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https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/1-5m-nih-grant-improving-patient-experience-at-discharge-from-hospital/
The award is for $1,495,213, starting in August and running to July 2022.Eugenio’s ongoing research is a collaborative effort between East and West campus with co-principal investigators Andrew Boyd and Karen Dunn Lopez (Applied Health Sciences), Pamela Martyn-Nemeth (Nursing), Richard Cameron (Liberal Arts and Sciences), Debaleena Chattopadhyay (Computer Science), and Amer Ardati and Carolyn Dickens (Medicine). “It is wonderful to see such a truly interdisciplinary team working on a project to use fundamental computer science and linguistics techniques to benefit hospital patients,” said Prof. Robert Sloan, computer science department head.UIC computer science professor Barbara Di Eugenio is the recipient of a new four-year NIH R01 award entitled “SCH: INT: MyPHA: Automatically generating personalized accounts of in‐patient hospitalization.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/800k-grant-aims-to-reduce-long-term-online-data-risks/
Both Zheleva and Kanich share an interest in online data and privacy as their main areas of research. The grant, entitled “SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: Enabling Long-Term Security and Privacy through Retrospective Data Management,” runs from August 1, 2018 to July 31, 2022 and is part of an overall $1.22 million collaborative project with Professor Blasé Ur from the University of Chicago’s computer science department.Assistant Professors Elena Zheleva and Chris Kanich were awarded an $800K NSF grant to conduct one of the first longitudinal studies of how desired security and privacy decisions change over time. The goal of the research is to develop methods and tools that enable users to manage the online data they have accumulated over many years, leveraging usercentered design and machine learning to partially automate the process. These tools will enable a better understanding of retrospective privacy in the context of modern long lived online archives. They will also empower users to more effectively manage the risks embedded in these archives.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/a-secure-privacy-preserving-contact-tracing-method/
“In this architecture, all users keep their personal information on their phone, and any information sent to others is encrypted in a fashion that no one else can decrypt. Consequently, all computations and communication happen only on encrypted undecryptable data,” Venkatakrishnan said.A user would set up an account, and a unique, secret key would randomly be generated — information not shared with anyone or even with the server. Ephemeral IDs (EID) would be generated by this key and beamed to other nearby users. The protocols proposed by Venkatakrishnan and his colleagues dovetail with Apple-Google’s mechanism of using Bluetooth on phones to record the location and time of any given user. But through a mechanism called Context Signature Verification (CSV), a cryptographic hash or code would be added to the beamed EIDs, adding a time and location stamp to the interaction. This way, if a system user were to be notified of a potential exposure, their phone would first verify that the CSVs of the COVID-19 positive individual matched — that they were indeed at the same place at the same time.Venkat Venkatakrishnan, associate dean for research and graduate studies and professor of computer science at UIC and interim director of research at Discovery Partners Institute, along with Parthasarathy Madhusudan and Ling Ren of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, released a white paper in May, Privacy-Preserving Secure Contact Tracing, ConTraIL Project, offering a more secure architecture for contact tracing.Apple and Google recently rolled a joint contract tracking-tracing application which will allow apps developed by states and countries to track COVID-19 cases via a user’s cellphones. Those who choose to adopt the alert system will be notified when they were in proximity to someone who tested positive for the disease. A few states have rolled out apps, but security concerns persist, and adoption of the technology by citizens remains low.The researchers’ privacy goals are extremely high. Their system keeps interactions HIPAA compliant and also protects users’ privacy from the app and the server that computes contacts, healthcare providers reporting illness, the government tracking cases, and external attackers. Their framework will rely heavily on cryptography to ensure privacy, similar to the type used in secure internet communications for bank transactions and financial trading.The group is currently speaking with industry through the Discovery Partner Institute, working to get their recommendations adopted at large.This mechanism solves the problem of long-range relay attacks, where a Bluetooth device that was collecting EIDs, say, in a supermarket in Chicago, could be hacked and relayed to Los Angeles, sending false alerts to users who were not in contact with that infected person and undermining the entire tracing system.Scientists around the world are racing to contribute to the understanding of the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, and the COVID-19 disease it causes. Here at UIC, researchers in the Computer Science Department are engaged in studies related to the disease outbreak. Updates to the research will be published as they are made available.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/andres-tapia-receives-scholarships-to-attend-tapia-conference-great-minds-in-stem-conference/
Tapia heard about the scholarship in a Computer Science Department email in the spring, and also from Professor and Department Head Robert Sloan, who was his Program Design I instructor. The application consisted of an essay, resume, reference letters, demographic information, and academic transcripts. The scholarship includes the cost of registration, hotel accommodations, and $500 toward travel expenses.“I am very excited to attend the conference, and humbled to have been selected to receive a scholarship,” Tapia said. “This is the first time I will attend this conference, and judging by the keynote speakers and other sessions, I will be exposed to many areas within the computer science field.”“Andres is exactly the kind of student who makes me really happy and proud to be a UIC Computer Science professor,” Sloan said. “I was delighted to hear that he had won these two awards.”UIC will also fund the cost of other students who are attending the Tapia conference, through money received through the BRAID program. The BRAID program, which stands for Building, Recruiting, And Inclusion for Diversity, involves 15 universities working to address specific issues. These include modifying computer science courses to make them less intimidating and more appealing to underrepresented students, leading outreach efforts for high school students and teachers to build a diverse pipeline of students, build confidence and community among underrepresented students, and promoting joint majors in areas like computer science and biology. UIC has participated in the program since its inception in 2014.“As a Hispanic student and a person with disabilities, in a field where we do not have large representation, conferences like the Richard Tapia provide a platform for us to appreciate the accomplishments of many students and faculty like me, who can serve as role models and mentors. This conference can provide a network and inspire me to broaden my ideas of what I can do with a degree in Computer Science,” Tapia said in his application.“My main intention was to start networking for potential internships and jobs after graduation,” Tapia explained.The first week of the fall semester, Tapia was notified that he received another scholarship, from the Great Minds in STEM organization, to attend their conference September 26 through 28 in Orlando, Florida. Tapia’s scholarship was funded by Oracle Academy. Great Minds in STEM’s mission is to “Be a national leader in keeping America technologically strong by promoting Science, Technology, Engineering and Math careers especially in underserved communities.”UIC sophomore Andres Tapia received a scholarship from the Richard Tapia Foundation to attend the 2019 Tapia Conference, a conference that celebrates the diversity in computing. Tapia, no relation to the conference’s namesake, Richard A. Tapia, is thrilled to join roughly 1,400 attendees from more than 250 schools at the event, which will be held September 18 through 21 in San Diego. The Tapia Conference is designed to connect students with others with common backgrounds, including ethnicities, disabilities, and gender to create communities that extend beyond the conference.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/associate-professor-mark-grechanik-wins-grant-best-paper-award-for-work-on-automating-software-integration-tests/
Grechanik has a long career working in industry and was a research manager at Accenture before joining UIC as a professor in 2012, and saw the real need for companies to increase the amount of integration tests they perform.Grechanik is the recipient of a grant worth over $375,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the work, “SHF: Small: Automatically Synthesizing System and Integration Tests.” He is the sole-principal investigator on the grant, which began August 15 and runs three years.“If you have 100 functions and try to examine all the ways to combine them you can have millions of tests, it’s not scalable, it’s not feasible to try to come up with all the interactions manually, and many of those tests aren’t needed,” said Grechanik.Grechanik is currently looking for two Ph.D. students to assist him with this work. He also works in security, simulation of complex cloud revenue management systems, and modeling different processes and optimization problems. Visit his website to learn more.Grechanik presented materials of the preliminary study that resulted in the NSF award at the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering in Lisbon, Portugal, in July, and he and his former PhD student Gurudev Devanla won the first place in the Best Paper Award category.Currently, programmers have to sit down together, discuss the codes they’ve written, and think through scenarios where issues might come up. This is time-consuming, and also very expensive to dedicate large chunks of programmer’s time to this process.“When I sat down with friends and former colleagues to discuss the problem they drew a diagram of tests for an enterprise claim system with 10 million lines of code. They’re running 120,000 acceptance tests, and 500,000 unit tests, but the integration tests in the middle? Maybe 10,000. They would prefer more integration tests to be run than either the large or small tests, but they just don’t have the time and resources to create them,” Grechanik said.Grechanik and Devanla created ASSIST (Automatically SyntheSizing Integration Software Tests), which automatically finds the frequently interacting components to test these items. They experimented with three Java applications, and preliminary results indicate that ASSIST performed comparably with manually written, programmer-created tests. The work has been publicly released and Grechanik plans to put it in open source.Computer Science Associate Professor Mark Grechanik is hoping to help companies increase the number of software integration tests they run, and simultaneously cut costs on the labor-intensive process. This novel approach examines frequently interacting components in software applications, and automatically creates integration tests for those parts of the functions that work together.When a company has software they spend years building, they need to ensure it’s of a good quality, and they continuously run tests. Programmers who work for those companies work on different levels: those who write code, and those who test code. There are different levels of tests as well, small unit tests, which might look at the functionality of a single program; mid-level tests, called integration tests, that examine how different programs work together; and large acceptance tests, which may last several days and can get quite expensive.Catching software bugs during integration is critical and running more tests at this phase is desirable, yet the least number of tests run are at this stage. If a defect is missed during integration testing and found later, the cost of fixing it can be five- to 20- times what it would have cost to rectify it earlier.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/biaffect-mood-disorder-app-goes-live-in-apple-app-store/
To download the app, users must first agree to participate in a related study led by UIC researchers. Users’ de-identified metadata will be used to continue “to search for digital biomarkers of bipolar disorder and to further refine and improve the app,” according to a UIC press release. People who download the BiAffect app can view their own metadata, including their cellphone usage overtime, number of keystrokes, use of spellcheck and more.“We’re tracking how they’re navigating the keyboard, the actual pixels they’re touching,” Leow said. “The overarching goal as I see it is to better understand the relationship between mood and cognition.”The BiAffect app was announced last May as the winner in a contest using Apple’s Research Kit, an open-source tool for creating apps, to study mood disorders. In addition to UIC, the development team included researchers from the University of Michigan, along with software companies Arbormoon Software and Sage.Bipolar disorder affects approximately 5.7 million Americans and is characterized by changes in mood, energy and activity level, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. People with bipolar disorder experience mood episodes ranging from periods of elation, high energy and increased activity levels to depression, low energy and decreased activity levels, respectively referred to as manic episodes and depressive episodes.An app developed by local researchers to predict manic episodes and depressive moods in people with bipolar disorder – based on how they interact with their cellphones – is now available to download in Apple’s app store.In a pilot study last year of 30 participants, researchers found typing speed, frequency of texting and social media usage correlated with manic and depressive episodes in people with bipolar disorder. Specifically, people who experienced manic episodes tended to type quickly on their phones and overrode spellcheck prompts, while people experiencing a depressive episode tended to write shorter messages, Leow told Chicago Tonight in January 2017.Dr. Alex Leow, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois Chicago who helped develop the BiAffect app, describes it as a “fitness tracker” for the brain that researchers can use to study mood disorders as well as the cognitive effects of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.“We think that this crowd-sourced app-based study will soon lead to digital technologies that act as an ‘early alert system’ for people with bipolar disorder to help them see manic and depressive episodes coming, and take action to mitigate the effects of those episodes. Just being aware of them is a step forward for the millions who live with this mood disorder,” said with UIC College of Engineering Dean Peter Nelson, who helped develop the app, in a press release.Contact Kristen Thometz: @kristenthometz | [email protected] | (773) 509-5452Loew says the app isn’t just for people with bipolar disorder. “We want people without mood disorders to use the app as well so that we can better understand keystroke dynamics in healthy adults versus those with bipolar disorder,” she said in a press release. “This will allow us to further hone in on the ‘virtual biomarkers’ of bipolar disorder or even mood in general.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/biaffet-app-can-typos-give-insight-into-your-mental-health/
The goal with this approach, the researchers say, is to make an unbiased real-time assessment of users’ mental state in their natural environments. Typical mental-health assessments are made by polling patients on their state of mind through questionnaires or in-person meetings in clinical settings, and they are prone to self-reporting bias and other collection flaws.‘ Rather than waiting until the patient shows up in somebody’s office for intervention, you could do the intervention in real time through the same device that’s monitoring their symptoms. ’The NIMH considers the development of digitally delivered interventions a priority because they have the potential to make treatment available to more people, decrease medication switch rates, reduce hospitalizations and perhaps lower medical costs in the long run.A team of researchers at the Center on Depression and Resilience at the University of Illinois Chicago is working on technology that could monitor users’ mood and cognition—important indicators of mental-health stress—by tracking their typing patterns with an iPhone app called BiAffect. Initial research has found it is possible to predict episodes of mania and depression among users with bipolar and major depressive disorder based on changes in their typing habits.Researchers test app that monitors changes in typing patterns to predict—and maybe someday treat—psychological episodes.But researchers hope the app will eventually allow clinicians to offer just-in-time interventions. “Rather than waiting until the patient shows up in somebody’s office for intervention, you could do the intervention in real time through the same device that’s monitoring their symptoms,” he says.The BiAffect study is part of a larger trend in psychology of attempting to measure how the brain functions using “digital exhaust” from users’ daily interactions with technology. There are over 10,000 mental-health-related apps on the App Store, according to the National Institute of Mental Health’s most recent count.—Dr. Olusola Ajilore, an associate professor of psychiatry on the BiAffect teamResearchers made BiAffect available to the general public on the App Store in March and it has since yielded over 8,150 hours of data from more than 1,300 users. The app was created as part of the Mood Challenge, a contest funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that challenged researchers to find new ways to use Apple Inc.’s open-source app development platform, ResearchKit, to study mood disorders.The trouble is that evidence-backed apps like BiAffect that can substantiate their claims of effectiveness make up just 3Additional information on BiAffect from when the app went live in March 2018 (WTTW )BiAffect’s aim is to be “as unobtrusive as possible,” says Dr. Leow. After downloading the app, users opt into the study and allow the specially coded BiAffect keyboard to replace their iPhone’s default version. The app then operates behind the scenes whenever a person uses their phone, compiling a trove of objective data.For instance, a manic episode may be preceded by rising numbers of typos, faster typing, more frequent use of the “delete” key or tremors detected by the phone’s accelerometer, which measures the device’s tilting and orientation. During depressive episodes, users withdraw from their personal technology and tend to send short, infrequent messages.However, apps like BiAffect that passively collect data come with a host of ethical concerns, mostly related to privacy. False positives can have costly consequences for users if an app fails to properly de-identify data or is not compliant with federal health-data protection standards, says Dr. Haim. People “need to understand the potential implications of opening themselves to the release of data to a third party,” he says.“It doesn’t track what you type, but how you type it,” says Dr. Alex Leow, an associate professor from the university’s College of Medicine and lead researcher on the project.Link to Wall Street Journal story (Subscription may be required)Laine Higgins Wall Street JournalBiAffect’s creators intentionally didn’t limit the app for use in clinical settings, though they believe it could be most effective when used by mental-health professionals to monitor their patients. Such use is probably several years off, said Dr. Olusola Ajilore, an associate professor of psychiatry on the BiAffect team.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/board-grants-key-approvals-for-uics-new-health-care-engineering-buildings/
“UI Health continues to see 5The computer science department has approximately $45 million in active research grants, with national CSRankings in: web and information retrieval (7), economics and computation (12), artificial intelligence (17), logic and verification (17), machine learning and data mining (21), and natural language processing (21).“The building will also serve as an important space for our computer science department, which has seen skyrocketing enrollments, has six specialties ranked in the top 25 nationally and is leading the nation in recruiting world-class faculty members,” Nelson said.“UIC’s students, staff and faculty are among Chicago’s most driven and innovative leaders and they need and deserve world-class facilities,” said UIC Chancellor Michael Amiridis. “These new buildings are an investment in our and Chicago’s future. They will enhance significantly our teaching, research and clinical operations and will allow UIC to advance, grow and flourish.”The board voted to approve all construction-related activity for UI Health’s new 200,000-square-foot Outpatient Surgery Center and Specialty Clinics building, which will be located at the southeast corner of Wood and Taylor streets. This includes approval for the university to enter into the agreements necessary to finalize the public-private partnership that will provide the majority of financing for the new $194 million building.The project will be presented to the Illinois Health Facilities and Services Review Board on April 7. Pending approval, groundbreaking is planned for August 2020. Completion of the project is expected in 2022.Groundbreaking is estimated for November 2020 and completion is expected in 2022.Under the public-private partnership between UIC and Provident Resources Group, a 501(c)(3) corporation, Provident will finance nearly three-quarters of the cost of the building through tax-exempt bonds and lease the facility to UI Health during the 30-year term of the bonds. Additional funding will come from the health system and private philanthropy. In November 2019, Bruno and Sallie Pasquinelli pledged $10 million for the project.The new building will be the second new construction project for UIC’s College of Engineering in recent years. The Engineering Innovation Building, which is home to the Chicago area’s only high-bay structural research laboratory, opened in July 2019.The Outpatient Surgery Center and Specialty Clinics building will include six floors of patient care space, including eight operating and eight procedure rooms, 48 pre- and post-surgery bays, clinic space for GI, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, transplant and urology clinics, and a pharmacy.“This new building represents the extraordinary momentum of the UIC College of Engineering, which has grown to serve more than 5,300 students each year,” said Peter Nelson, dean of the college.The board also approved a $117.8 budget for the Computer Design Research and Learning Center, a 125,000-square-foot mixed-use space for UIC’s College of Engineering. The building will be designed to meet LEED Gold certification standards for environmental sustainability and will be located at 900 W. Taylor St., adjacent to Memorial Grove.Two capital improvement projects planned for the University of Illinois Chicago campus received key approvals from the University of Illinois Board of Trustees today.The mixed-use space will include research labs and collaborative areas for students and research groups.“UI Health brings together seven health sciences colleges and a significant portfolio of bench to community research with a world-class, public clinical care delivery system,” said Dr. Robert Barish, vice chancellor for health affairs at UIC. “This building will serve as a new hub for our top-ranked ophthalmology and transplant programs, and we are looking forward to bringing this new, comfortable space to our patients.”The Computer Design Research and Learning Center will include a 1,200-square-foot robotics lab and 16,000 square feet of classroom space. It also will be the new home for UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, an internationally renowned interdisciplinary research lab.This story first appeared on UIC Today.“Computer science is also an increasingly popular minor among UIC students from a number of programs, like liberal arts and business, so this building will have an impact on many students across campus,” Nelson said.Over the last 15 years, the UIC computer science department has grown from 187 undergraduate students to more than 1,400 students, and since 2018, the department has hired 13 new faculty members.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/break-through-tech-chicago-announces-strategic-expert-as-new-director/
What intrigued Shetty about pursuing gender equity in tech was a look at the supply and demand side of the skills required in today’s workforce—namely competencies in technology.Shetty’s volunteer work in India demonstrated how a small investment could have a dramatic impact on women’s lives. “Be it in India or frankly anywhere else on this planet, sometimes it doesn’t take a lot to pull women forward,” she said. “It’s creating choices, having a voice at the table, being able to control what you want to do—it’s really that empowerment.”Shetty understands firsthand the importance of investment in individuals. She recognizes the impact of people who bet on her own academic and career potential: she received a scholarship to pursue an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and, later in her life, was offered “stretch roles” that helped her grow as a leader. She described both of these as “huge enablers” in her career.“We want to make sure we can get women into the pipeline, have them stay in the pipeline, and work to find out if they’re leaving, why,” Shetty said. “We want to be there every step of the way.”“There are a lot of levers that are used to address the gender gap in tech, but the question is: where can you achieve sustainable change at scale? For me, Break Through Tech offers that potential, which exists at the intersection of academia and industry,” Shetty said.Shetty comes to UIC from GATX Corporation, a railcar leasing company, where she was most recently the senior vice president of business development. At GATX, Shetty enabled a growth and diversification strategy by identifying and pursuing investment opportunities with scale. She was the co-founder and leader of GATX’s Women in Leadership, an employee resource group dedicated to achieving gender equity and a culture of inclusion in the workplace. Prior to GATX Corporation, she worked at General Electric in several business units, including GE Capital, GE Corporate, and GE Transportation. She spent her early career at Painted Word Inc., a startup technology consulting firm.Shetty, who started as director of Break Through Tech Chicago on September 16, has more than two decades of experience in leading strategic initiatives, executing strategy, and mobilizing change in large and startup organizations.For more on Break Through Tech Chicago, visit its website.In addition to her role with Break Through Tech, Shetty is an adjunct lecturer in UIC’s College of Business Administration, where she teaches graduate-level analytics strategy. She also is designing and delivering executive education for the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Leadership Institute at the Loyola University Chicago Quinlan School of Business.An equally important part of Shetty’s career has been her volunteer work. She mentored women from under-resourced backgrounds in India with the Shanti Bhavan Children’s Project, is a partner at Social Venture Partners Chicago, supports women-led socially conscious entrepreneurial ventures via SheEO, and is a long-term advocate of Reading in Motion’s literacy programs for children.“More than half of the graduating students in the United States are women, but such a small percentage of them have degrees in computer science and that trend has been steady declining over the last 30 years. Meanwhile, computing jobs are steadily growing,” Shetty said.Amita Shetty has been selected to lead the UIC computer science department’s Break Through Tech program, a national initiative aimed at achieving gender equality in tech. Earlier this year, following a competitive application process, UIC became the first recipient of a grant to begin a Break Through Tech program on its campus.Shetty aims to equip more women to take these high-paying, in-demand jobs, and sees Break Though Tech as a critical enabler in transforming economic outcomes for women. Break Through Tech’s program focuses on “3Cs”—curriculum innovation, career access, and community-building—and seeks to generate interest, develop a sense of belonging, and address systemic inequities to lower the barriers for women, especially women of color and first-generation college students. It is an initiative of Cornell Tech and supported by Pivotal Ventures, the Cognizant U.S. Foundation, and Verizon.Shetty has an MBA in management and strategy, marketing, and social enterprise from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and graduated cum laude with a BS in civil and environmental engineering from Lafayette College.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/brent-stephens-receives-nsf-career-award/
