Department News

2019 News Releases

2018 News Releases

Computer Science alumnus wins IBM’s Call for Code Challenge

2017 News Releases

Department of Computer Science’ News
2017 (January – June)

REU program

The Department of Computer Science hosts its fifth Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program funded by the National Science Foundation. The program started on May 15 and will end on July 21. The research theme is on software testing and software analytics. 10 students including 3 students from ECU were selected from 101 applicants nationwide. The home colleges of these students include Wake Forest, Elon, UNC Chapel Hill, NC State, Shaw, Elizabeth City State, University of Alabama, and ECU. Six faculty members from CS serve as research mentors of REU students. These faculty mentors are Drs. Junhua Ding (PI), Nasseh Tabrizi (Co-PI), Qin Ding, Venkat Gudivada, Mark Hills, and Sergiy Vilkomir. ECU students are John Baptista, Zachary Catalano, and Justin Whitaker. The details can be found at http://www.cs.ecu.edu/reu

Awards

The MSSE program was ranked #6 overall in the list of the best US online master’s degree programs in Software Engineering according to BestColleges.com: http://www.bestcolleges.com/features/top-online-software-engineering-degree-graduate-programs/
Dr. Venkat Gudivada was conferred as an International Academy, Research, and Industry Association (IARIA) fellow in Spring 2017. This fellowship recognizes his outstanding scientific research, exceptional scientific contribution to the IARIA events, and continuous leadership roles in IARIA conferences. https://www.iaria.org/fellows/VenkatNGudivada.pdf
Dr. Sergiy Vilkomir was a recipient of the Board of Governors Distinguished Professor for Teaching Award (April 2017). The award is designed to recognize and support excellent teaching. https://news.ecu.edu/2017/04/21/faculty-recognized-for-outstanding-teaching/

Grants

Dr. Mark Hills is a co-investigator on two projects funded by the Department of Homeland Security and the Coast Guard: “Recreational Boating Data Acquisition through Crowdsourcing: A Complementary Prototype to the National Recreational Boating Safety Survey” (sub-contract from the National Safe Boating Council) and “Evaluating Alternatives to Traditional Probability Based Survey Techniques for Unregistered Boater Data Capture” (sub-contract from the American Canoe Association). The role of Dr. Hills on these projects is to create a mobile survey mechanism that can be used to securely capture and further process the required data.

Student awards

The following students were recognized during the Computer Science Awards Ceremony on April 26:

William R. Spickerman Award: Zachery James and Shawn Kelly.
Lucille Moore Award: Jakayla Alston and Sophia Armstrong.
Robert C. Rogers Memorial Graduate Award: David Anderson.
Robert C. Faircloth Memorial Scholarship: Ryan Summerlin.
James F. Wirth Award: Seaver Thorn and Justin Whitaker.
John Crammer Award: Jordan Carter and Zachary Catalano.
Outstanding Senior in Computer Science: Christian Colglazier.
Outstanding Graduate Student: Seyedfaraz Yasrobi.
Outstanding Graduate Assistant: David Hoffman.
Barry and Karen Carter Scholarship: James Philips and Matthew Morgan.
Frankford M Johnson Scholarship: Jordan Rivera and Joshua Bowen.
Computer Science General Scholarship: Seaver Thorn and Matthew Bent.
Angela William Allen Scholarship: Jakayla Alston and Brandon Underwood.

ACM Student Chapter

The ACM Student Chapter has selected the student leaders for 2017-2018 year:

Seaver Thorn: Chair
Tiffany Nguyen: Vice Chair
David Anderson: Treasurer
Jakayla Alston: Secretary
Justin Whitaker: Webmaster

Published books

Dr. Venkat Gudivada published an edited book: V. Gudivada, V. Raghavan, V. Govindaraju, and C.R. Rao, eds., “Cognitive Computing: Theory and Applications,” Vol. 35, Handbook of Statistics. ISBN: 978-0444637444, New York, Elsevier, 2016.
https://www.amazon.com/Cognitive-Computing-Applications-Handbook-Statistics/dp/0444637443

