Departmental News

Dr. Lu Wei Receives NSF Grant

Dr. Lu Wei, an assistant professor of computer science, has been awarded $293,229 by the NSF for Collaborative Research: CNS Core: Small: Fundamentals of Ultra-Dense Wireless Networks with Generalized Repulsion

Project Overview: The project resides in the interdisciplinary area of electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics. The goal of the project is to identify and study new strongly coupled point processes as a model to understand the optimal deployment of base stations/sensors in wireless networks. The motivation of the study was that the prevailing models in the literature are, mostly due to analytical tractability, based on independent point processes. The newly proposed point processes are able to characterize diverse nodal repulsion phenomena in ultra-dense wireless networks to improve the existing modeling and analysis framework of wireless networks with spatial randomness. The outcome of the project also has applications in other domains, such as in machine learning and data science, where the project results offer new algorithms for sampling, marginalization, conditioning, and other inference tasks.Read more here.
Researchers find that hackers are abusing the cloud platform for other purposes

The “cloud” isn’t always what it seems to be….Computer Science PhD students, and research team, discover that cloud computing can be abused by adversaries and used as a platform to launch sneaky attacks. To read more click here : https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/17/cloud_services_hacking/
Vung Pham, PhD student supervised by Dr. Tommy Dang, recieved two awards at the 2018 IEEE VIS Conference

Vung Pham, a new PhD student supervised by Dr. Tommy Dang got two awards at the 2018 IEEE VIS Conference, a prestigious conference in data visualization.One award is Strong Support for Exploratory Analysis for the Mini -Challenge 2, and another is an honorable mention Representation of Small-ScaleTemporal Patterns for the Mini-Challenge 3.
Dr Chen’s Ph.D. student Xi Wang received the prestigious Helen DeVitt Jones Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award.

Dr Chen’s Ph.D. student Mr. Xi Wang received the prestigious Helen DeVitt Jones Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award.
Dr. Richard Watson was interviewed by Taylor Siekiewicz of Peterson’s Publishing

Dr. Richard Watson was interviewed by Taylor Siekiewicz of Peterson’s Publishing on pros’ and con’s of a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science versus attending a programming bootcamp (Interviewed September 12, 2018 to be published in near future)
Isaac Griswold-Steiner, an undergraduate student supervised by Dr. Abdul Serwadda, recieved an honorable mention for student research

Isaac Griswold-Steiner, an undergraduate student supervised by Dr. Abdul Serwadda, got an honorable mention for student research at the 2018 Computer Research Association Awards
EEG Identification Can Steal Your Most Closely Held Secrets

Dr. Serwada’s research on Biometric "EEG Identification Can Steal Your Most Closely Held Secrets" is featured in IEEE Spectrum. To read more click here : http://spectrum.ieee.org/the-human-os/biomedical/devices/eeg-identification-can-steal-your-most-private-secrets
Dr. Namin and Hewett received the distinguished poster paper award at ACM/USENIX SOUPS

Dr. Namin and Hewett received the distinguished poster paper award for their paper "The Sounds of Cyber Threats" presented at the ACM / USENIX International Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy (SOUPS) in Denver, Colorado. The poster received recognition at the award ceremony and selected as the best among the 25 poster papers presented by the international research community. The paper presents the usability of representing security threats through representative sounds and demonstrates their accessibility to the Internet users who are visually impaired. The project is sponsored by National Science Foundation.
Alaa Darabseh, Dr. Namin's former Ph.D. student, receives TTU Outstanding Thesis and Dissertation Award

