Computer Science & Software Engineering winter 2024

CSSE News

Computer Science & Software Engineering • Cal Poly College of Engineering • Winter 2024

2D to 3D Computer science professor paves way to a more inclusive future for creators of virtual reality content

CSSE News MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR

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s we start another quarter, I am thrilled to share some remarkable stories that highlight the incredible work taking place within our department.

The stories showcase the dedication and innovation of our students and professors, emphasizing our commitment to excellence in computer science and software engineering.

We kick off our newsletter by highlighting a discussion with Professors Zoë Wood and Ayaan Kazerouni. They played pivotal roles in implementing new curriculum aimed at illustrating how computer science can influence communities. The goal is to transform the early curriculum experience for historically marginalized students in computing, fostering a sense of belonging.

Professor Jonathan Ventura has been at the forefront of exploring approaches to empower a broader audience in creating immersive virtual reality realms. Recognizing the potential for deeper connections through such experiences, his work exemplifies our department’s commitment to pushing boundaries and engaging with cutting-edge technologies.

Beyond showing our technical prowess, our department is dedicated to positively affecting communities. Professor Alex Dekhtyar helped launch the RE Cares initiative that has become an integral part of the premier requirements engineering conference.

Through RE Cares, students and professors collaborate with local philanthropic or nonprofit groups, leveraging the talent gathered at the conference to address their software needs.

Professor Theresa Migler and her students have recognized the importance of mental health in STEM fields, focusing their research on the effect of social networks. They are exploring how positive social experiences can significantly help students and enhance their overall wellness — an initiative that underscores our commitment to holistic education.

Elaine Lau, a computer science master’s graduate, has conducted

groundbreaking research on the experience of visually impaired individuals with browser security warnings. Her work sets up best practices for this type of research and supplies valuable suggestions to improve online safety for this population. Elaine’s dedication exemplifies the real-world impact our students can have through their research.

Our newsletter concludes with a tribute to computer engineering Professor Joseph Callenes-Sloan who had a profound effect on students and faculty across the entire college.

These stories reflect the passion, diversity and impactful contributions of our department. I am immensely proud of the accomplishments of our students and professors, and I look forward to seeing continued growth and success in the quarters ahead.

Your support plays a crucial role in advancing our department’s mission of fostering innovation, pursuing meaningful research and providing exceptional educational experiences.

To donate, please visit the computer science and software engineering donation page HERE. Thank you for being a vital part of our story.

Aaron Keen

Department Chair Computer Science & Software Engineering

INSIDE 3

NSF grant helps Cal Poly implement culturally responsive computing curriculum

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CSSE students and faculty research mental health trends in STEM communities

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Computer science professor paves way to a more inclusive future

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Computer science grad student studies safe browsing for the visually impaired

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CSSE professor co-founds initiative to help engineering conferences

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In memoriam: Associate Professor Joseph Callenes-Sloan

COVER — Professor Jonathan Ventura and computer science student Nam Nguyen test a 3D video produced with a 2D panoramic image from a public dataset. See story on Page 4. (Photo: Dennis Steers | College of Engineering)

NSF Grant Helps Cal Poly Implement Culturally Responsive Computing Curriculum

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he National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded funding to six institutions from the California State University (CSU) system to help transform the early curriculum experience of historically marginalized students in computing.

The alliance brings together Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, CSU Dominguez Hills, CSU Fullerton, CSU Los Angeles, Cal Poly Pomona and San Francisco State University.

These universities have identified that more than 34% of computing students from underrepresented groups drop out of their majors, while computing students from dominant groups leave at a rate of 21.5%.

Because the largest percentage of students from underrepresented groups drop out of their computer science major in the first two years, the goal is for professors to use the curriculum early in their courses to show students how computer science can influence and impact communities.

Cal Poly’s Zoë Wood, Ayaan Kazerouni and Jane Lehr spearheaded the implementation of the new curriculum. We spoke with Wood and Kazerouni about their work to date.

Cal Poly CSSE Professor Ayaan Kazerouni and College of Engineering Associate Dean Zoë Wood have led the implementation of a new Culturally Responsive Computing curriculum.

