CS Department News
Congratulations to Computer Science faculty member Dr. Lei Xu who is the recipient of the 2023 Summer Research and Creative Activity Appointment from the Univeresity Research Council!
Congratulations to Computer Science faculty member Dr. Qiang Guan who has been awarded the 2023 New Faculty Outstanding Research and Scholarship Award (ORSA)!
OHIO CELEBRATES WOMEN IN COMPUTING, 2023
On February 24 and 25, women from across the state of Ohio gathered together for the Ohio Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (OCWIC), held at Sawmill Creek Resort in Huron, Ohio. Conference attendees included students in computing-related majors from a variety of different universities from across Ohio, faculty members, and industry professionals. Kent State was represented by a group of undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence, and UX/UI design as well as they organize first time the Leader summit workshop for ACM-W Chapters which provides a connection between local chapters and the ACM-W international organization. Ohio is the home of the first ACM-W Professional Chapter in the US joining the list of professional chapters worldwide.
NSF Grant to Benefit Researchers Needing Massive Data! Congratulations to the PI, Department Chair , Javed I. Khan.
Congratulations to Professor Qiang Guan who received multiple NSF (National Science Foundation) grants over the summer! Titles of the four grants are: 1.) OAC Core: Interpretable Resilience Analysis Platform for Scientific Workflow Applications; 2.) Cyber Training: Implementation: Small: Interactive and Integrated Training for Quantum Application Developers Across Platforms; 3.) Collaborative Research: PPoSS: Planning: Software Stack for Scalable Heterogeneous NISQ Cluster; and 4.) Collaborative Research: PPoSS: Planning: Software Stack for Scalable Heterogeneous NISQ Cluster.
In December, 2021, Computer Science Professor Feodor Dragan gave an opening plenary talk at the conference MGT 2021 on Metric Graph Theory in Marseille, France. The objective of the MGT 2021 Conference was to bring together researchers interested in the study of combinatorial, algorithmic, geometric, and topological structure of graphs occurring in metric graph theory and related fields such as geometric group theory, concurrency theory, or combinatorial optimization.
Congratulations to CS Professor Dr. Jonathan I. Maletic, Bowling Green State University faculty Dr. Michael J. Decker (KSU PhD 2017), and University of Akron faculty Dr. Michael L. Collard (KSU PhD 2004) for their paper Lightweight Transformation and Fact Extraction with the srcML Toolkit (published 2011), which has been awarded the MOST INFLUENTIAL PAPER at the International Work Conference on Source Code Analysis & Manipulation 2021!
CONGRATULATIONS to Dr. Kwangtaek Kim on his National Science Foundation Award in support of his research project Bimodal Haptic-Mixed Reality (HMR) Needle Insertion Simulation for Hand-Eye Skills. The $850,000 award includes Co-Principals Dr. Robert Clements and Dr. Jeremy M. Jarzembak. "This is an interdisciplinary research project funded from the NSF to develop an immersive tactile IV needle insertion training system needed for training nursing professionals and students. Faculty members from four departments including computer science, college of nursing, biological sciences, and psychology are teamed up to create a novel and innovative learning environment using haptic and mixed reality."
Professor Arvind Bansal delivered a keynote speech in the Tenth International Conference in Intelligent Systems and Applications (Intelli 21) held in Nice, France and Virtually in July 2021 (website: https://www.iaria.org/conferences2021/ProgramINTELLI21.html).
Read all about Computer Science Doctoral student Racheal Mukisa who has been awarded The American Association of University Women 2021-2022 International Fellowship! Congratulations, Rachael!
Congratulations to student Jin Woo Kim. His paper, "Immersive Haptic Interface Simulating Skin Biopsy for Dermatological Skill Training," has been awarded the BEST STUDENT FULL ACADEMIC PAPER at the International Conference of iLRN2022! Jin Woo is a student studying with Computer Science faculty Dr. Kwangtaek Kim.
Dr. Javed Khan, a researcher in intelligent cyberinfrastructure in the Department of Computer Science and a team of proficient collaborators including Phil Thomas of the Enterprise, Research, Technology and Support group at KSU, have secured a grant "to develop sharable high-performance cybercluster designed to drive data and computing intensive collaborative innovation." “It is great to work with advanced networking researchers and partner for new cyberinfrastructure opportunities like this one,” said John Rathje, VP of Kent State Information Technology and CIO. Dr. Khan is also serving as Chair of the Department of Computer Science.
Congratulations to KSU Computer Science student Justin Dannemiller who is the recipient of a NASA Ohio Space Grant Consortium scholarship! Justin is an undergraduate research working in Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim's ATR lab. He has been working on the robot vision system for the TeleBot-3R project. This scholarship will help him concentrate on his research.
