We have another exciting talk this week as part of the CSCE 791, and I invite you to join the talks. Please encourage your students to join as well via the link below: https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/e51c76fda53042b790ea62ff2d7b2895 Friday, 11/20/2020, from 2:20 pm to 3:10 pm EDT, we have a talk from Nirupam Roy, Assistant Professor, UMD College Park. Abstract: The recent proliferation of acoustic devices, ranging from voice assistants to wearable health monitors, is leading to a sensing ecosystem around us -- referred to as the Internet of Acoustic Things or IoAT. My research focuses on developing hardware-software building blocks that enable new capabilities for this emerging future. In this talk, I will sample some of my projects. For instance, (1) I will demonstrate carefully designed sounds that are completely inaudible to humans but recordable by all microphones. (2) I will discuss our work with physical vibrations from mobile devices, and how they conduct through finger bones to enable new modalities of short range, human-centric communication. (3) Finally, I will draw attention to various acoustic leakages and threats that arrive with sensor-rich environments. I will conclude this talk with a glimpse of my ongoing and future projects targeting a stronger convergence of sensing, computing, and communications in tomorrow’s IoT, cyber-physical systems, and healthcare technologies. Bio: Nirupam Roy is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2018. His research interests are in wireless networking, mobile computing, and embedded systems with applications to IoT, cyber-physical-systems, and security. His recent projects include low-power sensing techniques to enable self-defense in robots and drones. His doctoral thesis was selected for the 2019 CSL Ph.D. thesis award at UIUC. Nirupam is the recipient of the Valkenburg graduate research award, the Lalit Bahl fellowship, and the outstanding thesis awards from both his Bachelor's and Master's institutes. His research received the MobiSys best paper award and was selected for the ACM SIGMOBILE research highlights. Many of his research projects have been featured in news media such as the MIT Technology Review, The Telegraph, and The Huffington Post. https://www.cs.umd.edu/~nirupam/ I hope to see you all on Friday at Blackboard Collaborate.

We have another exciting talk this week as part of the CSCE 791, and I invite you to join the talks. Please encourage your students to join as well via the link below: https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/e51c76fda53042b790ea62ff2d7b2895 Friday, 11/13/2020, from 2:20 pm to 3:10 pm EDT, we have a talk from Mahanth Gowda, Assistant Professor, Pennsylvania State University. Title: Wireless and Mobile Sensing problems in IoT: Sports, Drones, and Material Sensing Abstract: Motion tracking and RF sensing is a broad area with classical problems that dates back many decades. While significant advances have come from the areas of robotics, control systems, and signal processing, the emergence of mobile and IoT devices is ushering a new age of embedded, human-centric applications. Fitbit is a simple example that has rapidly mobilized proactive healthcare; medical rehabilitation centers are utilizing wearable devices towards injury diagnosis and prediction. In this talk, I will discuss a variety of (new and old) IoT applications that present unique challenges at the intersection of mobility, multi-modal sensing, and indirect inference. For instance, I will discuss how inertial sensors embedded in balls, racquets, and shoes can be harnessed to deliver real-time sports analytics on your phone. In a separate application, I will show how GPS signals can be utilized to track the 3D orientation of an aggressively flying drone, ultimately delivering the much needed reliability against crashes. Finally, I will discuss sensing liquid materials by passing WiFi-like signals through containers holding liquids. In general, I hope to show that information fusion across wireless signals, sensors, and physical models can together deliver motion-related insights, useful to a range of applications in IoT, healthcare, and cyber physical systems. Bio: Mahanth Gowda is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at Penn State. His research interests include wireless networking, mobile sensing, and wearable computing, with applications to IoT, cyber physical systems, and human gesture recognition. He has published across diverse research forums, including NSDI, MobiCom, WWW, Infocom, Hotnets, ASPLOS, etc. http://www.cse.psu.edu/~mkg31/ I hope to see you all on Friday at Blackboard Collaborate.

