CIS Update 2020

College of Science and Technology

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CIS

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Computer and Information Sciences UPDATE WINTER 2020

For more news, go to cis.temple.edu

CIS students help younger students embrace computer science

‘Internet of Things’

An impressive number of CIS students are helping students in under-represented Philadelphia area neighborhoods get interested in technology and computer science.

“It’s remarkable how committed these students are,” says Professor Claudia Pine, the faculty advisor for both the Temple Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) student chapter and its ACM-Women chapter. “Most of them are balancing rigorous academic schedules and have jobs, but they still find time to give back.”

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TechGirlz Since 2017 both ACM student organizations, which total about 60 members, have been working with TechGirlz, a national organization dedicated to inspiring middle school girls to explore the possibilities of technology to empower their future careers. The Temple students offer occasional Saturday workshops, including one this semester on programming in C. In March they joined Drexel University in helping TechGirlz achieve a world record of more than 300 girls coding simultaneously in 17 U.S. cities.

“Our organization is committed to inspiring and retaining women in STEM, and the best way to do that is to expose girls to technology when they are younger,” says Mary Liu, a junior data science major from Northeast Philadelphia who is the past president and current treasurer of Temple’s ACM-W chapter.

STARS Computing Corps chapter Supported by the National Science Foundation and headquartered in the CIS Department, the Stars Computing Corps is a national alliance of more than 50 colleges and universities committed to developing a diverse 21st century technology workforce—in part by recruiting and retaining under-represented populations in computing academic programs and careers.

For the second year, the student organizers of the STARS chapter at Temple—which includes nearly 30 members—have been working with high school students at the

Gabriella Farrisi, CIS student and STARS Temple chapter president

Philadelphia Military Academy (PMA), located just north of Temple’s Main Campus.

Each weekday, two or more Temple STARS students are helping a biology/chemistry teacher teach PMA’s two computer science classes, and they are also frequently mentoring individual students in-person and via phone and email. The chapter also is broadening its outreach with workshops for middle and elementary school students.

“The students’ desire for computer science and how excited they are about it is really cool,” says chapter president Gabriella Farrisi, a senior information science and technology major.

“Our goal is to expose younger students who might not have the same resources we enjoy to computer science and different career possibilities.”

There are also concerns that, as usage of these devices increases, systems could be challenged by the large amounts of IoT data communicated over networks and stored in cloudbased data centers.

In response, the CIS team is developing a new testbed and infrastructure for exploring security and performance issues that make the IoT vulnerable and for exploring new approaches to make the IoT more robust, scalable and secure. The testbed incorporates: hundreds of IoT devices; an IoT edge-computing server; multiple software-defined network (SDN) switches; and state-of-the-art storage facilities.

“These IoT devices, and our research, have a wide range of applications,” says Du, “including for smart homes, healthcare and life sciences, cybersecurity, municipal infrastructure, retail, manufacturing, agriculture, education, automation and entertainment.”

In addition to developing a new graduate course in IoT security, the IoT infrastructure researchers develop will be made available to external researchers and educators.

Chair’s message The Department of Computer & Information Sciences (CIS) is continuing its tradition of excellence in research, teaching and community engagement. Our faculty are advancing research in several important areas of computing, with projects that make fundamental contributions to data, algorithms, and systems—and that have real-world impacts.

This newsletter highlights just a few of our research accomplishments, including advancing security in the Internet of Things, devising high-performance solutions for storing large-scale “big” data, and introducing new computer vision techniques that are being applied to images to combat human trafficking. Research funders include the National Science Foundations, Amazon, Cisco, NASA and National Institutes of Justice.

We continue to strengthen our faculty, with three stellar new hires—Xinghua Shi, Yan Wang and Yu Wang—bringing expertise in, respectively, solving large-scale computational problems in biology, smart healthcare and large-scale networked systems.

Our students also excel, including graduate students with strong academic publication records, undergraduates participating in CST’s Undergraduate Research Program, and students helping to bring computing skills to the community.

We have also introduced a new online master’s in information science and technology, which you can learn about at cst.temple.edu/istonline.

I want to thank all of our alumni and friends who support our department and incredible students. I invite you to learn more about our work at cis.temple.edu.

Sincerely,

Jamie Payton Chair

cis.temple.edu

Securing and enhancing ‘Internet of Things’ performance Smart security cameras. Smart locks. Smart thermostats. Smart appliances.

Thanks to what’s called the Internet of Things (IoT), modern homes and businesses increasingly feature everyday objects that, through a smart hub or router connected to the internet, offer sophisticated sensing and remote activation capabilities.

