BYTES DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
A NEWS MAGAZINE | 2023
UF PARTNERS ON NSF-FUNDED NATIONAL AI RESEARCH INSTITUTE The National Science Foundation has selected a team of scientists from the University of Florida and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to lead a $20 million institute to advance artificial intelligence to promote STEM education. PAGE 12 & 13
IN THIS ISSUE: FACULTY NEWS PAGE 5-16
STUDENT AWARDS & NEWS PAGE 19-23
Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Ph.D. Professor
MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR Dear colleagues, alumni and friends, This year the department will be moving to a new home in Malachowsky Hall for Data Science and Information Technology. The new building is meant to focus on collaboration and will connect students and researchers from other departments and disciplines. We look forward to the collaboration this multidiscipline space will bring. In this issue, we feature faculty who are doing amazing work to make a positive impact on society. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Ph.D., and a team of scientists from the University of Florida and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to lead a $20 million institute to advance artificial intelligence to promote STEM education (Page 12). Kiley Graim, Ph.D. is leading a $1.5 million National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute study to aid in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to model the evolution of cancer across hundreds of mammalian species and its correlation to humans (Page 14). We want to celebrate our faculty for their continued efforts and recent awards and recognitions, including Baba Vemuri, Ph.D., who was named distinguished professor (Page 6), Sumi Helal, Ph.D., who was named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (Page 6), and Kejun Huang, Ph.D., who received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Page 7). Beyond faculty, the department and our students had several reasons to celebrate this year. Our Computer Engineering Graduate program jumped two spots to number 13 in the U.S. News & World Report Rankings (Page 19). Patriel Stapleton, Ph.D. Student, received a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Page 21). Aysegul Bumin, Ph.D. student, along with her team recently received the best student paper award at the 13th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics for her research on fiber-based tensor completion for drug repurposing (Page 22). Join me in congratulating our faculty and students for their successes this year. As always, we thank you for your continued support. Sincerely,
Juan E. Gilbert
Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D. The Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor & CISE Department Chair
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UF | DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
BY THE NUMBERS
BY TES 2023
C H A I R ’S M E S S AG E ............ 2 FAC T S & F I G U R E S ..............3
THE GRADUATE COMPUTER ENGINEERING PROGRAM RANKS
13 # 1
PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN CURRENTLY ENROLLED
FAC U LT Y N E W S ............ 5 -16
#
NSF FUNDED AI RESEARCH I N S T I T U T E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 2 24% Undergrad 26% Master’s 30% Ph.D.
AMONG PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES
IEEE
IN THE STATE OF FLORIDA
ACM
2023 U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools
AAAS
20 FELLOWS
FACULTY STATS
55 45 18 TOTAL FACULTY
N E W FAC U LT Y .................. 4
TENURE/TENURETRACK FACULTY
NSF CAREER AWARD WINNERS
D E PA R T M E N T N E W S ........... ................................ 17-1 8 S T U D E N T AWA R D S ..... 19 -2 1 S T U D E N T N E W S ......... 2 1-2 3
Forrest J. Masters, Ph.D. IN TERIM DE A N, HERBER T W ER THEIM COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D. THE BA NK S FA MILY PREEMINENCE END OW ED PR OFE SSOR & DEPAR TMEN T CH AIR
Tamer Kahveci, Ph.D. CISE A SSO CIATE CHA IR OF AC ADEMIC AFFAIR S
Patrick Traynor, Ph.D. CISE A SSO CIATE CHA IR FOR RE SE A R CH
Allison Logan, MA
DEPARTMENT ENROLLMENT
4,055 BACHELOR’S 1,079 MASTER’S 175 PH.D.
COMMUNIC ATIONS M A NAGER M AG A ZINE EDITOR
Drew Brown M ARKE T ING SPECIALIS T M AG A ZINE EDITOR
CISE.UFL.EDU
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NEW FACULTY
NEW HIRE: WELCOMING CHRISTAN GRANT, PH.D. Christan Grant, Ph.D., joined the faculty as an Arnold and Lisa Goldberg Rising Star Associate Professor in Computer Science in Spring 2023. Dr. Grant leads the UF Data Studio, where he conducts research on various aspects of the data pipeline, including data acquisition, labeling, interactive machine learning, and visualization. Prior to joining CISE, Dr. Grant was an associate professor at the University of Oklahoma. His work has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and a Ph.D. in computer engineering, both from UF. By Allison Logan
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UF | DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
FACULTY NEWS
HONORING THE LIFE OF DR. PAUL GADER Paul Gader, Ph.D.