Will you describe your plans for a culturally responsive computing curriculum?

We have developed a new curriculum that has been taught in Computer Science 123 and 203, with the largest impact in the new version of Computer Science 123: Community Action Computing, first taught in fall 2022. We take a data-centric approach to introductory programming, meaning that nearly all assignments involve analyzing real-world datasets. For example, for the assignment students are currently working on, they are learning about variables and datatypes by studying data about Californians’ access to K-12 computer science education. They are learning that California lags quite far behind other states in terms of the percentage of its schools that offer any computer science courses, and there are sizeable inequities in California computer science enrollments along the lines of race and gender.

How did the idea of pushing for a culturally responsive computing curriculum start?

Cal Poly and the other California State Universities have identified an equity gap in retention rates (the percentage of incoming computer science majors who end up staying in the major). By “equity gap,” we mean that Hispanic/Latino students are leaving the computer science major at higher rates (17.8%) than white or Asian students (7.9%). Additionally, prior research suggests that students from groups that are underrepresented in computing, such as women and people of color, are more likely to be engaged by coursework that focuses on societal contexts. Our hope is that by adjusting our introductory courses so that the computing topics are grounded in real-world contexts, we might increase students’ intentions to persist in the computer science majors.

What are some of the communal-oriented socially responsible computing projects planned?

In the Computer Science 123 course at Cal Poly, students are using the data-centric assignments to learn about things like computer science education access, food access, SAT scores and housing. The course culminates with a final project where students will choose their own contexts and datasets with input from the instructor. That’s really where the students’ own interests can be incorporated into their projects. For example, if a student is interested in exploring data related to fatal police shootings, they can do so and present their findings to the rest of the class.

Additionally, we have also acquired some datasets with permission from local nonprofit organizations like EcoSLO and the Cal Poly Cat Program. This information helps students who are interested in exploring topics more related to the local SLO context.

What are the short-term and long-term goals of implementing this new curriculum and training faculty members to teach socially responsible computing?

Our short-term goals are to continue to teach the curricula and to collect data. The faculty learning community will continue throughout the grant period, and we welcome new faculty each fall and spring. We are working with an external evaluator who helps us collect data pertaining to students’ sense of belonging in computer science and their intention to take more computer science courses in the future. We plan to compare the data collected this year with the baseline data we collected last year. In the long term, we hope to see improvements in retention rates of Hispanic/Latino students and, in general, to continue to broaden the participation in computing from any students from historically underserved populations. n csc.calpoly.edu | 3

CSSE News Cover Story

Creating VR Content:

Professor Jonathan Ventura and computer science students Nam Nguyen and Edward Du test out a 3D video produced with a 2D panoramic image from a public dataset.

Computer science professor paves the way to a more inclusive future “It’s exciting to feel like we’re creating the future. And it’s motivating to work on something so cutting-edge and impactful.”

Jonathan Ventura CSSE professor

by Emily Slater

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omputer science Professor Jonathan Ventura spent time during the COVID-19 pandemic much like the rest of us – connecting to people and places over a screen.

His screen time differed from most of us, though, as he explored approaches to empower a broader audience to create immersive virtual reality realms, recognizing that such an endeavor can foster deeper connections through shared experiences.

“The equipment to make VR content costs tens of thousands of dollars,” Ventura said. “I

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started exploring how everyday people could make and share immersive content in an accessible way. I wondered, ‘Can we make VR content with our phones?’”

Turns out the answer is more complicated than one might think, but with a new, pandemic-sharpened focus on virtual reality along with grant funding, Ventura is getting closer to his vision.

“It’s exciting to feel like we’re creating the future,” said Ventura, strapping on a VR headset in preparation for a demonstration of one of his projects. “And it’s motivating to work on something so cutting-edge and impactful.”

Carving Out Space During his childhood on the Central Coast, Ventura was captivated by computer programming – an interest bolstered by his dad who ran a local software company.

He graduated from Arroyo Grande High School, then studied computer science at UC Santa Barbara where his path became clear after a chance conversation with his college roommate.