“Buying lots of servers and not using them all is wasteful, especially from an environmental perspective,” he said. “A lot of this push comes from extracting as much performance as we can from these servers.” He added: “It’s about creating new programming paradigms and frameworks for executing these programs as well as new approaches for handling congestion that overcome these non-starter limitations on current RDMA hardware.”“As soon as your input rate is greater than your service rate, things are going to continue piling up, which is called congestion,” Stephens said. “Buffer space isn’t infinite in computers, so that’s really where packet loss comes from.”Stephens came to UIC in 2018 after working for several years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He earned his PhD in computer science at Rice University. His work is largely at the intersection of networking, operating systems, and computer architecture.While cutting down on packet loss will help, a shift to a new networking framework can solve some of the limitations present in current hardware and improve server-utilization efficiency, Stephens believes.To address the problems created by this performance gap, Stephens is working on a few research projects that share a common theme. He is moving computation from computers attached to the network into the network itself, which can overcome the limitations of existing systems, and he’s continuing to scale application-level performance to meet the needs of existing and emerging applications.“RDMA network cards have advanced functionality, but no one is willing to use them because they are difficult to use, and the underlying network is essentially incompatible with them,” Stephens said.In NAAM, functions are written in a high-level language, then compiled to a bytecode, which is a simple, faster code for processing, and verified before they are executed on a network interface card. This new paradigm enables accelerating message processing and offloading of computation from the main processors, while providing a simple and expressive interface to application programmers.His first NSF grant focuses on a related area: controlling the flow of data in a network to prevent packet loss, which occurs when one or more packets of data travelling across a computer network fail to reach their destination.Stephens’ CAREER award proposal, titled “NIC-Accelerated Active Messaging as a Generic Replacement for RDMA,” is an extension of the work he did with his Google grant. In this project, he is rethinking the design of server-side networking with a new networking framework called Network Interface Card (NIC) Accelerated Active Messaging (NAAM).Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to scale application performance by improving the efficiency of a single computer. For more than 40 years, that had been the case. Transistors became ever smaller, allowing the density of transistors on each microchip to double roughly every two years. These more powerful chips increased the speed of central processing units, or CPUs—the part of a computer where most calculations take place—by 40 percent, without a corresponding increase in power consumption. Today, CPUs have reached the upper limits of those gains. According to Stephens, a single computing core within a network can generate about 35 to 40 gigabits per second (Gbps), which can also be quantified as six million packets per second—a level of performance that has not changed significantly over the past five years. By contrast, the performance of networks as a whole is continuing to increase: exponentially, in fact, to rates of 100 gigabits per second and beyond.Stephens sees this as an improvement over Remote Direct Memory Access, or RDMA, an existing technology that allows computers in a network to exchange data in main memory without involving the processor of either computer. While RDMA is fast, it presents challenges for developers and suffers from harmful performance variations that are hard to predict.The CAREER award is the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious honor in support of early-career faculty. Since arriving at UIC, Stephens has received two other grants in support of his work. He received a Google Faculty Award in 2018 and the following year received a $175,000 NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) grant.“This means there is an ever-increasing gap in between the amount of data we can consume, process, and generate on a CPU, and the amount of data the network can carry,” Stephens explained.For more on Stephens, visit his website at https://www.cs.uic.edu/~brents/More specifically, Stephens is focused on addressing one of the biggest challenges in computing today: the need to scale application performance. Scaling application performance is key not only to support the continued growth of important existing services in computing such as search and email, but also to enable new computationally intense applications that rely on machine learning, such as self-driving cars.Brent Stephens, assistant professor of computer science, has received a $500,000 National Science Foundation CAREER award. His project aims to rethink the way that distributed computing systems are implemented and deployed.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cecilia-avila-uic-cs-20-wins-get-chicago-fellowship/
Avila is excited to make connections in the tech industry and to gain the mentorship that comes with the GET Chicago Fellowship. She’s looking forward to working on the group project, which will likely involve creating an application or bot aimed at solving an issue that women in tech face. She hopes to work in software engineering and to continue her support of minorities in tech, increasing exposure to STEM in communities that do not have access. And she will continue her work with an off-campus dance group, Evolución Latina Dance Company.Avila’s interest in computer science began at the Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy in Chicago, where she was part of the school’s first graduating class. The school sought to have its students graduate with both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree.Avila felt scared to use the computer science department’s student lounge, a popular space for studying and socializing—she never saw any other women there, either. The feelings of imposter syndrome were difficult to shake. In her second year, her CS 251 Data Structures course represented a near-breaking point. She went to her faculty advisor and said she wanted to switch majors.GET Cities will hold a series of public events, including career talks and demo days, where you can learn more about Avila and the other fellows’ projects. Follow the organization on Twitter or visit its website for more information.“I think I was scared of computer science,” she said. “I noticed when I first went to my classes, there were not many women, like I didn’t belong. I wouldn’t sit in the front. I felt like I was invading something.”“Some of my classmates had been coding since they were 12, some were much older and already working,” she added. “I felt trapped, and that put me behind.”She received a scholarship to attend UIC, commuting from her home in the greater Chicago Lawn neighborhood. Avila was a very active UIC student: she helped to start the student organization known as LOGiCA, or Latinx Organization for Growth in Computing and Academics, and served as the secretary, treasurer, and co-president. She attended the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference and the Grace Hopper Celebration, was a teaching assistant for a UIC programming design course and for Break Through Tech, and danced with Movimiento Latino.This story first appeared on Break Through Tech Chicago‘s website.Through discussions with her advisor and others in the computer science department—including two members of the Break Through Tech Chicago leadership, Elena Lathos and Dale Reed—Avila grew more confident. She volunteered regularly at department events and became a teaching assistant. She realized the computer science lounge was a resource for her. There she met tutors and friends, including the ones with whom she eventually co-founded LOGiCA.Cecilia Avila, a fall 2020 graduate of UIC’s computer science program, is part of GET Cities’ inaugural cohort of the GET Chicago Fellowship program, which launched this month. GET stands for Gender Equality in Tech. As one of 20 area women to receive this award, Avila will spend the next nine months working as part of a team that examines issues facing women or minorities in tech and proposes solutions. She’ll also have a mentor in the industry to help navigate the start of her career.“I didn’t know what tech was, so when they told us we had to choose a focus for our associate’s degree, I chose computer science and networking,” Avila said. “I had no background in it at all.”“She said no, I don’t think you’ve given it a chance,” Avila recalled. “She told me to focus on anyone else, not to compare myself. The only competition is myself.”Still, Avila describes her time at UIC as difficult, initially.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-assistant-professor-chris-kanich-wins-graduate-mentoring-award/
He is currently mentoring five PhD students: Sara Amini, Mohammad Ghasemisharif, Awais Jafar, Mohammad Taha Khan, and John Kristoff. Amini, Ghasemisharif, and Khan nominated Kanich. A former student, Peter Snyder, penned a letter in support of the nomination.They continued, “Throughout his career, Chris has hired students from diverse backgrounds and ensured everyone feels a sense of belonging in the lab. We sincerely hope that once we are mentors ourselves, we are able to influence our students as profoundly as he has influenced us.”“This kind of kind of kindness and support would be terrific from a close friend; from a new professor working overtime to establish a lab, build his case for tenure, and get new course material together, it is tremendous and deserving of accommodation,” Snyder continued.Chris Kanich, an assistant professor in the computer science department at UIC, received the 2019 Graduate Mentoring Award from the University of Illinois Chicago’s Graduate College.Snyder described how Kanich takes his role as advisor one step further, even visiting him in the emergency room and assisting him with matters beyond academia.“Chris embodies all the personal and professional qualities of a great mentor. He has an excellent capability of guiding students of all levels and backgrounds and has consistently shown the same supportive and encouraging attitude as the first day we met him. We are grateful to him for encouraging us to learn new topics, which have led to our success in diverse research areas,” Amini, Ghasemisharif, and Khan wrote in their nomination.All of his students, like Kanich, are focused on internet security and privacy.The award includes a $2,000 prize. Other 2019 winners include Jennifer Cabrelli, assistant professor, Hispanic and Italian Studies; Richard Gemeinhart, research integrity officer and professor, Biopharmaceutical Sciences; and Rebecca Woodard, assistant professor, Curriculum and Instruction.Four faculty members are selected each year for the honor, and all recipients are student-nominated. The Graduate Mentoring Awards are designed to encourage and award excellence and innovation in all aspects of graduate mentoring.“It really warms my heart. I care a lot about my students,” Kanich said. “This kind of surprise from them is nice feedback.”“Chris is a uniquely great advisor because of his willingness to tussle with students about their ideas and objects. Over six years, Chris never once pulled rank, got dogmatic, or gave orders. Even when disagreements got heated (sometimes really heated) he was willing to see the argument through, confident that I either had a point in my disagreement or that I was at least clever enough to eventually see that he was (usually) right from the get-go. I cannot overstate how valuable this practice of politely-but-confidently advocating for an idea, project, or objection has proved to be as a researcher in industry,” Snyder said in the letter.Snyder, who graduated last year, now works as a privacy researcher with Brave Software. He shared that without Kanich’s guidance, he doesn’t think he would have his current job, and isn’t sure he would’ve completed his PhD.Kanich said mentoring students is an “amazingly enjoyable part of his job,” and views graduates not merely as students or employees but more like apprentices, where he spends four to seven years working closely alongside each student on various projects.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-department-welcomes-new-faculty-members/
Wei Tang, assistant professor, comes to UIC from the Computational Vision Lab at Northwestern, where he served as a research assistant. He was also a research intern at Microsoft. His research interests include computer vision, digital image/video processing, statistical learning, human motion and action analysis, and human-computer intelligent interaction. Tang received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from Northwestern University, where he received the Best Dissertation Award and the Murphy Fellowship in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received his M.E. and B.E. degrees both from Beihang University, Beijing. Tang will be teaching CS 415.Here are the new UIC computer science faculty members:Visiting Lecturer Sean Deitz earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from UIC, and has served as an adjunct lecturer at UIC since 2018. His interests lay between data visualization and software engineering, using visualization techniques to aid in the process of software engineering generally, and programming specifically. Dietz prowls academic papersand industry reviews for modern advances and examples to keep his course contents fresh to keep up with the moving target of modern programming, and looks forward to training the next generation of computer scientists with the skills they’ll need to succeed. He will teach CS 341 and CS 480.To keep pace with the growth, new faculty members will be joining the computer science department this year, bringing the total number of computer science faculty to 56.“We’re delighted to have been able to hire seven new faculty members of such high quality in the current, very competitive market for computer science faculty. One of the many great things about this group is that it includes two excellent researchers in computer vision, the one subfield we were missing in our outstanding data science, AI, and machine learning group,” said Sloan.Assistant Professor Abolfazl (Abol) Asudeh comes to UIC from a postdoc at the University of Michigan. He completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Texas at Arlington. To face the challenges of Big Data, Asudeh aims to find efficient, effective, and scalable algorithmic solutions for data science problems. This includes designing approximation and randomized algorithms, as well as applying techniques from domains such as computational geometry. He views responsibility, including fairness, stability, diversity, transparency, and equity, as an important dimension in the development of data-driven technologies. Absudeh will teach CS 401.Assistant Professor Sathya Ravi has a strong background in optimization algorithms that propel various computer vision and machine learning systems. He is interested in designing algorithms that can satisfy application-specific constraints and regularization, since these are often crucial and beneficial to overall performance. Ravi believes that understanding the mathematical underpinnings of data analysis techniques is a key component to achieve that goal. Multidisciplinary research is one of his favorite things, since it allows researchers to tackle challenging questions that have orders of magnitude more impact on society. Ravi has his PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.Luís Pina will join the CS department as an assistant professor. Pina held a postdoctoral appointment at George Mason University’s Department of Computer Science. Previously, Pina was part of the Software Reliability Group at Imperial College London, the Programming Languages Group at University of Maryland, and the Software Engineering Group at INESC-ID in Lisbon. Pena holds a PhD in information systems and computer engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal. His dissertation focused on making Dynamic Software Updates (DSU) practical. He will be teaching CS 474.Adding depth to the department’s research and teaching expertise was critical for Robert Sloan, professor and department head for computer science.Joseph E. Michaelis joins UIC as an assistant professor. He conducts research at the nexus of learning sciences and human-computer interaction disciplines. His current work focuses on designing learning companion robots to make long-term social connections with children that support learning and interest in STEM in ways that seamlessly integrate into existing educational activities in classrooms, informal learning environments, and at home. Michaelis received a PhD in learning sciences with a PhD minor in computer science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a MS in science education leadership from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Michaelis will teach CS 422.This fall, over 1,600 undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students will be studying computer science at UIC. The department has grown significantly—almost five times as many students are enrolled today as compared to a decade ago—and is the largest in the college of engineering.In the spring, Clinical Assistant Professor Diana Diaz will join the department. Diaz brings research experience in a variety of fields including software engineering, bioinformatics, health informatics, and applied deep learning. Her current research interests include studying methods to improve student comprehension of computer science courses. Diaz received both her PhD and MS from Wayne State University, where she is currently teaching. She has worked as a freelance software developer, a research assistant at the Universidad de los Andes, and a full-time lecturer at the Universidad Piloto de Colombia.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-distinguished-professor-bing-liu-works-to-improve-sentiment-analysis-with-lifelong-machine-learning/
Improvements to sentiment analysis will provide an ever-growing level of uses for the tool. Currently, some companies are employing the technology to reduce employee turnover and improve engagement and productivity by interpreting feedback to uncover factors that drive down morale. Sentiment analysis may also be used to forecast market movement based on news and social media sentiment, and as accuracy improves, in text analysis.What if researchers could create algorithms to help a computer learn over time from what it processes? Using a new machine learning paradigm, UIC Distinguished Professor Bing Liu is developing algorithms that can transfer past knowledge to a current task in order to improve the performance of sentiment analysis, a tool that extracts and classifies people’s opinions, emotions, and sentiments expressed on social media and elsewhere online.Sentiment analysis is key to helping individuals and businesses improve their decision-making process: a business can quickly analyze how a consumer feels about its product, or a consumer can ferret out what product to buy, based on the opinions of other consumers, without slogging through pages of reviews, or relying on outdated information.Liu’s research interests include lifelong machine learning, data mining, sentiment analysis, and opinion mining. He received a grant from the National Science Foundation worth just under $500,000, “III: Small: A Holistic Approach to Sentiment Analysis.” The grant runs from August 2019 to September 2022 and will fund two PhD students.“In traditional learning you get a bunch of data, run an algorithm on that data to produce a model, and then apply the model to perform sentiment analysis,” Liu said. “With lifelong learning, we read the data continuously, it’s not just fixed data.”“Everyone is interested in opinions. But there are also a lot of other potential applications,” Liu said.The idea of tracking and analyzing what people say about your product, or how they view a particular company or service has been around for a long time. With the advent of natural language processing and the use of more sophisticated sentiment tracking tools, the mining of this type of data has exploded in recent years. Still, accuracy remains low.A pioneer in the field of sentiment analysis, Liu’s past work uncovered the prevalence of four- and five- star reviews on commerce platforms such as Amazon, sounding the alarm that many of these reviews are fake.Liu’s current work investigates lifelong learning algorithms that help the computer “learn” over time from what it processes. His model imitates human learning, and transfers accumulated knowledge to help with a current task. The resulting algorithms will be incorporated into a holistic model to improve accuracy of sentiment analysis.Liu has published several books on lifelong machine learning and sentiment analysis. To learn more, visit his website.“Natural language is just incredibly hard for computers to understand. Put very bluntly, now a computer does not ‘understand’ anything we say; the only thing it does is statistical analysis, and word association, Liu said. “Humans have patterns when we say something, so we’re trying to catch those types of patterns.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-instructor-credits-course-success-to-online-learning/
“What I think we had as a department culture, was finding ways to use this technology before the pandemic hit, to best engage our students both synchronously and asynchronously,” Kanich said. “Nearly 90He pointed to Piazza, an online platform that was a staple in the department, as an example of what they had used even before COVID-19 quarantine. It fostered increased collaboration among students and instructors. He called the format of many of the department’s classes a “flipped classroom, active learning, peer instructional approach.”Kanich began preparing for the virtual change in early March when news accounts indicated that the pandemic was spreading. He began helping students become comfortable with Blackboard Collaborate while they were still in a classroom.Anoop Nagabhushana, a graduate student in Kanich’s class, who was finishing his final semester last spring, said he was impressed with Kanich’s transition plan because it was well thought out and flexible. With the Blackboard chat option, he and other students were able to instantly ask questions during the lectures which he would instantly answer or wait at the end to answer. Most of the time the questions led to deeper discussions.“From my (student) perspective, we didn’t feel we were out of place one bit,” Nagabhushana said. “In fact, I felt empowered as the video lectures involved direct tutoring compared to a lecture directed to a class in a physical setting.”He said that he kept seeking input and suggestions from his students as the semester continued online and he could adjust to better serve his students. He realized there was a silver lining.As an associate professor in computer science within the College of Engineering, Kanich and his colleagues already were well-versed in the use of asynchronous tools such as online discussion boards.He also said Kanich’s virtual office hours were extremely helpful and that students learned a lot of new resources.The structure had allowed itself to be replicated online in Blackboard Collaborate, where small groups could branch off into different “rooms” with Kanich and his teaching assistants monitoring discussions. The constant shift between lectures and discussions helped keep students engaged.“I must say, Kanich introduced us to so many tools, we felt the class was better online,” he said.These classes moved from in-person to virtual. Kanich would assign videos and readings, and then have questions waiting for students to trigger small group discussions. He would then lecture for several minutes and continue with small-class discussions followed by a lecture and then further discussion in smaller and then full classes.This story first appeared on UIC TodayHe said that another silver lining is that it has caused him and other instructors to rethink how they are teaching students.“It’s an opportunity to make big changes that may run against the inertia of traditional teaching,” Kanich said. “When you have a different perspective on what you’re supposed to be doing, you have this opportunity to rethink what works and what doesn’t, and nothing is sacred.”When Chris Kanich transformed his class into an online learning course when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, he did not feel like he was starting from square one.“Having that opportunity to be in the same virtual place at the same time with other people motivated to learn the same content is priceless,” he said. “In my mind, that is the most important part of the value proposition of a UIC degree.”This summer he has been building up synchronous course lessons and upgrading production of videos to remotely teach about 200 students in his two fall semester classes. Even if classes are to go back into physical classrooms, he knows the number of students allowed will be limited.“You had these interesting modalities where some students were not comfortable asking questions out loud in front of a hundred people, but they were totally willing to type in a question in the text box and send that to the faculty member or the class,” Kanich said.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-major-heads-to-taiwan-to-meet-with-future-uic-students/
Parents are most concerned about their children’s safety.He said the language barrier is the largest issue. Students have experience writing in English when they arrive from Taiwan but are not as comfortable speaking the language.At the end of the school year, computer science student Clark Chen will travel to Taiwan to do a bit of what a college recruiter typically does: explain and promote the student experience at UIC. Chen, president of UIC’s Taiwanese Student Association, will meet with incoming UIC students and their parents to discuss everything from housing to banking to transportation, and what it’s like to live in the United States—and Chicago in particular.Chen is a teaching assistant for Dale Reed, a clinical professor and director of undergraduate recruitment for the computer science department. He served as an officer of the Taiwanese Student Association last year, and took over as president this year. While many of the club members are international students, Chen emigrated to the Cincinnati area while he was in junior high.You can follow the club on its Facebook page to learn more. The Center for Student Involvement hosts a fair each fall, providing students the opportunity to explore the 300-plus registered student organizations and activities at UIC.The club hosts about a half-dozen events throughout the year, including a welcome tea, a Moon Festival BBQ, a Chinese New Year potluck, and a farewell dinner for graduating members.Chen said the club doesn’t budget for his trip to Taiwan; he will visit relatives when he travels to meet with the future UIC students May 26.“We give them some information so they won’t be afraid when they come here,” Chen said.“As the president of the club I felt it was important to go and meet with the incoming students.” Chen said.Chen said many of the students ask about life in Chicago in general, and housing specifically. He said many students prefer to find an apartment, though he does encourage them to try living on campus for the experience.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-professor-barbara-di-eugenio-receives-2019-2020-uic-award-for-excellence-in-teaching/
In the early 2000s, well before Alexa and Siri were household names, Di Eugenio created two classes on NLP for the Computer Science curriculum, one offered at the undergraduate level. Di Eugenio said she strives to conduct interactive classes, engaging students by presenting real data, be it a complex Turkish word or a newspaper article, which motivates the algorithms. As AI and NLP are advancing at a prodigious pace, these classes need to be continually updated. Di Eugenio adapts her curriculum to the latest advances, by assigning class projects that even if simple, are representative of the state-of-the-art.Winners of the UIC Award for Excellence in Teaching (AET) are faculty members who have taught at UIC for at least 10 years, and are nominated by their department. At most, five AET awards are given university wide each year. Each department’s faculty advisory committee is able to nominate one person for the award each year. The Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs then chooses the AET winners from among the nominations. Di Eugenio, who has been with the computer science department for 20 years, said she received word from Department Head Robert Sloan that she had been nominated.The awards ceremony honoring the AET recipients will be held October 30.Di Eugenio has taught a variety of courses at UIC, most at the graduate level, in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP).“The course is an introduction for students to all the things nobody ever tells you, but are requirements to be a good PhD student—how to conduct research, how to find an advisor, how to review papers, how to do a good bibliographical search. We cover ethics and requirements for human subject experiments. I also invite some colleagues to give an overview of the methods they use, to explain how they go about doing research in their areas,” Di Eugenio said.One of the courses she teaches is a class she introduced at UIC, and one that is taught every year, Research Methods in Computer Science. The class is a now a requirement for all PhD students in the department.Barbara Di Eugenio, professor and director of graduate studies in Computer Science, has received a UIC Award for Excellence in Teaching for the 2019-2020 academic year.Learn more about Di Eugenio and her work.“I think often one looks at people who are successful and only sees the successes. They don’t see all the work that went into it, and all the failures,” Di Eugenio said.“I consider it my teaching mission to form professionals that are versed in modeling the problem (computational thinking), in using current tools and methods (programming and machine learning), and in evaluating not only the results, but also the broader societal outcomes of current developments,” Di Eugenio said. “To achieve my mission, through my twenty years at UIC, I have worked on course offerings, on mentoring and advising graduate students, and on outreach, particularly to women students.”She said some students are a bit skeptical at the beginning of the course, but said it creates a comradery among students from various labs, and provides them with valuable insights. Di Eugenio said as part of the course, she asks colleagues to provide examples of papers that got rejected on first submissions, and to share the comments they received and how they changed the papers as a result of that feedback.A second passion of Di Eugenio’s is to mentor graduate students, both those that work with her and those she provides general advising for. Di Eugenio has graduated 11 PhD and 31 Master’s students. Of those 42 graduates, 16 are women, far higher than the national average of CS graduate degrees granted to women. Presently, she has eight total graduate students working with her, and also advises some undergraduate students.“I was thrilled to see another computer science faculty member win this very exclusive, prestigious campus teaching award. Several previous computer science winners have been tremendous teachers and innovators in undergraduate education. It was particularly nice to see Prof. Di Eugenio win primarily for her many excellent efforts in graduate education, since both graduate and undergraduate education are vitally important to us,” said Robert Sloan, department head of Computer Science.“One facet of teaching that I find particularly rewarding is to individually, and collectively, mentor students. I mentor undergraduate students in several ways, from advising my own twenty-plus advisees every semester to mentoring Honors College students,” Di Eugenio said.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-student-takes-first-prize-at-uic-2019-impact-and-research-day/
Hoang completed his undergraduate work in Japan and came to UIC because it was one of a handful of universities focused on human-computer interaction. Now, Hoang wants to continue with this work in the healthcare arena.“Minh Hoang’s great work at building the technology of two (interconnected) mobile apps and the back end in the cloud was amazing,” Faiola said. “Dani Bergey’s creative mobile interface design provided an outstanding user interface for ICU families and clinicians,” he added.Hoang, who first heard Faiola speak in a human augmentics class earlier this year, found out he was looking for help with the app and followed up with him.“The purpose of the app to address the mental health and trauma families go through when a family member is in the hospital,” Faiola said. “Research shows this is related to a lack of transparency and information. Families visit a patient when they can if they are local, but fear comes from a lack of information.”The family-centered care project was started about four years ago by Anthony Faiola, professor and head of the Department of Biomedical and Health Information Sciences, who also holds a courtesy faculty appointment in computer science. Faiola centers much of his work on critical care and the intensive-care unit of hospitals.He plans to stay on with Faiola’s team as the group tests the app first with nurses and then with patients. Hoang also said they may broaden the topic and look at additional technologies in the healthcare setting.Hoang and Dani Bergey, a graduate student in biomedical and health information sciences, shared the prize for their work on the app, one of three first-place finishes awarded to graduate students and the only one open to engineering students.“The most challenging thing for me was how to make the app. We had two apps: one for the hospital side and one for the user, and we had to figure out how to make them talk to each other,” Hoang said.Haong’s work on an app to assist hospital patients and their families caught the eye of judges at UIC’s 2019 Impact and Research Day, and the project, “Supporting the Mental Health of Families in the ICU: A Family-Centered Approach to Mobile Information Communication,” took first place in the Business/Computer Science/Mathematics + Engineering/Physical Sciences category.Impact and Research Day, a celebration of research across disciplines, involves undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. This year, participants entered more than 350 projects in the form of posters, displays, and oral or other creative presentations.Minh Haong is focused on computer science, but he is attracting attention for his work to improve the hospital experience.You can learn more about the app, FAMmCare, here.Faiola explained that the app is not engaged whatsoever with an electronic medical record; instead a patient’s family receives a code, which connects patients and family members. Qualitative data on about eight or 10 measures such as blood pressure, sleep, temperature, and medication, for example, are relayed: is the patient normal, above normal, or below normal? A chat function allows for texts to be sent back and forth between nurses and family members.“I’m very happy with the award and to be working on this project,” Hoang said.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-students-earn-research-student-scholarships-to-attend-grace-hopper-celebration/
