We would like to congratulate Mr. Daniel Grier, a junior in Computer Science and Math, on winning the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship to graduate school!

Rishi Patel, a CIS major, along with two other USC students, Ian Castrovinci and Dennis Lopez, have just released CloudShouts. CloudShouts is an iphone, and soon to be Android, app that lets you post messages, photos, and have conversations with other people in the same geographic "cloud". Right now there is a USC cloud, along with 10 other University clouds along the Eastern seaboard. So, go download the free iphone app.

From their about page: "CloudShouts was founded by three University of South Carolina students that noticed inefficiencies within their college community. Inspired by foursquare and Localmind, the team strives to solve these inefficiencies by designing their own community-sharing platform. The future of communication is changing fast, and the CloudShouts team is building it."

Once again the department was very successful at Graduate Student Day. We had one first place winner, Jarrell Waggoner, and two second place winners Laura Boccanfuso and Ishtiaq Rouf. Congratulations to both. For the full story see here or the links below.

• Jarrell Waggoner, Computer Science and Engineering PhD, Graph Cut Approaches for Materials Segmentation Preserving Shape, Appearance, and Topology Oral 2 - Physical Sciences 1st Place
• Laura Boccanfuso, Computer Science and Engineering PhD Remote Stress Detection with a High Precision Infrared Sensor Oral 6 - Health & Life Sciences 2nd Place
• Ishtiaq Rouf, Computer Science and Engineering MS Neighborhood Watch: Security and Privacy Analysis of Automatic Meter Reading Systems Poster 11 - Physical Sciences 2nd Place

Dr. Yan Tong, a Computer Science and Engineering assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, College of Engineering and Computing, has received the National Science Foundation's CAREER award. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is NSF's most prestigious award in support of the early career-development activities of junior faculty.

The award will support her research on facial recognition, that is, on developing algorithms that can detect whether a person in a video is smiling, angry, confused, etc. This work is innovative in that it blends both visual and auditory information so the software uses both what it sees and what it hears in the video to determine how the person's face looks like. In more detail:

Dr. Huang has received an award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in support of his research on "Collaborative DoD DURIP proposal: A Distributed Platform for Capturing, Analyzing, and Combating Botnet Attacks," which is a collaboration with the University of Texas.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina will offer in summer 2012 an institute in Computer Science for prospective teachers of AP* Computer Science A.

The plan is for the on-campus part of the institute to be held from 18 June through 22 June 2012. Some preparatory work will be required in the two weeks prior to the week on campus, and some work will be submitted in the week following the week on campus.

Dr. Buell's research on voting machines is featured in this article from the Myrtle Beach Online (part 2).

It wasn’t hard to jog the memory of Duncan Buell, a computer science professor at USC and one of the report’s authors, on Friday, more than three months after the report was released. Buell, a voting machine expert, said that ”Horry County has the messiest of the data, perhaps, in the entire state.“

Dr. Barry Markovsky (Sociology) and Dr. Jose M Vidal have received and NSF award for their research project "Web-based Tools for Developing and Accessing Sociological Theory." This project brings together researchers from the Sociology department and the Computer Science and Engineering department in order to design, implement and test a web-based system for developing, improving and disseminating sociological theories across all areas of the discipline.

“I see it as a cross between stackoverflow and the wikipedia, but targeted towards scientists” said Dr. Vidal. “Both of those sites are showing us how an online community can be formed and function successfully to aggregate the knowledge of many individuals. However, they are not without their drawbacks: stackoverflow enforces a very strick question-and-answers format, while the wikipedia actively discourages scientists from contributing on the topics they have the most expertise (their own research). Our system will try to overcome these limitations.” The researchers hope to build a system what will facilitate the development of improved Sociological, and later scientific, theories using proven incentives and knowledge aggregation methods.

Third year Computer Science and Engineering student Jonathan Kilby was recently awarded one of 20 Bridging Scholarships for Study Abroad in Japan. The Bridging Scholarship is a national award that offers $2500 for a semester-long study program or $4000 for a full academic year, for undergraduate students. It is coordinated by the Association of Teachers of Japanese and funded by private foundations and major U.S. corporations.

Applications are invited for one tenure-track position at the full professor or associate professor level. Candidates should have a doctorate in information systems, including computer information systems and management information systems. Candidates are expected to demonstrate excellence in both research and teaching. The new faculty member’s responsibilities will include leading the undergraduate degree program in computer information systems as well as teaching courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.