Ventura’s roommate was taking a course on computer vision – a field within computer science and software engineering that focuses on enabling computers to interpret and understand visual information from the world, just as humans do with their eyes – and happened to mention it during a dialogue.

“I heard about the course and thought, ‘I have to know about this!’” Ventura recalled with a laugh.

He enrolled in the class, got hooked and centered his graduate research around computer vision.

Ventura brought his expertise to Cal Poly in 2018, joining the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department and connecting with the students on topics they are passionate about: virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

The return to campus after COVID lockdowns came with a successful entry into the National Science Foundation’s Early Career Development Program and five-year grant that is funding Ventura’s work to create VR experiences from images and video.

“I’m trying to carve out my own space with technology that has made incredible advancements,” he said.

employed machine learning to infer what would be around that corner, filling in the visual gaps.

Ventura published a paper on the project in 2022 and is working on the next iteration with computer science master’s student Shivam Asija to improve the clarity of the scene.

“With virtual reality, your baseline is the 3D model, then you add other elements,” said Asija, who connected with Ventura last year over their shared interest in computer vision. “The goal is to get an immersive environment.”

Resolution is the key, according to Ventura who said visual elements that are fuzzy or blurry break the feeling of immersion.

The challenge is that VR headsets can only store so much data, so Asija and Ventura are testing the most efficient, accurate method for rendering high-resolution VR graphics.

Asija sees the value of VR particularly in education and only wishes the technology had been farther along when he was enrolled in an electrical engineering lab during distance learning due to COVID. “It would have been pretty great to participate in a VR lab with the oscilloscopes and other equipment,” he said with a grin.

aims to instruct a model to recover a highdynamic range reconstruction, ensuring that details in both bright and dim areas are preserved.

“The ultimate goal is that the model learns the settings so that you get a consistent 3D reconstruction regardless of the input,” he said.

Aiding Ventura is Nam Nguyen, a computer science master’s student with an interest in deep learning – a subset of machine learning that uses multi-layered neural networks to process and analyze data.

Nguyen and Ventura are searching for the best model that can process data from 2D images for reliable 3D reconstruction.

Nguyen believes such research is critical in the pursuit of enabling more people to create VR content.

“Part of the reason I’m excited about this project and VR in general is that it gives us the ability to connect people through experience,” he said.

With his family still in Vietnam, where he grew up, he shared a personal example: “I would love for my mom in Vietnam to share the experience I had of seeing Yosemite.” n

Ventura is also spearheading a project focused on 3D image reconstruction, which is crucial for creating immersive environments that are convincing and engaging.

Similar to how a digital camera adapts to changing lighting conditions, Ventura

Computer science students Edward Du and Nam Nguyen and Professor Jonathan Ventura are researching how to create 3D virtual reality videos. Du, Nguyen and Shivam Asija are a few of the students aiding Ventura in his efforts.

Sharing Virtual Experiences Ventura works with students in a small lab in Building 52, developing virtual reality experiences using readily available equipment accessible to the public.

For the project he calls PanoSynthVR, Ventura and a team of students took 2D panoramic image from a public dataset, then fed the data into a model to produce a 3D rendering.

“Panoramic images also can be captured with a consumer VR camera or smartphone,” he added.

The panorama offers a circular perspective but doesn’t allow the viewer to see around the corner of a building, for example, so Ventura and his students

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CSSE News

Caring Computers Through

RE Cares participants make a heart formation in Banff, Canada, during the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference in 2018. The customers from Mutual Aid Alberta stand in the middle of the heart, while RE Cares creators Jane Hayes and Alex Dekhtyar are at the bottom tip and holding a small sign, bottom right, respectively.

Global initiative co-founded

by Professor Alex Dekhtyar uses requirements engineering to help communities prosper

by Emily Slater

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nternational engineering conferences have the power to bring together top researchers, scientists, students and educators in one place, creating a hub of shared knowledge and expertise.

What better opportunity to harness such power for good?

Two professors who specialize in software engineering saw the potential to leave an imprint on communities hosting conferences, spearheading an initiative – Requirements Engineering (RE) Cares – that has become an integral part of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ events in the field.

Requirements engineering involves defining and documenting what a system needs to do, ensuring everyone understands its goals.

