Towards City-Scale Low-Power Wireless Internet

Friday, October 30, 2020 - 02:20 pm
Online
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/

AI and the Changing Landscape of Privacy Notice and Choice

Friday, October 23, 2020 - 02:20 pm
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

Marketing Analytics: Problem Spaces and Potential Solutions

Thursday, October 22, 2020 - 11:00 am
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

UofSC Codeathon

Friday, October 9, 2020 - 07:00 pm
Online
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/

Wireless Sensing: Material Identification and Localization

Friday, September 25, 2020 - 02:20 pm
Online
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/

ACM@UofSC

Thursday, September 17, 2020 - 07:00 pm
Discord
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

WiC Meeting

Tuesday, September 1, 2020 - 06:00 pm
online
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…

Smart Sensing Enabled Secure and Usable Pairing and Authentication

Friday, May 8, 2020 - 09:00 am
DISSERTATION DEFENSE Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Author : Xiaopeng Li Advisor : Dr. Lannon Luo Date : May 8, 2020 Time : 9:00 am Place : Virtual Defense Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) technologies have made our lives more convenient and better informed by sensing and monitoring our surroundings. Security applications, such as device pairing and user authentication, are the fundamentals for building a trustworthy smart environment. A secure and convenient pairing approach is critical to IoT enabled applications, as pairing is to establish a secure wireless communication channel for devices. Besides, since a smart environment usually has multiple people (e.g., kids and adults, patients and doctors), how to authenticate users operating on the densely deployed devices and sensitive objects (e.g., a cabinet storing medical records) is also an important problem. Existing security measures either rely on special hardware, have bad usability, or are vulnerable to attacks, and thus fail to protect resource-constrained IoT devices and dumb objects. This thesis aims at addressing the above shortcomings and implementing three security applications: (1) performing secure pairing for IoT devices that lack conventional user interfaces, such as keyboards and display; (2) providing secure and applicable authentication for IoT devices; (3) validating uses of sensitive dumb objects that have no user input interfaces. First, we propose a technique, Universal Operation Sensing, which allows an IoT device to sense the user’s physical operations on it without requiring inertial sensors. Based on this technique, a user carrying a smartphone or wearing a wristband can finish pairing in seconds by touching, in the form of some very simple operations, the target device. We design a pairing protocol based on fuzzy commitment, and build a prototype system named T2Pair. The comprehensive evaluation shows that it is secure and usable. Second, we design three usable authentication gestures by asking the user to ‘pet’ (in the form of some very simple touches for about 2 seconds) on the devices. We build a secure and intuitive authentication method that authenticates device users by comparing the petting operations sensed by devices and those captured by the user wristband. The authentication method is highly secure as physical operations are required, rather than based on proximity. It is also intuitive, adopting very simple authentication operations, e.g., clicking buttons, twisting rotary knobs, and swiping touchscreens. Unlike the state-of-the-art methods, our method does not require any hardware modifications of devices, and thus can be applied to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices. Finally, We present the first implicit and accurate authentication approach for dumb objects, named MoMatch. (1) It provides implicit and continuous authentication. (2) It makes fast authentication decision based on a single object interaction, e.g., pushing a door. (3) It is accurate with average area under the curve (AUC) across 10 different objects =0.97. (4) It works with objects that have zero authentication interfaces. (5) It uses zero biometrics, so does not need per-user profiling. (6) Rigorous security studies are performed, showing that MoMatch is resilient to attacks. The approach is built on a solid causal relationship: an object has a motion typically because a human hand moves it. Thus, the object’s motion and the legitimate user’s hand movement must correlate to validate the use. The main challenge is how to calculate the correlation, as conventional approaches, such as Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and SVM, all fail to work. We propose an Imagified Curve Comparison (ICC) technique that converts the motion-data correlation evaluation problem into an image comparison problem, and resolve it using neural networks successfully.

A Machine Learning Based Approach to Accelerate Catalyst Discovery

Wednesday, March 18, 2020 - 11:03 am
Meeting Room 2265, Innovation Center
DISSERTATION DEFENSE Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Author : Asif Jamil Chowdhury Advisor : Dr. Gabriel A. Terejanu Date : Mar 18, 2020 Time : 11:30 am Place : Meeting Room 2265, Innovation Center Abstract Computational catalysis, in contrast to experimental catalysis, uses approximations such as density functional theory (DFT) to compute properties of reaction intermediates. But DFT calculations for a large number of surface species on variety of active site models are resource intensive. In this work, we are building a machine learning based predictive framework for adsorption energies of intermediate species, which can reduce the computational overhead significantly. Our work includes the study and development of appropriate machine learning models and effective fingerprints or descriptors to predict energies accurately for different scenarios. Furthermore, Bayesian inverse problem, that integrates experimental catalysis with its computational counterpart, uses Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods to refine the uncertainties on the quantities-of-interest such as turnover frequency. However, large number of forward simulations required by MCMC can become a bottleneck, especially in computational catalysis, where the evaluation of likelihood functions involves finding the solution to microkinetic models. A novel and faster MCMC method is proposed to reduce the number of expensive target evaluations and to shorten the burn-in period by emulating the target along with using a better informed proposal distribution.

From Combination Puzzles to the Natural Sciences

Wednesday, March 11, 2020 - 10:15 am
Storey Innovation Center (Room 2277)
You are invited at the CSCE Colloquium on Wednesday 03/11/2020 at 10:15. Abstract: Combination puzzles, such as the Rubik’s cube, pose unique challenges for artificial intelligence. Furthermore, solutions to such puzzles are directly linked to problems in the natural sciences. In this talk, I will present DeepCubeA, a deep reinforcement learning and search algorithm that can solve the Rubik’s cube, and six other puzzles, without domain specific knowledge. Next, I will discuss how solving combination puzzles opens up new possibilities for solving problems in the natural sciences. In particular, I will describe how we are using DeepCubeA to tackle problems in chemistry. Finally, I will show how problems we encounter in the natural sciences motivate future research directions. A demonstration of our work can be seen at http://deepcube.igb.uci.edu/. Bio: Forest Agostinelli is a postdoctoral researcher at UC, Irvine. He received his B.S. from the Ohio State University, his M.S. from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. from UC, Irvine. His research interests include deep learning, reinforcement learning, search, bioinformatics, neuroscience, and chemistry. His homepage is located at https://www.ics.uci.edu/~fagostin/.