“I come from a background with no engineering experience, and I know how hard that is,” said Jones. “I wanted something similar to a club where I could learn things but couldn’t find one. So, I thought instead of waiting I’d just start it myself.”Siddiqui plans to take more courses on data science after her internship with Zheleva. Both women are working at UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory this summer on the Continuum, an advanced smart room.“Research helps me apply what I’ve been learning in my courses into real-world applications,” Siddiqui said. “It also allows for a lot of innovation and learning things about the world in general.”Four computer science undergraduate students finished the 2018-2019 academic year with news that they had earned scholarships to attend this year’s annual Grace Hopper Celebration, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists.While Reddy and Siddiqui will be attending Grace Hopper Celebration for the first time, Baiju will be returning for a second visit.“It is just one of the most empowering and liberating experiences for any women in a STEM field,” Jones said. “We would sit in this stadium and there would be thousands of women who had done so much in their communities and around the world, talking about their challenges growing up in a field that is predominantly male dominated. It just gave me goosebumps. It was an incredible experience.”“During the internship, we annotated news articles for key words that detected subjectivity to see if the articles had any biases in them. We then created a machine-learning model to detect accuracy,” Reddy said. “That experience is what got me interested in Grace Hopper.”Sabrina Jones, a sophomore, was thrilled to learn she was the recipient of the AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Celebration Student Scholarship.Jones will also be returning to the Grace Hopper Celebration after attending last year through the BRAID program. She found last year’s convention life-changing.Jones, who attended City Colleges of Chicago’s Harold Washington College before transferring to UIC, said some of the club’s participants from Harold Washington have also transferred to UIC.Jones is spending her summer as a teaching assistant for the UIC Women in Engineering Summer Program. Last year, she developed a program for students to tinker with electronics and computer hardware. The program, held at UIC, was in partnership with IEEE and with the City Colleges of Chicago and had 20 participants made up of UIC and Harold Washington College students. Over seven weeks, the group met at UIC’s MakerSpace to work with Arduinos, micro controllers, Raspberry Pi’s, solder, and learn other basics.“Research has been the most rewarding experience of my undergraduate years,” Baiju said. “Due to my work with the professors, I have keen interest in machine learning and natural language processing. Artificial intelligence has always been a topic which has fascinated me, and I was able to dive in deeper and learn so much about those fields.”Navya Reddy and Sumayya Siddiqui, both juniors, were encouraged to apply for the Computer Research Association-Women’s Research Scholars Program by Elena Zheleva, an assistant professor in the computer science department at UIC. Reddy and Siddiqui interned with Zheleva last summer, conducting research on machine learning. Their internship was part of UIC’s Guaranteed Paid Internship Program.The students will attend the conference alongside more than 20,000 women—a mix of students and professionals—from around the world. The three-day event features professional development workshops, technical tracks, and an opportunity to network.“What I cherished the most was the increase in confidence that I was able to gain,” Baiju said. “This year, I would like to learn more about graduate school options and research careers in the computing field and attend as many sessions as possible to learn more about different technologies, as well as mentoring sessions to gain more insight from people who are experts in their field.”The Grace Hopper Celebration will take place Orlando from October 1 to October 4, 2019. Current UIC computer science students seeking more information should contact their department’s student affairs office located in SEO 905.Senior Aiswarya Baiju has worked with Professor Barbara Di Eugenio and Assistant Professor Brian Ziebart since her freshman year on a project to build an automated virtual health coach. In addition to her work at UIC, Baiju is working at Northwestern Medicine this summer as an information service intern.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-students-gain-valuable-experience-with-summer-internships/
O’Donnell, a senior, traveled to Bangalore, India, to work at Infosys this summer. He said he learned about the internship in an email from the Engineering Career Center.The Fall 2019 Engineering and Computer Science Career Fair will be held September 18-19, 2019 at the UIC Forum. Visit the Engineering Career Center for more information.“India is one of the most diverse places on Earth. Diverse in the sense that like the U.S. there are so many things to see that are so different from each other. Infosys really takes care of the interns and makes sure they have time to see the real India. I would recommend this internship to anyone. It has truly changed my life for the better in multiple ways,” O’Donnell said.UIC Sophomore Andres Tapia found out about his internship at Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago through an email sent to former participants of a high school coding camp held at the lab. He was thrilled to be accepted by the Department of Energy to return to Argonne.“I was assigned to a manager who guided me throughout the internship, and helped me pick the projects that I was most interested in,” Jumani said. “The experience was all the more enriching since interns are treated on par with full-time employees, and work on projects that have a direct impact on Facebook’s products.”Jumani enjoyed events organized for interns to mingle with one another and learn about each other’s projects. She also had the opportunity to work on different Facebook products during an intern hackathon, then showcase a prototype.“A big surprise for me was how big a role technology plays in an insurance company like Allstate. There is a big push for innovation,” said Martinez. “It’s been great to see and be a part of.”The internship provided O’Donnell with friends for life, an appreciation for the company, and of India. He said the company provided free accommodations, lots of meals, and the opportunity to travel the country.“They treat me like a co-worker and respect and value my work. They have fulfilled every request I have made for things like extra monitors and computers,” said Middha.“It is surprising how the slightest changes to a product have a huge impact on the business,” Chavali said.“I can’t wait to see my project as a new feature in Expedia.com in the next couple of months! All in all, it was an amazing experience full of learning and fun,” said Chavali.Middha, a sophomore and president of the Association for Computing Machinery Student Chapter (ACM), is working as a software developer at Microsoft. He is working on Microsoft Office OneDrive SharePoint Team Sites. Middha found the internship online, and said he has learned a lot and grown as a software developer at the firm. Above all else, Middha values the culture at the firm.“It was an existing application that had been worked on before. I worked closely with my mentors to completely overhaul the UI [user interface] and then add back end telemetry,” O’Donnell said.Martinez, a senior, obtained her internship through the career fair at the 2018 Grace Hopper conference in Houston, Texas. She is working with the Allstate Information Security organization, on the Network Security Operations team. She has been learning about Allstate’s network infrastructure and the configuration and security policy implementation on the company’s firewalls.Middha enjoys downtime with colleagues playing Nerf Tag, going paddle boarding, for picnics and barbeques, and to trampoline parks.Martinez, who was born and raised in Chicago, found it scary at first to relocate to Charlotte, North Carolina, for the internship, but has found the experience to be incredibly rewarding.“Even though knowledge graph is a completely new domain for me, I managed to contribute in the whole pipeline from extracting and mining up to building the knowledge graph,” Ahsan said.O’Donnell worked in strategic software, on a parking lot solution application.He would welcome an opportunity to return to the company.Tapia worked in the Environmental Science Division, identifying, processing and synthesizing hundreds of millions of records of standard weather and air quality data for the Chicago area, in an effort to assess patterns that might trigger respiratory symptoms and other health effects in sensitive groups, information that can be integrated to help hospitals prepare for admission spikes.Tapia said he was able to expand his knowledge on the Python library, Pandas, and plotting data more effectively. His biggest surprise of the summer? He was able to wear shorts to work.Ahsan appreciates the open and flexible work culture at the firm, and was surprised many of his fellow employees are UIC alumni, in both junior and senior roles. He said it “felt like home” to join the Anthem team. An international student from Bangladesh, Ahsan also enjoys the breathtaking views from Anthem’s office, located on the 37th floor of the Willis Tower. He will continue his internship on a part-time basis during the fall semester.She learned to think about what a customer wants to see on a travel website, and was pleased Expedia.com allowed her to experiment with her ideas for a new feature she was working on, while helping her maintain a customer-centric mindset.“It’s undoubtedly a great work place for UIC students. I highly recommend Anthem,” Ahsan said.As summer break winds down, we caught up with several computer science students—from undergraduates to doctoral students–to learn about their internships. From major companies to the Department of Energy, from Chicago to India, read on to see how some of University of Illinois Chicago computer science students spent their summer.Ahsan, a fourth year Ph.D. student at UIC, received his internship at Chicago-based Anthem through his advisor’s recommendation. He went through multiple, hours-long interviews, but said he received his offer quickly after completing the process. Ahsan works for Anthem’s artificial intelligence team, building cutting-edge AI-based solutions. He worked on a project building a medical knowledge graph for a specific medical condition, from information found in medical journals.Tapia, who was part of four different abstracts, was offered a co-op appointment, and will be able to continue to work remotely for Argonne during the school year.“I had a really good mentor, Margaret MacDonell, who was knowledgeable, patient, and kind to all members of my team. She made me feel so welcome and included from day one,” Tapia said.Chavali found that working on software development in a real-time environment was incredibly enjoyable. She was pleased to that the internship provided her an opportunity to learn not only about the industry, but about the technology work culture in the United States.Jumani, a master of science student in the CS department, said her resume was selected off the Piazza Q&A forum by Facebook, and she was invited to a recruiting event held in Chicago. She interned in Facebook’s Menlo Park, California headquarters, working on machine learning models for the social media company.Chavali, a graduate student, applied online to Expedia, and is working for the travel giant on their multi-item packages team, in their Chicago office.“This internship has been the most productive and fun three months of my life.” Jumani said of her experience, noting that she received a full-time job offer to join the social networking giant.“The culture at Allstate is amazing. Everyone I have met is very welcoming. They want to see you succeed and everyone is there to help each other,” Martinez said. “There are a lot people at Allstate who have worked for more than 15 years. I think that says a lot about a company.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/computer-science-students-volunteered-to-help-recently-admitted-students-during-ignite-day-on-april-14th/
Prospective students have until May 1 to make their commitment to UIC.The CS Department’s portion of IGNITE was coordinated by its student affairs office with the help of Elena Lathos, Christina Martinez, and Roksanna Sady, who organized many students and professors from the CS Dept. to welcome students and answer their questions.On April 14, 55 recently admitted computer science students and their families attended IGNITE 2018, a day each year designed to help newly admitted students explore campus before making their decision to enroll.“It was a wonderful opportunity to talk to potential UIC CS students and share my passion for CS,” said Bharat Midha (BS ’21), who served as a student volunteer.“I had a lot of fun meeting future UIC CS students and learning about their backgrounds,” said Lydia Tse (BS ’20). She shared some advice for incoming freshmen: “Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Approach CS with a growth mindset, and you’ll be well on your way to becoming a successful CS student.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cruz-wang-use-big-data-to-track-the-impact-of-the-pandemic-on-college-towns/
An area of ambiguity in the research, which Cruz and Wang may explore in a future study, is how to interpret the use of the words “positive” and “negative” in tweets. In most situations, the word positive correlates to a positive emotion, and negative to a negative emotion. With COVID-19, the words may have an opposite implication: a negative test result is good news, and the word positive can be used to indicate one has contracted the disease.Twitter has become a crucial tool in determining how people find and disseminate health information in an urban environment, Cruz said. It’s a big change: as recently as 15 years ago, community health centers and healthcare providers still communicated information about topics such as flu cases via fax.Their research showed two peaks of negative sentiment over the time period they studied: one at the beginning of the pandemic, as many schools started to cancel their classes or move them online, and another even larger peak in mid-July, when many states were reopening but plans for higher education was unclear—and when students and faculty may not have felt safe returning to campuses.Cruz and Wang found that one of the biggest topics of conversation in many states was not about the disease itself, but rather its financial side effects.Distinguished Professor Isabel Cruz and Zhu (Ellen) Wang, a doctoral student in the Advances in Data, Visual, and Information Science Research Laboratory (ADVIS) lab, which Cruz directs, wanted to know what the people in college towns, from students to business owners, were discussing and sharing about these changes during the spring and fall.“We wanted to contribute our experience in analytics and big data to the study of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Cruz said. “When thinking about the impact of COVID-19, we remembered how difficult it was to adapt overnight to online learning.”Using a dataset of more than 6 billion COVID-19-related geotagged tweets, Cruz and Wang mapped tweets and correlated that information with confirmed cases of COVID-19 cases in college towns. They studied the content of those tweets, tracking keywords and looking for expressions of negative and positive emotions to determine the overall sentiment of the tweet.The duo presented their paper, Analysis of the Impact of COVID-19 on Education Based on Geotagged Twitter, in November, at the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Modeling and Understanding the Spread of COVID-19. They may use this work as a baseline for future studies as the pandemic continues.“Many of the students were talking about funding and student loans,” Wang said. “They expressed a lot of stress and anxiety in this area, but it was very different in different states.”Cruz and Wang approximated the sentiment of U.S. colleges and universities and the communities around them by computer-analyzing posts on Twitter. They harvested tweets by time and location to capture what people were saying online as confirmed COVID-19 cases spread throughout campuses. They conducted computerized content and sentiment analysis on these posts to evaluate the topics of people’s tweets and the specific thoughts they expressed.“Nowadays, researchers and healthcare entities rely on Twitter to detect flu trends and conduct disease surveillance, especially on geotagged tweets,” Cruz said.The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on our lives this year, a fact that is especially salient to the students and faculty who abruptly shifted to online learning in March—and the parents and community members around them who also have been affected by the departure from normal college life.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-assistant-professor-zheleva-works-to-infuse-causal-inference-into-machine-learning-algorithm-design/
Zheleva offered an example of a Twitter post containing fringe political content. “An algorithm doesn’t consider how this tweet that is recommended to you will impact your life,” she said. “Would it enhance your life in some way, or would it contribute to radicalizing you?”Gaining insight into causality—how different recommendations or interventions can help or harm us—is what Zheleva hopes to infuse into machine-learning algorithms, helping to reshape how they work.There is little research on how algorithms can maximize positive impact based on data collected in online settings, especially in rapidly changing environments. Zheleva has received grants to investigate solutions to this problem: one from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and another from Anthem.“We are looking different game characteristics that could affect team success,” Zheleva said.For instance, if a person quits or cuts down on smoking, that can lead to a significant decrease in medical costs. Individuals’ attributes, such as their genetics, environment, and pre-existing conditions, can amplify or diminish the causal effects of their smoking. Zheleva’s work will use causal inference methods to predict what the outcome would have been if a person who received treatment had received a different medical intervention instead.Zheleva’s other research project, funded by Anthem, is a collaboration with Houshang Darabi, an associate professor in UIC’s mechanical and industrial engineering department. In this study, Zheleva is analyzing large-scale longitudinal patient data to figure out which personalized interventions can optimize health outcomes.It’s a missing piece that concerns Elena Zheleva, assistant professor of computer science. She hopes to resolve the problem by infusing “causal inference” into how algorithms are designed.Even if we don’t realize it, machine-learning algorithms affect many of our everyday decisions: they can make recommendations on what to buy, what news to read, or whom to date. These algorithms do what they do by examining our previous choices and the choices of people who are similar to us. What they do not typically consider is the downstream impact of these recommendations: how we feel or how our perspectives change as a result.Zheleva’s algorithms will detect and analyze changes in a user’s performance and use that analysis to suggest tailored ways to improve attention and motivation. Her algorithm accounts for factors such as a user’s experience with a platform, the length of the user’s current session, and decisions that users make within sessions or games.The DARPA grant, which is in collaboration with the University of Southern California, isn’t solely about how algorithms affect the way people feel or what they perceive, but rather how algorithms can influence how people perform. She is studying human performance in several venues: online games, language-learning applications, and Stack Exchange, a network of question-and-answer websites where users vote on the questions and answers posted by others, leading the most highly endorsed posts to rise in reputation.For instance, if a user’s character gains or loses power in an online game, that may make some players become more fiercely competitive but cause others to lose interest and disengage. An algorithm that can keep a user engaged by recognizing and accommodating that person’s strengths and weaknesses could lead to a more successful outcome—depending on how you look at it, for the user, the platform, or both.To learn more about Zheleva’s work, visit her website.“Machine-learning algorithms are used to impact many decisions in our life. That’s something [that] recommendation algorithms control, and we should be aware of the impact,” Zheleva said—especially whether the effect is negative or positive.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-department-welcomes-three-new-faculty-members/
Adam Koehler most recently was a teaching assistant in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of California Riverside. He spent nearly a decade there, also serving as a research assistant and associate instructor while earning his doctorate in computer science. He received his BS and MS in computer science from Marquette University. Koehler’s focus is computer science education and includes work on automated tools and techniques for improving its delivery. He grew up outside Chicago and is happy to return to the area. Koehler will teach all sections of CS 109, Programming for Engineers with MatLab.UIC computer science welcomes three new faculty members: Clinical Assistant Professor Adam Koehler, Assistant Professor Peihan Miao, and Assistant Professor Fabio Miranda.Piehan Miao worked as a research scientist in the cryptography group of Visa Research before joining UIC. She received her PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and her BS degree from ACM Honors Class at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Her research interests are in cryptography and security, including secure computation, applied cryptography, secure authentication, and blockchain. Miao develops cryptographic tools to build practical systems with provable security and privacy guarantees, aiming to bridge the gap between theory and practice. She is a member of the Theory Group at UIC and will teach CS 494, Special Topics in Computer Science.Fabio Miranda will join the department in October. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the Visualization and Data Analytics Center and the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University, where he earned his PhD. During his doctoral studies, he completed internships at Argonne National Laboratory, IBM Research, AT&T Labs Research, and Sandia National Laboratories. Miranda’s research focuses on proposing new methods and systems that allow for the interactive visual analysis of large data of different types, such as time-series, spatio-temporal, geometry, and image data. By combining visualization, machine learning, data management, and computer graphics, his work tackles fundamental challenges in data science, enabling effective analysis of large data to untangle real-world problems.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-dept-increases-diversity-awareness-with-help-of-braid/
This large effort has been led by Robert Sloan whose focus has been on promoting diversity within the department, a goal that the CS Department will continue to nurture as it expands into the future.The Department of Computer Science has addressed these commitments by:The BRAID program, which stands for Building, Recruiting, And Inclusion for Diversity, aims to improve diversity of computing talent in schools and at a professional level. The CS Department has been a part of the initiative since its inception in 2014.Each of the current 15 BRAID schools are required to address specific commitments:Over the last few years, UIC’s Department of Computer Science has increased the percentage of women and underrepresented minority students enrolled in its undergraduate computing courses with the help of the BRAID program.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-dept-welcomes-two-academic-advisors-to-the-student-affairs-team/
Undergraduate CS students are strongly encouraged to take advantage of the resources Bryant and Josh can provide, they are looking forward to working with all CS students.When asked about changing his career around he said “I wanted to work in an environment that was energetic, promoted growth and would be personally fulfilling in helping others reach their aspirations. I’m looking forward to seeing the students I advise soar academically in their studies.” Josh has volunteered as a mentor at several non-profit organizations in Chicago for the past 11 years, which helped him make the final decision to change his career path.Josh is starting a new career path after spending the past 8 years in the financial sector at PNC. Josh was very careful in choosing his new career.Department of Computer Science hired two Academic Advisors, Bryant Hill and Josh Taylor, this past summer. The positions are brand new to any department in the College of Engineering (COE) and were created to help address increasing enrollment, estimated at over 1,300 undergraduate students for this fall.As new Academic Advisors Bryant and Josh’s responsibility will be in guiding CS undergraduate students through curriculum, degree requirements, course selection and all matters related to helping students stay focused on their path to completion of the degree. Faculty advisors will focus on advising students about variety of areas within Computer Science, career paths and the best technical electives to choose to achieve success in their chosen career path. Computer Science department’s new incoming student body has been changing considerably for the past few years, they are coming in with varied backgrounds and experiences.Primary responsibility of required advising for undergraduate students in COE has rested solely with faculty advisors so far. However, with increasing advising loads and changing student body the Academic Advisors will help the department serve CS students better.Bryant spent several years advising students in career center at University of Missouri and also did video production to help promote services and events. About his new role “I am an advocate for connecting students with the resources. It will be an incredibly satisfying experience, when a lost student, upon my advice, starts taking advantage of all the resources the university has to offer and succeeds” said Bryant. Bryant added “I really wish in my collegiate career I had a fraction of the resources that CS students have here at UIC, or a fraction of the dedicated faculty and staff. I am excited about working in a department that creates so many opportunities for students to excel”.Josh and Bryant’s offices are in SEO located near the CS Student Affairs office (905 SEO). Students last names A-L will be advised by Josh Taylor and M-Z by Bryant Hill. They will be available for all CS students throughout the school year, with certain weeks reserved for advising. They will have walk-in advising hours both in their offices and the CS Student Lounge.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-graduate-anusha-pai-represents-the-college-of-engineering-at-spring-2019-commencement/
Anusha Pai could barely contain her excitement after being named student representative for the UIC College of Engineering Spring 2019 Commencement ceremony. Pai, one of four Bell Honors Recipients, auditioned for the opportunity to address her class at the graduation ceremony on May 12 at Credit 1 Arena.Bell Honors Recipients are students recognized with the highest grade-point average in each graduating class. Pai, a computer science major, delivered her speech during a ceremony where 865 engineering students received their diplomas.On graduation day, Pai had her parents and brother in attendance, who she says are the backbone of her success. She says they have been incredibly supportive of every decision she’s made, and encourage her to follow her dreams.Pai believes UIC serves up every opportunity for students to succeed, and is grateful for the opportunities she’s had here. The commitment to diversity at UIC is one of Pai’s favorite things about the school, especially the commitment to see more women enter STEM fields.“Hard work, patience, I’ve applied all of that. Respect, sportsmanship—I’ve really taken everything I’ve learned from the game,” Pai said. “You play matches and you win some, and lose some. A loss or mistake isn’t the end; it’s a learning experience. You can fix it in the future. You can fall ten times, but you get up eleven times. That’s what life is about.”“It’s been a dream of mine to deliver a speech to a wide audience—especially this platform, at the beginning of my career. I’ve always wanted to do something that would encourage other people in a positive manner,” Pai said.Pai worked as a teaching assistant at UIC for CS 111, and gained valuable experience interning first at CDW Corporation, then completed two internships with Google in California. Google recruiters found her resume through her participation with Grace Hopper. Pai wants to travel before starting as a software engineer at Google Chicago in August. She also plans to fit some studying in between now and when she begins her new job.Pai attended the Grace Hopper Celebration twice as a student. With the help of Michelle Mittelman, associate director of the Engineering Career Center (ECC), Pai created a video with interviews of several company recruiters on her second Grace Hopper visit, to help fellow students understand what companies look for in job and internship candidates.Pai wasn’t always sure she was going into computer science, but found herself gravitating toward engineering in high school. An AP computer science course piqued her interest, and she said choosing the major became automatic as time went on.Pai’s approach to her time at UIC, and to life, draws on her experience as a lifelong tennis player. She credits the skills necessary to succeed in tennis as core to her values.To her fellow graduates, Pai says her advice is simple: “You always give your best. As you go about life and work, as long as you understand the concepts and you’re learning that’s enough. The result will come but the work you put in is what matters.”“Personally, academically, and career-wise, UIC is giving all of us such a great opportunity. The ECC takes their time to help each and every student find an internship, a job, to explore other areas within their field,” Pai said.“We just finished school but I want to learn a few topics I didn’t get to. I’m hoping to learn cloud computing,” Pai said.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-sends-more-than-60-to-grace-hopper-celebration-in-houston/