Date and time: Monday, Nov 9, 2020; 4:00-5:00 pm Abstract: Natural Language Inference is a fundamental task in natural language processing particularly due to its ability to evaluate the reasoning ability of models. Most approaches for solving the problem use only the textual content present in training data. However, use of knowledge graphs for Natural Language Inference is not well explored. In this presentation, I will detail two novel approaches that harness ConceptNet as a knowledge base for Natural Language Inference. The framework we use for both these approaches include selecting relevant information from the knowledge graph and encoding them to augment the text based models. The first approach selects concepts mentioned in the text and shows how information from knowledge graph embeddings of these concepts can augment the text based embeddings. However, it ignores the primary issue of noise from knowledge graphs while selecting relevant. The second approach builds upon the first by alleviating noise and using graph convolutional networks for not only considering the concepts mentioned in text but also their neighborhood structure that can be utilized. Overall we show that knowledge graphs can augment the existing text based NLI models with being robust in comparing to text-based models only. Bio: Pavan Kapanipathi is a Research Staff Member in the AI-foundations reasoning group at IBM Research. He is broadly intereseted in Knowledge Graphs, Semantic Web, Reasoning and Natural Language Processing. He graduated with a PhD from Wright State University in 2016. Pavan Kapanipathi has had a winning entry in the open track for the Triplification Challenge at I-Semantics and a best paper award at MRQA workshop at ACL, 2018. He has served as a Program Committee member of prominent AI, NLP, and Web conferences. Blackboard link: https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/4bae3374fe194ee0a0fd2ef232d48aec

We have another exciting talk this week as part of the CSCE 791, and I invite you to join the talks. Please encourage your students to join as well via the link below: https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/e51c76fda53042b790ea62ff2d7b2895 Friday, 10/30/2020, from 2:20 pm to 3:10 pm EDT, we have a talk from Swarun Kumar, Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University. Title: Towards City-Scale Low-Power Wireless Internet Abstract: This talk presents the challenges and opportunities of building a city-scale low-power wireless Internet-of-Things. We build upon low-power wide-area networking (LP-WAN), a technology that enables low-cost devices with a 10-year battery to communicate at few kbps to a base station, kilometers away. We address the challenges in deploying LP-WANs in large urban environments, given the power limits of the clients and attenuation from buildings that limit signal range. We further show how LP-WANs at shorter ranges can eliminate the need for a battery altogether. Beyond communication, the talk also discusses novel applications and sensing opportunities of an omnipresent low-power Internet. Bio: Swarun Kumar is an assistant professor at CMU where he heads the laboratory for emerging wireless technologies (WiTech lab). He designs and builds novel systems to enable faster wireless networks and new services. Swarun is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and Google Faculty Research Award. https://swarunkumar.com/

Abstract: For more than two decades since the rise of the World Wide Web, the "Notice and Choice" framework has been the governing practice for the disclosure of online privacy practices. The emergence of new forms of user interactions, such as voice, and the enforcement of new regulations, such as the EU's recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) promises to change this privacy landscape drastically. In this talk, I will discuss the challenges towards providing the privacy stakeholders with privacy awareness and control in this changing landscape. I will also present our recent research on utilizing AI to analyze privacy policies and settings. Bio: Kassem Fawaz is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. His research interests include the security and privacy of the interactions between users and connected systems. He was awarded the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies in 2019. He also received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2020. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation, Federal Highway Administration, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects. His work on privacy has been featured in several media outlets, such as Wired, the Wall Street Journal, the New Scientist, and ComputerWorld. https://kassemfawaz.com/ Location: https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/e51c76fda53042b790ea62ff2d7b2895

Abstract: Businesses large and small face a common challenge around attracting new customers and retaining existing ones, with marketing as a core component in tackling this challenge. As customers and businesses move online, the amount of data available to inform and improve marketing decisions has grown significantly. In this talk we'll look at a high level overview of some of the technical challenges involved in making use of this growing set of data to improve marketing decisions and optimize toward business goals, as well as a sample of solutions explored. Bio: Chao Cai is the engineering lead for Google's product efforts helping small and medium businesses (SMBs) grow by providing them with simple and effective advertising solutions. Previously, Chao led Google's conversion measurement, reporting, and attribution efforts across a number of advertiser products. In this role, he had led development in the past on products and features within Google Ads, Google Analytics, DoubleClick, and Google Tag Manager. Prior to this, Chao had focused on various display advertising efforts within AdSense and YouTube. He holds numerous patents across the areas of online advertising, web analytics, and conversion analysis. https://www.linkedin.com/in/chaocai/ Location: https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/e51c76fda53042b790ea62ff2d7b2895