"The Ohio Space Grant Consortium is a statewide network of colleges and universities working to expand opportunities for Ohioans to understand and participate in NASA’s aeronautics and space projects by supporting and enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) through scholarships, fellowships, higher education, research infrastructure, pre-college (K-12), and informal education public outreach efforts" https://osgc.org/
Attention OHIO STUDENTS: Scholarships are available to junior and senior Computer Science majors! The Choose Ohio First-Computer Science Program is a research integrated scholarship program that provides competitive scholarships to cover the cost of education if you are a computer science major. Awards range from $1500 to full tuition. Find out more about our Choose Ohio First-Computer Science Scholarships.
In December, 2021, Computer Science Professor Feodor Dragan gave an opening plenary talk at the conference MGT 2021 on Metric Graph Theory in Marseille, France. The objective of the MGT 2021 Conference was to bring together researchers interested in the study of combinatorial, algorithmic, geometric, and topological structure of graphs occurring in metric graph theory and related fields such as geometric group theory, concurrency theory, or combinatorial optimization.
In December of 2021, the ATR_Kent Team (Advanced Telerobotic Lab) was awarded the Distinguished Paper Award in the Disaster Robotics Category (Remote Participation) in the World Robot Summit (WRS). The cash prize will help them enhance their ongoing project! The team is led by Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim, professor and director of the ATR Lab. Team participants include students Irvin Cardenas, Saifuddin Mahmud, Alfred Shaker, Marcus Arnett, Stefan Hendricks, Naomi Wang, Nate Kanyok, Redwanul Haque Sourave, Sara Roman, Daniel Maher, and Kody Richardson. Congratulations, All!
9/28/2021: Congratulations to CS Professor Dr. Jonathan I. Maletic, Bowling Green State University faculty Dr. Michael J. Decker (KSU PhD 2017), and University of Akron faculty Dr. Michael L. Collard (KSU PhD 2004) for their paper Lightweight Transformation and Fact Extraction with the srcML Toolkit (published 2011), which has been awarded the MOST INFLUENTIAL PAPER at the International Work Conference on Source Code Analysis & Manipulation 2021!
9/22/2021: The Institute for Applied Linguistics has a talk on Friday, October 22, 10:00 to 11:00 AM via Blackboard Collaborative. Gualtiero Piccinini will present his work in "Neural Computation and 4EA Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective Neurocognitive Mechanisms". The link can be found here.
9/7/2021: CONGRATULATIONS to Dr. Kwangtaek Kim on his National Science Foundation Award in support of his research project Bimodal Haptic-Mixed Reality (HMR) Needle Insertion Simulation for Hand-Eye Skills. The $850,000 award includes Co-Principals Dr. Robert Clements and Dr. Jeremy M. Jarzembak. "This is an interdisciplinary research project funded from the NSF to develop an immersive tactile IV needle insertion training system needed for training nursing professionals and students. Faculty members from four departments including computer science, college of nursing, biological sciences, and psychology are teamed up to create a novel and innovative learning environment using haptic and mixed reality."
8/22/2021: Fall 2021 tutoring will be held on Blackboard from 1:00 PM to 12:00 midnight Monday through Friday, and 1:00 PM to 9:00 PM on Saturday and Sunday.
8/2021: THE 13TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION (IHCI 2021) is being hosted this year by Kent State University on December 20-22. Dr. Javed Khan, Chair of Computer Science is a Co-Host of the event and Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim, professor and Director of the Advanced Telerobotics Research Lab (ATR) is Program Chair. Call for Papers is here . More information about the conference is here. Downloadable information is here.
8/2021: Professor Arvind Bansal delivered a keynote speech in the Tenth International Conference in Intelligent Systems and Applications (Intelli 21) held in Nice, France and Virtually in July 2021 (website: https://www.iaria.org/conferences2021/ProgramINTELLI21.html).
8/2021: ATTENTION KSU UNDERGRADUATE COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENTS: If you are an undergraduate pursuing a B.S. in Computer Science, have junior or senior standing and a 3.0 GPA or better, and also have financial need as demonstrated by the FAFSA form, there is a new scholarship available NOW. The scholarship is also directed at students who are active in Kent State ACM-W Chapter, Kent State Scientista Chapter, Kent Women's Center or other organizations. It is the donor's preference that this scholarship will support diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging among the student body in STEM through the support of underrepresented students. The scholarship is the JOHNNIE W. BAKER ENDOWED COMPUTER SCIENCE SCHOLARSHIP. It may be applied to tuition, fees, room and board. If you wish to apply, please send an email to jkotila@kent.edu with Johnnie Baker Scholarship in the subject line and explain how you meet the requirements, be sure to include your name and Banner id number.
