The Department of Computer Science offers degrees at the Bachelors, Masters, and Doctoral levels. Our faculty believe in a strong advising approach and, as advisors, help students choose the appropriate program according to their goals, needs and interests. Students who are interested in a Computer Science degree with a rich set of options and electives should consider Kent State University.

Attention Computer Science students:  scholarship applications are open through May 31 for Fall 2021 disbursement!  Please follow this link! 

Faculty Office Hours Undergraduate CS Tutoring

Dr. Gokarna Sharma is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award.  The project is CAREER:  Transactional Memory for Distributed Systems.  This project aims to make programming easier in large-scale, possibly geo-distributed, multiprocessor systems.  Due to recent architectural and computational trends, new generations of multiprocessor systems are having an increasing number of cores and being able to program these systems is a necessary skill.  A recently emerged paradigm of transactional memory will be studied which has the potential to make this programmnig easier in these systems.  Dr. Sharma hopes that the outcomes of this project will attract and encourage non-expert users in multiprocessor programming.

**UPDATE:  Congratulations to the Opendive Team, Irvin, Xiangxu, Caitlynn and Tina, finished in the top ten and received the Binance Smart Chain Award of 1,200 Euros in BNB!

Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim's ATR Lab is becoming known for its passion for competition and its latest team, Opendive, made the finals of a university hackathon hosted by the Encode Hack Club.  PhD students Irvin Cardenas and Xiangxu Lin, M.S. student Caitlynn Lenhoff, and Tina Xu make up the team and have  advanced to the finals with 9 other teams.  Over 1200 students, researchers and hackers from over 50 countries and 75 universities have been in competition for 10 weeks.  Congratulations Opendive!  Find more information here: https://medium.com/encode-club/encode-hack-club-announcing-the-finalists-61c5f0eed554. **

Congratulations go out to the ATR (Advanced Telerobotic Research) Lab under the direction of  computer science professor Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim, with Dr. Gokarna Sharma.  The team of students, Irvin Cardenas, Xiangxu Lin, Alfred Shaker, Zachary Law, Saifuddin Mahmud, Redwanul Hague Sourave, Sara Roman, Michaeil Nelson, and Marcus Arnett  have worked tirelessly through weekends and holidays to prepare for the World Robot Summit (WRS) 2021 in Japan.  They have been notified that they have passed the final qualification exam and are in the top 10 of invited teams to compete in the disaster category.  The team has developed their robot, Telebot-3R, in a doglike form to traverse various terrains and to operate with human-computer interaction in search and rescue tasks.  Meet Telebot-3R on YouTube!  Find out more!

Best Paper Award   We congratulate Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim and his students, Irvin Steve Cardenas, Caitlyn Lenhoff, Michelle Park, Tina Yuqiao Xu, Xiangxu Lin, and Pradeep Kumar Paladugul, who received a Best Paper Award at the 12th International Conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction 2020 for their paper, AARON:  Assistive Augmented Reality Operations and Navigation System for NASA's Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unity (xEMU) November 26, 2020.

Foundational Contribution Award

Prof. Jonathan I. Maletic and Dr. Michael L. Collard (U of Akron) received the 2020 Mining Software Repositories Foundational Contribution Award for their work developing the srcML Infrastructure at the 20th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR).

“srcML addresses many hard problems in source code parsing and has fostered a wide range of research innovations throughout software engineering”

srcML, an open source system, has been under development at KSU for a number of years.  It is a widely used representation and tool set that supports exploration, analysis, and manipulation of large software systems.  The project has received over $1.5M in external funding over the past 12 years.

Distinguished Paper Award  Vlas Zyrianov, Drew Guarnera, Cole Peterson, Dr. Bonita Sharif, and Dr. Jonathan Maletic received an IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award at The IEEE 36th International Conference on Software Maintenance & Evolution (ICSME) 2020.  

The paper "Automated Recording and Semantics-Aware Replaying of High-Speed Eye Tracking and Interaction Data to Support Cognitive Studies of Software Engineering Tasks" is part of the NSF funded iTrace project.

The tool, Déjà Vu, is work Mr. Zyrianov did as an undergraduate at KSU, he is now a graduate student at U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Mr. Guarnera is a doctoral student at KSU.  The paper is a collaborative effort with Dr. Sharif and her graduate student, Mr. Peterson, at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

NSF Awards $652K for Software Engineering Research Infrastructure  srcML.org   Prof. Jonathan I. Maletic and Dr. Michael L. Collard (Univ. of Akron) were awarded a $652,485 grant ($397,848 to KSU and $254,636 to Akron) from the National Science Foundation (CNS 20-16465/16452) starting in July 2020.

The project involves enhancing the srcML infrastructure by adding a parser generator to support new programming languages.  srcML, developed at KSU, is a widely used XML representation and tool set that supports mixed language exploration, analysis, and manipulation of large software systems. 

Kent Hack Enough is October 24th - 25th and is virtual this year! Get ready to blast to the past as hackers compete for amazing prizes and learn new skills. New this year, KHE is international  and you can make some outstanding connections with students from across the world! 

If you have never heard of a hackathon, it is a 24-hour event for students to form groups and make a tech project through collaboration and learning new skills. Any tech-skill level and any major is accepted. You can come with an idea and group OR come with neither and meet your team there! Students can network with companies, receive mentorship on their hacks and win cool prizes!