It is that time of the semester again for the UofSC Codeathon! The Fall 2020 Codeathon is going to be held completely virtually this semester over the ACM Discord (no pizza this time unfortunately). The event will run from 7 pm Friday October 9th to 7 pm Saturday October 10th. Students will have a 24-hour time window to submit answers to algorithm-based coding questions (good practice for coding interviews). There are four divisions for students depending on which of the following classes they are in (or most recently completed if not in any of the following) 145, 146, 240, 350. We are still figuring out prizes for this semester, but we will send out an update/reminder when the event is closer. We also have an alumni division for grad students (this division does not have prizes and it has all of the lower and upper division problems). We would appreciate if you could mention this event in your CSCE classes, and potentially offer extra credit (either for placing, getting in some top percentage, solving one problem, attempting a problem, etc. your choice). Please let me know plan to offer extra credit, and if so, the requirements you choose to earn it. We do still plan to get a list of names of participants even though we will not have a physical sign in sheet. ACM Discord: http://discord.gg/uRRAmYD Codeathon Info: https://acm.cse.sc.edu/events/2020-10-09/

You are invited to the talk from an external speaker from Georgia Tech this Friday, 09/25/2020, from 2:20 pm to 3:10 pm EDT. The talk is a part of the CSCE 791: Seminar in Advances in Computing. Please join the virtual lecture via the link below: https://us.bbcollab.com/guest/e51c76fda53042b790ea62ff2d7b2895 Abstract: Wireless communication has truly transformed the world. It has enabled us to connect the entire globe, and made it simple to reach people separated by thousands of miles. However, what receives less attention are other interesting properties of these wireless signals. The fact that wireless signal spread out in all directions and bounce off objects, make them a power lens to look at our world through. This facilitates sensing of the world through wireless signals. In this talk I present two main ideas: Wireless localization which measures the time wireless signals take to travel between two devices, and wireless material identification which analyzes the effect of a liquid on wireless signals, in order to identify the liquid. Bio: Dr. Ashutosh Dhekne is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, his MTech from IIT Bombay, and bachelors from the University of Pune. His research interests include Mobile Computing, Wireless Networking, Wireless Sensing, and the Internet of Things. https://www.cc.gatech.edu/~dhekne/

I wanted to invite everyone down to our Association for Computing Machinery at the University of South Carolina. We are a student organization that meets weekly to discuss a wide range of topics, usually presented by students accompanied with pizza. This semester we may be unable to have our pizza, but we are continuing to have our talks every Thursday at 7. We enjoy talks from anything related to Computers or Computer Science, and we take talk proposals from all students who have an interest in any related topic. Always feel free to join us, we are currently on Discord for the semester. Our organization is also well suited for networking and in my opinion a great skill to have is to be able to present on a topic to any audience. ACM gives a great platform for developing those important skills. Our next two talks are a great example of the wide range of topics and people that give talks at our organization. On the 17th Charles Daniels, a PhD student here will be giving a talk, Introduction to Python. Next week, the 24th, Dalton Craven will be giving a talk, Interactive React, which will be an interactive activity that gives the basics to writing web applications that are pretty and responsive. Throughout the semester we have many other events, one of my personal favorites is ICPC. It is the ACM Intercollegiate Programming Competition, it is a programming competition where we travel to Charleston and compete with other schools such as Clemson, College of Charleston, University of Central Florida, and otherwise enjoy a day traveling and competing. One other is our semesterly codeathon, where we have an in-house programming competition for prizes and slots for our ICPC team. Lastly we have events such as Open Source Columbia, and Open Source 101, where we travel to conventions and are generally great networking opportunities, as well as places to learn the newest and shiniest materials in the field. Hope to see everyone this semester! ———————————————————————————— Introduction to Python Charles Daniels 17 September 2020 7:00 PM EDT (UTC-04) Discord ———————————————————————————— Interactive React Dalton Craven 24 September 2020 7:00 PM EDT (UTC-04) Discord ———————————————————————————— Below are some of our important forums. Discord: http://discord.gg/uRRAmYD ACM Website: https://acm.cse.sc.edu

Women in Computing is an organization at the University of South Carolina aimed at creating a space to meet others within your major. WiC has meetings twice a month and we help students with their career needs. Whether that means helping you set up a GitHub, or taking your headshots, or editing your resume, WiC is there for you! WiC will have their first meeting on Tuesday, September 1st at 6-7 pm. This will be a welcome meeting and we will hold elections for board members. Please join us! Topic: WiC 9/1 Meeting Time: Sep 1, 2020 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meeting https://us04web.zoom.us/j/75865675904?pwd=UHZmRE9tQ20rb002aXRIU2svWXU5U…