Alaa Darabseh 's thesis, "Cyberspace Security Using Keystroke Dynamics," received TTU Outstanding Thesis and Dissertation Award for 2016. Alaa presented in his thesis several algorithms for effectively and continuously authenticating users based on their interactions with a device. Darabseh's dissertation focuses on improving continuous user authentication systems (that are based on keystroke dynamics) designed to detect malicious activity caused by another person (impostor) whose goals to is take over the active session of a valid user. The research was carried out by1) studying the impact of the selected features on the performance of keystroke continuous authentication systems; 2) proposing new timing features that based on utilization of the most frequently used English words (e.g. “The”, “And”, For””) that could be useful in distinguishing between users in continuous authentication systems; 3) comparing the performance of keystroke continuous authentication systems with the application of different algorithms; 4) investigating the possibility of improving the accuracy of continuous user authentication systems by combining more than one feature; 5) proposing a new detector that did not require predefined typing models either from legitimate users or impostors. Alaa presented his research at a number of professional conferences, 2015 International Conferences on biometric security including: Cyber and Information Security Research Conference (CISR), Machine Learning Application (ICMLA), CyberWorlds (CW), ACM International Workshop on Security (CODASPY), and Biometrics Special Interest Group (BIOSIG). Moreover, Alaa received the best paper award for his paper presented at the International Conference on CyberWorld in Gotland, Sweden. Currently, Alaa is employed by IBM.
Gesture-based cybersecurity receives media attention

Computer Science faculty member, Dr. Serwada is one of the researchers on the team behind the DARPA-sponsored project on gesture-based cybersecurity For details, click here, here, or here.
Computer Science Program Ranks 81st Across the Nation

The Master of Computer Science Program at the Texas Tech University Computer Science Department is recently ranked 81st across the Nation by the TFE Times’ 2016 Master of Computer Science Rankings. TFE Times’ 2016 Master of Computer Science Rankings are based on a comprehensive benchmark of mean GRE scores, mean undergraduate GPA, acceptance rate, full time graduates employed at graduation, full time graduates employed three months after graduation, and mean starting salary and bonus. Among the list, other public institutions in Texas include University of Texas at Austin ranks 11th, Texas A&M University ranks 49th, University of Texas at Dallas ranks 86th, University of Texas at Arlington ranks 112th, and University of North Texas ranks 165th. Top three institutions on the list are Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Princeton University. .
Namin awarded new NSF grant close to $1 million on Cyber Security research

Professors Namin and Hewett received an NSF medium-size award titled “SaTC: Medium: User-Centric Design of a Sonification System for Automatically Alarming Security Threats and Impact” with a total amount of close to $1M to develop security artifacts and repositories. The project is designed for four years funded by Secure and Trustworthy Computing SaTC program of National Science Foundation. This project investigates the emotional impacts of security threats and attacks to Internet users. With respect to emotional and societal impact of security threats, each security concern is represented using sonification techniques by which proper earcon and auditory icons are used to inform Internet users about the potential consequences of the underlying attack. The project will build two repositories of security attacks and sonifications labeled with emotional impacts of security concerns. .
Gelfond awarded Test of Time award

Professor Gelfond received a prestigious 10 years Test of Time award from the Association of Logic Programming (ALP) for his paper “Toward an Integration of Answer Set and Constraint Solving” coauthored with S. Baselice and PA Bonatti.

The award identifies the most influential paper from the proceedings of International Conference on Logic Programming 10 years prior that stood the test of time.

The paper initiated the development of Constraint Answer Set Programming — a collection of new methods for solving complex combinatorial problems, which is now used in multiple industrial applications.

M. Gelfond is also a recipient of 20 years Test of Time awards in 2004 and 2012. According to Google Scholar the number of citations for these three conference papers is now around 4000.
Zhuang Awarded $255,807 NSF Grant

Professor Zhuang was awarded an NSF grant (CNS-1526055, http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1526055) with an amount of $255,807 to work on “System Research on Persistent High-Dimensional Data Access and Its Application to Semiclassical Molecular Dynamics Simulation”.

One of the main challenges of big data is the large number of attributes or features of data, e.g. images, voices, and other multimedia data. Content-based searches of such multimedia data are transformed into proximity searches of high dimensional data with each attribute space represented by a dimension of the high dimensional space.

Professor Zhuang’s project addresses the challenges of large high-dimensional big data by proposing a middleware system for fast data access with easy-to-use interfaces for data organizing, indexing, search, and I/O operations.
Naeini Awarded $188,505 NSF award

Professor Naeini received an NSF award for project titled "Collaborative Research: CRISP Type 2: Revolution through Evolution: A Controls Approach to Improve How Society Interacts with Electricity" with a total amount of $188,505.00 (TTU share) for 09/15/2015-08/31/2018.

