News
AU was awarded $5.7 million by the National Science Foundation to improve translation of academic research into real-world impact. Computer Science professor Bei Xiao is one of the cross-school faculty leading the project.
Mark Nelson gave an invited talk at Queen Mary University of London, "Analyzing State Spaces of Atari Games", on open challenges in understanding AI decision-making.
Bei Xiao (Computer Science) and Laurie Bayet (Neuroscience) received $40k from the CAS Collaborative Pilot Research Grant Program for their project "Deep Learning Modes of Human Object Vision."
MS students Ginger Schwarz and Fariba Jafari Horestani with professor Mehdi Owrang contributed a chapter, "Prediction of Breast Cancer Recurrence with Machine Learning," to the forthcoming edition of Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology.
Three computer science students won awards at the Mathias Student Research Conference: Milton Garcia (MS '23), Sydney Sachs (MS '23, BS '22), and Ian Whitehouse (BS '24).
Nathalie Japkowicz, Mark Nelson, and Roberto Corizzo were interviewed by AWOL, AU's student-run investigative journalism magazine, for the Spring 2023 cover story, "The Uncertainty of ChatGPT".
Nathalie Japkowicz was a lecturer at DeepLearn 2023, the 8th International School on Deep Learning that took place from January 16 to January 20, 2023 in Bournemouth, UK. She presented three lectures on the topic of “Learning from Class Imbalances”.
Bei Xiao gave an invited talk at the Japanese Vision Science Society Winter Meeting, January 20, 2023, entitled "Understanding material perception using deep generative models".
Nathalie Japkowicz gave an invited talk at Ben Gurion University, Israel on December 26, 2022, where she presented American University’s Lifelong Learning Project supported by DARPA and led by Michael Baron, Roberto Corizzo, and Nathalie Japkowicz.
Mark Nelson gave an invited talk at Sarah Lawrence College on November 1, 2022, entitled "What Does Playing Games Tell Us About AI?". The talk covered the history of why the field of artificial intelligence has been so interested in playing games since the '50s, and how game-playing relates to areas like game theory and general decision-making.
Leah Ding was awarded a $160,000 grant by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for her project “Accelerating NASA's Earth and Heliophysics Scientific Research with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Algorithms.”
Mark Nelson was an invited participant of Dagstuhl Seminar 22251, held at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany from June 19 - June 24, 2022, on the subject of Human–Game AI Interaction.
David Dunleavy (MS CS '22) won an award in the Graduate Physical Sciences Workshop category at the Mathias Student Research Conference, for research supervised by Mark Nelson.
American Magazine wrote about the career of Vandi Verma (MS CS ’96), chief robotic operations engineer for the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover.
Kristina McChesney (MS CS '22) was part of the team that won first place in the Hack-for-a-Change hackathon, developing a website intended as a one-stop sustainability shop for small businesses such as DC-area restaurants.
The cybersecurity publication README covered current research by Nathalie Japkowicz and Zois Boukouvalas on building a statistics-based AI model to identify the spread of false information on social media platforms.
AU was awarded a $785k grant from the National Science Foundation to build a new Aquatic Resource Trade in Species (ARTIS) database, which will make seafood trade data more accessible to researchers through downloadable analysis and visualization packages. The project is a collaboration between Jessica Gephart in Environmental Science (PI) and Alex Godwin in Computer Science (co-PI).
AU was awarded a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build a state-of-the-art volumetric capture studio, which will enable research projects in virtual and augmented reality when it opens in Spring 2022. The project is led by Krzysztof Pietroszek, with Bei Xiao from Computer Science as a co-PI.
The department launched a new Cybersecurity Minor open to undergraduate students from any major.
Nathalie Japkowicz was honored by the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association with the 2021 Distinguished Service Award.
Leah Ding and computer science major Lexie Rista won a NASA DC Space Grant Consortium summer research award, which will support a project on trustworthy machine learning.
Computer science majors Archibald Latham and Lexie Rista, and data science masters student Huong Doan, won awards at the 2021 Robyn Rafferty Mathias Student Research Conference, for research supervised by Leah Ding. Latham and Rista's project used machine learning to uncover hidden information in images, while Doan's project was on evaluating data poisoning attacks on machine learning models.
Nathalie Japkowicz and Roberto Corizzo are co-organizing a workshop at the 2021 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), From Shallow to Deep: Overcoming Limited and Adverse Data.
CS masters student Rempee Kalia was highlighted as one of ten AU grad student changemakers.
Computer science majors Cael MacEachern and Matt Wilkinson won prizes in the Hack-for-a-Change hackathon hosted by the AU Center for Innovation, supported by Narendra Desirazu.
Dr. Tribikram Pradhan joined the department as a postdoctoral fellow. He will be contributing to the improvement of AU's lifelong learning anomaly detection system proposed in the context of the Lifelong Learning Machine (L2M) DARPA program.
