Computer Science News
Professor Cecil has received the 2020 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM), which is administered by the US White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). In 2020, Cecil is one of the 15 PAESMEM recipients.
Cecil been working with psychologists in developing informal STEM learning environments using Virtual Reality to encourage K-12 students including autistic children towards STEM programs and careers. He has also pioneered the creation of Virtual Learning Environments for teaching robotics and emerging topics to both undergraduate and graduate students using domains such as NASA’s Moon Mission. His work has been funded by NSF, NASA, OCAST and other agencies.
Additional information can be found here:
Info on Presidental Excellence Award
Dr Akbas receives FY 21 ASR+1 and Grace hopper faculty scholar 2019
Dr. Akbas’ broad research areas are data mining and machine learning. Specifically, with her group in Data engineering Lab (DeLab), she works on graph (network) mining, text mining, and social network analysis. One aspect of her research is developing novel effective and efficient graph processing methods. Another aspect is to conduct biomedical knowledge mining to track public health issues in social networks.
Because of the quick growth of technology and the vast amount of data at entirely new scales and complexity-levels, the field needs new tools to face challenges in analyzing big data relevant to a wide range of domains. Her work on developing new graph compression and embedding methods in graph mining to expand large graphs for better management, querying, and display is critical to find meaningful patterns in the enormous size of real-world networks. Dr. Akbas also focuses on developing novel graph and text mining methods to extrapolate useful information from social media data. Her goal is to combat different public health problems, such as opioid addiction and Covid-19, to help government officials and health administrators with providing timely and useful information.
Dr. Aakur was awarded a $1M NSF grant as part of a multi-university research project
CSE faculty Dr. Aakur is part of a multi-university collaborative project awarded a $1M National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to carry on fundamental research for the project entitled “Collaborative Research: RI:Medium: Understanding Events from Streaming Video - Joint Deep and Graph Representations, Commonsense Priors, and Predictive Learning".
This multi-university collaborative project totaling $1M includes The University of South Florida, Florida State University, and Oklahoma State University. Dr. Aakur will work with Professor Sudeep Sarkar and Professor Anuj Srivastava in this four-year collaboration and lead the effort at OSU.
The goal of this proposed study is to formulate a computer vision-based event understanding algorithm that operates in a self-supervised, streaming fashion. The algorithm will predict and detect old and new events, learn to build hierarchical event representations, all in the context of a prior knowledge-base that is updated over time. The intent is to generate interpretations of an event that go beyond what is seen, rather than just recognition. This research pushes the frontier of computer vision by coupling the self-supervised learning process with prior knowledge, moving the field towards open-world algorithms, and needing little or no supervision.
Accelerating Research Discoveries with GPU-enabled Computing
Funder: Oklahoma State University’s Core Facility Support Program
Amount: $150,000
Duration: Dec 13, 2019 – Dec 31, 2020
Lead: Dr. Thanh Thieu and Dr. Sathya Aakur Narasimhan
This award equips 16 NVIDIA RTX6000 GPUs to be hosted at OSU’s HPCC.
- Fall 2019 President's Fellows Funding
- FY21 The Arts & Sciences Summer Research and Supplemental Travel
- Grace Hopper Faculty Scholar, 2020
Computer Science awarded grant to help with COVID-19 response:
The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently awarded OSU’s Department of Computer Science a Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant of more than $100,000 to develop virtual reality-based training simulators for COVID-19 first responders. Computer science professor Dr. J. Cecil, who is leading the project, explained that the proposal was approved by NSF in a matter of weeks—a process that can typically take at least six months.
Colton Fike, Kayla Walkup, and Brandon Shearrer
The Oustanding Senior for 2018-2019 is Ahmad Tashfeen, we congratulate you on your hard work!
Department of Computer Science's outstanding Senior for 2018-2019.
Scholarship Awardees for 2019-20
Students Win Prize for Health Data Innovation