Published journal papers

Qin Ding and R. Boykin, “A Framework for Distributed Nearest Neighbor Classification Using Hadoop,” Journal of Computational Methods in Science and Engineering, vol. 17, no. S1, pp. S11-S19, 2017.
http://content.iospress.com/articles/journal-of-computational-methods-in-sciences-and-engineering/jcm676
Sergiy Vilkomir,”Multi-device coverage testing of mobile applications,” Software Quality Journal (2017), Springer, pp. 1–19, DOI: 10.1007/s11219-017-9357-7. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11219-017-9357-7
Mark Hills, P. Klint, and J. Vinju, “Enabling PHP software engineering research in Rascal,” Science of Computer Programming, Volume 134, Issue 1, pp. 37–46, Elsevier, February 2017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2016.05.003
Junhua Ding, X. Hu, Venkat Gudivada, “A Machine Learning Based Framework for Verification and Validation of Massive Scale Image Data,” IEEE Transactions on Big Data, March 2017. DOI: 10.1109/TBDATA.2017.2680460. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7875094/
H. Sharghi and Kamran Sartipi, “An Expressive Event-based Language for Representing User Behavior Patterns,” Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (JIIS), Springer, 2017, pp. 1-25, DOI: 10.1007/s10844-017-0456-5. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10844-017-0456-5
W. Wang, J. Liu, J.Q. Lu, Junhua Ding, X. Hu, “Resolving power of diffraction imaging with an objective: a numerical study,” Optics Express, May 2017, Vol. 25, Issue 9, pp. 9628-9633, DOI: 10.1364/OE.25.009628. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28468345
Venkat Gudivada, A. Apon, and Junhua Ding, “Data Quality Considerations for Big Data and Machine Learning: Going Beyond Data Cleaning and Transformations,” International Journal on Advances in Software, Vol. 10, no. 1&2, June 2017.

Published conference papers

David Anderson, Mark Hills, “Query Construction Patterns in PHP,” Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER 2017), February 21–24, 2017, Klagenfurt, Austria, pp. 452-456. https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER.2017.7884652
The paper is co-authored by an ECU MS student.
Junhua Ding, X. Kang, X. Hu, “Validating a Deep Learning Framework by Metamorphic Testing,” Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Metamorphic Testing (MET’17), pp. 28-34, in conjunction with the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017), Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 20-28, 2017. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3103631
Babak Yadranjiaghdam, Seyedfaraz Yasrobi, Nasseh Tabrizi, “Developing a Real-time Data Analytics Framework For Twitter Streaming Data,” the 6th IEEE International Congress on Big Data, June 25-30, 2017, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.
The paper is co-authored by ECU MS students.
Julian Brinkley, David Hoffman, Nasseh Tabrizi, “A semantic social media portable profile system for assistive technology users,” the 1st IEEE International Conference on Congnitive Computing, June 25-30, 2017, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.
The paper is co-authored by ECU MS students.

Service for international conferences

Dr. Qin Ding served as a Program Co-Chair for the 9h International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICOB), March 20-22, 2017, Honolulu, HI, USA, http://sce.uhcl.edu/bicob17/
Dr. Junhua Ding served as a PC Co-Chair and Drs. Mark Hills and Sergiy Vilkomir served as PC members for the 12th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Automation of Software Test (AST 2017), in conjunction with the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’17), Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 20-28, 2017, http://tech.brookes.ac.uk/AST2017/index.html
Dr. Nasseh Tabrizi served as a Technical Committee member for the 5th International IBM Cloud Academy Conference (ICACON 2017), May 24-26, 2017, Wroclaw, Poland https://www.ibm.com/solutions/education/cloudacademy/us/en/cloud_academy_conference_2017.html
Drs. Junhua Ding and Sergiy Vilkomir are serving as PC members for the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2017), July 5-7, 2017, Pittsburgh, USA, https://ksiresearchorg.ipage.com/seke/seke17.html
Dr. Sergiy Vilkomir is serving as a General Chair and Dr. Junhua Ding is serving as a Program Chair for the IEEE International Workshop on Combinatorial Testing and its Applications (CTA 2017), Prague, Czech Republic, July 25-29, 2017, in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS 2017), http://paris.utdallas.edu/cta17/
Dr. Sergiy Vilkomir is serving as a PC member for the 12th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2017), July 26-28, 2017, Madrid, Spain, http://www.icsoft.org/
Drs. Venkat Gudivada and Junhua Ding are serving as Workshop Chairs for the “Data Quality Issues in Big Data and Machine Learning Applications: Going Beyond Data Cleaning and Transformations” workshop, in conjunction with the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Boston, MA, 11-14 December 2017, http://www.cs.ecu.edu/gudivada/2017-ieee-bigdata-data-quality-workshop.html
Dr. Nasseh Tabrizi is serving as a PC member for the 21st International Conference on Circuits, Systems, Communications and Computers (CSCC 2017), Crete Island, Greece, July 14-17, 2017 (http://cscc.co/) and the 2017 International Conference on Circuits, Systems and Signal Processing (CSSP 2017), Athens, Greece, October 6-8, 2017 (http://www.inase.org/conferences/2017/athens17/cssp.htm)
Dr. Qin Ding is serving as a Program Co-Chair for the 10th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICOB), March 19-21, 2018, Las Vegas, NV, USA, http://sceweb.uhcl.edu/bicob18/index.html

ECU Computer Science Seminars in 2017:

February 10, 2017: Dr. Tamer Omar, Department of Technology Systems, College of Engineering and Technology, East Carolina University. Title: Broadband Wireless Networking in the Era of Big Data
April 7, 2017: Dr. Sambit Bhattacharya, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Fayetteville State University. Title: Deep Learning Integrated with AI Techniques to Solve Visual Surveillance.
April 13, 2017: Dr. Kemafor Ogan, Department of Computer Science, NC State University. Title: Dealing with Semantic Heterogeneity- The Often-Overlooked Challenge in Big Data & Data Science
April 21, 2017: Dr. George Rouskas, Department of Computer Science, NC State University. Title: Network-Aware Virtual Request Partitioning Based on Spectral Clustering.

