ASU School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence

Grace Hopper once said, "The most important thing I've accomplished, other than building the compiler, is training young people."

At , we're 🎉 thrilled to continue that legacy, providing twelve scholarships for 🏆 exceptional 🏆 future computer scientists to attend the AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Celebration in October. At the welcome meeting, our faculty members spoke about opportunities at the conference for fellowship, friendship and fun. And there were ice cream sandwiches!

Good luck to our students and thank you to our faculty!

Time to polish up those CVs, get your free headshot from the ASU photobooth and make your social media presence shine. The Fulton Schools Career Fairs begin September 17! This is your chance to connect with top employers in the industry. Whether you're looking to launch your career or take it to the next level, don’t miss this opportunity to network, explore job opportunities, and make valuable connections. See you there!

https://career.engineering.asu.edu/students/career-fair/

NEW FALL FACULTY! To ensure our students have access to the highest quality learning programs and advance our research missions, we are proud to welcome 13 new faculty members to our team. Hailing from top academic programs from all over the country, the group brings a diverse set of research interests and capabilities to the school.

Welcome to our industrial engineering team:
Assistant Professor Lacy Greening
Assistant Professor Deniz Berfin Karakoc
Associate Professor Bing Si
Assistant Professor Baoyu Zhou

Welcome to our computer science and engineering team:
Assistant Teaching Professor Bharatesh Chakravarthi
Assistant Professor Vivek Gupta
Assistant Teaching Professor In Jung Kim
Assistant Professor Jaron Mink
Assistant Professor Ozgur Ozmen
Assistant Teaching Professor Zahra Sadri-Moshkenani
Assistant Professor Lindsay Sanneman
Assistant Professor Chenkai Weng
Assistant Professor Ben Zhou

They will join a cohort of 131 globally recognized faculty members — a group that includes trailblazers in artificial intelligence, biocomputing, computer vision, data visualization, mathematics, robotics and more.

ASU Engineering introduces new faculty for 2024–25 The Fulton Schools is continually growing its teaching and research enterprise to increase the scope and impact of its educational programs and research initiatives.

The first meeting of the 💻 CodeDevils 👿 is TOMORROW NIGHT!

🗓 Wednesday, August 28 2024
⏰ 7:30 PM MST

CodeDevils at Arizona State University is a student-run, inclusive organization that supports ASU students in their software development journey. As one of ASU's largest organizations, they cater primarily to online students, fostering a thriving virtual community where members can learn, collaborate, and grow.

CD 101: Intro to CodeDevils Discover unique opportunities at! Find and attend events, browse and join organizations, and showcase your involvement.

Early detection and prevention of potential pandemics are vital to the health, economy and security of the United States. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University will play a key role in the new APPEX Center — part of a $72 million initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to tackle the challenges of developing effective pandemic mitigation and response activities. SCAI professor K. Selcuk Candan will serve as Associate Director for Technology, Cyberinfrastructure and Tech Transfer in the new center.

The APPEX Center assembles a core team of researchers and practitioners spanning many areas of expertise to foster participation from the entire pandemic science community. Bringing together and materially supporting diverse teams of experts and decision makers in pandemic science, APPEX seeks to tackle questions about pandemic expansion that can only be answered at the interface among disciplines and domains.

"Research on emerging infectious diseases is a critical investment in our future, and it necessitates a collaborative approach that spans multiple disciplines and sectors and incorporates the newest tools and technology," says NSF Director and SCAI Professor Sethuraman Panchanathan.

Read the release:

New NSF centers will take a multidisciplinary approach to pandemic prediction and prevention Early detection and prevention of potential pandemics — whether they affect humans, animals or plants — are vital to the health, economy and security of the…

Faculty members in SCAI, part of , are exploring applications of in the medical sector. They have received multiple grants, including from the National Science Foundation, to develop tech tools that create better treatment options for women.

The IMPACT Lab seeks to combat bias in cardiovascular care, addressing the issue that when women need help for heart conditions, they often receive treatment based on studies conducted on men. The team, including Sandeep Gupta and Ayan Banerjee, is also using AI to develop an automated insulin delivery system for Type 1 diabetic women who are pregnant.

“Our goal is to create health care smart systems that can benefit understudied populations,” says Gupta, a professor of computer science and engineering in the Fulton Schools and head of the IMPACT Lab.

