academia, industry research and entrepreneurship.

We are happy to welcome a new faculty member, Dr. Ramtin Zand, this Fall. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida. His research interests involve Hardware Design for Machine Learning Systems, Neuromorphic Computing, Emerging Nanoscale Electronics including spintronic devices, Reconfigurable and Adaptive Computer Architectures, and Low-Power and Reliability-Aware VLSI Circuits. His office is Room 2211 at the Storey Innovation Center.

This is Dr. Matt Thatcher, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. I want to make you aware of an excellent opportunity available to you – the Bachelor’s/Masters Accelerated Program. This is a combined B.S./M.S degree program available to undergraduate students in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) with 90 or more hours earned toward their baccalaureate degrees. Students accepted into this program must have a minimum overall GPA of 3.40 and at least 3.40 in the course work taken in CSE. Up to 12 credit hours at the 500 level or above may be applied toward both the B.S. and M.S. degree requirements; this means that with one additional year of study you will leave USC with both a B.S. and an M.S. degree!

The approval of the student's advisor and the graduate director is required. You must have approval before enrolling in the 500 level or above courses in order for them to apply toward this accelerated degree program. So, make sure to contact the graduate director (via this link) soon to learn more about this opportunity; when you complete the contact form at this link please select Graduate admissions or questions as the Category. I hope everyone has a wonderful Fall Break! Sincerely, Matt E. Thatcher, Ph.D. Professor and Chair

We congratulate Dr. Amit Sheth for being awared the Distinguished Alumni Award for Academic Excellence by his alma mater The Ohio State University.  See more photos.

Dr. Jianjun Hu from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project titled "Collaborative Research: Integrating Physics and Generative Machine Learning Models for Inverse Materials Design".