My Computer Science and Engineering Department

If interested, checkout Women in Computing @USC group.

Some of our students attended the Kaspersky Hackathon which was hosted by Clemson in September 8. USC had 2 teams who took 2nd and 3rd place. Excellent work! Clay and Ronni were the trainers for the team. If you are interested, drop by the CyberSecurity@USC group. 

Dr. Lannan (Lisa) Luo has received an NSF award for her project "Enabling Precise and Automated Insecurity Analysis of Middleware on Mobile Platforms" which studies ways to improve the security of mobile platforms, like Android phones. From the abstract:

This project will develop new architectural designs, algorithms and techniques for precise and automated insecurity analysis of MoMP. To make the research concrete, demonstrations will be created for the Android Framework for mobile smartphones, tablets and IoT devices, and the first platform for precise and automated insecurity analysis of Android Framework will be built, combining current software analysis techniques, such as symbolic execution, hybrid dynamic/static analysis, and cross-process and cross-layer software analysis, to make them capable of analyzing complex and large-sized MoMP like Android Framework. The platform will be evaluated and applied to discovering various types of zero-day vulnerabilities and generating proof-of-concept exploits.

We are happy to welcome Dr. Qiang Zeng to the department. He received his PhD in Computer Science & Engineering from Penn State University and most recently was an Assistant Professor at Temple University. His main research interest is Software and Systems Security, with a focus on Internet of Things and Mobile Computing. He also works on the security aspect of machine learning. He is currently teaching CSCE 311 and is looking for students interested in Cybersecurity.

We are are happy to welcome Dr. Sanjib Sur to the Department. Dr. Sur received his PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research interests are in the areas of Wireless Systems and Architectures, Millimeter-wave Communications and Networks, Internet of Things Connectivity and Sensing Systems. He is currently teaching a class on Millimeter-Wave Networking and Applications and is looking for students to join his research group.

We are happy to welcome Dr. Pooyan Jamshidi to the Department. Dr. Jamshidi received his PhD in Computing at Dublin City University in Ireland and most recently was a Postdoctoral Associate at Carnegie Mellon University. His research goal is to advance a scientific, principled understanding of machine learning systems. He is teaching Machine Learning Systems this semester. You can visit his website to learn more about his research.

We are proud to announce that Eduardo Romero has been awarded a GEM National Consortium Fellowship. The GEM program seeks to enhance the value of the nation’s human capital by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups at the master’s and doctoral levels in engineering and science. The fellowship, in conjunction with the GEM graduate institution and GEM employer, provides a stipend, full tuition and fees, and a paid summer internship. Romero graduated Summa Cum Laude this May from the South Carolina Honors College with a major in Computer Science and minor in Mathematics. A 2017 Hispanic Scholarship Fund recipient, Eduardo was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the National Honors Society of Collegiate Scholars. His GEM internship will be at Adobe Systems Incorporated, where he will work to use Deep Learning algorithms for image classification to provide new tools to the analysts of Adobe’s Target team. Eduardo plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Ohio State University and then a career in private sector research.

Dr. Bakos has received a research award from the DOE for his joint work with Florida State University on "Electric Ship Research and Development."

We are proud to announce the following two ASPIRE award winners:

• Dr. Lisa Luo for her research on "Vulnerability Discovery and Test Input Generation for Android System Services".
• Dr. Greg Gay for his project "Investigating the Relationship between Real and Synthetic Software Faults".

Dr. Yonghong Yan has secured a research award from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory/DOE for his work on "Connecting ROSE to LLVM OpenMP Runtime".

Dr. Bakos has received a research grant from the Savannah River National Laboratory/DOE for work on "Data Analysis, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning for Plutonium Canister Corrosion Surveillance".

We are happy to announce that Rohan Bhandar, and William Edwards have been named Magellan Scholars. Their respective research topics are shown below. You can also view the full list of winners and instructions for applying. Rohan Bhandari, Honors, Sophomore, Computer Engineering, USC Columbia Mentors: Chin-Tser Huang, Computer Science and Engineering, USC Columbia Nawras Alkassab, Computer Science and Engineering, USC Columbia Analyzing and Mitigating Device-to-Device Malware Infection in IoT Networks. William Edwards, Honors, Junior, Computer Science, Mathematics, USC Columbia Mentor: Jason O'Kane, Computer Science and Engineering, USC Columbia Adjusting Predictions for Individual Variation

This year the 180 Seniors in our Capstone course developed 36 awesome applications for Industry or USC clients, or for themselves. The tech breakdown includes:

• 15 webapps: Node, Angular, firebase, meteor, django, react, ASP.NET, AWS, Google Cloud
• 14 mobile apps: Android, iOS, ionic, react native, firebase cloud
• 2 virtual reality aps: Unity
• 5 desktop/hardware applications: Windows, C#, Java, Linux, Qt

They have also recorded video demonstrations of their apps which you can watch online. We are always looking for clients for next year's Capstone course. If you want an app built for you, for free, click that link to learn more.

The winning team for this year's Backers and Hackers is Tiffany Abernathy, Cayla Przygoda, Jaime Areheart (Backer) for their app GamersCentral, an app for gamers to get connected and discover new games. Backers and Hackers is a completely student-run initiative organized by the Entrepreneurship Club and the College of Engineering and Computing at USC. The program brings together Columbia’s entrepreneurial community and USC’s mobile app development students to transform app ideas into reality.

Second place went to Jared Gentry, Brian Griffin, and Landon Sanford (Backer) for their app 2Q, a live streaming game app that is a merge between HQ Trivia and The Bachelor, where a weekly show allows a bachelorette/bachelor to find a winner based on questions that narrow people down based on comparability, and the winning pair is offered a prize to go on a date or throw a party with a bar tab.

Third place to James Chaszar, Daniel Berry, Alexander Rusnak, and Nicole Westley(backer) for their app InGate, a horse show management app that makes for easy and instant communication between the managers of the event and the competitors and coaches. Backers&Hackers are co-organized by CSCE546, a mobile app development course at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering. The apps are developed as the final projects for the course. We are always looking for clients/backers and app ideas as final projects for next year's course . If you want an app built for you, for free, or want to collaborate with app development, please contact Dr. Hu (jianjunh A.T sc.edu)

  

We are proud to announce that Noemi Glaeser has received a Goldwater Scholarship award. She is one of four USC students to receive the award this year. Nationally, 211 Goldwater Scholars and 281 Honorable Mentions were selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,280 mathematics, science, and engineering students, nominated by the faculties of 455 colleges and universities nationwide. 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.

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. After much deliberation, we have decided that the 2018 Computer Science and Engineering Outstanding Senior Awards go to: Computer Science Outstanding Senior Awards: Caleb Kisby Computer Information Systems Outstanding Senior Award: George Clayton Computer Engineering Outstanding Senior Award: Boyd Compton Computer Engineering SCSPE Award: Wesley Cherry All awardees will be honored at the University Awards Day ceremony. In addition, Wesley will be honored at a special awards banquet of the South Carolina Society of Professional Engineers. If you see them in the halls of Swearingen or the Storey Innovation Center, then please make sure to give them your congratulations!