Register for the event at https://khe.io and we look forward to seeing you there!

Hacksu, the on-campus coding club!       Check us out on Discord(https://discord.gg/rJDdvnt). Every Tuesday at 7PM.  

• CS Faculty member Ruoming Jin and collaborator Deric R. Kenne of the College of Public Health have been awarded a pilot study by the National Science Foundation.  Read more on the project, which collects data via cell phone use from students during the pandemic. 
• CS Faculty member Jong-Hoon Kim and students Irvin Steve Cardenas and Pradeep Kumar Paladugula, were awarded "Best Paper"  for their co-authored paper "Large Scale Distributed Data Processing for a Network of Humanoid Telepresence Robots" by the IEEE International Conference on IoT, Electronics, and Mechanics (IEMTRONICS) 2020, held September 9-12. 
• You can make a difference in the battle against COVID-19!  Ph.D. Student Irvin Cardenas has organized a fundraising effort to collect urgently needed masks for medical personnel in Northeast Ohio.   If you would like to contribute please go to here.  Answers to questions you should ask before you donate can be found on the link. Read the story here.
• Need Undergraduate Advising?  The CS Faculty Advisors would be happy to arrange an online advising appointment - see Undergraduate Faculty Advising for details.

• CS TUTORING: During the pause in on-campus, face-to-face classes, we want to try to continue tutoring via computer. Most of the tutors have decided to hold virtual question times through direct messages during their regularly posted tutoring times and any updates will be posted in the tutoring channel of the discord.  Here is the link:  https://discord.gg/JNeBC2Y.

• NEED HELP FROM CS OFFICE? Due to the preventative measures KSU is taking, we want you to know that we will continue to conduct business, just not "as usual." Our office staff will be reduced in number and will be either in the office or at home monitoring email and performing work we will facilitate via emails and Zoom chats, etc. Please email us because we will answer! depsec@cs.kent.edu is an email which all of the main office staff receive in their mailbox so you have the best chance of the swiftest answer using that email

• KSU Computer Science majors should consider applying for 2020-2021 scholarships.  https://www.kent.edu/cs/scholarships-computer-science-majors.  The deadline is March 31, 2020.

• Undergraduate Computer Science students Marcus Arnett, Brandon Price, Josh Behler, Adam Petrich and James Gingerich won "Most Market/Venture Potential" for their hack in the Fashion/Tech Hackathon 2020!  Learn about the backpack, BackTrac, project here! Congratulations, ATR Team!
• Professor Jonathan Maletic is addressing the 27th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering in London, Ontario, Canada, as KEYNOTE SPEAKER on Feb. 20. Read more about his talk here.
• On Jan. 21, 2020, Kent State University entered into the Era of Big Data Science through an NSF grant! Read more here.
• Congratulations to Professor Arvind Bansal as his newest textbook Introduction to Computational Health Informatics, has just been published by Chapman & Hall/CRC Press under its "data mining and knowledge discovery series." Read more. Press release here.
• Javed I. Khan, professor and chair of the Computer Science Department, has secured a $2 million grant to support the higher education of Ohio students starting with newly admitted students for the Fall 2020 semester.  Find out more about the Choose Ohio First Program!
• The ATR Lab, under the direction of Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim, has secured one of only 10 spots on the NASA Suits 2020 Challenge! Ph.D. student Irvin Cardenas will lead the team in April when they travel to the Johnson Space Center for the competition. The Suit Challenge is part of NASA's Artemis project, a landing on the moon to prepare for the Mars expedition.
• The Office of Global Education has spotlighted one of Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim's ATR Lab students, Amrth Ashok Shenava, a sophomore computer science major. He is a special person and student and we are so glad to have him here at KSU! 
• Exciting news for KSU from Dr. Javed I. Khan, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Khan is the principal investigator of a new NSF grant, *Networking Infrastructure: Network for Data Driven Science in Allied 21st Century Smart Multi-Campus System: A Use Case Design Through Kent State's Sharable Science DMZ. 
• Congratulations to Dr. Gokarna Sharma who has been awarded a two-year National Science Foundation grant, EAGER: Transactional Memory Foundation for Distributed Multiprocessor Systems.
• Congratulations to Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim's ATR Lab teams for bringing home cash prizes at the ETHBoston Hackathon held at Harvard Sept. 6 - 8.  Irvin Cardenas and Xiangxu Lin won a prize for their game app, MinerAdventure.  Amrth Ashok Shenava and Pradeep Kumar Paladugula won a prize for their app, Able Coins!
• Congratulations to Dr. Ruoming Jin who is co-PI with Dr. Deric Kenne of the College of Public Health on their 5-year grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to "develop and implement a real-time drug use detection system to inform drug prevention efforts in Portage, Geauga and Lake counties." The project title is Northeast Ohio Tri-County Prevention Infrastructure.
• Congratulations to Dr. Xiang Lian who was awarded a 2019 Summer Research and Creative Activity appointment from the University Research Council this past summer.
• Congratulations to Dr. Qiang Guan whose grant from Los Alamos National Laboratory has been expanded for another year. This grant is to Develop, Improve and Perform Research with the Open Sourced Tool PFSEFI Related to Error Propagation.
• Welcome to Dr. Kwangtaek Kim and his family! Dr. Kim has just begun his tenure track as full-time faculty in the Computer Science Department. His specialty area is haptics - watch as his lab develops on the third floor of MSB.