Using AI can improve health outcomes for women Team of ASU researchers receive multiple grants to develop tech tools to improve treatment options for women.

Food, fun, friendship and selfies with Sparky: Today, we welcomed many of our more than 1,400 first-year computer science and engineering students to Mullett Arena where they got their first look at the year that lies ahead. After getting a primer on how to be successful in the coming year, the students munched on snacks — then mixed and mingled with student clubs and organizations, including developer clubs, robotics groups and the Grand Challenges Scholars.

We’re so excited to help them get started making new memories.

TOMORROW 8/20: Incoming first-year undergrads: Don’t miss the Fall Welcome Event!

The SCAI advising team would like to welcome you to ASU. They are hosting a Fall Welcome event at the Tempe Campus:

Tuesday, August 20, 2024
4 p.m. – 5 p.m.
Mullett Arena
411 S Packard Dr
Tempe, AZ 85281

Doors open at 2:30 p.m. and the event will conclude at 5:00 p.m. The Fall Welcome will be followed by the Fulton Schools of Engineering Involvement Fair. Students are encouraged to attend and learn about our Fulton Schools engineering clubs and student organizations.

We can’t wait to help you celebrate this important milestone and start making new memories and friends. See you soon!

About the event:
https://asu.campuslabs.com/engage/event/9144432?sfnsn=mo

Find Mullett Arena:
https://www.mullettarena.com/contact-us/

SCAI students have spent the summer rocking the pines at E2! Each year, new engineering students head to northern Arizona for this program designed to prepare them for success as they seek a rewarding — but challenging — degree. In a fun camp setting, first-year students make unforgettable memories with new friends and get to engage with our amazing faculty, staff and industry professionals.

They develop their teamwork abilities and enhance their problem-solving skills. And sometimes Mr. Ira A. Fulton himself shows up to offer a bit of inspiration!

The final E2 session will conclude tomorrow. Huge thanks to everyone on our team who volunteered for these events, providing invaluable mentorship and support to our AMAZING students.

And oh, this year E2 even has its own video game. Check it out!
https://smanget.itch.io/e2-rock-the-pines

The faculty retreat is in full swing! As we gear up to welcome a record number of Sun Devils next week, our team is hard at work discussing how to best support students, maximize the impact of our research efforts and collaborate better across university and interdisciplinary channels.

Our new faculty members joined us as we brainstormed about current challenges in higher education, including the increased use of generative AI in academic environments.

We are ready for the new year!

Our faculty members continue to explore principled uses of artificial intelligence: Associate Professor Yanjie Fu and his research team will attend the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management in Boise in October to discuss novel uses of generative AI.

There, the team will present two accepted papers that address AI for cancer informatics and AI for material performance screening.

If you’ll also be attending , plan to connect with our team.

The papers:
- Revolutionizing Biomarker Discovery: Leveraging Generative AI for Bio-Knowledge-Embedded Continuous Space Exploration
- Revolutionizing Biomarker Discovery: Leveraging Generative AI for Bio-Knowledge-Embedded Continuous Space Exploration

https://cikm2024.org

ASU cybersecurity researchers are busy crafting a reverse engineering solution that will secure existing cyberphysical systems in as little as a month. Satellites, HVAC systems, smart irrigation systems and even the Amazon Echo are examples of cyberphysical technology and concern is growing that these systems are vulnerable to attack.

To secure these systems, a team led by Assistant Professor Tiffany Bao in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of , has been awarded a $15 million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, under the Faithful Integration, Reverse-engineering, and Emulation, or FIRE, program.

“There’s a lot of equipment in use that was not built with cybersecurity in mind,” says Bao, who notes that aging technology is deployed in many scenarios. “Being able to secure those cyberphysical systems, and to do that as soon as possible, is an important aspect of keeping us all safe.”

The team includes Associate Professors Adam Doupé, Yan Shosh*taishvili and Fish Wang, as well as Assistant Professors Zilin Jiang and Giulia Pedrielli, all faculty members in the Fulton Schools. The project is also supported by the Global Security Initiative, or GSI. Bao is an associate director in GSI’s Center for Cybersecurity and Trusted Foundations.

ASU team creates fast tools to secure cyberphysical systems Cyberphysical systems, like satellites and drones, are everywhere. ASU faculty members are working to secure them — quickly.