But as smart as they are, they—and the smart phones used to access and control them—are vulnerable to security threats. To address these concerns, four CIS researchers— Professor Xiaojiang Du, Laurel H. Carnell Professor Jie Wu, Professor Xubin He and Associate Professor and Chair Jamie Payton—recently (L to r) Internet of things researchers Xiaojiang Du, received a three-year Jie Wu, Jamie Payton and Xubin He $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and an additional $171,000 from CST. According to Du, the principal investigator, IoT devices are vulnerable because there are tens of thousands of manufacturers and many often don’t follow best security practices; some simpler devices don’t have strong encryption capabilities; interactions between apps on IoT devices could create security issues; and software bugs in some of apps could be exploited by hackers.

“These hackers could unlock your smart door, or use your security cameras to watch you,” says He. continued on page 4

Support Computer & Information Sciences and CST

You can contribute to the continued success of CST and the Department of Computer & Information Sciences by supporting scholarships, undergraduate research, faculty endowment and innovative programs. Make your gift at giving.temple.edu/givetocst.

Heng Fan already cited 450 times Heng Fan is expected to earn his PhD in computer science

Google is a family affair for Chang siblings If you recently used Google to have food delivered by a restaurant near you, Andrea Chang (BS ’17, CIS)—a Google technical solutions consultant who works on that technology—had something to do with it.

This past summer her enjoyment of working at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, was further enhanced by having her brother Charles join her in the Silicon Valley. He is a now a junior at Temple who, like his sister before him, is a mathematics and computer science major—and spent this past summer in a highly coveted Google internship in San Francisco.

“It was amazing,” reports Andrea. “I love Google so much and my brother so much, and I wanted him to experience what it’s like to work here because I’m just so happy I work for Google.”

Andrea recommended her brother for the internship, but that was just the beginning of an extensive interview process that led to Charles’ internship. “I helped him get in the door,” she says, “but he had to be smart enough to do it.”

As part of his 12-week engineering practicum internship, Charles is helping create a debugging tool for Google’s operating system.

“Temple prepared me really well to learn, and I learned so much computer science in just a short period of time,” says Charles. “Every day I was surrounded by amazingly talented and supportive people. It was a great experience.”

At Temple, Andrea was an undergraduate research assistant in robotics, nuclear/particle physics and linear and dynamic computer programming. The President’s Scholar most enjoyed programming a re-created 3-D Pacman game and spending two summer months in 2016 as a virtual reality research assistant at National Taiwan University.

Andrea treasured her CIS professors and Rose McGinnis, the college’s director of the Undergraduate Research Program: “They just felt like a second family to me. They truly cared not just about my educational growth but my personal growth too.”

After her May 2017 graduation, for a year she worked in New York City as an IBM software engineer. Then, last October, she joined Google in northern California. Like her brother, she raves about the work/life balance environment that Google fosters.

For example, says Andrea, “Google has a program that allows you to spend 20 percent of your time investigating a different area. I’m furthering the virtual reality research I did in Taiwan.”

The Changs have three younger siblings. “It would be amazing if I could get all of them here too,” says Andrea. “In fact, my brother Justice is a mathematics and computer science major at Temple.”

next year, but his research has already been cited 450 times by other researchers—far more than most PhD candidates garner before they earn their degrees. Of the 13 papers he has published in since coming to Temple in 2016, he has been the lead author on nine of them.

“I am interested in computer vision, artificial intelligence and machine learning, particularly robust and efficient visual object tracking,” says Fan, who first developed that interest while pursuing a master’s degree in engineering at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, China, where he also earned his undergraduate degree.

While a doctoral student at Temple, Fan has had research internships with researchers at the Toyota Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at HiScene, an information technology company in Shanghai, China.

After receiving his doctorate, he hopes to pursue a career in academic research.

NEW FACULTY Xinghua Shi, Associate Professor, comes to CST from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she was an assistant professor in the Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics. Before joining UNC Charlotte, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Shi earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Chicago, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and technology from Beijing Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on development of tools and algorithms to solve large-scale computational problems in biology and biomedical research. Her work is supported by Wells Fargo Foundation Fund, DARPA, NIH and NSF, including a 2018 CAREER Award.

Yan Wang, Assistant Professor, comes to CST from SUNY Binghamton, where he was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. He earned his PhD from Stevens Institute of Technology, specializing in computer engineering. His research interests include mobile and pervasive computing, cyber security and privacy and smart healthcare. Wang has authored and co-authored 16 papers in top journals and conferences, including ACM MobiCom, ACM MobiHoc, ACM MobiSys, IEEE InfoCom and IEEE TMC. His research has been reported by numerous media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, Fox News Channel, Inside Science TV, National Public Radio and CNET. Yu Wang, Professor, comes to CST from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he was professor and senior associate chair in the Department of Computer Science. He earned his PhD in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Wang’s research focuses on the design and analysis of algorithms/ protocols/ systems for large-scale networks (such as wireless networks, social networks and vehicular networks), smart sensing (using wireless/acoustic signals or leveraging mobile crowds), and mobile computing (including mobile edge computing and AI-enabled mobile systems). He is a fellow of the IEEE.

