Category Archives: Achievements and Awards

Alex Larkin, CS undergrad, achieves a national NCL ranking

FB_IMG_1525454724440Alex Larkin. Computer Science undergrad. Outstanding achievement.

Alex placed 36th out of 3,350 students/players in the 2018 National Cyber League (NCL) cyber competition!  CS Assistant Professor, Bo Chen, is the faculty coach.

The NCL was founded in May 2011 to provide an ongoing virtual training ground for collegiate students to develop, practice, and validate their cybersecurity skills. It is a defensive and offensive puzzle-based, capture-the-flag style cybersecurity competition. Its virtual training ground helps high school and college students prepare and test themselves against cybersecurity challenges that they will likely face in the workforce. All participants play the games simultaneously during Preseason, Regular Season and Postseason.

Way to go Alex!

 

Undergraduate Programming Competition Win

18th Annual NMU Invitational Programming Contest Logo with 95 Students, 6 Schools, 34 TeamsComputer science undergraduate students received top honors at the 19th Annual Northern Michigan University Invitational Programming Contest held March 24, 2018. Tony Duda, Justin Evankovich, and Nicholas Muggio took first place; Michael Lay, Parker Russcher, and Marcus Stojcevich took second. Michigan Tech earned the highest program count and No. 1 ranking.

Congratulations!

“We are proud of our students for representing Husky values of possibility and tenacity.” —Min Song, Chair, Computer Science

Zhenlin Wang receives an REU supplement to his NSF award

Zhenlin Wang received an REU supplement of $15,876 to his his NSF award titled 28“CSR:Small: Effective Sampling-Based Miss Ratio Curves: Theory and Practice”. The supplement will support two undergraduate students for one year, offering research experiences in cache modeling for modern multi-core processors and data center key-value stores.

Congratulations Zhenlin!

 

Research Excellence Fund (REF) Award Announced

Keith VirtanenThe Vice President for Research Office announced the 2018 Research Excellence Fund (REF) awards and thanked the volunteer review committees, as well as the deans and department chairs, for their time spent on this important internal research award process.

Keith has received a Research Excellence Fund (REF) seed grant from Michigan Tech for his project entitled “Automatic Speech Recognition using Deep Neural Networks”. This one-year project has a budget of $45,421. This project will create a state-of-the-art speech recognition engine based on deep neural networks. The recognizer will be used to investigate speech-based interactive systems for instrumented physical environments (e.g. cars) and person-centric devices (e.g. augmented reality smartglasses). The recognizer will also be used to investigate the input of Java source code by voice.

Congratulations Keith!

 

 

 

Keith Vertanen Receives NSF CAREER Award

Keith VirtanenKeith Vertanen(HCC), has been award a 2018 NSF CAREER Award for his project entitled, “Technology Assisted Conversations”. This 5-year award has a total budget of $538,799.

In this project, Keith will create new real-time communication solutions for people who face speaking challenges, including those with physical or cognitive disabilities.The primary goal of this project is to develop technology that improves upon the Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices currently available to help people speak faster and more fluidly.

Keith and his team will expand resources for research into conversational interactive systems, and will create a probabilistic text entry toolkit, AAC user interfaces, and an augmented reality conversation assistant.

https://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2018/may/keith-vertanen-wins-career-award.html

Computer Science Faculty Awarded ICC Seed Grant

Computer Science faculty members Keith Vertanen, Scott Kuhl, and Myounghoon “Philart” Jeon, were recently awarded the 2018 Paul Williams Seed Grant from the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC). The grant will give the researchers the opportunity to develop a research program that could be eligible and attractive for long-term and higher-level funding from external grants and contracts.

The projectCS_Fac_ICC_SeedGrant entitled, “Sensing and Feedback for On-Body Input,” will investigate how to appropriate everyday surfaces, including one’s own body, as an input device for interactive systems. In a series of user studies, they will compare the performance of the on-body sensing approach with vision-based hand tracking.

