SIGBITS November 2017

A WPI Computer Science Department summary of short notes on happenings involving faculty and students.

Publicity for Research Team Receiving NSF Award

Carolina Ruiz is part of a WPI research team receiving a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation's STEM+Computing Program to help high school teachers integrate biology and computer science tools and approaches in their classrooms. The work is led by Elizabeth Ryder, Associate Professor of Biology and Biotechnology; and also includes Robert Gegear, Assistant Professor of Biology and Biotechnology; and Shari Weaver, Assistant Director of Teacher Preparation at WPI's STEM Education Center. Nearly 100 media outlets, including seattlepi, Houston Chronicle, and the San Francisco Gate, published or broadcast articles on the WPI research team.

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Kyumin Lee

Lee's Featured Research on Detecting Fake "Likes"

Kyumin Lee, as part of work funded by a NSF CAREER Award, has developed algorithms that have proven highly accurate in detecting fake "likes" across various platforms like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter. The ACM and numerous media outlets, including, Fox 29-Philadelphia, ABC 25-Texas, Scienmag, Seattlepi, Houston Chronicle, and Worcester Magazine, featured the news.

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Gillian Smith

Smith's Work on Entertainment AI

Gillian Smith presented her paper, "Generative Design for Textiles: Opportunities and Challenges for Entertainment AI" at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) in Snowbird, Utah. She also co-organized and ran the doctoral consortium at AIIDE.

She went to the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory) conference in Orlando, FL where she presented on a panel about Computational Craft and co-organized a workshop for designing and building crafting-based games.

She participated in Dagstuhl seminar on "Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games: AI-Driven Game Design"

WPI Ranked as 4th Best Computer Science Program in the U.S.

College Factual has ranked WPI as the 4th best school to study Computer Science in the United States. The ranking methodology takes into account factors such as education quality and earnings of graduates.

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Xiangnan Kong

Recent Publications and Award for Kong

Xiangnan Kong has recent publications:

Thomas Hartvigsen, Cansu Sen, Sarah Brownell, Erin Teeple, Xiangnan Kong, Elke A. Rundensteiner. Early Prediction of MRSA Infections Using Electronic Health Records, In International Conference on Health Informatics (HEALTHINF), 2018

Susmitha Wunnava, Xiao Qin, Tabassum Kakar, Xiangnan Kong, Elke A. Rundensteiner, Sanjay K. Sahoo, Suranjan De. One Size Does Not Fit All: An Ensemble Approach Towards Information Extraction from Adverse Drug Event Narratives. In International Conference on Health Informatics (HEALTHINF)

He presented the paper with Xinyue Liu, Yuanfang Song, Charu Aggarwal, Yao Zhang, and Xiangnan Kong, BiCycle: Item Recommendation with Life Cycles, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), New Orleans, LA, 2017

He was award the grant NSF IIS-1718310 (PI Xiangnan Kong) Collaborative Research: Towards End-to-End Knowledge Discovery in Complex Brain Networks. (PIs Xiangnan Kong from WPI, Constance Moore from UMMS) WPI share of the award ($262,651). Award Dates 9/1/17-8/30/20.

Hugh Lauer

Lauer Advises at Copenhagen Project Center

Hugh Lauer spent A Term as a Faculty Advisor at WPI's Copenhagen Project Center. Twenty-four junior-year students were organized into six teams, and each team worked to complete their Interactive Qualifying Project for a sponsor in Denmark. Sponsors included two environmental organizations funded by the UN Agenda 21 initiative, the Danish Design Center, the Danish Waste Association, and a small start-up company focused on urban flooding. At the end of the term, one of the teams was invited by its sponsor to repeat its presentation as the keynote event of an industry conference in western Denmark.