Big congrats to SCAI Associate Professor Xusheng Xiao! He and his team have received an award from the OpenAI Researcher Access Program.

The group is working on leveraging LLMs to develop AI-enhanced software and system analysis approaches that synergistically combine software analysis and artificial intelligence to improve the reliability and the security of computer systems.

OpenAI’s program seeks to support researchers using their products to study areas related to the responsible deployment of AI, mitigating associated risks and understanding the societal impact of AI systems.

https://openai.com/form/researcher-access-program/

Can you believe this strange, AI-generated video of a tiger has been “liked” nearly one MILLION times on TikTok and even prompted concerned viewers to contact the Phoenix Zoo? SCAI Professor Subbarao Kambhampati spoke to Jade Cunningham from 12 News about the clip and provided some tips on how the public can spot fakes in the future.

https://www.12news.com/article/news/video-showing-human-like-tiger-shows-dangers-in-social-media-posts-phoenix-zoo-ai-artificial-intelligence/75-84a773be-7bf4-4ff3-b8ab-29f8ef343606

Students in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of , are turning old tech into new tunes.

Through ASU classes, rising computer science junior Aivery Onstott has discovered a passion for circuit bending.

“Many people think engineers aren’t creative,” Onstott says. “But really engineering is the perfect place for creativity. The field can be a great intersection of abilities. It’s a place where you can use your technical skills to make art.”

The classes, taught by Seth Thorn, a clinical assistant professor in ASU's School of Arts Media and Engineering, teach students to bend, break and remake circuit boards, turning them into highly original musical instruments.

Thorn says circuit bending might be used to help attract new students to technical careers. Bending provides a fun way to connect with microelectronics and Thorn often finds that it can stimulate interest in electrical engineering.

“The class gives people permission to tinker and explore without being concerned about failure,” Thorn says. “Students do things by accident and get incredible results.”

Circuit bending connects computer science and creativity Through innovative analog music, students and faculty challenge the cliché that engineers aren’t creative.

Help enhance maritime safety and sail off with cold, hard cash: Our waterways are full of small nautical vessels such as sailboats, fishing boats and personal watercraft. Unlike large vessels, which have well-established trajectory forecasting models, small vessels present a significant challenge for maritime waterway management, and they often traverse marine environments with limited traffic management capabilities.

Now, the CAOE and the University at Albany are hosting the Managing Maritime Movements (M3) Hackathon — a global challenge to develop innovative models for predicting small vessel routes.

The prizes:
* First place: $10,000 USD
* Second place: $5,000 USD

Key dates:
* August 1, 2024: Registration Opens
* September 16, 2024: Hackathon Starts
* October 31, 2024: All Submissions Due

Participation Requirements:
* Teams must consist of no more than three members.
* At least one member of each team must be a citizen of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom or the United States.
* All registration requests will be reviewed and accepted participants will be notified.
* Teams will be provided with a dataset to train their models, and all predictions, modeling code, and documentation must be submitted by October 31, 2024.

Learn more:
https://caoe.asu.edu/2024/07/25/managing-maritime-movements-m3-hackathon/?_thumbnail_id=1584&utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=

This exciting event is being developed by Brandon Behlendorf, Associate Professor at the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity and Principal Investigator for the CAOE.

🥇 at the Olympics🥇 Huge congrats to computer science student Léon Marchand! In front of his home country, Marchand claimed Olympic gold with a record-breaking time of 4:02.95, beating out Matsush*ta Tomoyuki of Japan and Carson Foster of Team USA for his first gold medal of his Olympic career.

Marchand won by a dominant six seconds, breaking the Olympic record set by Michael Phelps (4:03.84) from the 2016 Rio Olympics.

OLYMPIC GOLD! Léon Marchand Captures Olympic Glory for France in 400 IM - Arizona State University Athletics Former Sun Devil Swimmer Léon Marchand claimed Olympic gold by setting an Olympic record time of 4:02.95 Tuesday night in Paris. The first gold medal won by a Sun Devil since the 2012 London Olympics.

Check out this compelling interview with Nadya Bliss who, in addition to her role as Executive Director of the ASU Global Security Initiative, is a Professor of Practice in .