Dear Colleagues, It is with a heavy heart that I share with you that our colleague and friend, Dr. Paul Gader, passed away on Tuesday night surrounded by his loved ones. Paul received his master’s and doctorate in mathematics from the University of Florida in 1983 and 1986, respectively. He served as a faculty member at UF since 2001, beginning as an associate professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) and later, in 2003, becoming a full professor. Paul served as chair of CISE from 2012 to 2015 and joined ESSIE as an affiliate professor in 2016. Paul was an internationally recognized expert in machine learning and algorithm development, initially working on land-mine detection and handwriting analysis and later expanding this work to study hyperspectral image analysis and a broad range of environmental issues. He published more than 300 total papers, served as an associate editor of IEEE Geoscience & Remote Sensing Letters, enjoyed a threeyear term as a UF Research Foundation Professor, and was elected a Fellow of the IEEE. These accolades tell only part of the story about why Paul was such an important influence on his students and colleagues, as well as the college. He was brilliant but humble, always willing to step up and help irrespective of the complexity of the situation or current demands on his time. Anyone who knew him will tell you that Paul was truly one of the best of us. Paul, you will be greatly missed. We offer our condolences to his loved ones and to those of you who were close with him. With warm regards, Forrest Masters, Ph.D., P.E. Interim Dean, Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering
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FACULTY NEWS
HELAL NAMED A 2022 ACM FELLOW Sumi Helal, Ph.D., a professor, has been named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Dr. Helal was recognized for his contributions to mobile and pervasive computing and their applications in graceful aging and accessibility. He was one of 57 members selected and the only member from the state of Florida named as an ACM Fellow for 2022. The ACM Fellows program recognizes the top 1% of ACM Members for their outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology and/or outstanding service to ACM and the larger computing community. Fellows are nominated by their peers, with a distinguished selection committee reviewing nominations. Dr. Helal’s primary research areas are pervasive and mobile computing, digital health and the Internet of Things. His other research interests include the domains of disabilities, aging, and personal health and well-being. Sumi Helal, Ph.D. By Allison Logan
VEMURI NAMED DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR After many years devoted to teaching and research at the University of Florida, Baba Vemuri, Ph.D., was recently named a Distinguished Professor. The title of Distinguished Professor at the University of Florida is a rare honor given to those with exceptional records of teaching and research. “Distinguished Professor is the highest rank a UF faculty member can achieve. This is truly an honor earned by Dr. Vemuri for his outstanding research and teaching over the years,” said Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D., the Banks
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Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and department chair. Dr. Vemuri’s research interests include geometric deep learning, geometric statistics, medical image computing, computer vision, machine learning and information geometry. Earlier this year, Dr. Vemuri was awarded a $1.39 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), and National Institute on Aging (NIA) to assess the potential of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging for the purpose of differential
UF | DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders. By Allison Logan
Baba Vemuri, Ph.D.
FACULTY NEWS
Kejun Huang, Ph.D.
HUANG TO USE CAREER AWARD TO TACKLE AI’S UNSUPERVISED LEARNING CHALLENGES Kejun Huang, Ph.D., an assistant professor, has received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). His project, “Principled Unsupervised Learning via Minimum Volume Polytopic Embedding,” will focus on machine learning that addresses the challenges of unsupervised learning, which teaches the machine, or an AI system, to understand patterns in data. “If we want to develop a program to recognize whether there is a cat in an image, supervised learning requires that the algorithm is provided with a large set of images, and each of them is provided with the correct label of ‘cat’ or ‘no cat.’ This requirement may or may not be realistic in practice,” Dr. Huang said. “For unsupervised learning, the algorithm automatically finds patterns in the data without asking for specific examples of what the pattern is during the data preparation stage.” There are two major challenges in unsupervised learning:
1) how do we know if the learned representation is correct, meaning it is mathematically the unique solution? 2) all the existing models are known to be computationally hard to solve, as no known algorithm is guaranteed to exactly solve the problem within polynomial-time, also known as “NP-hard.” “The overarching goal of this project is to resolve all three of these issues by developing a principled framework of minimum volume polytopic embedding for unsupervised learning,” Dr. Huang said. CAREER awards are NSF’s most prestigious award for junior faculty and are designed to help provide a foundation for a lifetime of scientific leadership. The awards are given to an outstanding scientist who exemplifies the role of teacher-scholars through research, education, and the integration of education and research. By Allison Logan
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FACULTY NEWS
Prabhat Mishra, Ph.D.