“We wanted to find organizations or nonprofits at the site of the conference who needed software but didn’t have the means,” said computer science Professor Alex Dekhtyar who co-founded RE Cares in 2018.

“Our goal was to jump-start the development process, then hand the

Help Send Students to a Conference stakeholders something they could give to their team of developers.”

For five years, RE Cares has aided communities near and far – from Jeju Island, South Korea, to South Bend, Indiana – as participants apply their skills to show they care and to do good.

“RE Cares is one of the opportunities we can offer to our students who want to do something useful with computing,” Dekhtyar said. “Students are drawn to those projects where they can develop software with their heart.”

Launching RE Cares

Computer science Professor Alex Dekhtyar is seeking donor support to send Cal Poly students to the 2024 IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference at Reykjavik University in Iceland.

“Being at a conference for a week is incredibly powerful for our students,” he said, adding their involvement in RE Cares makes them an integral part of the event.

Cal Poly has yet to send a group to the conference, which has mainly been a virtual event since COVID. Now that the conferences are in person again, Dekhtyar sees the perfect opportunity for his students.

“I really like these types of experiences for our students,” he said. “To witness it is pure joy.”

To help students attend, visit HERE and include “2024 RE conference” in the special requests section.

The drivers behind RE Cares are Dekhtyar and computer science Professor Jane Hayes from the University of Kentucky who met in 2001 while working at the campus in Lexington, bonding over software development and the desire to make a difference.

Years later, Hayes visited Dekhtyar in San Luis Obispo, and the two had a lengthy conversation about the annual IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference and how it could benefit the host site.

“There is a whole group of international experts who come to the locale of a conference, then they are just gone,” said Hayes, likening the effect to a circus that leaves town as if it was never there.

The professors weren’t content to leave without a trace, so they hatched a plan: A team of educators and students would work with a philanthropic or nonprofit group to discuss their software needs prior to collaborating at the conference where they would pinpoint early features for a prototype.

RE Cares was launched in 2018 when conference attendees gathered in Banff, Canada, under a blanket of smoke from wildfires in British Columbia. Fittingly, RE Cares’ first client was Mutual Aid Alberta – a nonprofit group that trains first responders and needed a mobile app for internal communications in a crisis.

By the end of the conference, the RE Cares team helped Mutual Aid Alberta define the app’s requirements for which students later developed a prototype that was delivered in open source.

“This was a useful exercise for the organization as it helped them understand what they wanted,” Dekhtyar said. “The prototype guided the future development effort.”

In 2019, RE Cares helped an office of development on Jeju Island, South Korea, decide the requirements for an app that would alert a tourist with mobility challenges when an accessible bus reached a particular site on the island.

“Our goal was to engage people at the conference and help someone at that location jump-start a project that wouldn’t cost them money,” Dekhtyar said.

For Hayes, she had found the answer to the question she’d long asked herself: “How can we do better and how can we give back?”

Cal Poly Students Join the Effort In 2020, computer science students from the Cal Poly CS + Social Good club joined the RE Cares effort to set parameters for an app that would enable non-tech-savvy small business owners in Zurich,

Switzerland, learn basic computer technology. The 2020 conference shifted to a virtual format due to COVID-19, but the project was still completed.

The CS + Social Good club continued its involvement as RE Cares partnered with Goodwill Industries in South Bend, Indiana, near Notre Dame – the host site of the hybrid conference in 2021. Beyond running thrift stores, the nonprofit actively engages in community outreach that includes efforts to counter gun violence and gang activity in cities such as South Bend.

Case workers wanted a better system for documenting the addresses, court orders and interactions with residents, so they turned to RE Cares, ultimately connecting with Kenny Lau, technical lead for the RE Cares team.

Lau, a computer science master’s student, spent the months leading up to the conference in discussions with Goodwill about the notetaking app.

“This was my first time doing requirements engineering and it was a meaningful experience,” said Lau, adding he gained skills working with clients and professors from around the world.

Lau spent the next year building out the project with other computer science students, including Andrew Eller.

“Making a meaningful impact for social good was the main drive for me,” said Eller, who signed on as a programmer for his senior project. “With our skills in software development, we can make a larger impact on a broader audience.”