Bliss says:
"Technology is advancing at a rapid pace and is incredibly intertwined with every aspect of our lives. Yet security often remains a secondary consideration behind capabilities, despite all the examples we have of unforeseen harms stemming at least partly from new technologies."

"This is to me one of the most consequential debates taking place in our society today — the ethos of 'move fast and break things' vs. 'let’s take a beat and think about what exactly we might be breaking and what kind of damage that would cause.'"

Anticipating how technology can be manipulated to cause harm | ASU News Rapid advancements in new technologies are often embraced by society because they improve efficiencies, outcomes and make all our lives easier. But with each evolution, there is an equal and opposite consequence.

🎉 Special congratulations🎉 to Assistant Professor Zilin Jiang who has received the Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize from the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Optimization Society.

🏆 Given only every three years, the prestigious award honors famed American mathematician, Delbert Ray Fulkerson, who made pioneering contributions to network flow theory and combinatorial analysis.

Jiang received the award for the paper, “Equiangular lines with a fixed angle,” which he co-authored and was published in the Annals of Mathematics in 2021.

📣 Read the announcement:
https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=7345

📄 Read the paper:
https://projecteuclid.org/journals/annals-of-mathematics/volume-194/issue-3/Equiangular-lines-with-a-fixed-angle/10.4007/annals.2021.194.3.3.short

Congrats on the win, Zilin!

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Recent doctoral graduates Raha Moraffah and Zahra Zahedi are a testament to the determination in to foster excellence in its doctoral programs. This fall, Moraffah will assume a tenure-track faculty position at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute while Zahedi begins her career as a scientist at the Honda Research Institute.

“The program teaches you to be a leader,” Moraffah says.

Meanwhile, Rolando Garcia returns to to serve as the school’s Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow. The past recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship will continue his innovative machine learning research.

Read the full story for details:

Doctoral students cruise into roles as computer engineering innovators Recent computer science doctoral students leave as leaders while past graduates carry on tradition of mentorship.

Made in the shade: Associate Professor Ariane Middel is continuing her work to beat the summer’s extreme heat. She was recently interviewed by National Geographic, offering simple tips to help us keep our cool.

One important reminder: Seek out shade.

“If you are standing in the sun on a sunny day, it can make a difference of probably 30°C in terms of the heat load that hits your body, versus in the shade,” Middel told the magazine. “That’s what we measured in Phoenix but even in say Boston the difference could be 20°C.”

She offered some simple, practical tips to stay cool:
- When possible walk on the shady side of the street
- Don a wide-brimmed hat
- Consider using a typical rain umbrella to reduce the heat load on your body
- Try a cooling towel and apply it strategically to key pulse points like the neck, wrists and the insides of elbows

Read the full NatGeo article:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/stay-cool-heat-wave

Middel is the co-author of the “50 Grades of Shade” report that details her research to help make cities cooler:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/102/9/BAMS-D-20-0193.1.xml

More doctoral student excellence: Congrats to Liangyi Huang whose paper was recently accepted by the Conference on Language and Modeling ( ) which will be held at the University of Pennsylvania in October. In the work, conducted under the supervision of Xusheng Xiao, Huang proposes a novel way — powered by Large Language Models — to achieve 90% accuracy in building security-oriented knowledge graphs from Cyber Threat Intelligence articles written in natural language.

COLM is an academic venue focused on the study of language modeling, broadly defined, with the goal of creating a community of researchers with expertise in different disciplines, focused on understanding, improving, and critiquing the development of LM technology.

Congrats Liangyi!

Visit the team’s project website:
https://github.com/ctikgresearch/GTIKGResearch.

Learn more about Liangyi:
https://liangyi-huang.github.io/

Today is National Artificial Intelligence Appreciation Day and to celebrate we've put together a special edition of our monthly newsletter — a quick round-up of just a few of the many, many initiatives underway here at . Check out how our faculty team is on the front lines of the principled development of this new technology and how they are playing a leadership role in ensuring that AI is used for social good.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/special-edition-artificial-intelligence-zznbe/?trackingId=r01f4BSdRHafy%2FdrbsYc%2Bw%3D%3D

Gedeon Muhawenayo, a doctoral student in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, is on the front lines of artificial intelligence, or AI, research, helping tackle the planet’s most pressing problems.