MISHRA NAMED AAAS FELLOW The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals, has elected 19 faculty from the University of Florida to its newest class, breaking previous records for the number of faculty awarded in a single year. The honor, which includes alumni such as Thomas Edison and W.E.B. DuBois, is among the most distinctive in academia and recognizes extraordinary impact and achievement across disciplines, from research, teaching, and technology, to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public. Among the 19 selected as Fellows is Prabhat Mishra, Ph.D., a professor and a UF Research Foundation Professor. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He is also the Director of CISE Embedded Systems Lab. Dr. Mishra’s research interests include embedded and cyber-physical systems, hardware security
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and trust, computer architecture, energy-aware computing, machine learning, and quantum computing. His research enabled automated and scalable hardware validation using an effective combination of formal verification, test generation, and side-channel analysis to design secure and energy-efficient systems. The 2022 class of AAAS Fellows are among 505 scientists, engineers and innovators who have been recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements. “An important measure of the university’s prowess is the accolades its faculty members receive from national and international organizations,” said David Norton, vice president for UF Research. “The awarding of Fellow from AAAS to so many UF researchers this year is the result of the remarkable achievements of these individuals and reflects very positively on UF as we strive to become the best public research university in the country.” By UF News
UF | DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
FACULTY NEWS
ACM NAMES DR. JAIN TO EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Eakta Jain, Ph.D., an associate professor, was recently named an Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) Executive Committee Director. “This role gives me an opportunity to give back to the professional community I ‘grew up in,’ ” Dr. Jain said. “It reflects that my professional community trusts me to look out for this SIG and help steer it such that it continues to be a vibrant SIG in the years to come. The role also provides me with continuing personal and professional growth.” “The role is also important to me because it reflects how supportive our department has been of my professional growth. It is a result of departmental support that I have been able to carve out the time needed to put into SIGGRAPH executive committee work, a characteristic that was recognized by various SIGGRAPH committee members as very positive and very rare. It is also a result of the mentorship provided by department senior faculty that I have been able to navigate the numerous roles and responsibilities within ACM SIGGRAPH that prepared me to take on this role.” Dr. Jain said every director has the general responsibility of setting the strategic direction of where the community is going, overseeing year-toyear continuity, and shepherding new initiatives. In addition, each director takes on two individual responsibilities. Dr. Jain’s responsibilities are to chair the Nurturing Community strategy group – a
Eakta Jain, Ph.D.
think tank whose charter is to broadly consider how SIGGRAPH can support its members as well as the graphics community beyond the membership in-group – and liaise with the Career Development Committee Grouping – SIGGRAPH standing committees are grouped by theme and are assigned one or two executive committee members as liaisons. “SIGGRAPH is one of the biggest special interest groups (SIGs) within ACM and is exceptional in the extent to which it connects research and practices with annual conference events and year-round activity,” said Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D., the Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and department chair. “Dr. Jain’s leadership in this SIG raises the department’s profile both in the academic and industry realm.” Governance is a cornerstone of ACM SIGGRAPH’s mission to nurture, champion and connect researchers and practitioners of computer graphics and interactive techniques. The organization is managed by the executive committee, which consists of nine directors, who vote on major strategic decisions, and two appointed members. The elected directors are elected by the ACM SIGGRAPH membership and serve three-year terms. The officers, chair, chair-elect, treasurer, and treasurer-elect, are selected each year from the directors. By Allison Logan
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FACULTY NEWS
RANKA NAMED UF RESEARCH FOUNDATION PROFESSOR The University of Florida Research Foundation (UFRF) has named Sanjay Ranka, Ph.D., a distinguished professor, a UFRF Professor for 20232026. Dr. Ranka was one of 34 faculty members selected at the university. His areas of expertise are data science, machine learning and high-performance computing. The focus of his current research is on using them for solving applications in Transportation, Health Care and Scientific Computing. His research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, U.S. Department of Transportation and Florida Department of Transportation.
Dr. Ranka earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Minnesota and a B. Tech. in computer science from IIT, Kanpur, India. He has co-authored one book, four monographs, and over 300 journal and refereed conference articles. His work has received more than 14,700 citations with an h-index of 61 (based on Google Scholar) and he has consulted for several startups and Fortune 500 companies. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association Fellow, and a past member of the IFIP Committee on System Modeling and Optimization.
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In 2020, he received the IEEE Technical Committee on Cloud Computing Impact Award and was also awarded the 2022 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He is an associate Editor-inChief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and an associate editor for the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Computing Surveys, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Sustainable Computing: Systems and Informatics, Knowledge and Information Systems, and International Journal of Computing. By Allison Logan
FACULTY NEWS
GILBERT NAMED 2023 IEEE FELLOW Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D., the Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and department chair, has been named a 2023 Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Dr. Gilbert was elevated for “leadership in broadening participation in computing and contributions to accessible voting technologies.” IEEE Fellow is a distinction reserved for select IEEE members whose extraordinary accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest are deemed fitting of this elevation.