Lau agreed, adding, “It can be easy to get caught up in the technology and lose sight of the impact on users, but we can affect people for good.”

Eller graduated in December 2022, and Lau handed off the product soon after. Hayes highlighted the Cal Poly students’ impressive work to a new customer during the most recent conference in Hannover, Germany.

She and Dekhtyar will continue their work with RE Cares, with the hope that more conferences adopt their model.

“There are dozens of engineering conferences and there is no reason each one of them couldn’t have a Cares component,” she said.

Dekhtyar added, “Students want their computer work to matter, and we can give them that opportunity.”n

“Making a meaningful impact for social good was the main drive for me. With our skills in software development, we can make a larger impact on a broader audience.”

Andrew Eller | CSSE student

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CSSE News

Putting Focus on Mental Health

Professor Theresa Migler, center, goes over a lesson in algorithms with computer science students Mio Nakagawa and Sophie Russ.

Computer science students and faculty research mental health trends in STEM communities

by Taylor Villanueva

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s college students begin their learning experience in an environment different from anything they had previously known, many face challenges that affect them throughout their college careers.

While some of these challenges are short term, others can negatively impact students’ mental health and potentially leave long-lasting effects. One professor and a group of students are hoping to change that.

There was a consensus among computer science Assistant Professor Theresa Migler’s students that there should be a greater 8 | COMPUTER SCIENCE & SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

focus on mental health in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.

“My students have been researching the impact of social networks on mental health,” Migler said.

The social networks in these studies are defined by the groups of people an individual regularly spends time with. The research revolves around how positive social experiences can benefit students and boost their mental health.

Three of the mental health topics Migler’s students found the most interesting were that people with happy friends tend to be

happier themselves; obesity spreads through social networks; and cancer survivors with strong social networks generally have better recovery outcomes.

“These studies prompted the students to question the state of the social network among students in the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department,” Migler said.

The project’s student lead Rachel Izenson (computer science) wanted to further explore why some students felt a social disconnect from their peers.

“I became interested in tackling mental health in the CSSE Department because I feel like mental health can be overlooked and misrepresented,” she said. “As my group-mates and I began discussing project ideas, we all bonded over the room for growth in our department regarding helping students feel like they belong.”

Izenson and her classmates hoped their research would allow for better resources and approaches to mental health in the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department that would appropriately target student needs.

“I think there are a lot of resources available to students in the College of Engineering, but throughout my college experience I wasn’t aware of them to their fullest extent,” she said. “I mainly heard about resources from friends or group chats rather than being presented with them at the beginning of the year or quarter.”

Previous groups of students from the same department have also conducted research on the state of students’ mental health.

“In a study conducted in 2020 and again in 2022 with computer science Professor Zoë Wood, Associate Professor Bruce DeBruhl and computer science and software engineering students, it was found that many students in the CSSE Department didn’t feel like they belonged,” Migler said.

Computer science graduate student Kylan Stewart researched the topic during her time at Cal Poly, surveying and studying students’ sense of belonging over two years.

Her work is documented in her thesis, “An Equity-Minded Assessment of Belonging Among Computing Students at Cal Poly,” and in the conference paper of the same name.

Stewart’s work was continued by student Jenisa Nguyen (computer science), who documented a third year of survey data in her senior project, “Sense of Belonging: Analysis of Computing Students at Cal Poly through the Lens of Virtual Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Utilizing NLP.” To continue studying the patterns of mental health disparity among STEM students and further the research conducted by her peers, Izenson and her group-mates looked for the root of the

problem and possible solutions.

“We believe the connectedness of students has an impact on their overall health and academic success,” she explained. “From our research group’s experience, we felt that we performed better academically when we had friends in our classes.”

Creating small changes to improve students’ quality of life can greatly impact their mental health over time and create a better learning and working environment, something important across all fields of study.

“While our research will primarily focus on the social network within the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department, we believe our survey and analysis can be used within other departments at Cal Poly to understand the social networks and the connectedness of their students,” Izenson said. “We are excited to begin gathering data and generating the social networks of students.”n

Professor Theresa Migler, center, has fun going over a lesson in algorithms with computer science students.