Muhawenayo recently attended Data Science Africa Summer School, held on the campus of Dedan Kimathi University of Technology in Nyeri, Kenya, where hundreds of students, industry professionals and academics from all over the world collaborated on the theme of "Data Science for Social Good in the Age of Generative AI."

At the event, Muhawenayo led a machine learning for remote sensing workshop, training fellow graduate students on how to deal with large sets of Earth observation data as part of efforts to promote food security.

"Many African countries are prone to a wide range of natural hazards that strain the most vulnerable communities, particularly smallholder farmers," he says. "Advancements in machine learning can support ways to increase harvests for these communities, especially in the face of challenges posed by climate change."

429 Too Many Requests

At the spring 2024 student convocations, the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence awarded 1,824 new degrees, celebrating one of the largest computer science graduating classes in the country and the largest in the history of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

Director Ross Maciejewski is hard at work, plotting a future course to ensure that graduates remain in demand in the workforce, that the school continues its research mission and the dedicated faculty members are well-supported in their efforts.

ASU Regents Professor Douglas Montgomery, a thought leader in systems engineering who joined the Fulton Schools in 1987, remembers the past and looks forward to the future.

“While I am proud of all we have accomplished thus far,” Montgomery says, “I am excited to see what develops and I know Ross Maciejewski is the right choice to guide us to the next stage of our evolution.”

Computer science school celebrates record number of graduates The School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence works to ensure graduate success and program momentum.

A team of student researchers led by Assistant Professor Zhichao Cao has received the Best Paper Award at the 16th HotStorage: The ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Storage and File Systems (HotStorage24) currently underway in Santa Clara, California.

Doctoral student Viraj Thakkar, master’s student Jiaxin Dai and undergraduate students Madhumitha Sukumar and Kaushiki Singh co-authored the paper, "Can Modern LLMs Tune and Configure LSM-based Key-Value Stores?" The work explores the possibility of using modern LLMs to construct the automatic, interactive, and comprehensive tuning framework for Log-Structured Merge-Tree-based Key-Value Stores by leveraging the expertise and understanding of LLMs.

The HotStorage workshop provides a forum for cutting-edge storage research, a place where researchers and industry practitioners can discuss new opportunities and challenges in storage technology.

Congrats to all!

https://github.com/asu-idi/ELMo-Tune

This year, “The Pragmatic Programmer” by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt turns 25! Often placed on lists of most influential programming books of all time, it introduced the world to the concept of rubber duck debugging, or rubberducking. Inspired by a story of a software engineer who would explain his code, line by line to a rubber duck, rubberducking challenges software engineers to be able to discuss their work in plain language with non-technical people — a process that often results in better design solutions.

The devil duck is over here chilling by the pool in case anyone has code they need to review.

SCAI graduate students Utkarsh Nath and Yanchen Wang have published a journal paper in the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) titled, "Robust Neural Architecture Search by Cross-Layer Knowledge Distillation."

The paper advances the area of model development by jointly considering robustness to adversarial attacks and model compactness, along task-specific performance in the learning objective. They were jointly advised by Assistant Professor Yingzhen Yang and Pavan Turaga, professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering and director of the School of Arts, Media and Engineering.

Read more:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11263-024-02133-4

New 3D bone atlas: A pair of researchers at Arizona State University are combining the powers of software engineering and forensic science to tackle a difficult, growing problem: elder abuse.

Kevin Gary, an associate professor of software engineering in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University , and Katelyn Bolhofner, an assistant professor of forensic anthropology in ASU’s School of Interdisciplinary Forensics, have created software that will help experts tell the difference between accidental bone fractures and those that are the result of intentional harm or neglect.

The next step is to develop artificial intelligence tools to flag possible instances of abuse and spot patterns.

ASU team creates 3D bone atlas to stop elder abuse Researchers combine forensic and engineering expertise to create a tech tool to help identify bone fractures.

Code warriors: students placed high on CodeSignal's annual University Ranking Report, which ranks the top 50 national universities based on technical skills. The same report also urged employers to look harder at our students when searching for strong talent, naming ASU as one of the top five schools under-targeted by recruiters.

CodeSignal’s 2024 University Ranking Report CodeSignal's 2024 University Ranking Report CodeSignal's annual University Ranking Report is back, ranking the top 50 national universities based on technical skills. CodeSignal’s skills-based university ranking We ranked colleges and universities based on their students’ objective coding skills...