His research is in human-centered computing (HCC) and artificial intelligence (AI). His research integrates people, technology, information, policy, and culture to address societal issues. Dr. Gilbert’s areas of specialization within HCC and AI are natural interactive systems, bias in AI, advanced learning technologies/ intelligent tutoring systems, ethnocomputing/ culturally aware computing and information technology workforce, human-computer interaction, databases and data mining. Dr. Gilbert leads the Computing for Social Good Lab, which is focused on Each year, following a rigorous designing, building, and evaluating evaluation procedure, the IEEE Fellow computational technologies as they Committee recommends a group of relate to the human condition and recipients to become Fellows. Less reflecting on how these technologies than 0.1 percent of voting members are affect society. He is an ACM Fellow, a selected annually. Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) “It is a significant distinction to be named Juan Gilbert, Ph.D. and a Fellow of the National Academy of an IEEE Fellow,” Dr. Gilbert said. “I am truly Inventors. In 2012, Dr. Gilbert received grateful and honored to have been elevated the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, to Fellow. It’s an acknowledgment that our research Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring. and mentoring activities are appreciated at the highest levels.”
By Allison Logan
FICS RESEARCH DIRECTOR APPOINTED TO COMPUTING COMMUNITY CONSORTIUM COUNCIL Congratulations to Kevin R.B. Butler, Ph.D., a CISE professor and director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research, who was recently appointed to the 2023 council for the Computing Community Consortium (CCC). Dr. Butler was one of five members recently appointed to the CCC, whose mission is to enable the pursuit of innovative, high-impact computing research that aligns with pressing national and global challenges.
The CCC Council is comprised of 23 members who have expertise in diverse areas of computing. The goal of the CCC is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer-range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives.
Dr. Butler’s membership will begin on July 1, and he will serve for three terms.
By Allison Logan
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FEATURE STORY
UF PARTNERS ON NSF-FUNDED NATIONAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOCUSED ON STEM LEARNING Computing has never been more important to our The National Science Foundation announced that it has selected a team of scientists from the University of Florida and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to lead a $20 million institute to advance artificial intelligence to promote STEM education. The AI Institute for Inclusive Intelligent Technologies for Education (INVITE) will be based in Illinois with UF as a major partner and with scholars and practitioners from across the U.S.
“AI holds the potential to transform STEM education by learning from diverse students’ data and empowering teachers to customize students’ experiences,” said Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Ph.D., managing director of the new institute and a professor of computer science in UF’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. “The INVITE Institute will collect unparalleled datasets for training AI systems to deliver this customized learning, with a partner network of over 96,000 students across 24 school districts in eight states.”
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FEATURE FACULTY STORY NEWS
The INVITE Institute seeks to fundamentally reframe how educational technologies interact with learners by developing AI tools and approaches to support three crucial noncognitive skills known to underlie effective learning: persistence, academic resilience and collaboration.
engagement with and learning of STEM among historically marginalized groups at K-12 levels by investigating emerging AI techniques and building intelligent technologies. Postsecondary students will be heavily involved through educational and research opportunities that strive to build a diverse workforce of scientists and engineers.
“We’re honored to be selected to partner on this important NSF institute, which is critical to ensuring that teachers know each child’s strengths “In the INVITE Institute, our talented faculty and weaknesses and can adapt their strategies will leverage unique AI infrastructure in a multiaccordingly,” said UF President Ben Sasse. “At the institutional effort that addresses arguably the University of Florida, we recognize that AI isn’t most important responsibility we have, namely the the next big thing, it is the big thing; using these preparation of our children for future success,” said technologies to help young David Norton, vice president people succeed will provide for research at UF. “University significant long-term benefits of Florida researchers will join "AI holds the potential to for our state, our nation and others to understand how our world.” transform STEM education AI and related technologies by learning from diverse can improve the educational The institute’s use-inspired students’ data and empowering research will focus on how experience for K-12 learners. teachers to customize students’ children communicate This is critically important as we seek to elevate education STEM content, how they experiences," learn to persist through for all students in our - Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Ph.D. challenging work, and country.” how teachers support and The institute will build promote noncognitive skill national capacity for AI development. The AI-based tools created as a result research and broaden participation in computing will be integrated into classrooms to empower through nationwide partnerships, professional teachers to support learners in more customized development programs, outreach and community ways. activities, and provide a wide range of AI in “Supporting all children as they achieve their goals education resources. is one of the most promising ways we can harness AI to benefit society,” said Maya Israel, an associate The NSF’s funding partner for the INVITE Institute is the U.S. Department of Education Institute of professor of Educational Technology at UF and Education Sciences. senior personnel of the INVITE Institute. “With unique capabilities among its partner institutions, With more than $500 million in support from the INVITE Institute will create new techniques the NSF and its funding partners, the National and technologies that benefit tens of thousands AI Institutes represent the most significant of students from a range of backgrounds and federal investment in AI research and workforce experiences.” development to date, according to the agency. A key purpose of the INVITE research is to broaden