“I became interested in tackling mental health in the CSSE Department because I feel like mental health can be overlooked and misrepresented. As my group-mates and I began discussing project ideas, we all bonded over the room for growth in our department regarding helping students feel like they belong.”

Rachel Izenson | CSSE student

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CSSE News

Safe Browsing For the Visually Impaired Computer science master’s student Elain Lau presents study at USENIX Security Symposium

by Taylor Villanueva

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“I realized that having good vision to be able to view and heed warnings is a privilege that not everyone has, and it’s important to ensure that browser warnings can be effective for all populations.”

— Elaine Lau | CSSE master’s graduate

CSSE master’s graduate Elaine Lau on stage at the USENIX Security Symposium in Anaheim, California.

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hile updates in computer security have made it generally easier for the everyday user to avoid malware or malicious websites, not everyone is safe from technological bugs or cyber attacks.

Studies have shown that visually impaired people may have a harder time avoiding web viruses because prevention tools aren’t very successful in catching visual cues.

Computer science master’s graduate Elaine Lau decided to delve into the discrepancy.

She presented her research “A Research Framework and Initial Study of Browser Security for the Visually Impaired” alongside faculty member Zachary Peterson at the USENIX Security Symposium in Anaheim, California.

Their work explores how the visually impaired experience browser security warnings, establishes best practices in conducting this type of research and makes suggestions on how to improve online safety for this population.

“I was interested in the intersection of privacy and security with UX research and accessibility,” Lau explained. “When I began thinking about topics to research for my master’s thesis, I discovered that while there was some research related to improving web security for the visually impaired, there were virtually no studies related to browser security warnings with this population.”

Lau decided to focus on this topic with the hopes of finding solutions to make web use more accessible.

“I realized that having good vision to be able to view and heed warnings is a privilege that not everyone has, and it’s important to ensure that browser warnings can be effective for all populations,” she concluded.

Lau interviewed visually impaired people as part of her research to determine their pain points when it came to browser warnings.

“Browser security warnings - including SSL, malware and phishing warnings - use visual elements such as iconography, text size, color and images

to deter users from moving on to the potentially unsafe websites and bring users’ attention to the safer choice of returning to the previous page or another safe website,” Lau explained.

These visual techniques aren’t as effective for visually impaired users.

Screen readers or other assistive technology don’t catch the virus warnings as successfully as the human eye.

“Screen readers convert text to audio, and it’s not clear whether the aural representation of the browser warning has a similar effectiveness for ensuring warning compliance,” Lau said.

The master’s student used feedback from the interview subjects to determine how to improve browser security for that demographic and was able to present her findings at the USENIX Security Symposium.

“Forums like the USENIX Security Symposium are accepting more research papers in the realm of accessibility and inclusivity,” she said. “For those of us who are sighted, we see warnings everywhere, such as octagonal stop signs or hazard lights on the road or even stickers on products alerting us to dangerous uses. There are similar warnings to keep us from danger on the web, too.”

Lau, who is now working as a software engineer at TriMet, shares her gratitude for her master’s thesis committee members, Dr. Franz Kurfess and Dr. Bruce DeBruhl, and her master’s thesis advisor, Dr. Zachary Peterson.

“While Cal Poly SLO is not typically considered to be a research-heavy institution, I am incredibly proud to have had my education here learning from the wonderful Computer Science Department faculty who are second to none,” she shared.

Lau encourages undergraduate students considering research opportunities to pursue their interests while at Cal Poly, noting the abundance of faculty members ready and eager to help guide the way. n To learn more about Lau’s research findings, click HERE.

In Memoriam

Joseph Augustyn Callenes-Sloan Sept. 2, 1983 - Dec. 27, 2023

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omputer engineering Associate Professor Joseph Callenes-Sloan died of heart disease on Dec. 27 while on sabbatical at his family home in Alexandria, Virginia. He was 40.

In the lecture hall, Callenes-Sloan was known for his unwavering dedication to his students. He had a unique ability to make the most complex concepts accessible, fostering an environment where curiosity flourished. His students used to send him notes attributing their understanding of computer engineering to his patient guidance and thanking him for encouraging them to dream bigger and strive for excellence.