Aiswary Baiju (BS ’19) was one of several Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) attendees selected for a technical poster presentation of her research on the development of an automated virtual health coaching assistant.Baiju enjoyed her GHC experience. “It was a very enlightening and quite an eye-opening moment for me; it boosted my confidence in both my technical as well as professional skills. Seeing all these women excel in their field and receiving valuable feedback from them and just being around such accomplished individuals who had so much knowledge and advice to share with us, it was just incredible.”More than 60 Computer Science students, faculty and staff attended the Grace Hopper Celebration in Houston September 26-28. Students were able to attend presentations on a variety of topics, professional development activities, an open source day, and much more during what is billed as the world’s largest gathering of women technologists.Baiju’s advice for other female computer science students: “I would encourage more people to apply and attend GHC because every second we spent there was so worth it and so inspirational. It’s an experience that we don’t get much of and is worth taking advantage of,” she said.CS student Aiswarya Baiju presents her research at Grace HopperBaiju felt her poster made a good impression on the GHC attendees. “They were quite fascinated by the project we were working on and wanted to know much more about it and the future steps we will be working on for automation and the system. Some have even decided to follow-up with me after the conference to further discuss about the research and to know more about the previous progress.”“I have always been intrigued by Artificial Intelligence and the research project my professor was working on was very interesting and it’s a technology that doesn’t exist yet. So I knew I wanted to be part of such a project that will expose me to new ideas and help me learn more and put my technical skills to test,” Baiju said.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-student-orgs-recruit-members-at-involvement-fair/
All Computer Science students at UIC are encouraged to join student organizations to help develop relationships and a strong network, as well as put you on the right path to a successful career after college.The UIC Involvement Fair, which took place on September 5th and 6th, is a chance for students to learn about all of the organizations and clubs on campus. The three main organizations for Computer Science; Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Women in Computer Science (WICS) and Linux Users Group (LUG), were all represented. The three CS student orgs. are just a few of the 30 student orgs.within the College of Engineering.Joining student organizations is also a great way to make friends who share your interests. “WICS is a great community of women. Everyone is very supportive of each other in achieving our academic and career goals. I have made some great friends here,” said Dana Dolat, board member for WICS at UIC.“Employers want to see that you have built out a portfolio of projects,” said ACM President Will Toher. “At ACM we all work together to help everyone translate their academic and personal achievements into securing internships while in school and landing multiple job offers leading up to graduation.”“Being a member of one of these groups is a great way to get conversations started around a career in Computer Science and helps prepare you for what life is going to be like after you graduate,” said Reem Husseein, president of the WICS UIC chapter. “It’s especially helpful for transfer students. Also, all members of these student groups are CS majors, so you are networking with the right people,” she added.Above all, members of the CS student organizations stress the importance of being able to transfer knowledge and skills learned while at UIC into a satisfying career after graduation.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-students-lead-edt-robot-team-to-semifinals-at-engineering-competition/
Team Air includes: Laura Rojas Canelo, Yuritzi Castel, Keefe Li, Mohammad Mohammad, Crista Mondragon-Rivera, Jesus Resendiz, and Hasan Sehwail.Mohammad said he and his teammate Laura Rojas are using the offseason to work on an instruction book for aerial drones for UIC’s MRDC, since this was the first time the school entered one in the competition. This way, the knowledge can be passed on to other students.Team Stella includes: Francis Paul Amadeo, Keara Dillon, Duy Do, Damien Gilbert, Erick Gonzalez, Steven Mac, Matt Meyers, Singee Nguyen, Tri Toan Nguyen, Adrian Arif Rahardji, Denisse Manzanilla Reyna, Joseph Stiso, and Kaleb Vicary-Rzab.Team DevastatingWin includes: Kamaleddine Abou-zhar, David Cowan, Farid Elbouakhri, Chris Escobar, Thomas Hysick, Hamza Mohammed, Ratnay, Antonio Romero, and Houssain Youssfi.“If we had more time with the robot I know we would have done even better,” Mohammad said.“My grandma was always a very frugal lady, so I try to reuse as much as I can to save the school money and not waste things, like precious metal,” Damien Gilbert, co-captain of Team Stella, said. “For instance, the chassis, or frame of the robot has been there three years. It’s steel—unless it gets hit, it will stay good forever.”While the MRDC is all finesse, Robobrawl, a double-elimination tournament featuring 30-pound combat robots fighting in a 16-foot by 16-foot arena, is about brawn, with projectile weapons allowed.Team Stella’s approach was to re-use as many parts as they could from past contests.For students interested in joining EDT, the group holds meetings at the beginning of each semester, and fliers with meeting times will be posted in SEL. You can also join the team’s Slack channel at chicagoedt.slack.comUIC’s Engineering Design Team (EDT) brought the heat to this year’s Engineering Open House at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with a strong showing by all three robots entered into the contest by their teams.Both the air and ground robots compete at the same time, causing chaos—and excitement. At one point, both Stella and Air were in the arena, and Air flew over Stella as they both went through a hula hoop, with little clearance. Air ultimately crashed on a different hula-hoop maneuver, in the semi-final round.Team Stella’s robot was captained by Gilbert and Kaleb Vicary-Rzab, both electrical engineering majors. Gilbert said Stella is all engine. The team put in a motor used in a previous competition, one so large it barely fit their frame. They kept a low center of mass to keep the robot from tipping, and outfitted it with Honda snowblower treads for grip. Initially, the team tried to build a separate mechanism for completing the various tasks. When the team arrived at MRDC, the mechanism still wasn’t complete—and the team had to decide if they could score enough points with a simpler tool.The Midwestern Robotics Design Competition (MRDC) was started in 1987 and is one of the oldest continuously-run robotics competitions in country. This annual two-day contest is completely student-run. It involves multi-level platforms, obstacles, and various challenges, and is rebuilt each year. The teams faced tasks including triggering lights on a game in a certain sequence (similar to the classic Hasbro Simon Game), pushing a 12-pound bowling ball up a ramp, flinging small balls through a hoop, and crossing narrow, speed-bump laden bridges without sending the robots tumbling into ball pits.Next year, Mohammad said the team will likely change to a more advanced drone, one open to developers.“We made a mechanism on the fly and that’s what got us to second place. That’s what engineering is about sometimes, finding the simplest solutions to a difficult problem,” said Gilbert.In the objectives competition, EDT’s ground robot Stella placed second out of 32 teams, and team Air’s drone, piloted by captains from the computer science department, made it to the semi-final round. Team DevastatingWin lasted three rounds in the combat robot tournament. The two robot contests take place simultaneously at the Engineering Open House—one is skills-based, the other a robot brawl.Team DevastatingWin, captained by Antonio Romero, an electrical engineering major, and David Cowan, a mechanical engineering major, made it through three rounds in the battle.“It would be more fun than a prebuilt drone and we can add stuff to it, work on it from the ground up,” said Mohammad. “We may even enter it as an autonomous vehicle.”While team Stella used a rebuilt robot, team Air used a brand-new drone—they received it less than a week before competition. The first day, the team was adding a mechanism for scooping balls. Air’s captains include Crista Mondragon and Mohammad Mohammad, both computer science majors.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/cs-welcomes-13-new-faculty-members/
As of this fall, more than 1,200 undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students are studying computer science at UIC, more than triple the number enrolled in the department just seven years ago. The department engaged in an intensive faculty recruiting effort not only keep pace with that growth—bringing the total number of computer science faculty to 48—but also to broaden and deepen the department’s research and teaching expertise.The group of 13 is thoughtful and insightful about their potential for impact. Assistant Professor Xingbo Wu, a PhD graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington who focuses on operating systems, storage, virtualization, and high-performance databases, hopes to contribute to UIC’s visibility in these fields. William Mansky, an assistant professor who has held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, sees UIC’s computer science department as a rising center for “students who want to learn how to write code that really works.” Shanon Reckinger and Scott Reckinger share a dedication to inclusiveness and an excitement about learning. They hope to share their academic interests in computational representations of fluid dynamics while motivating the next generation of computer scientists.On the research side, Natalie Parde, an assistant professor who recently completed her PhD in computer science and engineering at the University of North Texas, brings a background in conversational interaction in artificial intelligence and has implemented a platform for human-robot book discussion groups. Assistant Professor Brent Stephens, coming off a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, works on improving the back-end services that drive the cloud-based applications that we use on a daily basis (think Gmail or Netflix). Associate Professor Ian Kash works in the cloud, too, but examines it from an economic perspective, as a market. Cornelia Caragea, an associate professor who most recently held the Lloyd T. Smith Creativity in Engineering Chair at Kansas State University, hopes to improve people’s ability to effectively and efficiently unearth meaningful discoveries from large amounts of digital data, and Xiaorui Sun, who just finished a postdoctoral term at Microsoft Research, designs new algorithms to solve computational problems even faster.A record 13 new full-time faculty members joined the computer science department this year, representing the College of Engineering’s commitment to matching an ever-growing population of computer science students with a team of talented, inspired teachers and researchers.Top Row: Mandy Burton, Cornelia Caragea, David Hayes, Ian Kash, William Mansky, Evan McCarty Bottom Row: Nasim Mobasheri, Natalie Parde, Scott Reckinger, Shanon Reckinger, Brad Stephens, Xiaorui Sun, Xingbo WuIn these areas, the new faculty are poised to make noteworthy contributions.McCarty says that “UIC provides a great opportunity to have an impact on students’ lives,” and Stephens hopes “to inspire students and to help them achieve success in their research.” If you ask any of these 13 faculty members what they see as characterizing their coming years at UIC, common words include visibility, inclusivity, and excellence (and pizza). These are lofty yet attainable goals for these additions to UIC’s community of computer science scholars.Teaching is also core to the mission of the new computer science faculty. David Hayes will teach Mobile Web Application Development, illustrating recent changes in what web technologies are capable of and letting students build some technologies of their own. Mandy Burton specializes in the ethics of computer science and plans to develop a non-technical elective in the history of technology. Nasim Mobasheri will integrate group activities into Computer Algorithms I and hopes to encourage more women and students of underrepresented backgrounds to choose computer science. Evan McCarty, who joins UIC from the University of Washington, teaches Languages and Automata, noting that “the transition from when students just see computer science as programming to seeing it as a diverse academic field is very rewarding.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/data-visualization-gets-artificial-intelligence-boost-with-5-million-nsf-grant/
SAGE3’s novel interactive artificial intelligence methods will learn from human analytic activity and use the knowledge gained to assist people in synthesizing relevant data connections that lead to new hypotheses and findings, explained Chris North, a professor of computer science in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech and a co-principal investigator.SAGE and SAGE2 are software to enable data-rich collaboration on high-resolution display walls. SAGE2 moved SAGE into cloud computing and SAGE3 ushers in the inclusion of artificial intelligence.Principal investigator Jason Leigh is a computer and information science professor at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and the inventor of SAGE. SAGE is software to enable teams of collaborators to work together with data in the form of data visualizations.Through seed funds provided by Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and the Hawai‘i Data Science Institute, North had the opportunity to work side-by-side with Leigh in the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization & Applications at the University of Hawai’i during the spring 2020 semester. This in-person exchange, and numerous video-teleconferences with the Electronic Visualization Laboratory, was essential to helping plan and initiate the five-year SAGE3 collaboration, noted North. SAGE3 will serve the Institute’s missions of bringing together computer scientists, domain scientists, engineers, artists, and designers to tackle some of the world’s most complex challenges.Researchers at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, University of Illinois Chicago, and Virginia Tech were awarded a $5 million National Science Foundation grant to synergize two complementary technologies — large-scale data visualization and artificial intelligence — to create the Smart Amplified Group Environment (SAGE3) open-source software.The user base goes well beyond scientists. Leigh said he sees SAGE3 helping teachers use and share artificial intelligence concepts to future generations of students. And for those who work in creative media, such as filmmakers and video game designers, Leigh envisions it being a highly visual tool to brainstorm new ideas and analyze all forms of digital media to see how they relate to each other, which ones were most popular and why.“SAGE3 also supports resource orchestration services that integrates these smart services with applications, workflows, and visualizations and collaboration services, and makes it easy for users to connect to local and remote display walls and computational systems and to securely run reproducible work models,” explained Luc Renambot, Electronic Visualization Laboratory associate research professor and co-architect with Leigh of the SAGE software since its inception.“As a ‘co-pilot’ to individuals or teams who are trying to examine large datasets, SAGE3 will provide a discovery pathway from data sources to human insights and knowledge, which is currently a gap in the e-Science pipeline that the National Science Foundation has called the ‘missing middle,'” said Mahdi Belcaid, assistant professor at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and the artificial intelligence co-principal investigator on the project.According to the researchers, SAGE3 will make artificial intelligence technologies broadly accessible, not just a privilege for the technically savvy. North said the project will conduct user-centered design research studies to ensure usability of this novel combination of data visualization and artificial intelligence in SAGE3.He created SAGE in collaboration with researchers from the University of Illinois Chicago 16 years ago. They’ve since further developed SAGE and SAGE2 with 15 years of research funding by the National Science Foundation.SAGE, soon to be on its third iteration as SAGE3, is the most widely used big-data visualization and collaboration software in the world.Leigh said the applications for the SAGE3 technology are endless. “It will be tremendously useful to enable evidence-based response during natural disasters and events like the current COVID-19 pandemic,” Leigh said.Scientists analyzing their data in SAGE3 will collaborate with each other and with artificial intelligence through large interactive visualization spaces, such as multi-monitor workstations, tiled display walls, and virtual reality headsets.— Written by Jenise L. Jacques, Virginia Tech“This new funding provides us with an opportunity to take SAGE to the next level — providing smart end-user services to amplify users’ productivity making commercial and open-source artificial intelligence solutions available that can autonomously and transparently analyze data while continually learning and improving through user interactions,” said Maxine Brown, director of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago. Brown has been involved with SAGE since its inception.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/early-research-scholars-program-provides-apprenticeship-to-cs-ece-undergrads/
“One professor who participated expressed hope that a student would continue on to graduate school. Overall, the goal of the program is to get our students to feel like they belong here,” Revelo said.Undergraduate students in the computer science and electrical and computer engineering departments at UIC have the opportunity to experience an apprenticeship in research through the Early Research Scholars Program (ESRP).The program is a two-semester experience. In the fall semester, scholars learn how to conduct research: how to perform a literature review and present results, for example. They meet weekly with a team of mentors, including program directors Renata A. Revelo, clinical assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering department, and Joe Hummel, clinical associate professor of computer science, as well as a graduate student ERSP mentor, who is an advanced PhD student from one of the two participating departments. They also learn about graduate school and other aspects of their chosen fields. Teams of three or four scholars are paired with a faculty member for a research project, which culminates in a final report and poster presentation at the end of the second semester.UIC is one of four schools in the NSF grant-funded Early Research Scholars Program cohort, which began at University of California San Diego. Other schools include Stanford and University of California Santa Barbara.For more information visit the Early Research Scholars Program Chicago website.“ERSP provides first and second year undergraduates a chance to get involved in active research projects, one of the advantages of attending an R1 university. It’s a unique program, and we are proud that our students are not only interested, but succeeding at such a demanding level,” Hummel said.“The content hasn’t changed but the teamwork aspect has,” Revelo said, noting that the group is leveraging multiple online collaboration tools to facilitate group work during remote learning.For the 2019-2020 academic year, 28 scholars participated. They resulted in eight completed research projects, including an ECE project to exploit CRP correlations in arbiter PUFs for Associate Professor Wenjing Rao, which involved ERSP Scholars Marius Zavistanavicius, Sasha Typkheeva, and Eloisa Marquez; and a project focused on the user interface of a wearable tongue-computer control interface for Haneneh Esmailbeigi, a clinical associate professor in the bioengineering department. The four ESRPScholars who worked on that project—Maryam Ahmed, Mallika Patil, Mahal Schroeder, and Anya Ellis—had their poster accepted by the Grace Hopper Celebration, an outside conference focused on women in technology.Since students cannot travel to attend outside conferences this year, Revelo said that portion of the budget has been redirected to add undergraduate peer mentors to the program, students who participated in the program in its inaugural year.This school year, 30 scholars are taking part in the program.“Our approach to the program is from the holistic side. We want students to feel connected to their major, to the school,” Revelo said. “Through ERSP, we want to make sure that the students feel a sense of belonging in ECE and CS.”The program has a particular focus on including women, Black, Latinx, Native American and Indigenous students. Students must apply to the program, which is advertised through the introductory CS and ECE courses, through student groups such as the Society of Women Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers, Women in Computer Science, and with UIC’s Equity and Inclusion in Engineering Program.Students who complete both semesters receive three technical elective credit hours toward graduation.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/engineering-students-learn-autonomous-vehicles-in-new-multidisciplinary-course/
“The Autonomous Vehicles group is the first in the College of Engineering Research Working groups aimed at promoting cross-disciplinary collaboration. The innovative efforts of the AV group faculty serve as a fine illustration of the virtues of faculty working together on grand challenge problem areas,” said Venkat Venkatakrishnan, associate dean of research and graduate studies for the college.“How do you predict the future demand of transportation, in this case specifically for AVs? Who is going to use them, and what kind of ownership model are we going to have?” said Lin, whose main research focus is transportation planning and modeling.“We calibrate the camera and teach it different sizes and shapes. It learns how to detect the distance between the camera and the car in front of it, then sends that to the controller, which is the heart of the autonomous car, which can tell it to stop,” said Sameer Ingale, a student in mechanical and industrial engineering.“We want the course to turn into a master’s level concentration or certificate program. There is quite a lot of interest from industry in this specialty,” said Zefran, who specializes in robotics, human-robot interaction, and control and safety of autonomous vehicle systems. “We are well-positioned in that Chicago is a transportation hub. That’s why we started the course.”“The car had to choose this path, or that path. We had to write the justification letter, and it was difficult to come up with how we made that choice,” said Durga Kumari Pisipati, an electrical and computer engineering student, as her voice trailed off. “There are not enough apologies for this.”“Are cities declining to invest in other transit sources due to the potential for AVs? I wanted to understand more on the technical side,” Lauer said.Still, the students remain incredibly optimistic about the future of AVs, and almost all expressed interest in taking future courses, should they be offered. The faculty hope to grow the course, and build an AV program.Lin also works with the students to understand the impacts and challenges of mixing AVs with human-driven vehicles.Students interested in learning more about AVs should contact current faculty members, or visit the UIC AV research area online.Each student has a different reason for wanting to take part in the class. Peter Lauer, a civil and materials engineering major, works at a not-for-profit shared-use mobility center, and has been studying consequences associated with various transportation choices. He is curious about the effects of AVs on pedestrians, and on other transportation choices.As a result, lecture topics run the gamut, from power consumption, computer vision, and signal processing—what one might expect in an engineering course centered around AV design, to ethics in human-machine systems, public policy, and philosophy.In designing the AV course, the core faculty members discussed the issues that surround autonomous vehicles—from ethical concerns to traffic congestion, to economic and environmental impacts.The hardest assignment, several classmates agreed, was a fictitious scenario where an AV had to kill either one person, or five.“We have to realize that as good as we write code, or as well as a program works it’s very important to consider that this impacts people,” said Oluwadamilola Saka, a mechanical and industrial engineering student. “I am part of the narrative, and I should not just look at engineering design.”“We think it’s good to establish a research program in this area because autonomous vehicles will happen,” said Buy. “The convenience of not having to drive is just too great, and the public will demand them. It may be decades away but we will have it. This course is just the first step.”“The one thing we decided that was important about training AV engineers of the future is that they should be really conversant with some of the implications that are outside of the strictly technical,” said Scott, who has worked extensively with UIC’s Interdisciplinary Product Development program.“Who wouldn’t want to take this course?” said Akshay Sachdeva, an electrical and computer engineering major. “This is the first time they’ve organized this subject, and it’s a fantasy for us.”This spring, a group of 60 UIC College of Engineering students feel like they won the lottery. In a way, they did—they were the lucky group selected via a lottery from among many students clamoring to participate in a full course on autonomous vehicles (AVs). This first-of-its-kind, interdisciplinary class is providing graduate students with a look at all the major issues relating to the development and eventual widespread implementation of AVs.For the technical portion of the class, groups of students use DuckieBots, part of the Duckietown platform, for programming their AVs. The small-scale autonomous robot platform was developed at MIT in 2016. A 10 foot by 20 foot roadway, or town, was set up in the UIC Makerspace, and students program their AVs to follow lanes on the floor, follow each other with interference from other vehicles, and learn to ‘platoon,’ or bunch together at relatively high speeds by wirelessly communicating with one another, which is a method to reduce roadway congestion.The course includes 15 guest lecturers, and is coordinated by four core faculty members; Ugo Buy (computer science), Jane Lin (civil and materials engineering), Michael Scott (mechanical and industrial engineering) and Milos Zefran (electrical and computer engineering).The AV course is the first in a number of interdisciplinary projects being developed by college of engineering faculty, in collaboration across departments. The projects will focus on various topics with societal and global importance.One of the bigger surprises in the class for the students so far has been the ethics and philosophy lessons.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/evl-members-gather-for-a-1993-photo-included-in-a-new-book-the-rise-of-women-in-the-digital-arts-9-of-the-22-contributors-hail-form-uic/
“I know most of the women who contributed to the book, many from the time they were either EVL students or collaborators or both and am thrilled to see this compendium that recognizes their achievements,” said Brown.“I knew Maxine was a key person for the book because she not only has contributed but also has a unique historical perspective,” said Cox.The EVL was such an early pioneer in the digital arts that it collaborated not only within UIC, but with others, notably with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and with book co-editors Sandor and Cox at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at UIUC.“In the 70s, there were very few computer science departments in the U.S., let alone places where young people interested in both art and technology could go to school,” Brown said. “In fact, in the early days, the ‘electronic visualization’ art program was more renowned than the computer science program and attracted very technical-savvy artists, including a number of women. In the computer science department, students who had artistic hobbies (e.g., painting, ballet, playing a musical instrument, singing) gravitated to the program.”“While this is not a history book,” Brown said, “it certainly provides an historical perspective on the influence of Midwestern women in helping establish digital media as a true art form, and in helping promote its importance, both nationally and globally.”In 2009, Maxine Brown, who heads UIC’s Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL), received an email from Donna Cox, director of UIUC’s Advanced Visualization Lab (AVL) enlisting her help in gathering information for a book on how Midwestern women in the arts contributed to the digital revolution.“While I don’t consider myself an artist; I am an art appreciator. I was active in the computer graphics community since 1976 and met EVL faculty and students, starting in 1977. I recognized how special EVL was, so was thrilled when offered a position here in 1986, where I started helping write grant proposals and promotional materials. Co-editor Cox told me that I am included in the book because I am an “artist of words and a collector of [computer] art.”The book, containing personal narratives from its 22 contributors, goes on sale June 15.That email sparked a chain of events that would eventually lead to the publishing of “New Media Futures: The Rise of Women in the Digital Arts,” in which Cox is one of three co-editors, along with Ellen Sandor and Janine Fron—all long-time EVL collaborators.Nine of the 22 contributing women (see the list below) have ties to UIC and the EVL, which was founded in 1973 by computer science professor Tom DeFanti and art professor Dan Sandin, who were interested in interdisciplinary collaboration to advance the development of interactive, real-time, computer-generated imagery.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/evl-researchers-land-interspeech-nomination/