This project addresses the challenges associated with the rapid evolution of the electricity grid with communication and human interactions considerations. The keystone of this research is the transformation of power distribution feeders, from relatively passive channels for delivering electricity to customers, to distribution microgrids, entities that actively manage local production, storage and use of electricity, with participation from individual customers.

This project addresses many socio-technological gaps necessary to translate from research discovery to commercial applications. To date, there is no theoretical framework to ensure system stability as renewable energy routed through power electronics replaces traditional rotating machinery.
Mengel awarded Presidents' Collaborative Research Initiative Award

Professor Mengel recently received a Presidents' Collaborative Research Initiative Award (with PI Professor Sueann Lee, Speech & Hearing Science, TTUHSC) with an amount of $30,000 for 2015-2016 for a project titled “The Effect of Animation-Based Learning in Speech Therapy via Telepractice”.

The long-term goal of their project is to develop a theoretical model of telepractice for speech-language services and to identify the factors that have an impact on the effectiveness of telepractice for individuals with speech-language disorders. In fact, the majority of previous studies examined efficacy of speech therapy using telepractice by comparing with traditional face-to-face method. Thus, no systematic investigation has resulted in the identification of any factors impacting effectiveness of telepractice on improving speech-language behaviors.

The short-term goal of the project is to examine the effect of animation-based learning on improving morphology skills using telepractice for children with hearing loss. They will develop a telepractice platform with animation function to evaluate the effect of animation-based learning on improving language behaviors. After the study is complete, the telepractice platform will become available to speech pathologists in rural areas of West Texas. A strong need exists for a telepractice platform that is open to speech pathologists in rural areas due to the cost of user licenses for commercially available telepractice platforms.
Naeini taught “Introduction to Programming and Simulation” for “Science: It's A Girl Thing!” program

Professor Naeini developed and taught a short course (one week) about “Introduction to Programming and Simulation” in the summer camp 2015 for “Science: It's A Girl Thing!” program at TTU.

The purpose of this outreach event was to introduce computer science and programming to 5th-6th grade students using Alice 3 and NetLogo software. During this short course, students had fun making their own animations and games while learning about computer programming and computer science. Students also learned about computer simulations and worked with NetLogo to see some simple simulation examples, such as simulating propagation of fire in a forest!
Namin and Hewett received $10,000 grant from TTAA

Professors Namin and Hewett received a grant from Texas Tech Alumni Association (TTAA) for a project titled “Texas Tech University Virtual Life” with an amount of $10,000.

This project proposes an initiative to design, develop, and deploy a virtual Texas Tech University based on Second Life (SL) technology. The scope of the proposed development of second life at TTU can be as small as experiencing a virtual library or a dormitory or it can be as large as walking around campus and visiting every building and laboratories.

The opportunities for second life projects in various virtual environments and scenarios are endless. Through this initiative, a system prototype for Texas Tech Second Life will be built. The Tech Second Life will be deployed on its own SL Island accessible through the Internet. The funding received will be used for implementing the proposed system, specifically to design a virtual map for TTU and develop a prototype second life on the leased island encompassing the Tech map with various places to gather information related to Tech.
Namin and Alaa(PhD student) received Best Paper Award

A paper published by Professor Namin and his PhD student (Alaa Darabseh) received the Best Paper Award.

The paper is titled “On Accuracy of Classification-based Keystroke Dynamics for Continuous User Authentication”. It received the Best Papwer Award and will be presented at The CyberWorld 2015 Conference (CW2015) in the Biometric and Cybersecurity Session, in Gotland, Sweden, in October 2015.
Namin awarded $348,732 NSF grant

Professor Namin was awarded an NSF grant (DGE-1516636, http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1516636) with an amount of $348,732 to work on “Building Cybersecurity Workforce and Capacity through Enhancing Defending Skill Sets” (with Co-PIs Drs. Keith Jones and Fethi Inan).

Professor Namin’s project will investigate attacking/defending strategies employed by security professionals and experts. The skillsets that will be identified by this project will be incorporated into instructional modules and materials that will provide students and professionals with the skills required to defend against cyberattacks.