Suzanne Mello-Stark

Cybersecurity Activities By Mello-Stark

Suzanne Mello-Stark was interviewed for an article in National Security, which noted WPI’s successful cybersecurity program. In the article she stated that despite forecasts of a global decline in people entering the field, interest in WPI’s cybersecurity program is growing. Mello-Stark is the program manager for Cyber Corps Scholarship for Service, a $4.4 million program funded by the National Science Foundation to provide scholarships and other funding in exchange for participating students’ commitment to a summer internship or a period of post-graduation employment with the government. WPI also hosts a cybersecurity summer camp funded by the National Security Agency, and the university’s coursework challenges students to solve real-world cybersecurity problems as part of graduation requirements.

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She was interviewed about the Scholarship for Service program by the Worcester Business Journal.

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She was given the honor of Introducing Barbara Simons, Former ACM President and President of Verified Voting, at the 50th year Celebration of the University of Rhode Island's Computer Science and Statistics department on Saturday, Oct 14th.

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WPI Students and Faculty Attend Grace Hopper Conference

Emily Hao and MaryAnn VanValkenburg were two of a dozen WPI students who attended the 2017 Grace Hopper Conference in Orlando. Suzanne Mello-Stark also attended the conference and chaired a panel on open source software.

Xiao Appointed as New Director of Robotics Engineering

Jing Xiao, new Director of Robotics Engineering at WPI, was featured in Robotic Trends "Meet Jing Xiao, WPI's New Director or Robotics" as media outlets continue publishing news of her appointment.

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Korkin Uses Mixed Reality to Visualize Complex Biological Networks

Dmitry Korkin's work on using mixed reality to visualize complex biological networks appeared in the Communications of the ACM.

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Craig Wills

Wills Publishes Study on Outcomes of Computer Science Faculty Searches

Work by Craig Wills on "Outcomes of Advertised Computer Science Faculty Searches for 2017", was published in the Computing Research News.

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WPI Ranked as a Best Big Data Degree

WPI is included in Best Computer Science School's ranking of the "2017 Ranking of the Best Big Data Degrees." Nearly 100 media outlets, including The Street, Buffalo News, and Telemundo20 publicized the results.

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Elke Rundensteiner

New Award and Publications for Rundensteiner

Elke Rundensteiner was awarded funding by the CRA-W (Computing Research Association Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research): Grant Funds for Collaborative Research Experiences for Undergraduates Funding, 2 female WPI undergraduate students, graduate mentor: Caitlin Kuehlman, faculty mentor: E. Rundensteiner, 2017- 2018, $7,500.

She and her students have a number of recent publications:

Susmitha Wunnava, Xiao Qin, Tabassum Kakar, Xiangnan Kong, Elke A. Rundensteiner, Sanjay K. Sahoo, Suranjan De, One Size Does Not Fit All: An Ensemble Approach Towards Information Extraction from Adverse Drug Event Narratives, HEALTHINF 2018, Funchal, Portugal, January 19-21, 2018.

ML Tlachac, Elke Rundensteiner, Kerri Barton, Scott Troppy, Shira Doron, and Kirthana Beaulac, Predicting Future Antibiotic Susceptibility using Regression-based Methods on Longitudinal Massachusetts Antibiogram Data, HEALTHINF 2018, Funchal, Portugal, January 19-21, 2018.

Thomas Hartvigsen, Cansu Sen, Sarah Brownell, Erin Teeple, Xiangnan Kong, Elke Rundensteiner, Early Prediction of MRSA Infections Using Electronic Health Records, HEALTHINF 2018, Funchal, Portugal, January 19-21, 2018.

Yizhou Yan, Lei Cao, and Elke Rundensteiner, Distributed Top-N Local Outlier Detection in Big Data, IEEE Big Data 2017 conference, Boston, MA.

Olga Poppe, Chuan Lei, E. Rundensteiner and D. Maier, GRETA: Graph-based Real-time Event Trend Aggregation. VLDB 2018.

Mingrui Wei, Lei Cao, Chris Cormier, Hui Zheng and Elke Rundensteiner, Interactive Outlier Analytics, The 26th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), Demonstration paper, November 6-10, 2017, Singapore.