8/2021: Dr. Arvind Bansal speaks about the department's new Master's Degree in Artificial Intelligence in an interview with Hansa Srishty Jha in an episode of "Academia Talks" in New Delhi.
8/2021: Congratulations to PhD student Betis Behari on the publication of his paper, QuGan: A Quantum State Fidelity based on Generative Adversarial Network which has been accepted by the IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE) 2021. QCE is the flagship quantum computing conference. Betis studies under Dr. Qiang Guan.
7/2021: Congratulations to Master's student Jacob Tronge on the publication of his paper BeeSwarm: Enabling Parallel Scaling Performance Measurement in Continuous Integration for HPC Applications by the 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), one of the top three software conferences. Jacob studies under Dr. Qiang Guan.
7/2021: to student Joseph Oglio and co-author Kendric Hood whose paper, Byzantine Geoconsensus, was awarded Best Student Paper in the 9th International Conference on Networked Systems (NETYS) 2021! Co-authors also include Gokarna Sharma and Mikhail Nesterenko. . http://netys.net/awards/
6/2021: Naomi Wang is a KSU undergraduate and Computer Science student who is part of the ATR (Robotics) Lab directed by Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim. We send our congratulations to Naomi, she is the recipient of a 2021-2022 Scholarship from the OSGC (Ohio Space Grant Consortium)! Naomi will be engaged in a research project under the scholarship and will have her bio published in the OSGC Student Journal as well as a summary report of her project posted on the OSGC website. Well done, Naomi!
5/2021: Congratulations to Jonathan Maletic of the Computer Science Department. Dr. Maletic is one of two recipients of the 2021 Outstanding Research and Scholarship Award, awarded by the Division of Research and Sponsored Programs and the University Research Council. "Awardees are selected based on the quality of their research, creative activities and scholarship and their impact on society." To learn more about Dr. Maletic's research you can visit his webpage. Read more about the award here.
5/2021: Dr. Gokarna Sharma and Dr. Xing Lian have each been granted tenure and promotion to Associate Professor as of the 2021-22 academic year. A tenure track faculty member's path to tenure is not an easy one. In addition to their teaching responsibilities and service to the department, they must establish a strong research path with external funding. The Department congratulates them on their considerable accomplishments!
5/2021: News from the University about the M.S. in Artificial Intelligence in the Dept. of Computer Science!
5/2021: Attention Computer Science students: scholarship applications are open through May 31 for Fall 2021 disbursement! Please follow this link!
Dr. Jonathan Maletic has had two papers recently accepted by two prestigious conferences coming up in Madrid, Spain. Eye Movement on Source Code Versus Natural Text: Model Based Examination is co-authored with Naser Al Madi and B. Sharif and published in the proceedings of the 29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension, Madrid, Spain, May 18-20. On the Naming of Methods: A Survey of Professional Developers, is his paper co-authored with R. Alsuhaibani, C. Newman, M. Decker and M.L. Collard in the proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Madrid Spain, May 25 - 28.
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 programming 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, and M.S. students 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 them 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.
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT CHAIR JAVED KHAN VISITS M.I.E.T. IN JAMMU, INDIA
Dr. Khan has been visiting MIET (Model Institute of Engineering and Technology) in Jammu, India. MIET is known as one of the best engineering institutions in the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in the Himalayan Mountains of Northern India. Dr. Khan is exploring future collaboration opportunities between MIET and KSU Computer Science, but he also presented a seminar to 200 MIET students on Next-Generation Networks with a specific focus on Software-Defined Networking.
Computer Science Department Welcomes New Faculty
Welcome Dr. Jong-Hoon Kim! Dr. Kim's research focuses on "advanced telerobotic systems and their embedded systems which allow performing critical missions safely and effectively from a distance. Dr. Kim's PhD is awarded by Louisiana State University (2011). The ATR (Advanced Telerobotic Research) Lab is located in 236, Mathematical Sciences Building.
Join us in welcoming Dr. Qiang Guan to the faculty of Computer Science. Dr. Guan earned his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of North Texas. He comes to us from his employment as a scientist with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Guan's research focuses on a "variety of topics (related to) dependability and resilience assurance in cloud systems and High Performance Computing Systems and building user defined software stack in HPC infrastructure."
ParkApps ...
ParkApps is a new app to help you explore the 33,000-acre Cuyahoga Valley National Park located between Cleveland and Akron. It is the product of an NSF grant led by Dr. Rick Ferdig of Lifespan Development and Education Sciences and Dr. C.C. Lu, Professor and Assistant Chair, Computer Science. ParkApps is available now for iPhone users, but Android is on its way. To download this free app, fo the App Store on your phone and search for ParkApps. The development will continue, so expect regular updates to come along. ParkApps is also on Twitter (@appsforparks), Facebook (ParkApps) and Instagram (appsforparks).