PhD candidate John Novak and Professor Robert Kenyon aim to address the issue of helping people better understand speech in difficult situations by developing computerized tools customized to user needs.Their research paper, “Effects of User Controlled Speech Rate on Intelligibility in Noisy Environments,” was one of twelve nominated out of hundreds of accepted papers and more than 2,500 submissions for INTERSPEECH, the world’s largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing.Novak will present his research on September 2. Whether or not he receives the award, Novak says he already sees the experience as a win.“The difficult situation is a type of background noise called ‘cocktail party noise,’ which is exactly what it sounds like: multiple people talking in the background of a target voice,” said Novak. “The computer-mediated tool was a method of artificially slowing speech without causing distortion, especially without dropping the pitch of the voices. This is something that talkers do naturally to help their listeners, but we wanted to put some control in the hands of the listener. We believe this is very important, although very difficult to achieve.”The nomination was a surprise for Novak. “I was as confident about this as I’ve been about any other submission, but being nominated for a best student paper award never even entered my mind,” he said.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/evl-to-be-featured-in-chicago-new-media-1973-1992-exhibition/
“Chicago New Media 1973–1992” is a public exhibition, to be held November 1 – December 15, 2018, that illuminates the largely untold story of Chicago’s computer-based art and design legacy, and provides new historical understanding of the artists and organizations that contributed to digital art and technology in the latter half of the 20th Century. The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) is prominently featured. The exhibition spans the dates EVL was founded (1973) as a joint effort of the UIC Computer Science (CS) department and the School of Art and Design, through EVL’s introduction of the CAVE™ automatic virtual environment (1992).The “Chicago New Media 1973–1992” exhibition is part of Terra Foundation’s major citywide celebration of the unique and vital role Chicago plays as America’s crossroads of creativity and commerce. It is curated by VGA Gallery, an art organization devoted to video games and new media, and will be held at Gallery 400, 400 South Peoria St., Chicago, IL 60607.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/evls-lance-long-recognized-with-uics-award-of-merit/
It is an honor long overdue. Congratulations to Lance!Of the 30 awards being given this year, Long is one of two from the College of Engineering, representing the Computer Science department. Long started his career as a UIC Computer Science graduate student, who early on contributed to EVL’s successes and is now a dedicated staff member that retains the collective laboratory memory of how things were developed, while helping make new advancements.The Merit Award recognizes Long’s service to the laboratory, the Computer Science department, and the campus. He is currently responsible for facilitating and expediting the design, development, acquisition and integration of EVL’s advanced visualization, computing and networking technologies. In addition, he assists with EVL tours and demonstrations for campus visitors and for student recruitment, supports interdisciplinary faculty and students who use EVL resources, and spends many hours assisting other campus units who want to replicate EVL’s technologies. In addition, he contributes to Federal grants, co-authors research papers, helps set up and demo EVL’s technologies at major conferences, and visits and consults with academic, government and industrial partners who use and/or license EVL’s technologies.Lance Long, Senior Research Programmer for the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), which is part of the Computer Science (CS) department at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), is a recipient of the 2018 UIC Award of Merit. This campus-wide honor annually recognizes Academic Professional and Civil Service employees who have demonstrated a commitment to excellence in all aspects of their work.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/foursquare-visits-uic-plans-to-expand-its-growth-in-chicago/
In January, we shared an announcement that Foursquare was opening a new Midwest engineering hub. We are pleased to update that 7 months later we have hit our goal of building a team of six, and are looking to expand even more. After being so impressed by the caliber of talent in the market and early impact of the group there, we have decided to significantly grow the Chicago team.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/get-to-know-computer-science-graduate-student-ryan-nishimoto/
Nishimoto will begin a yearlong rotational program with Optum upon graduation.He said choosing UIC for grad school was an easy decision; Nishimoto liked the Electronics Visualization Lab (EVL) and heard good things about the computer science program. He also grew up in the Chicago area, and his family is in the suburbs.Though Nishimoto chose the coursework-only option for his degree, he said many of the classes through the EVL are project based. For one project, he collaborated with Adler Planetarium astronomer Aaron Gellar, and astronomer Mark SubbaRao, who also directs Adler’s Space Visualization Laboratory, on virtual reality and displays to be used as educational tools in the museum.CS student Ryan Nishimoto is set to earn his master’s degree this spring, and has job waiting for him with Optum Pharma Inc., a consultancy company specializing in pharmaceuticals and healthcare insurance. He interned with the company this summer, working with a team on a full-stack application: building a database, creating the front end using JavaScript, having the two pieces talk to each other, then containerizing the separate applications and pushing them to the cloud.“One of the analysts is interested in using virtual reality in rehabilitation, and is working on that as a side project,” Nishimoto said.Nishimoto has an undergraduate degree from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in astrophysics.“A lot of cloud development is happening in companies, so Docker and Microsoft Azure are more prevalent in industry. Some of the classes at UIC are teaching these platforms,” Nishimoto said.“By my senior year, I realized that the two people they accepted to the graduate astrophysics program were computer science bachelor’s students. A lot of the work in the field is light data, and then computation. I took a 400-level astrophysics course and it was a computer science person doing the database, which they created in Python,” Nishimoto said. “That’s what got me interested in computer science.”Learn more about the CS master’s program here.Nishimoto first heard about Optum Pharma when UIC’s Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) club hosted the company on campus. He followed up at a UIC job fair, and a week later had an on-campus interview.“It was very relatable to hear from alumni talking about their projects when Optum visited campus, and the whole interview process was really smooth,” Nishimoto said.Some of the projects Nishimoto worked on at the EVL caught the attention of the folks at Optum as well.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/googles-hispanic-leadership-summit-chicago-tailor-made-for-some-uic-computer-science-students/
Benitez Gorostieta will be participating in Google’s computer science mentorship program this spring, and Samayoa has an upcoming interview for the Google residency program.“The summit made me think about how I could program better,” Samayoa said. “It’s about more inclusivity and programming for everyone. Google is thinking about that. Who are we coding for?”Benitez Gorostieta presented a lighting talk at the summit, focused on STEM awareness and Chicago youth. He is a computer science instructor for children at his former school, Moraine Valley Community College.“Some of the kids I teach can’t even read yet; I teach them block code with pictures, and they learn to program from that. Older kids get tougher material. I like to reach out to organizations like SHPE and LOGiCA to help with youth outreach; they partner with schools from the city,” Benitez Gorostieta said. “I grew up in Chicago and CPS is not very well funded. I didn’t learn any programming until I was 20, and wish I was introduced to this stuff earlier.”This fall, Google hosted a series of Hispanic Student Leadership Community Summits, in partnership with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities. One of these events was held at the Chicago Google office, drawing undergraduate student leaders from around the Midwest. Approximately 20 UIC students attended, including computer science majors J. Jesus Benitez Gorostieta and Luis Samayoa.Samayoa and Benitez Gorostieta said that Google discussed their Pixel phone, and an algorithm the company developed to better detect skin tones and contrast them, and a crowdsourcing effort to deepen the company’s global perspective.The event included a presentation on internships and the hiring process at the company, and was paired with practical experience that would be helpful in a job interview at Google or for any tech job—a sample code problem to solve, a mock interview, resume workshop, and primer on crafting an elevator pitch. The summit also featured a panel discussion that included several Googlers of Hispanic or Latino descent who shared their path to working at Google, and the realities of working for the company.“The underlying theme of the summit is hope,” Samayoa said. “When I was younger I was like, Google is a fairy tale, and now it’s possible.”Samayoa, a senior, said the Latinx focus of the summit made the event feel more tailored to his needs, and Benitez Gorostieta, a junior, is hopeful that Google is trying to grow the Latinx representation at the company from the current level of between three and four percent of their workforce.“The crowdsourcing is open to anyone who wants to use it. There is a photo section that will show you a picture, for instance of a ‘bride.’ You can determine if this label correctly identifies the picture. A bride in the U.S. would look different from a bride in India, but with crowdsourcing the algorithm will learn to recognize both as a bride. It will be better globally for users,” Samayoa said.“I felt like this summit was directed specifically at my field, for people of my background,” said Benitez Gorostieta.He said many of the summit attendees followed up with him, hoping to establish similar outreach efforts at their universities.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/how-do-values-influence-stay-at-home-attitudes-during-the-covid-19-health-crisis/
“This project will develop a novel computational frame analysis methodology that combines moral foundations theory, natural language processing, causal inference, and data visualization,” Zheleva said.The grant period runs through April 30, 2021.Understanding these attitudes by focusing on the values people use to justify resistance to such health measures will provide health officials with a means to re-frame their messages to appeal to and change the opinions of target audiences.Scientists around the world are racing to contribute to the understanding of the novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, and the COVID-19 disease it causes. Here at UIC, researchers in the Computer Science Department are engaged in studies related to the disease outbreak. Updates to the research will be published as they are made available.“It’s an evolving situation,” Zheleva explained. “When we started writing this proposal no one had started protesting the stay-at-home orders. The proposal has become much more relevant.”The researchers are developing algorithms to analyze stay-at-home attitudes expressed on social media, and will then correlate these sentiments to their impact on the pandemic, considering geographical locations and socioeconomic context.Massive amounts of data will be analyzed; as of mid- May, over 130 million Tweets with COVID-19 related keywords were sent.There is a range of attitudes among citizens to recently enacted stay-at-home recommendations and orders aimed at slowing the spread of the COVID-19 virus that have been announced across the country. Understanding people’s justifications for following or resisting these directives is key to helping policy makers craft more persuasive public health messaging. Elena Zheleva, assistant professor, Barbara Di Eugenio, professor and director of graduate studies, and Elisabeta Marai, associate professor, all with UIC’s Computer Science Department, and Andrew Rojecki, associate professor of communication, received a one year, nearly $100,000 National Science Foundation Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) for their study, “Stay-at-home attitudes and their impact on the COVID-19 pandemic.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/inspiring-grads-discovering-passion-for-computer-science-pays-off/
For Kevin Bell, the feat is a real-life milestone, a far-off dream come to fruition.This story first appeared on UIC todayFaculty and staff from the College of Engineering have helped him, too. Thanks in part to a career fair in September, Bell secured a job at Discover as a software engineer, which he’ll start after graduation. But before he accepted the position, he also had interviews with Google, Microsoft and Amazon.At first glance the story seems unreal: a high school student with a 1.1 GPA turned college graduate — earning a degree in computer science, no less.“That’s where I really started to say, ‘This is pretty cool. I’m going to figure out how to get into this,’” Bell said.“I took it as a sign to go back to school, to go with a different mindset and try. To see what I could do if I actually tried,” he said.“I did the bare minimum to graduate. I was unmotivated,” Bell said.So, Bell made a change. He enrolled at Harold Washington College, where he committed to becoming more serious about academics and his future.In 2016, he graduated with an associate’s degree in applied science. He transferred to UIC as a Black Tech Scholar and took a 100-level computer science class, which looked at programming in terms of public policy and legal issues such as predictive policing.Bell had other things on his mind. Video games, mostly.He also took advantage of the resources and support available to students through places like the UIC cultural centers.“People from the African American Cultural Center said, ‘Hey man, we see you here often, do you want a job?’ And I became their IT assistant,” he said.“I started to think, ‘What am I going to school for? OK, I like video games, so maybe computer science to work on video games,’ but video games are really hard,” Bell said with a laugh. “But I thought ‘Hey, I like this coding thing, so let me see what this is about.’”When he looks back on his time at UIC, he’ll think of the people who have touched his life — and his responsibility to pay it forward.“When I was younger, if you would have told me that I would be graduating with a computer science degree, I would have called you crazy,” said Bell, who is from Hazel Crest, Illinois. “I really didn’t care about my future like that.”“I think of this period in my life as a time when I blossomed and as a time where I learned to be mindful of helping others like me because a lot of people here have helped me get where I am,” he said. “I’m ready to excel and tackle what comes next.”That attitude continued when he enrolled in his local community college, but was dismissed due to his grades soon after he started. He turned to the U.S. Navy as another possible career option, but was disqualified from joining.“I’m the first Bell to graduate from college. I’m the first engineer in my family. I haven’t really said that out loud, and it’s crazy to think about,” Bell said.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/making-music-out-of-numbers-lessons-in-break-through-techs-cs-100-summer-course/
Andrew Davis, a computer science professor at Wellesley College and classically trained composer, was a guest at “tea time,” the course’s recurring time slot for conversation with guest experts. He shared how computer science is a big part of the music industry. Increasingly, musicians and artists want to be well versed in music software. That software is designed and created by a legion of computer engineers and computer programmers. Davis demonstrated SuperCollider, a free program he uses, which comes with basic predefined instruments and is also a programming language, allowing artists to build their own virtual instruments to produce music. In his view, a computer is just another musical instrument.In the introductory CS 100 course that is being offered tuition-free as part of Break Through Tech Chicago, students have begun to discover computer science in an assortment of ways: via text-based programming, Python, image processing, plotting data and, most recently, EarSketch, a program that teaches coding through music.“At the end of the day, audio is just a set of numbers, and we can manipulate numbers,” Davis explained. “On your computer, music is just a set of numbers.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/masters-student-receives-honorable-mention-at-ubicomp-2018/
“Once I was excluded from an internship application because I am a woman. I was told that men become scientists and engineers, and I, as a woman, don’t fit among them,” she said.Sakhini received Honorable Mention (Top 3 out of 200!) for her poster presentation of her project myCityMeter, a device that detects noise and air pollution, which has shown to produce mild cognitive impairment in older adults who experience long-term exposure. She discovered this problem while researching epidemiological studies with her advisor Professor Debeleena Chattopadhyay in the HCI Lab at UIC.“We had discussions about the different problems people from around the world go through as researchers. A significant thing I learned from this workshop is ‘research-life’Nina plans on expanding her research on myCity Meter. “We are working on replacing the handheld sensing module with a wearable. We are also working on improving the quality of the low-cost sensor readings by constructing algorithms for calibration based on different attenuation and distortion factors. Also, we are working on replacing the cognitive test with an avatar-based interface that will evaluate the cognitive performance,” she said.Although Nina is completing her Masters this spring, she plans on continuing her research and expanding on myCityMeter by pursuing her PhD in Computer Science.Nina Sakhnini (MS ’19) was honored at Ubicomp 2018 in Singapore earlier this month for her research on human-computer interfaces (HCI). Ubicomp is an annual global conference focused on research in pervasive and ubiquitous computing.Nina also participated in a Broadening Participation workshop where she connected with students and researchers from around the world.skills,” she said. “These are non-technical skills that could help me to sustain a successful research career. My favorite takeaway was “be stubborn and persistent.”“That was when I decided I wanted to be both! I want to be in a leading position- the academic professor: to contribute in the process of creating generations of engineers and scientists and to empower those who might be oppressed otherwise, the scientist in engineering: to contribute to bettering the world by adding to the body of science and engineering.”“During the presentation, I was happy with how people thought that it is a great project and good work,” Sakhnini said. “I loved seeing the excitement in the eyes of my audience as I introduced them to myCityMeter and walked them through the project. Most importantly, I loved how people gave me feedback and ideas about the project.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/maxine-brown-director-of-uics-electronic-visualization-laboratory-retires-after-34-years/
I was co-editor of the landmark NSF-report “Visualization in Scientific Computing” that coined the term “scientific visualization” (1987). EVL invented the CAVE virtual-reality environment and pioneered “tele-immersion,” or virtual-reality over distance (1992).EVL’s SAGE collaboration and visualization software came out of that work (2004), and lessons learned from that project became EVL’s motivator for all subsequent systems architecture research. And, over the past decade, EVL created the next-generation CAVE2 system (2012) as well as SAGE2 (2014) and now SAGE3 (2020).“Maxine taught me how to write proposals—I only knew how to program computers and shoot and edit videotapes. I still use the template Maxine generated in Word 25 years ago—and about $80 million dollars (in grants) later,” said DeFanti.How would you sum up the impact of EVL on digital media and computer graphics?“I’ve known Maxine for over 25 years and she has always been strongly committed to building the future by creating new infrastructure and applications, encouraging multi-disciplinary collaborations and multi-national partnerships, organizing conferences for researchers and the public to meet and share knowledge, and mentoring students into future leaders,” said Andy Johnson, interim director and director of research at EVL and professor of computer science.During her tenure, she was part of EVL teams that conducted pioneering work in scientific visualization, advanced virtual reality, and high-speed networking infrastructure. One of the lab’s best-known inventions includes the CAVE™ virtual-reality environment; a way for accessing, sharing, and interacting with ultra-high-resolution 3D images on tiled display walls. This was followed by the CAVE2™ hybrid-reality environment, the SAGE™ scalable adaptive graphics environment, the SAGE2™ scalable amplified group environment, and the SAGE3™ smart amplified group environment.All EVL students get great jobs upon graduation and take with them not only their education, but EVL’s history of innovation, culture of inclusivity, and emphasis on interdisciplinary collaborations among scientists, artists, and engineers.What are you looking forward to in retirement?While I will miss all the energy, expertise, and creativity at EVL, I welcome more personal time to explore old hobbies and new interests.Big Data keeps getting bigger (e.g., higher-resolution instruments, Internet of Things’ sensor data, drones taking 360-degree photos and video, autonomous vehicles). Research and development globalization makes the world keep getting smaller, so techniques to capture, store, move, process, and analyze visual information among collaborators worldwide continues to grow. All these pursuits, across domains, open many opportunities for EVL.EVL, along with Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory, created STAR TAP (1997), the research and education network connection facility for international traffic located in downtown Chicago. STAR TAP was followed by StarLight (2001), which is still the largest research and engineering advanced networking facility in the world.Tom DeFanti, co-director emeritus of EVL and distinguished professor of computer science, who co-founded and co-directed EVL with Dan Sandin, emeritus professor of art, hired Brown and credits her with helping grow EVL exponentially.Brown was a recipient of the 1990 UIC Chancellor’s Academic Professional Excellence (CAPE) award, the 1998 Association for Computing Machinergy (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) Outstanding Service Award, and the 2001 UIC Merit Award.EVL already had some major achievements before I joined. For instance, EVL had a role in developing the computer graphics for the first Star Wars movie, though EVL has many other things about which to brag. But since my arrival, ‘Team EVL’ and I had many seminal accomplishments.What do you hope to see in the near- or long- term future for the lab?EVL has been, and continues to be, one of several highly-regarded computer graphics and visualization research laboratories worldwide. However, EVL has always looked at the bigger picture of digital media in the context of today’s cyberinfrastructure ecosystem—from creating (compute/visualization) to enhancing (i.e., multimedia, such as audio and touch), manipulating (image processing), interacting (human-computer interfaces), streaming (networks), sharing (computer supported collaborative work), and immersing one’s self (virtual reality) into the data.EVL was a lead institution with UC San Diego’s Calit2-Qualcomm Institute of the NSF-funded “OptIPuter” initiative (2002-2009) that envisioned a future in which high-speed networks were the backbone of a distributed computer whose components (compute, storage, visualization) could be located anywhere in the world.Maxine Brown, director of UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), retired in October, after a 34-year career at the interdisciplinary research lab, which specializes in collaborative visualization, virtual reality, visual data science, and advanced computing and networking infrastructure. She joined EVL as associate director in 1986 and became the lab’s director in 2014.Below is an interview with Brown, lightly edited for clarity.You joined the lab in 1986. What made you want to work at EVL?I always liked explaining things to people. I enjoyed being a teaching assistant in graduate school. I wrote documentation for the marketing people when I was a programmer in industry, and I organized the technical program for user group meetings when I moved into corporate marketing. I never thought I could work in academia with a MS in computer science (I left grad school with an A.B.D – All But Dissertation). EVL was beyond special, as it was both academia and computer graphics, with an emphasis on the arts. EVL was the absolute best of all worlds.What are some of your proudest moments?EVL inventions were adopted by a wide variety of application domains, from medical to earth sciences to astronomy, which I found fascinating, and these inventions created commercialization licensing opportunities, patents, and royalties, which kept us very busy.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/meet-jovad-uribe-a-junior-in-uics-new-data-science-program/
A: I heard about the major through a friend who is a computer science major. I am part of the Quantitative Trading Club at UIC, and we focus on building trading strategies and teaching others how to do the same thing. As a finance major I didn’t have too strong a background in programming, but I found myself on the computer all the time, building trading algorithms. I really enjoyed it. This summer I held an internship at an algorithmic trading software company, where I learned a lot about data science, building algorithms, and software development. It made me realize I wanted to pursue a career at the intersection of finance and technology. I applied the data analysis and data mining I’d learned. I had taken a computer science class in high school, but not before my internship this summer and I had to pick up some skills on the spot. I enjoy a challenge and thought why not pursue a new major?Q: Have you chosen a concentration?A: As I was entering college I knew I wanted to enter the finance industry. I didn’t know exactly where, so I majored in finance. A major in finance is great if you’re going for a finance career in commercial banking, financial advising, or other qualitative forms of finance—but the other 50 percent of finance is very quantitative. A lot of the hedge fund industry is moving toward data science, and I want to enter the quantitative hedge fund space.Q: Do you know what career path you want to pursue?UIC’s data science degree program officially launches this fall, but students can begin to take courses in the new major, which is housed in the computer science department. In addition to core courses in areas including foundational mathematics, statistics, computer science, and ethics, nine areas of concentration allow students to focus on a variety of industries that are increasingly dependent on data analysis. Learn more here.A: I’ve chosen computer science as my concentration, mainly because I want to build certain applications alongside techniques I want to employ with data. I’ve unofficially declared my minor as business administration. I really like how the program is set up. It provides a lot of concentrations to build domain knowledge of what you want to learn.This interview was edited for clarity.Q: What prompted you to switch majors?Junior Jovad Uribe just transferred into the computer science department, and is taking classes in the new data science program. He was a finance major.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/microsoft-ai-for-earth-adds-wild-me-to-50m-project-initiative/
“There was an intense demand for something that didn’t yet exist,” Berger-Wolf said, alluding to Wildbook’s rapid success over the past few years with limited resources. “It was all happening so fast at the beginning. Research and development were happening at the same time. It takes a great team of talented, dedicated and passionate researchers and engineers.”The Wildbook team’s research started in 2014 with an initial grant from the National Science Foundation. By February 2015, the first Wildbook prototype was launched and was powering the first-ever count of animals using photographs from citizen scientists: The Great Zebra and Giraffe Count at Nairobi National Park. Wildbook’s popularity and growth within the conservation community was just getting started.Professor Tanya Berger-Wolf’s career in research has come a long way (and full-circle) since she secured her first-ever funding dollars from Microsoft Research back in 1996.“Microsoft’s partnership allows us to grow to planetary scales,” said Berger-Wolf, “to thousands of species, efficiently, accessibly for scientists and wildlife conservationists, who can use it to study and protect biodiversity of our planet.”It was on sabbatical in 2013 at Microsoft in Redmond, WA when Tanya met Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental scientist and AI for Earth Director, and when she initially conceived the idea for Wildbook, an open-source software which has rapidly become the world’s leading repository for tracking endangered wildlife.The team consists of four co-founders, two graduate students, and an engineer. Dan Rubenstein is an ecologist and zebra expert (and a long-term collaborator) at Princeton University. Jason Holmberg is a data architect who started whaleshark.org and created the data management layer of Wildbook as a hobby in his spare time. He is now the inaugural executive director and director of engineering at Wild Me. Chuck Stewart is the computer vision researcher at RPI, who enlisted two PhD students Jon Crall and Jason Parham. Jon Van Oast is the team’s part-time senior engineer.“That’s the moment I felt like Wild Me and Wildbook were finally growing up!” Berger-Wolf said of hearing the news regarding Microsoft’s funding and support of Wild Me. “An idea that was in our mind five years ago that became the duct taped Wildbook prototype, put together by a few volunteer researchers and engineers, was finally going to be a real product usable by thousands of scientists and conservationists throughout the world.”Microsoft recently recognized the impact and potential of Wildbook’s framework and awarded Wild Me (Wildbook’s non-profit organization) with a featured project for its AI for Earth program. Wild Me will receive resources and support from Microsoft as part of it’s $50 million initiative to put its cloud and AI tools in the hands of those working to solve global environmental challenges. There are currently four featured AI for Earth projects at Microsoft.With the new funding and support of Microsoft, Wild Me plans to continue the success of Wildbook on a much larger scale by adding three more dedicated engineers and moving onto Microsoft’s Azure platform, where Wildbook will be included in the Azure Marketplace.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/mitchell-theys-receives-uics-highest-teaching-honor/