Yizhou Yan, Lei Cao, Caitlin Kuhlman and Elke Rundensteiner, Distributed Local Outlier Detection in Big Data, ACM KDD, Research Track, Aug 2017.

Xiao Qin, Tabassum Kakar, Susmitha Wunnava, Elke Rundensteiner, Lei Cao, MARAS: Signaling Multi- Drug Adverse Reactions, ACM KDD, Applied Data Science Track, 2017.

Yizhou Yan, Lei Cao, Caitlin Kuhlman and Elke Rundensteiner, Distributed Local Outlier Detection in Big Data, ACM KDD, Research Track, 2017.

Caitlin Kuhlman and Elke Rundensteiner, Towards an Interactive Learning-to-Rank System for Economic Competitiveness Understanding, KDD 2017, Workshop on Interactive Data Exploration and Analytics (IDEA'17), 2017

Caitlin Kuhlman, Yizhou Yan, Lei Cao, and Elke Rundensteiner, Pivot-based Distributed K-Nearest Neighbor Mining, European Conference on Machine Learning, Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery (ECML-PKDD) 2017, Research Track, Springer LNCS,

Cansu Sen, Thomas Hartvigsen, Elke Rundensteiner, and Kajal Claypool, CREST - Risk Prediction for Clostridium Difficile Infection Using Multimodal Data Mining'', April 20, 2017 to The European Conference on Machine Learning & Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery (ECML-PKDD), Applied Data Science track, Springer LNCS, 2017, Maryam Hasan, Elke Rundensteiner, Xiangnan Kong and Emmanuel Agu, Discovery of Public Emotion Using Social Sensing, WebSIG Newsletter, Winter 2017.

Data Science REU Site at WPI

Profs Rundensteiner and Emdad ran another successful REU site at WPI in Data Science. A number of Computer Science faculty served as research mentors, including Prof. Li, Prof. Kong, Prof. Agu, Prof. Ruiz, Prof. Harrison, and Prof. Rundensteiner.

Several students from the REU site published their resulting research in various conferences, including an AIMA workshop 2017 and a conference paper at Health Informatics 2018.

Courtney Burns (REU) and Jennifer Ha (REU), with WPI undergraduate student Andrew Schade (WPI) Mentored by Graduate student: Ermal Toto and by Faculty Advisors: Professors E. Agu and E. Rundensteiner. Title of Poster : Using Machine Learning to Detect Depression by Voice, Accepted as poster for presentation at 2017 IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference, Nov 2017.

Sarah Brownell ( REU student), Mentored by Graduate student: Tom Hartvigsen (who had been an REU student himself as undergraduate student) and Faculty Advisors: Professor X. Kong and E. Rundensteiner. Title of Poster : MRSA Infection Prediction System. Accepted as poster for presentation at 2017 IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference, Nov 2017.

REU student Sarah Brownell publishes as part of team: Thomas Hartvigsen, Cansu Sen, Sarah Brownell, Erin Teeple, Xiangnan Kong, Elke Rundensteiner, Early Prediction of MRSA Infections Using Electronic Health Records, HEALTHINF 2018, Funchal, Portugal, January 19-21, 2018.

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Rodica Neamtu

Neamtu with Paper in Big Data Workshop

Rodica Neamtu announced that the paper Ranked Time Series Matching by Interleaving Similarity Distances authors: Cuong Nguyen, Charles Lovering, and Rodica Neamtu has been accepted for publication by the 4th Workshop on Advances in Software and Hardware for Big data to Knowledge Discovery in conjunction with 2017 IEEE Conference on Big Data.

Craig Shue

New Publications for Shue

Craig Shue presented a publication he co-authored with Mohamed Najd entitled "DeepContext: An OpenFlow-Compatible, Host-Based SDN for Enterprise Networks" at the IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN) in October.

He presented a publication he co-authored with Curtis Taylor, Tian Guo, and Mohamed Najd entitled "On the Feasibility of Cloud-Based SDN Controllers for Residential Networks." The paper was presented at the IEEE Conference on Network Function Virtualization and Software Defined Networks (NFV-SDN) in November.