Xubin He making sure big data doesn’t swamp storage and performance capabilities Big data is revolutionizing many scientific fields. Professor Xubin He is committed to assuring that the big data storage and input/output (I/O) systems can keep up with the demand.

Over the past six years, He—who joined Temple in 2016 from Virginia Commonwealth University—has participated in research projects totaling $3.7 million, with his share of that funding exceeding $2 million. According to He, big data represents three main challenges from the computer systems aspect: 1. Huge growth of digital data has made it harder for systems to find requested information as quickly as possible.

2. New file and data management systems are needed because traditional systems have become swamped by data volume.

3. As data volumes increase, failures become more common.

Funded Research 2018-2019 Eduard Dragut • BIGDATA: F: Collaborative Research: Collective Mining of Vertical Social Communities, NSF

Xiaojiang Du, Xubin He, Jamie Payton, and Jie Wu • MRI: Development of an Information Assurance and Performance Infrastructure for the Internet of Things, NSF

Xiaojiang Du and Jie Wu • SpecEES: Collaborative Research: Study of the Tradeoff between Spectrum Allocation Efficiency and Operation Privacy in Dynamic Spectrum Access Systems, NSF

Xubin He • SHF: Understanding, Modeling and Systems Support for HPC Data Reduction, NSF

Krishna Kant

“We may be able to tolerate slightly slower computers, but none of us can tolerate data loss, whether it’s business sensitive data or five years of our photos,” says He, director of the Storage Technology and Architecture Research (STAR) lab.

He is also collaborating on his research with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, New Jersey Institute of Technology and China’s Huazhong University of Science & Technology, one of the world’s premier computer science institutions. “We aren’t generating data ourselves, but we’re trying to design algorithms and solutions that create reliable, highperformance building blocks that adequately support data storage and I/O systems,” he says.

• EAGER: Exploring Magnetic Communication for Challenging Environments, NSF

Computer vision and crowdsourcing to combat trafficking

• Detection and Countering R&D for Counter-UAS, Northeastern University

More than 60 percent of child sex trafficking survivors were at one point advertised online, according to 2016 research by the University of New Hampshire. These advertisements often include photos of the victim posed provocatively in a hotel room.

To help law enforcement identify where these photos were taken, Associate Professor Richard Souvenir has teamed up with George Washington University researchers, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the St. Louis County, Missouri, Police Department to devise a system called TraffickCam. Recently funded by a three-year, $1 million grant from the National Institutes of Justice, the research agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, TraffickCam incorporates millions of U.S. hotel room images collected from both publicly available travel websites and crowdsourced photos submitted by more than 100,000 users of the project’s mobile app, who voluntarily take photos while traveling; and a new computer vision approach that supports classification of the hotel room images and fast image-search capabilities for particular objects in rooms—all powered by deep neural networks. The system, which the researchers continue to refine, has already been used successfully in some prosecutions. “It’s not a silver bullet that solves cases on its own,” Souvenir said. “But it’s one more tool that can lead law enforcement officials to apprehend criminals in the hotels or, more commonly, provide corroborating evidence to show where they have engaged in criminal activity.”

• US-Serbia and West Balkan Data Science Workshop, NSF

Longin Jan Latecki and Haibin Ling • RI: Small: Learning Shape Features with Deep Neural Networks, NSF • Focus Area Image Search with Target Object Detection, Amazon Research Awards Program

Zoran Obradovic • Characterizing Diversity of Demographics and Health Conditions Affecting Risk for Comorbidities Development in Cancer Patients, King Abdullah University of Science & Technology

• Disease Detection and Disease Progression Modeling, IQVIA

Zoran Obradovic and Eduard Dragut • EAGER: Assessing Influence of News Articles on Emerging Events, NSF

Jamie Payton • Collaborative Research: Retaining and Engaging Computer Science Majors by Solving and Visualizing Algorithmic Problems on Real-world Data Sets, NSF • EAGER: Collaborative Research: Enhancing Impact of Broadening Participation in Computing Efforts through the STARS Cohort Conference Attendance Program, NSF

Richard Souvenir • An Object-Centric Approach for Image Analysis to Combat Human Trafficking, National Institutes of Justice

Pei Wang • Cognitive Automation via Reasoning and Learning, Cisco

Jie Wu • Cyber Forensic Tool Kit for Machinery Control, TDI Technologies Inc.