The move to online learning this spring, while difficult, provided some unexpected benefits in this area; Theys said he found many more of his students asking questions in the chat windows. Whether it was the anonymity provided by the online format or the unique situation of being isolated at home, Theys noted an increased level of interaction, which he hopes to keep up even when classes return to campus.Ultimately, teaching students to apply that creative, engineering mindset to their work is critical to Theys’ approach in the classroom.“I’m amazed. I didn’t have to contend with student debt, with working, with supporting a family while in school. It makes you feel really good that we can help improve their situation and help them realize the opportunities to do what they want,” he said.Theys just finished his 21st year teaching at UIC. He considered a career in industry but thought academia would be more interesting and challenging. He specifically admires the student body at UIC.“I often get, ‘How do I do it? Just tell me the steps that I need to do and I’ll do them.’ And that’s not what engineering is about. It’s about problem solving,” Theys said.Mitchell Theys, a clinical associate professor of computer engineering, received UIC’s highest teaching honor: the Award for Excellence in Teaching. The accolade, given by the Office of the Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, is bestowed on up to five faculty members per year university wide.Theys says his biggest focus as an instructor is to get his students to ask questions.“It’s always nice to be recognized,” Theys said. “I enjoy teaching, I enjoy problem solving, and I enjoy trying to explain material to the students.”Theys is also the faculty advisor for both the Linux Users Group (LUGS) and Association for Computing Machinery Student Chapter (ACM) and finds that attending social activities with the groups helps his students relate to him.“We can teach them the steps of problem solving. That’s why I think our students are in such high demand. A lot of students don’t have experience with applying the state of the art in a new way, and we encourage that here,” Theys said.Theys and the other Award for Excellence in Teaching recipients are scheduled to be honored in a ceremony October 28, 2020.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/more-than-60-k-12-teachers-from-the-chicago-area-attended-cs-ed-camp-hosted-by-csta-and-the-uic-cs-department/
Chicago is at the forefront of the growing need for those teachers with its Computer Science for All (CS4All) initiative at Chicago Public Schools (CPS), a movement to bring computer science education to every student in the CPS system.The camp, a participant-driven conference created to support K-12 teachers in their computer science skills, filled up within six hours of its registration opening.More than 60 Chicago-area CS teachers helped organize the inaugural CS Ed Camp, an event for teachers of the 440-member Chicago Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) funded by Google and sponsored in part by the UIC CS Department.For Trahey and the other participants, the CS Ed Camp offered four anchor sessions introducing cryptography, the Google CS First curriculum, mobile web app development, and micro:bits, in addition to session topics participants voted for based on interest.For the Chicago CSTA, they believe this is only the beginning for educating and preparing CS teachers.“Watching the numbers grow confirmed in our minds that this event seems to be meeting a real need for teachers to be able to exchange ideas on their own terms,” said Prof. Dale Reed, a founding member of Chicago CSTA.“These teachers are hungry for meaningful CS material for students,” said Prof. David Hayes, who helped administer the camp and presented one of the anchor sessions. “Teachers have been doing great work on their own in their schools just to provide more opportunities for their students. This camp was a chance for teachers to get active and engaged in ideas and tools they can bring into their classroom next year.”“I’m eager to learn the curriculum to help educate my students,” said Mike Trahey from Wells Community Academy High School in Chicago, whose first year teaching CS will be this fall. “I look forward to collaborating with other teachers and taking it all in so I am more prepared.”“The history of educational research is rife with examples of well-meaning and well-funded efforts vanishing after the funding dries up, because they have often been an imposition of values and practices imposed from the outside,” said Reed. “A culturally relevant approach celebrates, supports and builds upon the expertise that existing teachers bring to the table. CS Ed Camp builds on this ethos of valuing what teachers have to offer. We have a sense that this ethos and model could be both powerful and replicable elsewhere.”The CSTA, which has grown to more than 25,000 professionals since it was founded in 2004 by the Association of Computing Machinery, helps empower, engage, and advocate for K-12 CS teachers worldwide.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/ms-student-awarded-twice-at-mit-energy-hack-2018/
The hackathon was organized by the MIT Energy Club and hosted on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, MA. Congrats to Chirag and his teammates!“It was a great experience to participate, trying to solve the most challenging problems that companies are facing in the industry,” said Soni. “A big shout-out to my team MassSave involving these amazing people I worked with and without whom it wouldn’t have been possible!”Chirag Soni (MS ’19) spent an intense weekend at his first hackathon, MIT Energy Hack 2018, competing with teams involving participants from all around the globe. The challenge: Hacking MIT’s Smart Sensor!: Reduce GHG emissions with Machine Learning.Soni was the lone UIC representative at the hackathon, teaming up with students from Stanford, Northeastern and North Carolina State University to form their team MassSave. Soni’s team developed a Building Management System(BMS) to hack MIT’s Smart Sensor using a Machine Learning model and a Deep Reinforcement Learning model.His hard work over the weekend paid off as he and his team were awarded two prizes: 3rd place overall and an award for addressing a Problem Statement through the MIT Office of Sustainability.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/ms-students-win-mobility-hackathon-chicago-with-feel-your-city-platform/
This was not the team’s first hackathon, but it was their first top prize. They bested 11 other teams.The team created machine-learning algorithms to extract useful information from the Feel Your City sensors in real time. The data can be provided to government officials, who can use it in their decision-making to improve the public experience of moving around the city.The students each won $1,000 and a three-month membership to the Chicago Connectory, an IoT incubator located in the Merchandise Mart.Five MS in Computer Science students won the top prize at Mobility Hackathon Chicago, sponsored by Bosch and KPMG. Their winning platform and device—which they named “Feel Your City”—can collect, visualize, and analyze data about air quality and noise pollution in major metropolitan areas. The idea is to put the sensor on public transportation vehicles, such as bikes, buses, and trains, to give us better information about conditions in the places where we live.The team had 26 continuous hours to come up with an idea and create a working prototype—a challenging task.“We were the only team to physically build something during the event, so we were hoping to get at least one of the prizes,” Pressiani explained, but “we didn’t expect to see such an appreciation for our work from the judges.”This is only the beginning for Feel Your City. “We would like to continue to work on this project and work with the people we met at the hackathon to go through our idea and understand if and what needs to be adjusted to make it an actual viable product,” Pressiani said.“We strongly suggest to all our mates to try to join one of these events,” he said. “There are a ton of events like the one we did. Try to find the one that best matches your skills and just do it. Even if you don’t win, these events open you a lot of opportunities thanks to the networking that you can do.”“The most exciting thing about this project is the chance to actually use our skills to do something good for the city,” Pressiani said. “It was a great feeling to see how we could build something useful in such a short amount of time, doing what we do every day.”“It wasn’t easy,” said Riccardo Pressiani, MS ’19. “We started to think about how we move around Chicago. We’re students, so we use the CTA every day to commute to UIC and back home. The breakthrough happened when we put our skills on the table: what came out [included] sensors, IoT, cloud platforms, data analytics, machine learning, and data visualization. Putting everything together, we came up with Feel Your City.”Putting the victory aside, Pressiani is a big advocate for UIC computer science students attending hackathons.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/nine-computer-science-phd-students-were-honored-at-itfs-fifty-for-the-future-awards/
The award honors 50 local college students and ten local high school students for their aspirations in the field of technology, along with their academic achievements, and builds awareness of tomorrow’s workforce talent for the Illinois technology ecosystem.The UIC computer science department was represented by nine PhD students who were recognized for their pursuits within the field of technology.UIC had the largest number of winners with eleven students who were honored at Illinois Technology Foundation’s (ITF) annual Fifty for the Future awards ceremony held on March 15 at Robert Morris University in Chicago.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/nsf-awards-uic-1-5m-for-new-data-science-institute/
This story first appeared on UIC TodayThe institute is part of the NSF Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea initiative, and it will be jointly led by UIC faculty researchers from the College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts and Science.The researchers say data science takes a different approach to answering “how” and “why” questions across fields and results, so far, have been revolutionary.Science has always been data-driven, but the scale and resolution of questions are changing, according to Lev Reyzin, co-principal investigator and UIC associate professor of mathematics, statistics, and computer science at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. “Data science enables decision-making in a very different way. We take advantage of vast data sets to form new methods and develop realistic models that answer scientific questions.”“I think one of the reasons we received this award is because we have a strong collaborative infrastructure,” Reyzin said. “Internally, each department has very strong groups studying the foundational and theoretical areas of data science that come together. We also have collaborated with many schools across the Chicagoland area and with local government. We want to leverage resources with academic, government and industry partners and to foster new collaborations.”43815“While traditional scientific models, which are explanatory or analytical models, help us understand various phenomena, many of these models do not survive contact with large data,” said Tanya Berger-Wolf, co-principal investigator and UIC professor of computer science at the College of Engineering. “Data science allows the study of phenomena through the lens of data — it helps form new models and decide what computational or mathematical approaches are appropriate in the context of that phenomenon to find an answer.”“As a public and urban institution, UIC provides the opportunity to train diverse student bodies and perform innovative research,” Berger-Wolf said. “Using training programs supported by each one of the participating departments, we hope this institute will be an opportunity for more underrepresented groups to study data science.”A multidisciplinary team of University of Illinois Chicago researchers received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to form a new data science institute.Other investigators at the UIC Foundations of Data Science Institute include Gonzalo Bello Lander, Isabel Cruz, Bhaskar DasGupta, Ian Kash, Bing Liu, Xinhua Zhang, Elena Zheleva and Brian Ziebart from the department of computer science at the College of Engineering; Shuo Han, Daniela Tuninetti and Milos Zefran from the department of electrical and computer engineering at the College of Engineering; and Yichao Wu and Ping-Shou Zhong from the department of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.The UIC Foundations of Data Science Institute is intended to establish a place on campus that will focus on the theory of data science. The institute will concentrate on three themes: the representation and structure of data, machine learning and complexity, and robustness and privacy. These themes will link theory with the application of data science to create new ways to apply data to research. The institute will further develop the data science curriculum at UIC, promote interdisciplinary collaborations on and off-campus, and train the next generation of data scientists.The new institute also will focus on training the next generation of data scientists. Berger-Wolf said that data science is an interdisciplinary field that attracts more underrepresented groups and women than other associated fields, such as math, computer science and electrical engineering.Co-principal investigators also include Natasha Devroye, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Anastasios Sidiropoulos, associate professor of computer science, at the College of Engineering; and Will Perkins, assistant professor of mathematics, statistics and computer science at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.The researchers say that UIC’s location in Chicago is an advantage.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/nsf-grant-to-help-uic-project-for-faster-computing/
Eriksson and his students will refine an alternative approach to handling shared data resources on multi-core computers.A $500,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation will allow researchers in the University of Illinois Chicago College of Engineering to refine a new method of data processing that promises up to 10 times faster speeds for software running on currently available hardware.The speed with which individual computer processors have grown faster and more efficient has slowed down in recent years due to physical limitations. To get around this apparent speed limit, hardware designers have resorted to designing computer chips that contain multiple independent processors, also known as cores. The resulting machine is known as a multi-core computer.“This method of locking shared data is known as synchronized access, which can be highly inefficient,” said Jakob Eriksson, associate professor of computer science in the UIC College of Engineering and principal investigator on the grant.This work-around is limited by the need to coordinate activities between processors, currently done using what’s called a lock.In delegation, a single core acts as a server whose sole job it is to deal with data that needs to be shared among processors. While delegation often comes with a higher initial cost in terms of time needed, ultimately, performance can be much faster than with locking on modern computers.In previous research, Eriksson’s group showed that an efficient delegation system can dramatically outperform locking-based methods on processes that need shared access to individual items of data. They found that delegation is 10 times faster than using a lock-based processing system.Under the new grant, Eriksson will continue to refine delegation-based processing by identifying and eliminating roadblocks to additional gains in processing speed, and by adapting delegation to work in a wider range of settings.“Consider the analogy of a family doing dishes,” Eriksson said. “The locking approach is inefficient: each family member opens the tap, squirts some soap, washes one dish, closes the tap, dries their hands and then waits for their turn to use the sink again. With the delegation approach, the family members hand their dishes to a single designated washer who uses a pre-filled sink of soapy water and quickly does the dishes for everybody. For a single shared resource – in this analogy that’s the sink – with many users contending for it, delegation is always more efficient.”When a program uses multiple cores concurrently, there are times when a critical piece of information or data needs to be modified before the next step in computing can take place. To prevent multiple chips from accessing that shared resource simultaneously – which could lead to errors – the data is temporarily “locked,” meaning that only one core can handle and modify it at a time. But locking can be slow. The chip must first “acquire” the lock, or send signals to all the other chips that the data it needs to modify is off-limits; then it does what it needs to do with that data, before finally releasing the lock, making it available to other processors in the computer.“Instead of synchronization or locking, we are looking at another way of computing called delegation,” Eriksson said.Sharon [email protected]
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/prof-liu-honored-with-two-awards-for-his-research/
24th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)Prof. Liu was awarded with KDD’s highest honor, the Innovation Award which is awarded to researchers who have made significant technical contributions with lasting impact. Liu was honored “for his seminal contributions to the foundation of data mining and applications, particularly in opinion mining.” The annual conference took place in London from August 19-23.Illinois Science & Technology Coalition (ISTC) Researchers to Know 2018Innovation AwardProf. Liu was one of 22 people in five categories honored for their research. Liu was recognized for his research in the areas of sentiment analysis, machine learning and data mining. Some of his highlighted research includes using association rules to provide an innovate means for classification in data mining and applying his research to help detect fake online reviews.Category: Technologists
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/professor-venkatakrishnan-secures-new-3-million-computer-security-grant-from-darpa/
“GAMEPLAY is intended to be used by cybersecurity analysts, software developers and other professionals interested in identifying ‘exploits’ in software. It will run, for the most part, on its own but when an issue arises where a decision needs to be made, then a human will provide input to guide the system.”The project will also include students at the graduate and undergraduate level who will have a chance to take part in constructing GAMEPLAY while learning about state-of-the-art digital security tools.“GAMEPLAY will be built on a language-agnostic platform extensible to multiple computer languages,” Venkatakrishnan said.The system will be designed to be able to evaluate software written in several computer languages, including C, Python and JavaScript.“We want to create a system that allows software developers and security experts to be proactive by building a tool that will let them scan for potential problems in code that could provide an opening for hackers before the hackers have a chance to find the weaknesses themselves,” Venkatakrishnan said.The University of Illinois Chicago will lead a $3 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to design, develop and evaluate a system that will identify security vulnerabilities in web software. UIC will receive $1.4 million of the funding, and the rest will support co-investigators at the University of Texas at Dallas and The Johns Hopkins University. The system will spot security weaknesses in the millions – sometimes billions – of lines of code that run websites including banking and online shopping which are attractive to hackers.“The GAMEPLAY project will be rolled into several student classes on code analysis and vulnerability identification,” said Rigel Gjomemo, research assistant professor of computer science and associate director of UIC’s Electronic Security and Privacy: Technological, Human, Enterprise and Legal Considerations program. “Students may also participate in hacking competitions using what they’ve learned in these classes, giving them experience that they can bring to their future employers in the cybersecurity field.”Once identified by the system, called GAMEPLAY (for Graph Analysis for Mechanized Exploit-generation and vulnerability Patching Leveraging human Assistance for improved Yield), the vulnerabilities will be automatically probed to determine whether they really could be leveraged by hackers. GAMEPLAY will then generate patches for these vulnerabilities, known as “exploits” to computer scientists.The UIC team will be joined by computer scientists from Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas at Dallas to develop GAMEPLAY for these different computer languages.“GAMEPLAY addresses a pressing need in both government and industry for more rapid vulnerability identification and patching response strategies that can scale with the increasing speed and scope of modern cyber-warfare campaigns that target networked software,” said Venkat Venkatakrishnan, professor of computer science in the UIC College of Engineering and principal investigator on the grant.Venkatakrishnan says that systems to scan and analyze code exist, but they can be expensive and may not provide total assurance because code is exceedingly complex and scanning it thoroughly presents a huge computational problem. GAMEPLAY will get around these issues by allowing for human input as the system runs.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/professors-stump-students-to-claim-cs-bragging-rights/
UIC’s Association of Computing Machinery hosted Stump the Profs on Tuesday, April 10 in the CS Lounge. Teams made up of about 80 students had the opportunity to test their computer science knowledge against two faculty teams in a Jeopardy-style contest with categories ranging from programming to historical trivia.”This year was a landslide victory for the two faculty teams,” said Prof. Dale Reed, “in part because the historical trivia questions were from our lifetimes, but not our students’!”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/reaping-the-benefits-of-an-internship-experience/
Securing the internship:I found out about the internship through the Grace Hopper Conference (fall 2017).Best part of the internship:Working on a project with an amazing group of talent would have to be the best part of my internship. I also loved that the project I worked on has a large-scale impact on many users.Evaluating overall experience:It was an amazing experience, I learned so much about myself and how I work with a team and how I work as a programmer.Most valuable thing learned that was not CS or engineering related:I learned that networking with as many people as you can is very important in your career. During my internship, there were a lot of intern events and team events that motivated us to build connections and get to know the team a little better.Anusha Pai | GoogleMost valuable thing learned that was not CS or engineering related:I learned how different working for a tech company in ecommerce is than a tech company that focuses only on tech. This was valuable because I realized I really like the business applications and emphasis on the customer that companies like Macy’s focus on and that I will probably want to work for a company much like this one.Best part of the internship:Being able to explore a different city, and meeting new people within my field. Networking with people across the company and learning how ecommerce works.Ask anyone who has completed internships before starting their full-time job out of college and they will most likely tell you how much it prepared them for so many things they they did not or could not learn in a classroom or lab. That was the experience for Anusha Pai (BS ’19) and Daisy Arellano (BS ’19) during their software engineering internships this past summer in California. Anusha was at Google in Mountain View while Daisy completed her internship at Macy’s Technology in San Francisco. They each shared details from their experience.Daisy Arellano | Macy’s TechnologySurprising part of the internship:I was surprised by how much the company cared about making sure I had a fun experience. There was a lot more downtime than I expected allocated just for us to network and enjoy San Francisco.If they offered a full-time position:My internship experience at Google was very positive, and I loved working there every single day over the summer with such an incredible group of people. I would love to work at Google again and would definitely accept a full-time offer from them.Most challenging part of the internship:I think the hardest part of my internship was becoming comfortable and confident enough within my team to ask questions and ask for resources I needed.Additional comments:I was very nervous about my first internship as I usually work with teams at UIC that I am fairly familiar with but everyone was so focused on making sure I learned as much as possible and was so helpful. For anyone who is nervous about their first internship I encourage you to research the company because while I had a great experience I know many people who did not and it really does make a difference.Evaluation of overall experience:My overall experience was unforgettable! I have been so fortunate and blessed to be a part of the Google community. I received a warm welcome, great support, had a fantastic time, and learned tons during my internship.Surprising part of internship:I was surprised how truly caring every single coworker is and how motivating everyone is to each other. It was exactly like I heard it would be like. The environment and work culture is very positive and caring, and the company truly believes in each individual’s success. The Google community is like one big family who helps each other out in all situations, which is one of the many reasons I loved interning there.Most challenging part of the internship:This was my second internship at Google, so I was more comfortable with the internal tools, the work environment/culture, and the campus. However, during my first Google internship, I felt overwhelmed with the large campus and all the training in the first week, which was very challenging for me, but with the help of my team, I was able to complete the training and learn lots of new things during my internship successfully.If they offered a full-time position:Accepting the offer would mean relocating and I have family and friends here. I also love Chicago and would like to stay for a while after I graduate. If I get an offer I will have lots to think about but it is definitely a possibility!Securing the internship:I was recruited through the Grace Hopper 2017 conference which I attended with the UIC computer science department.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/recent-phd-grad-rachel-harsley-named-to-crains-tech-50-of-2018/
After becoming the first black woman to receive a doctorate in computer science from UIC in 2017, Harsley joined Google as a software engineer. Before that, she built a messaging app that won the UIC Startup Challenge. The St. Louis native, whose research focused on natural language processing and machine learning, interned at Intel, GE, and AT&T before joining Google.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/senior-dane-zieman-challenges-fellow-cs-students-to-prepare-for-technical-interviews/
An added challenge to the already stressful job interview process facing computer science graduates is the technical interview. It’s an assessment of what you know, how you think, and how well you can communicate this information. Some students wonder how to better prepare for this part of their interviews.“I wanted to create a SIG group that would help students build up all of those skills,” Zieman said.All of the Algorithm Challenges materials are available on Zieman’s Github page, under the SIG_Algorithm_Challenges tab. His hopes to create and share an interview preparatory document, similar to those given to candidates by large tech companies, on the site in the near future. Zieman said drop-ins to the SIG group are welcome.The UIC Engineering Career Center provides mock behavioral interviews, along with an array of services to students, and provides links to lists of programming questions students may encounter in interviews. But Zieman thought mock challenges would better prepare computer science students for what to expect, and for the interview process itself.He added that the ability to progress further in these technical challenges is critical in the hiring process.The group was formed in January and meets each Wednesday. Just prior to spring break, Zieman said the first mock interview was conducted. He said typically five or six students come each week, and in total 20 unique students have attended. More students are trickling in as interviews are scheduled. It is Zieman’s hope that the group continues after his graduation in May.“Fair or not, a lot of the hiring process depends on you doing well on the coding challenges. It can be, you do well and you get the job, or you do you poorly and you don’t get the job,” Zieman said.Dane Zieman, a senior in the computer science program at UIC, saw an unmet need on campus and did something about it. He started Algorithm Challenges, a student Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) special interest group (SIG) that teaches students techniques to solve coding challenges, hosts practice sessions, and even conducts mock technical interviews with students, incorporating concepts from data structures and algorithm classes.“I hope someone will take up the mantle.” Zieman said.Zieman is treasurer of UIC’s ACM chapter, and a teaching assistant for CS261, Machine Organization. He also has firsthand knowledge of what it’s like to interview for post-collegiate jobs, holding a degree in chemical engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and working in that field before deciding to change to a career in computer science.“That can end up being thousands of dollars of difference in salary, depending on if you pass one or two challenges, or not,” said Zieman.Zieman explained that many companies have long stages of automated coding challenges before a prospective hire even speaks to a person in the interview process. The candidate may encounter a quick code screen that they must enter into an online interface, which provides a simple “yes” or “no” as to whether the problem was correctly solved. If the process progresses to a phone call, the interviewee may have to lay out their approach to solving a different coding challenge. If a candidate makes it to an in-person interview, he or she may have to write their code down on a white board, a skill in itself.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/siham-hussein-juggles-work-volunteerism-with-graduation/