First Place for WPI Students at HealthHacksRI

Rhode Island Innovation published the article, "College Students Tackle IoT, Aging at HealthHacksRI with WPI Team Drogo, comprised of Mark Landergan, Andrew Joshua Nagal, Ben Hylak and Alex Tacescu, placing first at the competition at the University of Rhode Island for their motion-tracking undergarments for the elderly.

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Krishna Venkatasubramanian

Venkatasubramanian Interviewed on Interacting with Wearables

Krishna Venkatasubramanian was interviewed for an article titled "Say goodbye to your keyboard" for Hewlett Packard Enterprises Insights page. The story discussed how the advent of IoT and wearables will bring about new ways of interacting with them.

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Emmanuel Agu

Agu Featured on Mobile Apps

Emmanuel Agu was featured in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette for his work on health apps.

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Michael Gennert

Recent Publications for Gennert

Michael Gennert has had a number of recent publications.

V. Jagtap, S.N. Gavarraju, S. Agarwal, S. Kejriwal, S. Devadoss, M.A. Gennert, "Towards Full Autonomy for Humanoid Robots", IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and System (IROS), Sep. 2017.

R. Natarajan, M.A. Gennert, "Efficient Factor Graph Fusion for Multi-Robot Mapping", IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and System (IROS), Sep. 2017.

C. Lindsay, A. Bhat, M.A. King, M.A. Gennert, "A Novel Robotic Motion Phantom For Ground Truth Motion in Medical Imaging", 6th Int. Wkshp. on Computational Human Phantoms, Aug. 2017.

S.H. Roy, B. Shiwani B, J.C. Kline, M.H. Saint-Hilaire, C.A. Thomas, M.A. Gennert, G. De Luc, "Real-Time, Autonomous Tracking of Whole-Body Bradykinesia In Parkinson's Disease", ASB 2017 Annual Conf. American Society of Biomechanics, Aug. 2017.

Kathi Fisler

Fisler Reports Best Paper Award

Kathi Fisler reports that Francis Castro's paper won the best paper award at the recent Koli Calling conference on Computing Education Research (held annually in Koli, Finland). The paper is "Designing a Multi-Faceted SOLO Taxonomy to Track Program Design Skills Through an Entire Course". Francis Castro and Kathi Fisler. Koli Calling 2017.

Yanhua Li

Recent Publications from Li

Yanhua Li has a number of recent publications:

Ran Wang, Chi-Yin Chow, Yan Lyu, Victor C. S. Lee, Sam Kwong, Yanhua Li, and Jia Zeng, TaxiRec: Recommending Road Clusters to Taxi Drivers Using Ranking-based Extreme Learning Machines, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Accepted for publication, Nov. 2017.

Yan Lyu, Chi-Yin Chow, Victor Lee, Joseph Kee-Yin Ng, Yanhua Li, and Jia Zeng, R-Sharing: Rendezvous for Personalized Taxi Sharing, IEEE Access, Accepted for publication, Nov. 2017.

Bo Lyu, Yanhua Li, Jie Fu, Andrew C. Trapp, Haiyong Xie, Yong Liao, Scalable User-Substation Assignment with Big Data from Power Grids, IEEE Transactions on Big Data, Accepted for publication, Oct. 2017.

He received a gift research hardware award for his research on "Enabling Smart and Scalable Urban Event Detection and Diagnosis Using GPU Technology".

Poppe Successfully Defends PhD Dissertation

Olga Poppe successfully defended her PhD Dissertation. Her dissertation research, titled ""Event Stream Analytics", focuses on strategies for scaling analytics including trend discovery and aggregation on event streams. Performance and effectiveness of the proposed strategies have been studied. Her thesis advisior is Prof. Elke Rundensteiner. Her committee members are Prof. Mohamed Eltabakh, Prof. Dan Dougherty, and Prof. D. Mailera from Portland State University;

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An archive of previous SIGBITS editions is also available.