COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina John Hodgson Blizzard Entertainment Date: April 17, 2015 Time: 1530-1630 (3:30-4:20pm) Place: Swearingen 1C01 (Amoco Hall) Abstract There are "games" (some of which are "computer games"), and there are "serious games. What is meant by these terms? And are they the right terms? We will talk about why the term "serious game" might be a bad term. We will discuss how the values and purpose of video games informs their design and how the work of computer scientists and media artists can converge in the design and production of videogames. John Hodgson is a Technical Designer at Blizzard Entertainment, a position he has held since 2012. Following a B.S. degree in Computer Science, he received an M.S. degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, with a thesis, "Desperate Fishwives: A Study in Applied Game Design," supervised by Dr. Heidi Rae Cooley and Dr. Duncan Buell and partially funded by an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (IATDH), with support from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. At Blizzard, Mr. Hodgson designs and implements game elements and systems, interfacing between design and software development disciplines on the upcoming game Heroes of the Storm.

Dr. JJ Shepherd is one of the organizers of Indie Bits.

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COLLOQUIUM Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of South Carolina Alberto Quattrini Li Department of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Bioengineering Politecnico di Milano Date: April 10, 2015 Time: 1450-1605 (2:50-4:05pm) Place: Swearingen 2A05 Abstract Exploration of initially unknown environments through the deployment of multirobot systems is an effective technique for many real-life applications, including map building and search and rescue. One of the most important and challenging aspects that could significantly impact system autonomy and performance is the decision about where to go next (exploration strategy) and about which robot goes where (coordination method) given current knowledge of the environment. In this talk, I will present some results that contribute to the study, the design, and the evaluation of some aspects of such a decision-making process. In the first part, I will show a method for studying the optimal behavior obtainable by an exploring robot with limited and discrete visibility in a given environment represented as a grid. Further, I will present a worst- and average-case analysis of some exploration strategies used in practice on a graph-based environment. In the second part, I will present a multirobot exploration system based on semantic information, which contributes to improve the online exploration performance. In the third part, I will discuss how to improve the experimental assessment of multirobot exploration systems, specifically by calculating the competitive ratio of some online exploration strategies and by systematically assessing some important factors affecting the exploration process, through repeatable experiments. The long-term endeavor is to contribute to make robots more efficient and autonomous, by shifting from the "how to go there?" to the "where to go?" paradigm. Alberto Quattrini Li received a M.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering (2011) and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering (2015) from the Politecnico di Milano (Italy), working with Professor Francesco Amigoni. In 2014 he was a visiting scholar in the Robotic Sensor Networks Lab (led by Professor Volkan Isler) of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research belongs to the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Multi-Agent Systems, and Robotics, and mainly focuses on the design and analysis of decision-making techniques in robotics exploration.

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THESIS DEFENSE Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina Candidate: Aniqua Z. Baset Advisor: Dr. Wenyuan Xu Date: Monday, April 6, 2015 Time: 9:00am Place: Swearingen, 3A00 (Dean’s Conference Room) Abstract Modern Home Automation (HA) systems handle all aspects of daily home living. Security breaches in these systems, therefore, can affect the homeowners in various ways, ranging from creating harassments to causing physical harm. As HA systems become a common feature of modern households, the robustness of these systems against external attack demand a thorough study. In this work, we explore the vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art HA systems and, study their potential effect on the privacy and security of the homeowners. We investigated the Control4 and SmartThings HA systems as typical representatives of the HA systems available in the market. The devices in these systems communicate wirelessly using the ZigBee protocol, a prominent wireless technology in the HA field. Therefore, our study and findings can be extended to a wide range of HAs in the market. We discovered several vulnerabilities in the systems that allowed us to execute eavesdropping, spoofing and DoS attacks. We observed that it is possible to infer the types, location and activities of the devices in the home exploiting the uncovered vulnerabilities, which may lead to tracking homeowners’ activities and routine. We were also able to control home devices by injecting spoofed messages. In the end, we discussed some defense strategies that can mitigate the security and privacy risks of the HA systems we studied as well as the HA systems in general.

WIC meeting. April 2nd, 6pm, room 3A75: Raghav Badiger, Entrepreneur and Start up Guru. More Information.

DISSERTATION DEFENSE Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina Candidate: Shuai Jiang Advisor: Dr. Jijun Tang Date: Thursday, April 2, 2015 Time: 3:00pm Place: Swearingen, 3A00 (Dean’s Conference Room) Abstract Genome rearrangements are evolutionary events that shuffle genomic material. Since large-scale rearrangements happen rarely and have dramatic effect on the genomes, the evolutionary history between two genomes usually corresponds to a shortest rearrangement scenario (minimal number of rearrangements) between them. However, there may exist multiple shortest rearrangement scenarios between two genomes, making it difficult to find the true history. Furthermore, there also exist "complex" rearrangement operations such as transpositions (that cut off a segment of a chromosome and insert it into some other place in the genome), whose effect on the shortest rearrangement scenario is still unclear. There exist several rearrangement models that simplify the rearrangement analysis, such as multi-break (also known as k-breaks, k=2,3) and Double-Cut-and-Join, none of which is biologically adequate for analysis of transpositions among other types of genome rearrangements. In the first part of this dissertation, we employ the multi-break rearrangement model to study the shortest rearrangement scenarios between two genomes. We show the appearance of transpositions in the shortest 2-break scenarios and derive the upper and lower bounds of their proportion in such scenarios. The results imply that transpositions may exist in large proportion in shortest 2-break scenarios. Then we prove that the introduction of a relative large weight to transpositions cannot achieve its purpose of bounding the proportion of transpositions in shortest 3-break scenarios. The ability of finding a shortest rearrangement scenario can be used for reconstruction of ancestral genomes from the given genomes, so that the total numbers of rearrangements between ancestral genomes and given genomes is minimal. This problem is known to be NP-complete even in the "simplest" case of three genome, called the genome median problem. Currently, there exist several tools for reconstruction of ancestral genomes, such as Multiple Genome Rearrangements and Ancestors (MGRA). Most of them are limited to genomes on the same set of genes with each gene present in a single copy in every genome. This limitation makes these tools inapplicable for many important biological datasets or degrades the resolution of ancestral reconstructions in others. Furthermore even if the given genomes are linear (i.e., consist only of linear chromosomes), the ancestral genomes reconstructed by existing tools may contain circular chromosomes, which is biologically inadequate. In the second part of this dissertation, we present a next-generation tool MGRA2 that extends MGRA functionality to support gene insertions and deletions, making it applicable for more complex genomic datasets. We also propose an algorithm that uses the existing solution for ancestral genome reconstruction problem to obtain linear ancestral genomes in some optimal way.

It's that time again! Our friends at Hackerrank are helping us with another Code-a-thon, and I want you to be there! I will be posting more specifics as I find them, but here is the setup: 3 tiers: Beginner (145) Intermediate (146) Expert (240+) Each tier has it's own set of questions and prizes. Not sure what time we will be starting yet, but it will be overnight (3/27 - 3/28) The more people we get the more likely we are to be able to do this again! Invite your friends and come out! More Information at event page.