By Brittany Sylvestri
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FACULTY NEWS
CRACKING THE CODE: BUILDING A DNA MAP FOR HUMAN CANCER DETECTION FROM OTHER SPECIES Kiley Graim, Ph.D., assistant professor, is leading a $1.5 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Cancer Institute study with co-investigator James Cahill, Ph.D., an assistant instructional professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences. Together with Ji-Hyun Lee, DrPH, a professor in the Department of Biostatistics, their grant seeks to create a panmammalian tumor atlas that will aid in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to model the evolution of cancer across hundreds of mammalian species — and its correlation to humans. As is always the case with creating reliable AI, it demands huge amounts of clinical data to become a viable tool. Particularly where the cancers are a rare variety, a sufficiency of samples is rarer still. “We’re not getting enough people in clinical trials because their diseases are too rare, and people aren’t lining up as donors of healthy bone tissue,” Dr. Graim said. “That prevents us from getting traction from machine learning, which requires big data. We might only have a few hundred samples and a few billion base pairs in each of their genomes. Building a model from those leaves far too many variables; I have more genes that are going to change in each patient than I have patients.”
compare bone cancer in mice, dogs and humans,” Dr. Graim said. “They’re very closely related and we can look at the ancestral networks — how the genes interact with each other. It works really well.” A NOVEL SEARCH FOR BIG DATA TO FEED MACHINE LEARNING Seeking a sufficient clinical data set, Dr. Graim recruited the evolutionary biology and comparative genomics expertise of Dr. Cahill, pulling in millions of years of evolution data to see the commonalities in various species that develop cancer and those that don’t. “We’re looking at all cancers, but we’re trying to identify good model organisms for rare cancers, as the data set from which to draw those is so much smaller,” Dr. Cahill said. “We’re looking at a wide array of mammals, quantifying their relationship to each other in a complex way. The machine-learning models can leverage both close- and dissimilarly related species so there’s a hierarchy of the different parts of the genomes and how similar they are across all of those.”
She observed that dogs are 75 times more likely to get osteosarcoma than humans — and UF gets tons of cases coming through every year, yielding valuable data.
Studies have indicated that breast cancer in dogs and humans is very similar, with the same genome subtypes which respond to the same treatments. While most cancer research is done either on humans or mice, this NIH R01 grant, specific to early-stage investigators, is allowing the UF team to look at several hundred different species at the same time. Dr. Graim noted that this approach is better because of the number of samples it produces, and because they are closely related species for which their team has done a lot of work to understand the genomic difference between them.
“I started looking at other species because we can
By Shawn Jenkins
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FACULTY NEWS
HOW A HORSE WHISPERER CAN HELP ENGINEERS BUILD BETTER ROBOTS Humans and horses have enjoyed a strong working relationship for nearly 10,000 years — a partnership that transformed how food was produced, people were transported and even how wars were fought and won. Can these age-old interactions between people and their horses teach us something about building robots designed to improve our lives? Researchers at the University of Florida say yes. “There are no fundamental guiding principles for how to build an effective working relationship between robots and humans,” said Eakta Jain, Ph.D., an associate professor. “As we work to improve how humans interact with autonomous vehicles and other forms of AI, it occurred to me that we’ve done this before with horses. This relationship has existed for millennia but was never leveraged to provide insights for human-robot interaction.” Dr. Jain conducted a year of fieldwork observing the special interactions among horses and humans at the UF Horse Teaching Unit in Gainesville, Fla. She recently presented her findings at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany. As horses did thousands of years before, robots are entering our lives and workplaces as companions and teammates. They vacuum our floors, help educate and entertain our children, and studies are showing that social robots can be effective therapy tools to help improve mental and physical health. Increasingly, robots are found in factories and warehouses, working collaboratively with human workers and sometimes even called co-bots. “Some of the findings are concrete and easy to visualize, while others are more abstract,” she says. “For example, we learned that a horse speaks with its body. You can see its ears pointing to where something caught its attention. We could build in similar types of nonverbal expressions in our robots, like ears that point when there is a knock on the door or something visual in the car when there’s a pedestrian on that side of the street.” By Karen Dooley Read the full story on our website.