“I think the biggest blocker that took me to come to terms with is the imposter syndrome,” she said. “Everyone feels it at some point in their career. You have to recognize it and overcome it, or it can completely cripple you.”Hussein primarily works on privacy products, including Google Takeout, a tool to allow users to download their data to another device. This can include photos, documents, contacts, and other files. She works on the team that is handling the back end, or service-integration end, of the project, which is leading the development of the open source code.“I went in knowing that it wasn’t going to directly impact my job, but I wanted to pursue something outside of work,” she said.Hussein feels strongly about mentorship and reaching out to encourage women to find careers in tech.For Siham Hussein (BS ’15, MS ’20), earning a master’s degree in computer science was just one item on this month’s very busy agenda. The senior software engineer was juggling finals, full-time work at Google, and computer-science-related volunteering.Hussein almost didn’t pursue a career in tech. She came to UIC as a chemistry major, intending to pursue pharmacy. She excelled in chemistry and AP calculus in high school but realized in college that she didn’t enjoy chemistry as much as she thought she did—the memorization required in organic chemistry wasn’t for her. Searching for other options, she recalled an introductory tech class she took in high school, and switched majors.Hussein, who finished her bachelor’s degree in computer science summa cum laude, returned to UIC for a master’s to delve into research areas she didn’t explore during her undergraduate years, including theoretical mathematics, natural language processing, and machine learning.With her master’s degree behind her, Hussein will have more time to enjoy her hobbies, which include crocheting and knitting, baking cake pops and all things chocolate, and wasting “what would be productive hours” on Animal Crossing.“If you’re interested in learning a new thing, there are people to teach you that new thing,” she said. The company also allows staff members to explore via “20-percent projects,” which allow you to “do your primary role and still take on another project.”Hussein never stops learning at her job, either. She recently was promoted to senior software engineer and said that growth opportunities are readily available at Google, a large company with a vast product line.“The tech class in high school involved a little programming, Excel, word processing, and designing web pages,” she said. “What I liked about chemistry was the math behind it. CS was the perfect blend of theoretical and application.”Inside and outside of Google, Hussein is an active volunteer. This month, she participated in Computer Science Education Week, an annual community-led effort whose mission statement is “to inspire K-12 students to learn computer science, advocate for equity in computer science education, and celebrate the contributions of students, teachers, and partners to the field.” She sits on the community engagement committee at Google, which visits area high schools and middle schools to show students what a software engineer looks like. Finally, she works with Girls Who Code, a group that aims to close the gender gap in tech by offering coding clubs and summer camps for girls in secondary school, as well as college programs.To learn more about the CS master’s degree program, visit https://cs.uic.edu/graduate/
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/sisl-researchers-land-usenix-security-distinguished-paper/
A research team from Professor V.N. Venkatakrishnan’s Systems and Internet Security Lab (SISL), including PhD student Abeer Alhuzali, Rigel Gjomemo, PhD, and Birhanu Eshete, PhD, were honored with a Distinguished Paper award at the 27th USENIX Security Symposium held in Baltimore, MD from August 15 to 17. Their paper was one of five awarded.View their slide presentation here.“USENIX Security is the most prestigious venue in security for practical systems work, and this award is quite prestigious in the security community,” Venkatakrishnan said.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/students-in-break-through-techs-cs-100-course-focus-on-networking-in-final-week-of-class/
Students who want to learn more about Break Through Tech programs can sign up here.In the fourth and final week of the introductory CS 100 course that is part of Break Through Tech Chicago, students hit rewind and went back to the beginning—to the dawn of the Internet. The week’s theme was networking, from online history to sending data.Jinying Dong, who is entering her sophomore year at UIC, hadn’t considered taking computer science classes before she heard about the Break Through Tech CS 100 summer course. The class changed her long-held beliefs about the subject.Dong published the gaming app she created during the final week of the course, and she looks forward to inviting her friends to play online with her.By the end of the final week, students had amassed a portfolio of their work.Students worked in groups of eight, each representing a node, or computer, on an imaginary eight-computer network. They were able to “talk to” two of the seven other nodes in each exchange about the cost of communication with those nodes, and they then repeated the exercise with other pairs of nodes. Put together, the information they collected allowed them to determine the best or cheapest path for sending data across the network. Often, the cheapest route would include more stops than a direct route. Through this exercise, students also learned how computers verify that information is received by a node, so that if a packet is lost it can be retrieved.After this positive experience with tech, Dong, an accounting major, is considering taking additional computer science classes, based on the idea that it could have a positive impact on her career.“I didn’t like computer science since I was in elementary school,” Dong said. “I thought it was difficult and complicated, so I didn’t want to learn about it. But after I took this course, I found out how interesting computer science is.”The path that data takes through networks and how it reaches its final destination were some of the concepts covered in this final week of class. In one exercise, students created their own routing table. These tables contain the information necessary for a computer to forward information along the best path to its destination, and they provide instructions to send the information to the next stop on its route.Students learned that the Internet began as a Department of Defense project more than 50 years ago, as ARPANET, or Advanced Research Project Agency Network. The goal was to create a communication system that would withstand a nuclear attack. Messages could be broken up into blocks and sent as fast as possible in every direction through a mesh network.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/students-in-break-through-techs-cs-100-course-learn-about-thwarting-cyber-attackers/
He also led the class through an exercise in which they evaluated nine common approaches to minimize risk. He revealed that non-security experts valued behaviors such as antivirus software, only visiting known or familiar websites, and having strong passwords that are changed frequently and not shared with others. Conversely, security experts feel the most valuable controls are running software updates, employing two-factor authentication, choosing a strong, unique password, and utilizing a password manager.The lesson ended with students learning how to “be a hacker” by editing how existing webpages appeared on their own computers (the hack wouldn’t change the text on anyone else’s screen who was viewing the same web page).Kanich advised: “You have to be aware of the attack surface, which is all of the things you can be attacked through to get at your assets, and your operational security, what you do on a day to day basis to protect yourself and others.”Chris Kanich, an associate professor of computer science at UIC who conducts data-driven research on the socio-technical aspects of cybersecurity, shared insights on threat modeling. Students first developed their own inventories of their assets that they would like to protect: physical items, such as laptops, phones, and credit cards; their data, including emails and text messages; and their own personal security. Then they imagined a list of individuals who might threaten the security of those items, from cyber criminals and hackers to classmates and roommates. Finally, they suggested controls they could use to thwart attacks and protect their assets, including strong passwords, antivirus software, physical security systems, and turning off GPS location tracking on their devices.“Every website has built-in web developer tools,” Kanich explained. “I own my computer, and I can manipulate what is shown on it.”The summer introductory CS 100 course being offered tuition-free as part of Break Through Tech Chicago allows students to discover computer science and envision themselves in a tech career. In the course’s third week, students focused on algorithms, data structures, ethics, privacy and security, and quantum computing.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/tanya-berger-wolf-receives-university-scholar-of-the-year-award-for-2018/
The platform uses data derived from photographs of animals taken by tourists, scientists and camera traps and uses advanced deep learning and computer vision to identify individual animals based on coat pattern or other unique features. Wildbook helped determine the most accurate sizes of global populations of the endangered Grevy’s zebra and whale shark. Wildbook also enabled the most comprehensive study of the biology of whale sharks, helping discover the seasonality of migration patterns, among other things.“If we want to know more about the social relationships between animals, we need to know who their ‘friends’ are, so we developed Wildbook to help track which animals are spending time with which other animals, and by knowing this, we can begin to answer questions about their social structure and behavior,” Berger-Wolf said.“In baboons, it’s not always the alpha male who initiates group movement. In fact, it’s rarely the alpha male. These animals have a very democratic structure,” Berger-Wolf said.Berger-Wolf said dynamic network analysis can be used to study the qualities and characteristics of leaders in groups of animals like baboons, fish or even humans.“What makes the rest of the group follow this one individual? How is group movement initiated? These are questions we can begin to now answer,” Berger-Wolf said.Recently, Berger-Wolf and colleagues determined that images and videos uploaded to social media channels like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram can help researchers determine accurate wildlife population counts.“Traditional methods of determining population counts aren’t really very accurate,” Berger-Wolf explained. “And without accurate numbers, we can’t really develop useful policies for protecting animals. We found that analysis of images on social media can provide better population numbers for a variety of species.”Her core interest is in creating tools that ecologists can use to analyze data that will shed light on the social and behavioral traits of animals. Her work has also resulted in tools that, for the first time, can help ecologists determine true population numbers of species that are endangered, and will likely help identify many more species that are on the verge of extinction, allowing for them to be listed and better-protected.Berger-Wolf, professor of computer science in the UIC College of Engineering, is perhaps best-known for developing Wildbook, a kind of Facebook for animals.Tanya Berger-Wolf is a computational ecologist. In fact, she is one of the first — and certainly one of the most well-known — computational ecologists in the young but rapidly growing field.Her studies into leadership already have produced some interesting insights.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/three-cs-faculty-speak-at-ai-for-social-good-conference/
“Artificial intelligence and citizen science are working together to understand the natural world,” Berger Wolf said.Berger Wolf will present a keynote on her Wildbook wildlife conservation AI project, and participate in a fireside chat about the role of AI in nature.“When I was recruiting, I made sure to include women. Half my team were women,” Zheleva said.Three UIC computer science faculty, Tanya Berger-Wolf, Barbara Di Eugenio, and Elena Zheleva, are featured speakers at “AI Humans | a day in the life of,” the Midwest’s largest artificial intelligence conference focused on social good. It takes place on Dec. 11.Di Eugenio and Zheleva will speak on a panel about being in positions of leadership in AI.“For me, leadership is about being a mentor—to undergraduates, graduate students, and colleagues,” Di Eugenio said. “When you are a principal investigator on a grant, that’s how research happens. It’s participating in the dialog and trying to affect change.”Zheleva worked in industry before joining the faculty at UIC, and led a data science team.The conference will be held at the AON Center. UIC faculty, staff, and students can register at a discount with the code UICAI25.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-aims-to-break-through-gender-gap-in-computer-science/
“Computer science is the only one of the STEM fields where the fraction of women graduates has declined over the past few decades,” he said. “Today, women represent less than 20“We want to see a 12.5This story first appeared on UIC Today“Break Through Tech is thrilled to partner with the computer science department at UIC and build upon their successes of the last several years,” said Judith Spitz, executive director of Break Through Tech. “Our experience in New York has shown us that a deep partnership with a public university that has both scale and diversity, the delivery of a continuity of programming that supports women and other underrepresented groups throughout their college journey and innovative partnerships with the industry players within the city is a formula that delivers transformation results for both the students and the tech ecosystem.”Unlike many internship programs, the new opportunities for UIC students will be held during the university’s winter break. “Winternships” will provide students with chances to build their resumes with real-world experiences that increase their chances of landing coveted summer tech internships, which are key experiences that tech recruiters look for when evaluating graduates for full-time employment.Educational opportunities will include new introductory computer science courses and workshops that teach students how to code and emphasize real-world applications of technology.The University of Illinois Chicago will build programs to engage and retain women in its undergraduate computer science program, thanks to a new partnership with Cornell Tech’s Break Through Tech program, a national initiative that propels women into higher education and tech careers and is funded by Pivotal Ventures, a Melinda Gates investment company.Sloan says the field of computer science has a diversity problem.Sloan said women represent 20Sloan said that, contrary to existing stereotypes, teamwork and collaboration are fundamental in computer science. “Diversity in these teams leads to better results,” he said, using the example of improving voice recognition technology to recognize all kinds of voices, not just male voices.“This partnership is an opportunity for the UIC College of Engineering to help change the face of computer science and tech in Chicago and nationally,” Sloan said. “Our country and cities need computer science professionals, developers, researchers and educators and, frankly, we all lose if those individuals represent only a narrow segment of the population.”New introductory courses and workshops will be held beginning in May 2020 and the first cohort of students in the winternship program are expected to start as early as December 2020.“We are proud that UIC was selected as the first university for the national expansion of Break Through Tech,” said Peter Nelson, UIC dean of the College of Engineering. “We look forward to working with Cornell Tech and building a successful program here in Chicago. The Cornell Tech grant to support our efforts is one of the largest grants the UIC College of Engineering has ever received.”Efforts will include developing educational opportunities for women and other underrepresented groups at UIC and nearby community colleges to learn about computer science. Efforts will also include creating pathways for computer science students to secure paid internship opportunities during freshman or sophomore year.Students seeking more information about the program at UIC can email [email protected] develop the new educational and internship programs for engaging women and underrepresented groups, the college’s computer science department will receive funding from Break Through Tech. Break Through Tech, which announced its expansion into Chicago today, pioneered a similar program, called WiTNY — for Women in Technology and Entrepreneurship in New York — in New York City with City University of New York.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-alumnus-victor-mateevitsis-spidersense-jacket-included-in-msis-wired-to-wear-exhibition/
Mateevitsi worked on other tools during his time at UIC’s EVL, including developing 3D Visualization Software for the U.S. Air Force medical researchers; inventing the HealthBar, an ambient persuasive technology reflecting the health status of an office worker; and developing a client-server application enabling medical researches to upload image datasets to a remote database.“I’m waiting for technology to catch up,” Mateevitsi said.These objects are just a few of the more than 100 wearable technology pieces that will be included at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago (MSI) Wired to Wear™ exhibition, the first ever dedicated to wearable technology.He currently works as a human-computer interaction research scientist and sensory engineer at GN Advanced Science, a company that makes medical, professional and consumer audio products, including hearing aids.Mateevitsi earned his PhD in Computer Science, with a specialization in human augmentics from UIC’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL). Human augmentics can enable humans to see and hear better, absorb and interpret more information and increase physical endurance. Not all of human augmentics is what we would consider the stuff of science fiction: it can include eyeglasses, or hearing aids. More recent technologies include robotic limbs, Bluetooth earpieces and biometric sensors.While we wait, visitors to the Wired to Wear exhibit will have the opportunity to test out SpiderSense. Using Mateevitsi’s concept, technological futurist firm Quantum XPR built out a vest for the exhibition, and guests will navigate a space relying on the haptic feedback the vest provides to alert them to obstacles in close proximity. Mateevitsi’s first two prototypes will also be on display.There are still some hurdles before the SpiderSense can be commercialized. The first prototype, which Mateevitsi co-invented with fellow UIC students Brad Haggadone and Brian Kunzer while at UIC, was a bit clunky, with 13 modules strapped to the wearer’s body. The second iteration, developed by Mateevitsi, is more streamlined and easier to wear, but the electronics are housed in plastic cases, and the SpiderSense jacket cannot be washed without damaging the wires.“Wearable technology sits at the intersection of design, technology and innovation, and we are proud to bring together compelling examples of how it is changing the world,” said David Mosena, MSI’s president and chief executive officer. “We designed Wired to Wear to showcase the possibilities that wearable technology presents for society now and help guests understand how it can create opportunities for them they could have never imagined.”“I’ve never had my technology in a museum,” Mateevitsi said. “As scientists, we do bleeding-edge work but we typically are presenting to peers, in journals. We rarely get the chance to share work directly with the public, and see them interact with it.”A jet suit that can travel more than 30 miles per hour and ascend to 12,000 feet. Self-lacing sneakers. And a jacket that allows its wearer to navigate by using vibrations to alert them to obstacles in close proximity.The original SpiderSense prototype had 13 sensors, located on the shoulders, wrists, chest, upper back, lower back, and abs. SpiderSense technology works by vibrating to let the user know if they are approaching an object, or if an object is approaching them. It can be used by the visually impaired or people in the line of duty, such as soldiers or firefighters, who are in areas of low visibility.The Wired to Wear™ exhibition opens on March 21. Wired to Wear™ is sponsored by BMO Harris Bank and will be at MSI through May 2020. It is not included in Museum Entry and requires an additional timed-entry ticket, $12 for adults and seniors, and $9 for children. For more information on the exhibition visit msichicago.org or call 773-684-1414.The inclusion of UIC alumnus Victor Mateevitsi’s SpiderSense tactile jacket in the exhibition thrills its designer.The EVL at UIC, where the human augmentics research is being pioneered, is an internationally renowned interdisciplinary research laboratory that enables scientific and engineering discoveries by designing and developing high-performance visualization, virtual reality, and collaboration systems using advanced networking infrastructure. Established in 1973 as a joint effort of the UIC College of Engineering and School of Art and Design, EVL is the oldest formal collaboration between engineering and art in the United States.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-college-of-engineering-researchers-selected-for-discovery-partners-institute-seed-funding/
More than half of heart failure patients lack the knowledge to manage their disease, and health care providers often use jargon-filled language when communicating with patients. African Americans are at the highest risk of developing heart failure, followed by Hispanics. By teaming up with health care coaches who work with minority populations, Di Eugenio and her UIC colleagues are designing a dialog agent that is adept in suggesting sound health care strategies that will be available to health care providers 24/7.“The goal of our research is to reduce the cost of such radar systems while maintaining their reliability—thus helping with the mass deployment of radar-based advanced vehicular safety features. Given such requirements, our work will lead to novel hardware implementations that demonstrate our approach for on-field operations,” said Soltanalian.Of 88 proposals submitted for consideration, 10 were selected based on a combination of exceptional intellectual merit and research excellence, and potential for commercial impact. Below is a list of the four funded projects involving UIC college of engineering researchers:“This DPI grant will allow us to improve the reliability of control algorithms used in autonomous vehicles to ensure safe operation in a multitude of situations that may occur on the road. It will also allow us to create a research program that could potentially attract collaborations with industry through the new Discovery Partner Institute,” said Han.In the United States, 166 million people live in areas with unhealthy air, and the World Health Organization identified air pollution as the world’s largest single environmental health risk. While the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s AirNow program provides air quality information and associated health risk indicator – Air Quality Index (AQI) – to the public, more than 42 million people reside in places that are farther than 40 km from the nearest PM2.5 monitor.“Control of High-Speed Autonomous Vehicles in Complex Environments Using Onboard Computing,” Shuo Han and Milos Zefran, electrical and computer engineering.“A Contextualized Dialogue Agent to Address Health Disparities among Urban African American and Latinos with Heart Failure,” Barbara Di Eugenio, computer science, with collaborators from the college of medicine and the college of applied health sciences.“Ubiquitous Radar Systems for Autonomous Vehicles and Advanced Safety in Urban Environments,” Mojtaba Soltanalian and Amit Trivedi, electrical and computer engineering.To address this issue, Lin and her partners are developing the MY-AIR: Monitoring Your Air-Pollution Risk a Mobile app, which will reflect individuals’ health risk to pollution exposure and take into account a person’s microenvironment, activity, and physiology. It will consist of a smartphone app and enabling models and algorithms on the server end. MY-AIR will apply advanced deep learning techniques to interpolate current and predict near-future air pollutant levels at fine spatial and temporal scales, and provide personalized AQI.Four projects involving College of Engineering researchers received funding from the first round of UIC’s DPI Cycle 1 Seed Funding Program. Chancellor Michael D. Amiridis and Vice Chancellor Joanna Groden budgeted up to $100,000 per project to catalyze UIC-led activities that advance the mission of the University of Illinois System’s Discovery Partners Institute (DPI). Up to $10 million will be leveraged from UIC’s royalties’ revenue for projects aligned with DPI goals.“The tool will be like an Alexa or Siri, which is competent in specific health care issues, but can use the right terms and be appropriate for these populations,” said Di Eugenio. “We will work with health care coaches and focus groups to discuss the types of questions patients have about heart failure, medications and other issues.”Radar-based safety technology is superior to visible and infrared imaging techniques for use in autonomous vehicles (AVs), and performs better in poor weather. The cost of ultra-high frequency radar signal processors prevents their mass use—the typical AV radar bandwidth is large, which makes it expensive. Soltanalian and Trivedi are using the machine learning framework of deep unfolding to achieve high performance, while using low-cost and low-speed technologies.“MY-AIR: Monitoring Your Air-Pollution Risk a Mobile App,” Jane Lin, civil and mechanical engineering, with collaborators from computer science and the college of medicine.Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must solve complex optimization and decision problems in real time using a computer. These calculations must be made faster than the environment they are operating in changes, which is challenging especially when driving at a high speed on a highway. To tackle this challenge, Han and Zefran want to design a framework that is inspired by the way human drivers operate—reacting to the most pressing constraint, such as the nearest car, rather than trying to consider all factors, which is what most AVs do. At the same time, the system must ensure that safety is not compromised as the focus of attention shifts.Established in 2018, the DPI statewide network will partner research universities and industry, governmental, non-governmental, community-based agencies, and cultural and philanthropic organizations to advance technological innovation and grow the economy.“We are very excited by these seed funding projects that span a variety of domains such as healthcare, autonomous vehicles, and transportation infrastructure. These projects are excellent illustrations of how the faculty from UIC’s College of Engineering are advancing DPI’s mission with their deep research expertise,” said Venkat Venkatakrishnan, associate dean for research and graduate studies for the college.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-computer-science-faculty-become-temporary-googlers-to-help-students-learn-needed-tech-industry-skills/
Two faculty members from the University of Illinois Chicago’s Computer Science Department spent a month at Google’s Mountain View headquarters, part of the technology company’s Faculty in Residence program. Clinical Assistant Professors Gonzalo Bello and Shanon Reckinger participated in hands-on, project-based learning workshops, discussed industry expectations, learned more about the technical interviewing process at Google, and immersed themselves in Google’s engineering culture.“Google is reaching out to universities like UIC that it hasn’t traditionally recruited from. They are trying to get their workforce in tech, the engineers, to be representative of the people they serve,” said Reckinger.Bello and Reckinger intend to work with the Engineering Career Center on sharing what they’ve learned, and they will be at events when Google is on campus. They hope to conduct interview sessions for students. Reckinger will also be working with UIC’s Women in Computer Science group on technical interview training.The Faculty in Residence cohort went through the company’s interview process, and gained a clear understanding of the skills Google wants their prospective employees to possess.Bello is working on a syllabus for a class he teaches that will be more projects-based, incorporating hands-on activities, and discussions about practical applications to help students develop the professional skills needed to succeed in the workplace. Some of these skills include using version control systems such as GitHub; and application programming interfaces (APIs) for building software applications.“Sometimes we take for granted that students are learning these things on their own, but it’s helpful to have that as an actual objective in our classrooms,” Bello said.Google shared what they called their workflow, based on how their engineers work on problems, where every piece of code is reviewed by multiple people, and each engineer has to review each other’s codes. Reckinger says she hopes to mimic this approach, adapting it for the realities of the classroom.All of Google’s Faculty in Residence program participants came with their own goal to work on, and for Reckinger it was retooling projects for the CS 251 course, Data Structures.Reckinger and Bello were part of the third cohort of the Faculty in Residence program, which included 21 computer science faculty from 19 institutions that serve underrepresented students. The program provides faculty with the opportunity to learn from Google and collaborate with one another, and create learning materials that can be incorporated into their classrooms. Google, in turn, says the program provides valuable insights into advancing their commitment to diversity and inclusion for its employees and users.“I can only say positive things about the experience,” said Reckinger. “I could really see what it is like to work at Google.”“A big goal of the program is to understand the process and give students resources they didn’t have to prepare for them. We spent the whole month brainstorming how we can do some of this in the classroom,” Reckinger said.Applications for roles at Google are accepted on a rolling basis, so Bello advises students interested in internships or jobs to act as soon as possible—even if the deadline is distant, the earlier you apply, the better. He said applications open in September.Both Reckinger and Bello appreciated the attention paid to the hiring process. At tech companies, this often includes an online candidate prescreen, a phone screen, problem solving over the phone, then multiples of these phone technical interviews before in-person interviews take place. At in-person interviews, candidates must solve coding challenges at a white board, while explaining their approach as they go along. Preparation is key.“I think that one of the biggest takeaways is that anybody can work at Google if they prepare for that job interview. In the past when I spoke with some of my students their feeling was that maybe they were not going to be considered by Google,” said Bello. “That it is certainly not true.”“Learning about Google’s hiring practices, and even going through a technical interview myself, will allow me to better guide and advise students through their job search,” said Bello.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-computer-science-professor-bing-lius-work-on-fake-online-reviews-wins-test-of-time-award/