Web site: http://www.cs.ecu.edu/sartipi/CSseminar/

Invited talks

Dr. Mark Hills, “Meta-Programming for Program Analysis & Comprehension,” at ABB Corporate Research in Raleigh, NC on April 7, 2017.

Notice of Upcoming Conference

Data quality issues trace back their origin to the early days of computing. A wide range of domain-specific techniques to assess and improve data quality exist in the literature. However, these solutions primarily target data which resides in relational databases and data warehouses.

The emergence of big data and renaissance in machine learning challenges the suitability of database-centric approaches to data quality assessment. Minor data errors can cause major damage in Big Data applications. Damages manifest in various forms including loss of revenue, operational inefficiency, and regulatory compliance failure. Moreover, these errors cascade through downstream applications and exacerbate damages.

Machine Learning (ML)/ Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings to fore unique data quality issues. In addition to conventional data quality dimensions — missing data, incomplete data, inconsistent data, inaccurate data, duplicate and dated data — AI ushers in issues such as outliers, data imbalance, correlations between features, and curse of dimensionality. Gender bias in AI data is another big concern.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together data quality researchers and industry practitioners to share their ideas and best practices, identify and define important problems to further the field.

The workshop Call for Papers webpage is at:

http://www.cs.ecu.edu/gudivada/2017-ieee-bigdata-data-quality-workshop.html

The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data webpage is at:

http://cci.drexel.edu/bigdata/bigdata2017/

2015 News Releases

Dr. Sergiy Vilkomir has been invited to be a member of the program committee of the following conferences: The 28th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2016), July 1 – July 3, 2016, Redwood City, CA, USA. http://ksiresearchorg.ipage.com/seke/seke16.html The 11th International Conference on Software Engineering and Applications (ICSOFT-EA 2016), 24 – 26 July, 2016, Lisbon, Portugal. http://www.icsoft-ea.org/

Dr. Mark Hills presented a paper titled “Variable Feature Usage Patterns in PHP” at the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2015), 9 – 13 November 2015 Lincoln, Nebraska, USA.

Seth Butler and John Dixon, both Computer Science seniors, were awarded an all expenses paid scholarship to attend the ACM SIGPLAN conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) conference (http://2015.splashcon.org/) and Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop, in Pittsburgh, PA, 27 – 30 October, 2015.

Dr. Mark Hills will present an extended abstract titled “Supporting PHP Dynamic Analysis in PHP AiR” at the Workshop on Dynamic Analysis at the Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH) conference, 30 October 2015, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

Ms. Galen Pennell, a Computer Science senior, presented her research at Sigma Xi Student Research Conference held in Kansas City, Missouri, October 23-24, 2015 (https://www.sigmaxi.org/meetings-events/student-research-conference). Her presentation is titled “Empirical Investigation of Pair-wise Testing for Mixed Logical Expressions.” This research was performed under the guidance of Dr. S. Vilkomir. Ms. Pennell started this research in Summer 2015 under ECU Computer Science REU program funded by the National Science Foundation, with Dr. Junhua Ding as the Principal Investigator. She continued her research in Fall 2015 semester as a member of Software Testing Research Group (STRG – http://core.ecu.edu/STRG/).

Dr. Gudivada coauthored a research paper titled “Understanding Search-Engine Optimization.” IEEE Computer, Issue 10, Vol. 48, pp. 67 – 76, October 2015.

Dr. Gudivada coauthored a chapter titled “Big Data Driven Natural Language Processing Research and Applications” for a research monograph. The monograph is titled “Big Data Analytics,” edited by V. Govindaraju and V. Raghavan and C. R. Rao, and published by Elsevier. pp. 203 – 238, July 2015.

Shawn Braddy, a graduate student in Software Engineering did an internship at Boeing this past summer. He was selected for the Boeing IT Intern Profiles on Boeing’s website. Here is the link: http://www.boeing.com/careers/college/it-internships-profiles.page#/profile-03

The paper “Effectiveness of Multi-Device Testing Mobile Applications” by S. Vilkomir, K. Marszalkowski, C. Perry, and S. Mahendrakar was published in the Proceedings of the 2nd ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MobileSoft 2015), May 16-17, 2015, Florence, Italy, pp. 44-47, in conjunction with the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’15). The paper has been presented by Dr. Vilkomir.

The paper “Relationship between pair-wise and MC/DC testing: Initial experimental results” by S. Vilkomir and D. Anderson was published in the Proceedings of the IEEE 8th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops (ICSTW 2015), 13-17 April 2015, Graz, Austria.