Nathalie Japkowicz, Roberto Corizzo, and Michael Baron (Math/Stats) received a $210,000 award from DARPA, administered by SRI International, for their project entitled: "Analysis of Hierarchical Eigentasks and Change-Point Detection in SRI Lifelong Learning Machine". The award is for 10 months and was made in the context of Phase II of the Lifelong Learning Machine (L2M) DARPA program, following the successful completion of Phase I of the program by the AU team.
Roberto Corizzo joined us as Assistant Professor from January 2021. His research is on high-performance computing for big data analytics. He uses methods such as sensor data forecasting, time series classification, predictive modeling, and feature extraction for real-world applications in fields such as energy, cybersecurity, astrophysics, and social networks.
Leah Ding gave an invited talk, "Trust Preservation in the Age of AI", at the December 2020 Women in Hardware and Systems Security workshop.
Myles Russell successfully defended his master's thesis, entitled "Feature Ablation Analysis and Alternate Representations Using Machine Learning in Surgical Risk Assessment", supervised by Nathalie Japkowicz.
Five AU students did computer science internships with Freddie Mac over Summer 2020, and three, including CS senior Angélica Vega Aponte, were offered full-time jobs after graduation.
Kathleen Riley was interviewed by Zippia about current employment trends for computer science graduates, discussing how the Covid pandemic has impacted the job market, which nonetheless remains quite strong in this field.
Older News
Mark Nelson served as Artificial Intelligence track chair for the Foundations of Digital Games conference, coordinating peer review of papers, and hosting the track for the virtual conference on September 15–18, 2020.
Leah Ding joined us as Associate Professor from August 2020. She specializes in cybersecurity research, and has extensive experience doing cybersecurity R&D in industrial research labs. Before to coming to AU, she was Research Associate Principal at the R&D division of Accenture, and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Kathleen Riley joined us as Professorial Lecturer from August 2020. She specializes in computer science education, and has a number of years of experience teaching CS at various levels, most recently as lecturer at Bryn Mawr College. Before going into education, she had a career in the tech industry, with Hewlett-Packard and Silicon Graphics.
Professorial Lecturer Alan Ford retired after a 30-year career in the AU CS department. He started in 1990 as the department's lab manager, and joined the faculty in 2000. In the 20 years since, he's taught a variety of classes across the curriculum to several generations of students, and helped to sustain the department through many changes. You'll be missed, Alan!
CS alumna Aspen Russell '18 was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to pursue a PhD in Information Science at Cornell University.
Rising senior Anthony LoPrete won a Goldwater Scholarship, based in part on his undergraduate research work in collaboration with Art Shapiro.
CS senior Zhiqi Lu won the 2020 Scott A. Bass Outstanding Scholarship at the Undergraduate Level Award.
Mark Nelson received a $175k grant from the National Science Foundation to systematically characterize the performance and robustness of AI decision-making algorithms, using games as benchmark domains. The budget will support equipping a new research lab with servers for computational simulations, and 2 years of funding for a graduate research assistant.
CS senior Lily Donaldson was invited to present her research at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lighting R&D Workshop, January 28–30, 2020, in San Diego.
Nathalie Japkowicz and Alex Godwin, in collaboration with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and faculty members from the Math/Stat department, received a faculty Mellon Award to support the Spring 2020 project "Data Analysis, Visualization, and Knowledge Discovery for Early Detection of Child Victimization".
Mike Treanor received a faculty Mellon Award to support the Spring 2020 project "Towards Computational Tools to Promote Complex Social Reasoning and Reflection".
Alp Aziz joined the department as a full-time Lecturer, teaching sections of CSC-280 and CSC-281. Prior to coming to AU, he was a data scientist at the World Bank.
Recent PhD graduate Wenyan Bi, whose PhD was supervised by Bei Xiao, was offered a postdoctoral position in the Cognitive & Neural Computation Lab at Yale University.
Mark Nelson was invited to participate in the Dagstuhl Seminar on Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games, December 15–20, 2019, at Schloss Dagstuhl, Saarland, Germany.
Nathalie Japkowicz is giving an invited talk, "How to succeed as a STEM woman in Academia", at the Women-in-Computing Forum of the ACM/IEEE Symposium on Edge Computing. November 8, 2019, at the Hilton Crystal City, Arlington, VA.
Bei Xiao was invited to give a talk in a mini-symposium on material perception, and serve on a PhD dissertation committee, at the Department of Industrial Design, Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, October 27-30, 2019.
Mark Nelson took a trip to the San Francisco Bay Area to give invited research talks on an ongoing project to analyze design spaces of games by positioning individual games as points within a metric space. At Google, Mountain View, CA on October 25; and UC Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA on October 29, 2019.
Alex Godwin co-chaired the Workshop on Urban Data Visualization at IEEE VIS 2019. The conference ran from 20-25 October 2019 in Vancouver, Canada.
Stephen Casey was awarded U.S. Patent 10,455,426, "Windowing methods and systems for use in time-frequency analysis".
PhD student Wenyan Bi successfully defended her dissertation on October 2, 2019. The dissertation is entitled "Visual Inference of Material Properties of Deformable Objects in Dynamic Environments", and was supervised by Bei Xiao.