 

Caden Sumner and HIDE team develop online learning center scheduling program

Problem: Scheduling learning center appointments. Solution: Apply education; develop online scheduling program.

Maybe you’ve heard the claim that Michigan Technological University students are crazy smart. In case you needed proof, meet Caden Sumner, a third-year who is double majoring in computer science and psychology. He’s also a coach at the Michigan Tech Multiliteracies Center (MTMC) and leader of the Human Interface Design Enterprise (HIDE) programming team that developed Timeslot.

Timeslot enables students to schedule appointments in campus learning centers from their mobile devices and computers, instead of having to sign up in person. A combination of factors inspired Sumner to develop the program: his interest in psychology, his first (intimidating) impression in a learning center, his experiences as a coach in the MTMC, and encouragement from his boss and MTMC Assistant Director Bill De Herder.

Sumner says, “We were using a software that was really difficult to use. It was hard to figure out how to schedule appointments. Students didn’t like it, coaches hated it. My boss mentioned ‘you should do something about that’ at about the end of last (academic) year. I said absolutely, I’ll give that a go.”

Sumner and his fellow HIDE teammates started working on Timeslot at the start of the fall 2017 semester. Though they didn’t keep track of the hours they put into development, Sumner says it was “a lot.”

Creatsumne-profile-personneling His Future

Timeslot went live for the MTMC the first week of spring 2018 classes. The HIDE team is taking a soft rollout approach so as to catch and fix all program bugs and prevent a huge scheduling snafu. The math lab will implement the software in the fall, and plans for the biology lab are in the works. Sumner and his team hope that in time all 17 University learning centers will adopt the system.

Congrats!

Please see the full story from Tech Today here.

 

 

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Graduate Student Colloquium features two CS students

Two of the Computer Science graduate students attended the Graduate Research Colloquium hosted by the GSG this week.  This is MTU’s largest graduate research showcase and competition with grad students presenting more than 60 research papers.  See the article in Michigan Tech Today http://gsg.mtu.edu/grc/.

“Improving Caching for Web Applications” by Daniel Byrne

Abstract:  Web applications employ caches to store the data that is most commonly accessed. The cache improves the application’s performance by reducing the time it takes to fetch a piece of data from the application’s database. Since the cache typically resides in a limited amount system memory, maximizing the memory utilization is key to delivering the best performance possible. In addition, application data access patterns change over time, so the system should be adaptive in its memory allocation policy as opposed to current staticDaniel Bryne allocations.In this work, we address both multi-tennancy (where a single cache is used for multiple applications) and dynamic workloads (changing access patterns) using a sharing model that relates the cache size to the application miss-rate, know as a miss-ratio curve. Intuitively, the larger the cache, the less likely the system will need to fetch the data from the database. Our efficient, online construction of the miss-ratio curve allows for us to determine the optimal memory allocation given the available system memory, while adapting to changing data access patterns. We show that our model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art sharing model in terms of overall cache hit-rate and does so at a lower time cost.

 

“Maximizing Coverage in VANETs” by Ali Jalooli

The sAli Jalooliuccess of vehicular networks is highly dependent on the coverage of message, which refers to the Euclidean spatial distance that a message once initiated by a given mobile node (i.e., source vehicle) can reach within time t. We studied the crucial problem of optimal utilization of roadside units (RSUs) in 2-D environments, and proposed a greedy algorithm, which by taking the V2V communication into consideration, finds the optimal locations for RSUs deployment to achieve the maximum message coverage.

 

 

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CS Students develop new healthy eating app

Congratulations to Kyle Ludwig and CS graduate student Chetan Chaurasiya on creating a new app to help healthy eating habits.

A locally developed app which tracks eating habits and recommends healthy meals will soon be hitting the market.  Please read the full story from the Daily Mining Gazette here http://www.mininggazette.com/news/2018/01/new-eating-app-developed-by-tech-student-graduate/

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