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FACULTY NEWS
LASER ATTACK BLINDS AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES, DELETING PEDESTRIANS AND CONFUSING CARS Self-driving cars, like the human drivers that preceded them, need to see what’s around them to avoid obstacles and drive safely. The most sophisticated autonomous vehicles typically use lidar, a spinning radar-type device that acts as the eyes of the car. Lidar provides constant information about the distance to objects so the car can decide what actions are safe to take. But these eyes, it turns out, can be tricked. New research reveals that expertly timed lasers shined at an approaching lidar system can create a blind spot in front of the vehicle large enough to completely hide moving pedestrians and other obstacles. The deleted data causes the cars to think the road is safe to continue moving along, endangering whatever may be in the attack’s blind spot. This is the first time that lidar sensors have been tricked into deleting data about obstacles. The vulnerability was uncovered by researchers from the University of Florida,
the University of Michigan and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan. The scientists also provide upgrades that could eliminate this weakness to protect people from malicious attacks. The findings will be presented at the 2023 USENIX Security Symposium and are publicly available online. Lidar works by emitting laser light and capturing the reflections to calculate distances, much like how a bat’s echolocation uses sound echoes. The attack creates fake reflections to scramble the sensor. “We mimic the lidar reflections with our laser to make the sensor discount other reflections that are coming in from genuine obstacles,” said Sara Rampazzi, Ph.D., a CISE assistant profesor who led the study. “The lidar is still receiving genuine data from the obstacle, but the data are automatically discarded because our fake reflections are the only ones perceived by the sensor.” By Eric Hamilton
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
COMPUTER ENGINEERING GRADUATE PROGRAM JUMPS 2 SPOTS IN U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT RANKINGS The Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) at the University of Florida continues to climb in the latest U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) rankings among public graduate engineering programs. The computer engineering graduate program has risen to No. 13 among public universities nationwide. Last year, the program was ranked No. 15 among public universities. “The increase in our rankings is a result of dedication to excellence in our Ph.D. programs,” said Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D., The Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor and CISE department chair. “The faculty are determined to provide our Ph.D. students the best training for their futures, and this change in rankings is a result of that determination.” The computer engineering degree offers a broad, flexible approach in mastering both computer software and hardware. The department offers both a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in computer engineering. Six of the UF engineering college’s disciplines — agricultural engineering, biomedical engineering, computer engineering, industrial engineering, materials engineering and nuclear engineering — are listed among the Top 15 public programs. Overall, the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering, which saw its research expenditure grow by more than 10%, ranked No. 26 among all public institutions. By Allison Logan
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DEPARTMENT NEWS
CISE IS MOVING TO MALACHOWSKY HALL We are moving to the Malachowsky Hall for Data Science & Information Technology! Our new home is a 263,000-square-foot academic building located in the heart of UF’s main campus that will connect students and researchers from across disciplines and create a hub for advances in computing, communication and cyber-technologies with the potential for profound societal impact. Malachowsky Hall will be the headquarters for the department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity, and the Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World. The building is meant to be an interdisciplinary hub for collaboration in data science and cyber systems. We are excited to join our fellow departments and work together towards innovation. By Drew Brown
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STUDENT AWARDS
PATRIEL STAPLETON RECEIVES NSF GRADUATE RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP
Patriel Stapleton, Ph.D. student
Patriel Stapleton, a Ph.D. student, has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. Her research investigates how gamebased learning simulations can be used to effectively teach middleschool students about complex topics. “Receiving the NSF fellowship is a great honor because it means that experienced researchers in my field see value in my research and the potential in me as a budding researcher,” Stapleton said. “The NSF award allows me to focus primarily on expanding my research skills as I will now have more time to put toward expanding and refining my research and advancing my own research agenda under the tutelage of my advisors.” She is pursuing her Ph.D. in HumanCentered Computing as a member of the Engaging Learning Lab under the advisement of Jeremiah Blanchard, Ph.D., instructional assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education and the director of the computer engineering undergraduate program, and Christina Gardner-McCune, Ph.D., a CISE associate professor. Stapleton, who is Caribbean and whose family is from the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Florida.