We're growing! The CS department is hiring three new full-time faculty. Two openings are tenure-track/tenured positions in cybersecurity and high-performance computing, and one is a term-faculty position focused on introductory programming courses. Applications will be reviewed starting in late October/November 2019 (see the linked job postings for details).
Alum Bruce Schneier discussed cybersecurity and the need for public policy technologists on the 80,000 Hours podcast.
AU hosted the National Student Leadership Conference on Cybersecurity in July 2019, coordinated by Kathryn Walters-Conte. A number of our students worked as TAs for the event, including Zhiqi Lu, James Cavallon, Anthony Baron, Sarah Jo Sleiman, and Divya Ramjee (thanks to Kristof Aldenderfer for coordinating TAs).
Bei Xiao is co-organizing the 2019 Computational Vision Summer School in Freudenstadt, Black Forest, Germany, June 30-July 7, 2019.
CS major Evan Jeing won a NASA AU STEM Student Summer Research Award to support his project "Visual and Haptic Perception of Object Material Properties in VR", during Summer 2019. He will be supervised by Bei Xiao.
Master's student Richard Moulton, co-supervised by Herna Viktor (University of Ottawa) and Nathalie Japkowicz (American University) won the 2019 Best Master's Thesis Award at the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC). The award will be presented at the Canadian AI Conference (AI 2019) in Kingston, ON, May 29-31.
Bei Xiao was awarded a National Eye Institute Early Career Scientist Travel Grant to attend the 2019 Vision Science Society annual meeting. May 17-22, 2019 in St. Pete Beach, Florida.
Nathalie Japkowicz and Michael Baron (Math/Stats) received an award of $208,598 from the Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) DARPA program for their proposal entitled "Lifelong Streaming Anomaly Detection". The award runs from March 2019 to July 2020.
Nathalie Japkowicz was invited as keynote speaker for the National Cancer Institute Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Radiation Oncology Research and Management. April 4, 2019, at the NCI Campus, Rockville, Maryland.
Mark Nelson was invited to participate in the Shonan Meeting "Artificial General Intelligence in Games." March 18 – 21, 2019, at Shonan Village Center, Kanagawa, Japan.
Mark Nelson was invited to give the keynote at the Symposium on Live Game Design, the concluding event of a 3-year applied research project funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, for which he also served as external scientific advisor. February 27, 2019, at the Volkshotel, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Nathalie Japkowicz was invited to give a talk at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) weekly seminar for Congressional staffers on current trends in machine learning capabilities, research, and technologies. February 21, 2019, at UPenn's Biden Center.
Arthur Shapiro was selected to receive a 2019 Outstanding Faculty Mentorship in Undergraduate Research award from AU, based on nominations submitted by his students.
Chun-Hsi Huang received an award of $219,006 from the National Science Foundation for the 2018-2019 Program Director in the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA).
Arthur Shapiro won first place in the 10th Visual Illusion and Auditory Illusion Contest in Japan, for his illusion "Helix Rotation: A New Twist on Pulfrich and Hess."
Recent Grants
Bei Xiao was awarded $420,000 from the NIH/National Eye Institute, to support the project "Learning diagnostic latent representations for human material perception: common mechanisms and individual variability". March 2023
Leah Ding was awarded $160,000 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for her project “Accelerating NASA's Earth and Heliophysics Scientific Research with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Algorithms.” September 2022
Jessica Gephart (PI, environmental science) and Alex Godwin (co-PI, computer science) were awarded $785k from the National Science Foundation to build an Aquatic Resource Trade in Species (ARTIS) database, which will make seafood trade data more accessible to researchers through analysis and visualization packages. January 2022
AU was awarded $1 million from the National Science Foundation to build a state-of-the-art volumetric capture studio, which will enable research projects in virtual and augmented reality. The project is led by Krzysztof Pietroszek (School of Communication), with Bei Xiao (Computer Science) as co-PI. October 2021
Nathalie Japkowicz and Roberto Corizzo, along with Michael Baron from Math/Stats, received a $210,000 award from DARPA, administered by SRI International, for their project entitled: "Analysis of Hierarchical Eigentasks and Change-Point Detection in SRI Lifelong Learning Machine". The award is part of Phase II of the Lifelong Learning Machine (L2M) program. February 2021
Mark Nelson was awarded $174,951 from the National Science Foundation to systematically characterize the performance and robustness of AI decision-making algorithms, using games as benchmark domains. April 2020
Events
Fall 2023 Events
CS Research Seminar double feature:
Prediction and planning of cloud resource usage
September 6, 12:45-2:15pm | DMTI 117
Guest speakers Piotr Nawrocki and Bartlomiej Sniezynski (AGH University, Poland) will be presenting their research on applying machine learning to real-world industrial problems, in particular to predict and optimize cloud resource usage. Pizza will be served.
Computer Science Welcome Party
September 13, 12:30-2:15pm | DMTI 117
All computer science students are invited to a welcome party to start off the year! Pizza and refreshments will be provided, and the department's professors will give an overview of what they research and teach, along with opportunities for students to get involved in department research and other activities.