In total, their research in 2008 revealed that 60 percent of the product reviews they found on Amazon were five stars, and an additional 20 percent were four stars. Liu estimated that in those early years, one-third of all consumer reviews were probably fake, though discerning whether the fake reviews were written by marketers, customers who may have received a discount for posting the review, or were third-party created content was almost impossible.Liu said that while companies are self-policing in an effort to keep online reviews legitimate, fake reviews are still commonplace, and some companies still blatantly solicit positive reviews on social media.The paper, “Opinion Spam and Analysis,” was co-authored with Liu’s former PhD student, Nitin Jindal, and was first presented at the First ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) in 2008.“I asked an MS student to look around and see if something was fishy. He went to Amazon and on the second day said yes, he had already found some stuff,” Liu said.Liu and Jindal set out to answer the question: are opinions on the web trustworthy? They wanted to detect deceptive or fake information, especially website reviews.Bing Liu, distinguished professor in the Department of Computer Science at UIC, was recognized with a Test of Time award for a seminal paper about detecting fake online reviews. The Test of Time award recognizes an outstanding paper published more than 10 years ago that is still relevant today, even in the rapidly changing world of web search and data mining.The Test of Time award was presented in February at the 12th ACM International WSDM Conference in Melbourne, Australia.While today online reviews are usually viewed with a jaundiced eye, this paper was the first-ever about this topic, and garnered Liu and Jindal a lot of press attention starting in 2011, when the general public started to be concerned about fake reviews.By using data mining and machine learning algorithms, they began to detect clues: reviews laden with praise, reviews copied or borrowing heavily from another review, or a prolific reviewer praising multiple, and often disparate items.“It’s still going on, and it’s surprising that companies are openly doing that,” Liu said.Liu has moved on from the research program of fake reviews and opinions, and is now focused on natural language processing, and lifelong machine learning.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-cs-students-help-chicago-public-school-students-explore-computer-science/
“You can teach hard material in an easier and more understandable way. Even the most difficult material can be taught more simply,” Chen said.“Miss Lilagan said it’s possible to host a Google meetup or hangout, but some of CPS online learning is up in the air. Some students do not have access,” Tse said.UIC Computer Science students Lydia Tse and Clark Chen spent part of their spring semester at Jones College Prep, mentoring students in the school’s Exploring Computer Science classes, as part of their CS 398 undergraduate research project. The high school computer science class is a recent graduation requirement for Chicago Public School (CPS) high school students, and Tse and Chen taught cybersecurity and robotics in three sections of teacher Cindy Lilagan’s honors classes.Learn more about CPS’ Explore Computer Science program.“The students knew some of this already, but we also went over how things are hacked in their social life—how advertising companies get their information online, for example,” Chen said.With CPS classes moved online due to Covid19, the future of Tse and Chen’s involvement in the program for this semester is uncertain. They finished designing the entire curriculum, but some of the material—including the robot battles—cannot easily translate online.“I’m at a crossroads right now. I’m very interested in a PhD in learning sciences intermixed with CS,” Tse said. “I’m also interning as a data engineer, which is very interesting as well.”Tse heard about the program after reading about Dale Reed’s involvement in bringing computer science instruction to CPS schools. Reed, a clinical professor and director of undergraduate recruitment at UIC, was interested in seeing how high school students would relate to and understand more advanced computer science curriculum. Chen has served as a teaching assistant (TA) for Reed for four semesters. Tse and Chen were accepted by Lilagan and Jones Prep to teach the course.“It is so important that students, especially high schoolers, get exposed to computer science,” Tse said.Chen said the use of robotics could teach the students cybersecurity concepts: when a student writes code, they can spoof each other’s robots, intercept and break one another’s encryption signals, and use Caesar’s cipher, one of the simplest and most widely known encryption methods, where each plain text letter is replaced by another set number or position down the alphabet.Tse is working with Reed and PhD candidates at UIC, getting a sense for what life as a PhD student would be like. Her internship is with Synchrony Financial, where she is developing a tool for their enterprise data lake. (Both data lakes and data warehouses are widely used for storing big data, but a data lake is a large pool of raw data, whereas information held in a data warehouse is structured, and has already been processed for a specific purpose.) Tse is helping the transition to data lakes for the company. She worked previously as a summer immersion program instructor with Girls Who Code.Chen is looking forward to his senior year at UIC, and hopes to work as a software engineer after graduation.Tse discovered computer science through her younger sister, and decided to return to school for a second bachelor’s degree, after working with Girls Who Code, a nonprofit that teaches women coding and computer skills (UIC also offers a Girls Who Code at UIC Club). Now, Tse is working on a dual bachelor’s/master’s degree in computer science at UIC.Although he’s been a TA for two years at UIC, Chen has found the experience at Jones to be enlightening.Upcoming lessons would involve battles between the student’s robots.Chen, a junior, is hoping to work with the Jones students, even in a volunteer capacity, perhaps in the fall. He returned over UIC’s spring break to his family’s home in Taiwan, and will complete the school year from overseas.For Tse, helping expose high schoolers to computer science is a passion. Tse was on the path to becoming a doctor, and holds a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Case Western University. After shadowing a few doctors, she had a change of heart, just before graduation.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-engineering-team-wins-builtworlds-hackathon/
“We designed a software algorithm that would map images and stitch them together, so we can reconstruct the room. The algorithm will eliminate duplicates and categorize each room,” Pressiani said. “We came up with a solution for a legacy problem and made improvements.”Foglio, Muscioni, and Pressiani were part of last year’s winning team at the Chicago Mobility Hackathon, and Foglio and Pressiani have since formed a startup, Wepo.io.“We thought for sure that one of the teams that won a single task won, and then they announced a fourth winner, the winner of the grand prize—us!” said Soresini.Key to the team’s success was Gambacorta’s and Soresini’s focus on making the business model work.“We looked at components. The companies don’t want to spend so much money on the solutions. We changed our ideas many times,” said Gambacorta.While the Italy Program only requires one semester in the United States, all of the students remain in the Chicago area, and most have extended their study a second semester.The group is looking forward to competing in more hackathons during their time at UIC, after a brief visit home to Milan for the holidays.The team chose the challenge presented by Clayco, which was focused on reducing the size of image libraries, and localizing pictures collected at construction sites. They proposed “Oculus,” a process to improve and streamline the process using Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.Sgherzi’s research focus is on graph algorithms and approximation algorithms applied to graphs, mostly on hardware such as GPUs and FPGAs. Gambacorta is working with her bioengineering advisor, Thomas Royston, on acoustics and vibrations in MRI images for MR elastography. And Sorensini is focused on wearable technology and device prototyping, and software and hardware development, with her bioengineering advisor James Patton, and Clinical Associate Professor Hananeh Esmailbeigi.Hackathon participants worked for 36 hours over a weekend. They were tasked with choosing one of three projects to work on, including prototyping and developing new business ideas about cities, buildings, and infrastructure. The final projects were pitched to a panel of judges, including representatives from Clayco, Pepper Constructions, LitCon Group, Mechanical Inc., Autodesk, Caterpillar, and EllisDon Corporation.The team members believe their previous experiences at similar hackathons and the skills they acquired while doing research at UIC and Politecnico di Milano played a key role in the development of their idea. In particular, they used their engineering experience to tackle a problem far from their comfort zone.A team of graduate students and alumni from the University of Illinois Chicago’s College of Engineering won the 2019 BuildWorlds Hackathon, taking home a $7,500 grand prize. Four computer science students: Matteo Foglio, Guido Muscioni, Riccardo Pressiani (MS ‘19), and Francesco Sgherzi (MS ‘20) joined forces with two bioengineering students: Chiara Gambacorta, and Giulia Soresini (MS ‘20) for the competition. All are part of UIC’s Italy Program, which allows students from two top technical universities—Politecnico di Torino and Politecnico di Milano—to earn a master of science degree from UIC.At the competition, the team was thrilled to learn of their win: three single task winners were announced before the grand prize winners.“We never had the opportunity to participate in a hackathon focusing on this broad of a topic. It wasn’t a typical computer science hackathon, it was focused on construction, something we didn’t know anything about,” Sgherzi said. “You may have a similar type of hackathon in Italy, but it was the first time I saw a non-computer science problem tackled in a computer science way.”“Wepo is a software consulting company focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Our advisor, Tanya Berger Wolf, encouraged us to give it a shot,” Pressiani said. “We have a couple of clients and are talking with others.”
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-faculty-member-dale-reed-helps-bring-computer-science-to-every-chicago-public-school-student/
The group chose Exploring Computer Science, a year-long, research-based high school introductory computer science curriculum and teacher professional development program. After attending the weeklong professional development in Los Angeles with CPS teachers Jeff Solin and Don Yanek, Reed and the team brought Exploring Computer Science professional development to Chicago for the first group of CPS teachers. Thanks in part to Reed’s efforts, The National Science Foundation provided a CE21 Taste of Computing grant for the professional development (PD) sessions, and Chicago now hosts three of these PD sessions per year.During his days of presenting to high school students, Reed met a few different high school teachers and began discussing computer science education. Many schools didn’t have dedicated computer science teachers; oftentimes a math teacher would provide instruction in the subject, if it was taught at all. Some schools—and parents—mistakenly defined computer science as keyboarding, browsing the internet and video games. Eventually a few like-minded professors joined the group—Lucia Dettori from DePaul University, Ron Greenberg from Loyola University, and initially, Matt Bauer from Illinois Institute of Technology. They began meeting with Brenda Wilkerson, who was then the director of computer science education for CPS. The group quickly realized that they needed a course to offer to high school principals who were interested in a computer science curriculum.Initially, Reed started visiting area high schools, and over the course of six years gave hundreds of presentations to more than 10,000 students, in groups of 30. The goal was to acquaint CPS students with CS and with UIC. The thought was people were unfamiliar with the school, with what engineering is, and what resources were available to prospective students. While it’s hard to imagine now, with computer science undergraduate enrollment projected to surpass 1,400 students for the fall of 2019, in 2005 the department had just 185 undergraduate students.Reed credits UIC with supporting his efforts with CPS, as well as the national teacher mentoring. UIC hosted the first professional development workshop in 2010, and has hosted six Chicago Computer Science Teachers Association events, including Chicago’s Inaugural CS Education Unconference in 2018.Each member of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) high school class of 2020 will have successfully completed a computer science course before graduation next spring, making Chicago the first large school district in the nation to require computer science education.This semester, you can find Reed teaching CS 141 here at UIC.“Working with the high school teachers has had a profound impact on me personally, and here at UIC,” Reed said. “For most students our traditional classroom format of one voice at a time talking for mostly the whole time is not the most effective way to teach, and I’ve learned about that from the high school teachers.”“It’s not just for the computer science majors. Technology is now a tool that is present in everything; it’s ubiquitous in entertainment, scientific research, data analysis, and politics,” Reed said. “It is part of being educationally literate in today’s modern world.”“It’s been our mission for a long time to provide a compelling and relevant computer science experience to every student in Chicago,” Reed said. “We think it’s the right thing for our kids, and by our kids I mean all the kids in Chicago. We also think it’s the right thing for our country in terms of providing a competitive advantage, and we think it’s the right thing for our students because they can use technology in lots of different careers.”Reed is passionate that computer science education in the schools is beneficial for all students. He’s not alone in this belief; a few years ago, the leaders of the College Board, the group that administers the SAT college entrance exam, said that of all the skills and knowledge they test students for that correlate with success in college and beyond, a mastery of computer science and the U.S. Constitution were key. They have since adapted the SATs and AP program to measure knowledge of both.In addition to serving as an Exploring Computer Science facilitator for CPS, Reed is a national professional development mentor facilitator. This summer Reed worked with groups at Tuskegee and Clemson, and at the national meeting in Golden, Colorado.Dale Reed, clinical professor in the computer science (CS) department and director of computer science recruitment at UIC, was a part of a team that championed this change. He has worked to bring computer science to area schools for more than 12 years.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-partners-with-northrop-grumman-on-machine-learning-and-ai/
“In today’s environment, machine learning, cognition and artificial intelligence are dramatically reshaping the way machines support customers in their mission,” said Eric Reinke, vice president and chief scientist, mission systems, Northrop Grumman. “The highly complex and dynamic nature of the mission demands an integrated set of technologies and we are excited to partner with academia to enhance our customers mission.”“Our first goal is to design algorithms to enable a robot to learn to perform a task more efficiently, without too many trials and errors,” Liu said.“At UIC we are working on two projects, natural language interface for robots, and lifelong learning robots,” Liu said.The natural language interface, once built, will allow humans to give instructions to robots in plain language, by asking the robots to perform specific tasks. It will allow for simple dialogue between the robots and humans and in the process the robots will continuously learn from humans to improve performance.Northrop Grumman is a leading global security company providing innovative systems, products and solutions in autonomous systems, cyber, C4ISR, space, strike, and logistics and modernization to customers worldwide.In addition to UIC, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, Purdue University, Stanford University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of Maryland, College Park are participating, sharing in $1.2 million in research funding.“With the lifelong learning robots our ultimate goal is to enable robots to learn to perform more and more tasks continually,” Liu said.As with the natural language interface, the lifelong learning robots will learn from each interaction. A robot will learn something with each task performed, and leverage the knowledge gained from previous tasks so that robots can work more quickly and accurately.UIC is part of a new industry-academia partnership to advance machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) programs. On April 30, Northrop Grumman Corporation launched the new initiative, Research in Applications for Learning Machines (REALM), bringing together leading universities with strong programs in these areas.Bing Liu, distinguished professor in the department of computer science, is the principal investigator for UIC on the project.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-receives-explorecsr-grant-from-google/
UIC is one of 24 institutions to receive an exploreCSR grant from Google. The grants were introduced in 2018 and are designed to help more undergraduate women get involved in research in computing.“Making computer science (CS) education accessible and available to everyone is an important initiative, and we’re excited to provide this grant to University of Illinois Chicago to help encourage more women to pursue careers in computer science research,” said Sepi Hejazi Moghadam, a senior program manager at Google.The exploreCSR grant from Google will fund fall and spring two-day workshops for female undergraduates who are studying or interested in computer science.Clinical Assistant Professor Shanon Reckinger developed the idea for the workshop and applied for the exploreCSR grant.“We want to expose students to what a career as a CS researcher looks like. A lot of undergraduates don’t really see that side of the discipline,” said Reckinger. “Most plan to go directly to work for industry after earning their bachelor degree. We want to show what careers are available with a master’s or PhD, how graduate school works, and that many students in a STEM discipline receive funding to pursue a graduate degree.”The first set of workshops will take place on October 22 and November 5. They will include research faculty, alumni, graduate students, and members of Women in Computer Science (WiCS) from UIC. The second set is scheduled for this spring. For more information, visit Reckinger’s workshop information page.In addition to working as a researcher at a university, many companies have a research and development team, which is primarily filled with advanced-degree holders. Positions that require expertise in some fields, like AI and machine learning, also typically require more than a bachelor’s degree. And there are many job opportunities at national laboratories, which are often interdisciplinary and require research skills. The Midwest boasts three labs: Argonne National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Lab, and Aimes Laboratory in Iowa. All three were present to recruit at the 2019 Grace Hopper Celebration in October.“It’s different than a normal hackathon, where the goal is just to get a problem solved,” Reckinger said. “Both groups will get the time and space to unwrap the problem-solving process and unravel any part of it that needs work.”“I really want undergraduate students to have confidence in their problem-solving skills. I sometimes see students who are struggling to solve problems and apply their knowledge,” Reckinger said.One of the exercises will be “problem-solving speed dating,” which Reckinger said will pair students who have taken a data structures course with other students who have not. The more experienced students will receive a problem and know how to solve it, having worked it out on their own before the group exercise. They will then “speed-date” inexperienced students, coaching them and providing support, rotating through different partners. The inexperienced students will then vote on who provided them with the best coaching.The CS department will also hold a machine learning workshop in the spring. Details will be forthcoming.The workshops hosted by Reckinger will include a collaborative problem-solving component and an introduction to research careers. To help build confidence among students, Reckinger plans to incorporate collaborative activities focused on the problem-solving process.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-receives-ongoing-funding-to-improve-diversity-in-computer-science/
Lathos said in addition to the bond the students form who attend Grace Hopper Celebration together, before they depart, professors and previous attendees meet with them to offer advice on what to pack and how to prepare for the interviews and events of the trip. A reunion of all current and former students and faculty who have attended Grace Hopper is in the planning stages.The UIC Department of Computer Science will be receiving a fifth year of funding as part of an initiative to improve the diversity of talent in undergraduate computer science programs.UIC’s computer science department has increased the number of women and underrepresented minority students enrolled in its undergraduate computing courses, and BRAID funding augments these efforts. In the past five years, the percentage of females enrolled in UIC’s Computer Science program has increased from just over 12 percent to almost 18 percent, with 217 women enrolled as of the fall 2018 semester. During the same time period, underrepresented minority enrollment increased from 117 students to 246 students, remaining at just under 20 percent of enrollment.BRAID funding will also support sending several UIC students to the Tapia Conference this fall, a conference that celebrates the diversity in computing. Last year 1,400 attendees from more than 250 schools participated in Tapia, which connects students with others with common backgrounds, including ethnicities, disabilities, and gender to create communities that extend beyond the conference.“It was obvious to me the minute that Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College—who is also a computer scientist—announced her idea for this program that I knew UIC was a good fit,” said Sloan. “The institutions whose department heads or chairs responded the fastest when this was announced were the ones chosen.”The Grace Hopper Celebration is the world’s largest gathering of women technologists, with more than20,000 women from 78 countries attending in 2018. About one-quarter of the participants are students; professionals at all levels and recruiters make up the majority of the attendees. The three-day event features professional development workshops, technical tracks, and an opportunity to network.UIC’s Computer Science Department expects to receive the $30,000 of BRAID funding later this spring. Intel, Qualcomm, and Microsoft are among the current and anticipated funders this year.“Female students can walk into a room with thousands of other women, just like them. They will never walk into a computer science class and see this,” said Lathos. “That eases the stress of being here at UIC, having this community and this experience to rely on.”Elena Lathos, a program coordinator with the UIC Department of Computer Science, said the BRAID funding will assist student organizations and send approximately 40 undergraduate students to the Grace Hopper Celebration in the fall.The BRAID program, which stands for Building, Recruiting, And Inclusion for Diversity, involves 15 universities working to address specific issues. These include modifying computer science courses to make them less intimidating and more appealing to underrepresented students, leading outreach efforts for high school students and teachers to build a diverse pipeline of students, build confidence and community among underrepresented students, and promoting joint majors in areas like computer science and biology.“Almost all of the students come back with an internship, or offer of employment. There is an overwhelming amount of companies at Grace Hopper that our students wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to connect with,” said Lathos.Robert H. Sloan, professor and head of the UIC Department of Computer Science, secured BRAID funding for the university when the program was first announced in 2014.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uic-researchers-zero-in-on-critical-information-to-combat-cyberattacks/
“An intrusion detection system may tell you, all right, they read our emails. It will not tell you they also changed the database passwords, or the salaries in the database, or that they read all the social security numbers,” Gjomemo said. “For that you need to be able to connect these dots, sound different alarms. You have to be able to detect the cause and effect.”In recent years, targeted cyberattacks have increased dramatically, wreaking havoc on all manner of large enterprises including businesses, governments, and educational institutions. The explosion of these attacks, also called advanced persistent threats, undermine public trust in cyber technologies, and cost enormous sums. Worldwide cybercrime loss was estimated at over one trillion dollars in 2018, almost double the assumed losses in 2017.Existing cyber defense tools, such as intrusion detection systems, are helpful but generate a torrent of information. Not only does a cyber analyst have to sift through mountains of data to find the intrusion, they often lack tools to piece together the fragments of an attack that spans multiple hosts or applications. And cyberattackers have gotten more sophisticated and are able to bypass these protective systems altogether in many cases.“This is the sort of novelty other tools haven’t done before,” Venkatakrishnan said. “We’re organizing this information in the form of a provenance graph, then building algorithms that do root cause analysis, how did the attacker get in; or impact analysis, what activities did the attacker perform once he got in. We are building the organization of this data because we are talking about millions or billions of records in an enterprise system.”The project is a joint collaboration, part of a larger overall project with the State University of New York at Stony Brook with R. Sekar, with overall funding of $1.2 million. Microsoft Research is also collaborating. The project also has a significant participation component, providing education for graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 through cybersecurity coursework, research, and outreach activities. Governor’s State University and Chicago Public Schools are partnering, as well as the National Center for Women & Information Technology. The grant period runs through October 2023.Additionally, the team is using the provenance graphs to learn what is normal behavior in the system, and what is out of the ordinary. This can be complicated by the fact that data in a given system may be corrupt from past attacks.What’s needed is a way to learn more than just an attack has occurred, to obtain a snapshot of the intrusion: what are the criminals are after, what do they want to achieve, and how did they get in. Determining how these things are connected, what, if any response action to take, and the overall impact of the attack on the system are all important to responding well to a cyberattack.Venkatakrishnan said the approach they’ve developed is applicable to enterprise networks that exist today, and they’ve already built tools for enterprise systems that run Windows, Linux, or Mac, and to some extent Android operating systems.This grant is building on four years of research conducted by Venkatakrishnan and his team, work that is part of the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency on the Transparent Computing program. In the program, a series of red team – blue team engagements took place where the red team simulated attackers and the blue team had to defend an enterprise network in real time. A third team monitored each exercise to see how well the blue team did in rooting out the attacks.“How do we take these billions of records and bring it down to a few thousand, or a few hundred that represent threat activity? That is the big challenge we are addressing,” Venkatakrishnan said.“The system we are building will have very few false positives. It will really improve accuracy and cut down on the number of false alarms,” Gjomemo said. “We will be able to provide a whole picture so they don’t have to go back and look at one million or 10 million records, to find those four or five produced by the attacker.”Sadhegh Momemi, a former PhD student of Venkatakrishnan, was recently hired by Google after completing his degree to work on their enterprise team as a result of his contributions to this research.The UIC team’s approach utilized a provenance graph, which records and preserves all of the components and processes in an enterprise system, tracking the interactions and creating a roadmap to trace all activities in a high level of detail. This creates windows into a normally opaque process.Venkat Venkatakrishnan, associate dean for Research and Graduate Studies and professor of computer science, and Rigel Gjomemo, a research associate professor at UIC, received a four-year, $612,000 National Science Foundation Grant titled “SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: RADAR: Real-time Advanced Detection and Attack Reconstruction.” The aim of the grant is to allow cyber analysts to detect and respond to these threats in real time.
https://cs.uic.edu/news-stories/uics-electronic-visiualization-lab-is-helping-reimagine-live-stage-performance/
The performances are scheduled to run at the Goodman Theatre in the fall of 2020, as part of the Goodman’s New Stages Festival. New Stages is a free public outreach program providing public access to new plays and the theater development process, which takes place annually over a three-week period. Approximately 50 students will be able to attend each of the eight planned performances. After the end of the show’s run the play will live on, and people can visit a persistent virtual space. Steppenwolf and Chicago Children’s Theatre are also interested in future collaborations.This collaboration is enabled by a $150,000 University of Illinois Presidential Initiative to Celebrate the Impact of the Arts and the Humanities, and was one of 14 projects selected earlier this year to share in nearly $2 million in funding. The project, “Transforming Storytelling: Multi-User Virtual Reality Theater for Collaborative Tele-Immersive Exploration” includes Tsoupikova, Cattell, Andrew Johnson, EVL’s director of research and a professor in the computer science department; Lance Long, EVL’s senior research programmer; and Arthur Nishimoto, a PhD student in computer science at UIC. Both Design and Computer Science students will help with the grant.“This is the way to go. It by no means will replace live theater, but it is a way to reengage with the theater, by delegating part of the story, by giving the audience the opportunity to control the story, to be in the story themselves. In real time. That’s what they want, that’s why they play all these games,” Johnson said.While UIC is wired and ready to go, the Goodman Theatre may not have the technology in place to support the play just yet—fast, reliable networking is a necessity. Tsoupikova and Johnson are meeting with the technical director of the Goodman in April to assess how much technology needs to be installed for their virtual environment, and are hoping for corporate support to help with the expense.“Kids may not have a lot of experience with theater, but most have a lot of experience with gaming, especially on their mobile devices. We want to instill an appreciation for live performance and engage them in the theater,” said Tsoupikova.Daria Tsoupikova, associate professor of new media design at UIC, is working with her colleagues in UIC Computer Science’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), the Goodman Theatre, and Jo Cattell, a Chicago-based theater producer, to create and stage this innovative, interactive experience for Chicago youth from underserved west- and south-side communities.Either virtual reality headsets or head-mounted displays, along with other augmented and mixed-reality devices, will connect audience members and ac