“After I graduate with my Ph.D., I’d like to join industry,” Stapleton said. “My skillset and passion lie in creating technologies and tools that create a more equitable society through education and awareness. Over the next three years, I hope to identify what these roles can look like outside of academia and in the larger tech industry that often impacts our daily life.” This year, she was part of the CRA-WP Grad Cohort Workshop for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Leadership Skills (IDEALS), which aims to widen the participation, access, opportunities, and experience of individuals in computing research by building and mentoring nationwide communities through their graduate studies. She was also named a recipient of the Granter Group Graduate Fellowship, which supports Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering students interested in learning about information technology. In 2021, Stapleton was named a GEM Fellow and a McKnight Fellow. The NSF Graduate Research Fellowship recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited institutions nationwide. By Allison Logan
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STUDENT AWARDS
STUDENT WINS BEST PAPER AWARD AT ACM CONFERENCE Aysegul Bumin, Ph.D., along with her team received the best student paper award at the 13th Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Ta m e r Ka hve ci, Ph . D. (l e f t), & Ayse g u l B u min, Ph . D. Health Informatics (ACM BCB) for her research on fiber-based tensor completion for drug repurposing. The paper titled, “FiT : Fiber-based tensor completion for drug repurposing,” was coauthored by Anna Ritz, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Biology Department at Reed College; Donna Slonim, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University; Tamer Kahveci, Ph.D., a CISE professor; and Kejun Huang, Ph.D., a CISE assistant professor. The research focuses on the problem of missing data in fiber structure, and
the method proposed provides fast and accurate imputations compared to existing algorithms. The imputed values are used for solving an important problem: drug repurposing. Drug repurposing is the process of finding new uses for drugs or compounds already in development. Repurposing existing drugs for novel indications reduces drug development time and cost, and can decrease the risk of failure, as developing new drugs and compounds for different disease-affected cells with unique traits is costly and can take decades, making drug repurposing a necessity. ACM-BCB is the premier conference covering all aspects of bioinformatics research, including design, analysis, specification, verification, implementation and performance. By Allison Logan Read the full story on our website.
2023-2024 CISE Scholarship & Award Recipients The department congratulates the following award and scholarship winners. These students were selected by the awards committee based on their outstanding academic performance and significant contributions to society.
UNDERGRADUATE LAC Scholarship Jesus Gil • Maria Morales • Jose Figueredo
Nieten Award for Undergraduate Students Alexandra Cornide Huber
Cottmeyer Family Scholarship Michael Hayworth • Itzel Maldonado • Benjamin Cortese • Karina LaRubbio • Olivia Pinson
Gartner Group Information Technology Fund Laura Chang • Zander Bournand • Adam Horton
20 UF UF| |DEPARTMENT DEPARTMENTOF OFCOMPUTER COMPUTER&&INFORMATION INFORMATIONSCIENCE SCIENCE&&ENGINEERING ENGINEERING 20
STUDENT NEWS
CLEARING HURDLES: SHPE PROGRAM PROPELS FUTURE LEADERS IN ENGINEERING Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), including delegates from UF SHPE, was granted an unprecedented three-hour briefing on “Building the Next Generation of Hispanic Leaders in STEM” with officials at the White House. The discussion revolved around how academia, the private sector, and government can increase Hispanic representation in the tech ecosystem by lowering education and career barriers for Hispanic students and professional engineers. “In line with our new strategic plan, this prestigious event is a significant step towards achieving our goal of being a key voice in Washington, D.C. with deep reach and a reputation as the leading organization for Hispanics in STEM,” said Miguel Alemañy, interim SHPE CEO. “The entire familia should be proud to see SHPE with a seat at this table.”
The briefing was organized into three conversations: K-12, Gender Equity, and Workforce Pathways. An underlying theme across the discourse was the involvement of the entire family in every student’s success, a role that SHPE fills in its mission by embracing and including family in a similar way that Hispanic culture centers family. While all students benefit from the support of family to be successful in a field as demanding as engineering, Hispanic students often face a complex web of barriers in their pursuit of STEM education, such as language barriers, immigration issues, and overcoming stereotypes. Navigating these obstacles requires a unique blend of resilience, creativity, and determination, which are qualities that bolster and galvanize all engineering professionals. By Samantha Jones Read the full story on our website.