His passion for teaching did not come from his involvement as an instructor but from his empathy based on his extensive experience as a student.

He graduated from Illinois Math and Science Academy, Iowa State University and the Joseph Callenes-Sloan University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign, earning a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering.

Beyond the classroom, Callenes-Sloan pioneered research, contributing groundbreaking advancements to the field. Deeply moved by the aftermath of Hurricane Fiona, he worked eagerly to search for smart techniques that could quickly restore electricity in devastated communities. He received the best paper award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference in Washington, D.C., in 2019.

His innovative research in wildfire mitigation led to a joint patent for a wildfire detection invention that integrates smart sensors into electric power transmission infrastructure to protect lives and natural landscapes. He championed

“Joseph was a wonderful colleague and I feel very lucky to have had the chance to work with him as a fellow professor of computer engineering for the past six years at Cal Poly. He had a genuinely kind disposition and worked hard to give his students a positive and enriching university experience. I will remember Joseph for his dedication, compassion and intellectual curiosity and will miss his kind and thoughtful presence.”

“I extend my deepest condolences on the passing of Professor Joseph Callenes-Sloan. His impact on my academic journey was profound, and the knowledge he shared will forever resonate in my pursuits. May his legacy continue to inspire and guide students, and may he rest in eternal peace.”

Giovanni Angel | electrical engineering, class of 2023

a sustainable future with unwavering dedication, and his contributions will undoubtedly shape the landscape of computer engineering for years to come.

Callenes-Sloan always mentored his students, involving them in research papers and summer projects, nurturing their talents and igniting a passion for meaningful work.

He believed in empowering the next generation, instilling a sense of responsibility and the joy of innovation. What truly set him apart, however, was his kindness and compassion for his students. He took the time to listen, understand and offer guidance, creating a sense of community that extended far beyond the university’s walls.

Callenes-Sloan moved to San Luis Obispo in 2017 knowing no one in the area, but up to his last day, he quickly became a valuable advocate and volunteer for the area. He offered his help in emergency housing facilities and other social justice organizations to give back to his community, and he was brilliant at forming a family out of whoever was around.

He was a passionate soccer player, runner, traveler and food lover. He loved the Peruvian and U.S. national soccer teams, as he had special connections to Peru where he spent several summers with family and friends. He recently competed in the Army Ten-Miler and the Alexandria Turkey Trot and enjoyed nature activities that included stargazing, hiking and camping, with Yosemite National Park being one of his favorite destinations. He was always enthusiastic about upcoming journeys, whether they were related to his professional endeavors or personal experiences.

Over the last decade, he developed a fondness for chess, theater, opera, poetry and history – passions that he shared with his wife. He was a selfless and devoted husband, an esteemed colleague, a beloved friend and a loving son and brother. He infused every situation with joy and a playful sense of humor. He will be greatly missed.

Callenes-Sloan is survived by his wife, Mercedez Callenes, parents Patrick Sloan and Donna Augustyn-Sloan, and siblings Christopher and Sara Marie. n

Bridget Benson | associate dean and computer engineering professor

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SURP+ Symposium CSSE students display Summer Undergraduate Research Program projects in annual event Computer science and entrepreneurship student Kylene Landenberger talks about her project, “Ethics and Social Justice for All in Data Science,” with Chris Lupo, director of The Noyce School of Applied Computing, at the SURP+ Research Poster Symposium.

Computer science student Zoila Anuri Kanu and her project, “Exploring Approaches to Engage K-12 Students in Learning Computational Thinking Using Collaborative Robots.”

Computer science students Nidhi Raviprasad and Rajvir Harshvardhan and their project, “DEI: Exploring Academic Reflections Using Natural Language Processing To Create A Roadmap Of Student Success And Foster Inclusive Engineering Education.”

FOCUS ON THE FUTURE Make a gift to support computer science labs, projects, clubs and conferences Click HERE to make a gift now, or contact Amy Blosser Spikes, assistant dean of advancement, at spikes@calpoly.edu or 805-756-2163