GRADUATE L3Harris Corporation Graduate Fellowship Jeremy Block • Joseph Isaac • Kyle Lo • Daniel Volya Gartner Group Information Technology Scholarship Yang Bai • Jayetri Bardhan Gartner Group Graduate Fellowship Alexander Barquero • Nathaniel Bennett • Anik Chattopadhyay • Yu-Peng Chen • Wenchong He • Aruna Jayasena • Chathuri Jayaweera Arachchilage • Gloria Katuka • Abhishek Kulkarni • Qing Li • Hansika Madushan Weerasena Loku Kattadige • Jean Louis • Yingbo Ma • Sam Markelon • Hoang Ngo • Truc Nguyen • Daniel Olszewski • Nanjie Rao • Patriel Stapleton • Yuchen Sun • Xiaoyi Tian • Tyler Tucker • Yifan Wang • Heting Wang • Tingsong Xiao • Weidong Zhu • Hasini Witharana ← TABLE OF CONTENTS | CISE.UFL.EDU 21 CISE.UFL.EDU 21
STUDENT NEWS
WICSE HOSTS CODE-A-THON FOR GAINESVILLE STUDENTS Women in Computer Science and Engineering (WiCSE), the official student Association for Computing Machinery’s Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) chapter at the University of Florida, recently hosted its annual Middle and High School Code-A-Thon. The group welcomed about 35 Gainesville-area middle and high school students for a day of interactive and educational computer science workshops. Students were split into two groups based on prior computer science knowledge. The more beginner group participated in workshops that introduced them to binary, hex, logic gates, and Arduinos while the more advanced group participated in data structures, introductory cybersecurity, neural networks, and React workshops. The workshops were hosted by a variety of student organizations from UF, including Women in Electrical and Computer Engineering (WECE), the
UF Student Information Security Team (UFSIT), the UF Programming Team (UFPT), the UF Software Engineering Club (UFSEC), and Dream Team Engineering. “Computer Science education is important for the future of our society,” said Rong Zhang, Ph.D., an instructional associate professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering and co-advisor for WiCSE. “WiCSE and UF-TYPE are dedicated to introducing coding skills to students at an early age.” WiCSE’s mission is to facilitate the growth and empowerment of women in computer science by educating and celebrating their participation in the field. The group holds professional development workshops, and social and outreach events. WiCSE welcomes any and all UF students to join. To learn more, visit https://ufwicse.com/. By Allison Logan
22 UF | DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER & INFORMATION SCIENCE & ENGINEERING
STUDENT NEWS
UF INFORMATION SECURITY TEAM WINS COMPUTER SECURITY COMPETITION A group of students representing the UF Student InfoSec Team (UF-SIT) Kernel Sanders team recently won a Capture the Flag (CTF) tournament sponsored by Raymond James in St. Petersburg, Fla. By finishing first, the team won a $10,000 prize. “Although different teams have been participating in this competition for a while, UF has often placed near the top,” said Joe Wilson, Ph.D., associate professor and the group’s faculty sponsor. “The competition has always been tough, and this win is special.” The Kernel Sanders team was founded in the Fall of 2006 by Jordan Wiens and John Sawyer, who were both working in UF Information Security at the time. Team members for this event include Scott Lagler (captain), Miguel Caputo, Ayden Colby, Robert Dick and Jeffery Luo. The competition was a one-day event with the theme “The Watchers at the Wall,” a blue-teamthemed CTF managed by Warl0ckgam3z, an online testing and training challenge architecture for individual participants or teams. The “blue team” is comprised of people in an organization who work on defending their information security resources
from attack. The challenges involved a variety of problems, from physical challenges such as lock picking and fitness (a rarity for CTFs), typical code cracking problems, extracting and decoding remote desktop sessions, and identifying and exploiting operating system misconfiguration, among others. Several teams were clustered near the top of the scoreboard just before the end of the competition, but UF team’s points from ancillary challenges such as Hacker Jeopardy, lock picking, physical fitness, and Lego building put them over the top. There are no club dues or applications required to join UF-SIT. The group generally does around 5060 competitions each year, varying in scale and duration, with most contests online. UF-SIT funding comes from student government, and the group welcomes the support of sponsors to help fund student travel to these types of competitions. Visit the UF-SIT or join their slack channel to learn more about the group and how to become a member. By Allison Logan
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P. O . B O X 1 1 6 1 2 0 GAINESVILLE, FL 32611 W W W.C I S E .U F L . E D U
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Join Our Team The Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering at the University of Florida invites applications for a full-time, tenure-track or tenured faculty position at the rank of Associate Professor in the Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE) in the areas of Computer Science and Engineering. CISE provides a vibrant, multidisciplinary, and highly collaborative environment, and is consistently ranked among the top departments for both graduate and undergraduate programs. This department is among the largest CISE departments in the nation, with 57 faculty members and over 5,000 graduate and undergraduate students. Research is central to the success of the program, and new faculty will be expected to initiate and sustain strong sponsored research and graduate training programs.
CISE AT A GLANCE
15
ACTIVE GRANTS OVER $1 MILLION
51
INVENTIONS DISCLOSED SINCE 2017
APPLY NOW AT CISE.UFL.EDU/ABOUT/JOIN-US Contact: Prabhat Mishra, Ph.D., prabhat@ufl.edu Chair, CISE Faculty Search Committee
THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER.
Malachowsky Hall for Data Science & Information Technology, the future home of UF CISE.