This research project will introduce a simulated cyber battlefield that will consist of authentic challenges, scenarios, and strategies. This authentic and engaging learning platform will allow instructors to teach the basic and advanced topics of cybersecurity to students using a realistic scenario-based approach. The cybersecurity attack and defend scenarios will be integrated into an undergraduate course curriculum that will support student learning and will enhance the effectiveness of teaching security related concepts and cyber defense techniques.
Chen received Presidents' Collaborative Research Initiative Award with $40,000

Professor Chen recently received a Presidents' Collaborative Research Initiative Award (with Co-PI Professor Shengping Yang, TTUHSC) with an amount of $40,000 for 2015-2016 for a project titled “Computational Algorithm and Software Development for Integrated Next-Generation Sequencing Data Analysis”.

With the delivery of the first $1,000 genome sequencer at 30x coverage by Illumina in 2014, the NGS (Next-Generation Sequencing) is “officially” becoming an indispensable tool in disease diagnosis, drug development, and clinical medicine. In the meantime, however, the difficulty in decoding, analyzing, and interpreting the gigantic amount of data is very likely to hamper the realization of the full potential of NGS, especially in the foreseeable near future.

Professors Chen and Yang’s project intends to design and develop data normalization algorithm, CNA (Copy Number Alterations) detection algorithm, and statistical methods and build a prototype of implementing these algorithms and methodologies for the integrated NGS data analysis.
Chen awarded $105,000 grant from NSF funded Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center (CAC) and Nimboxx Inc.

Professor Chen recently received an award from the NSF funded Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center (CAC) and Nimboxx Inc. with an amount of $105,000 to work on a project titled “Unistore: A Unified Storage Architecture for Cloud Computing”.

Emerging large-scale applications on Cloud computing platform, such as information retrieval, data mining, online business, and social network, are data- rather than computation-intensive. Storage system is one of the most critical components for Cloud computing.

Traditional hard disk drives (HDD) are dominant storage devices in Clouds, but are notorious for long access latency and failure prone. The emerging storage class memory (SCM) such as Solid State Drives provides a new promising storage solution of high bandwidth, low latency, and mechanical component free, but with inherent limitations of small capacity, short lifetime, and high cost. Professor Chen’s project intends to build an innovative unified storage architecture (Unistore) with the co-existence and efficient integration of heterogeneous HDD and SCM devices for Cloud storage systems.
Lim Receives Texas Tech Alumni Association New Faculty Award

Dr. Sunho Lim, an assistant professor of computer science, has been named the recipient of the 2014-2015 Texas Tech Alumni Association New Faculty Award. In order to assist Texas Tech in attracting and retaining world class faculty, the Texas Tech Alumni Association established the New Faculty Awards program in 1987 to recognize outstanding new members of the faculty in each college and the School of Law.

The dean of each of these academic units designates the recipient of the award, which carries with it a certificate and an honorarium of $500 funded by the Texas Tech Alumni Association. The awards are presented to faculty who have four years, or fewer, of service at any university and who have earned distinction for dedicated service to Texas Tech.
Feroz and Liu Receive Travel Awards to Attend IEEE Big Data 2014

Mohammed Feroz and Jialin Liu, graduate computer science students, have been awarded travel grants to attend the IEEE International Conference on Big Data 2014 (IEEE BigData 2014). The National Science Foundation provides support for travel grants so that students can present research papers. The conference received 264 student submissions and 49 were accepted as full papers.

Feroz will present his full paper, "Examination of Data, Rule Generation and Detection of Phishing URLs using Online Logistic Regression," which was written with Dr. Susan Mengel, an associate professor of computer science.

Liu will present his paper, "In-advance Data Analytics for Reducing Time to Discovery," which was written with Yin Lu, a graduate computer science student, and Dr. Yong Chen, an assistant professor of computer science.
Chen Named IEEE TCSC Young Achiever in Scalable Computing

Dr. Yong Chen, an assistant professor of computer science, has been named a 2014 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC) Young Achiever in Scalable Computing. Five recipients were selected by the IEEE TCSC selection committee and the award will be presented at the 2014 International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC14) conference in New Orleans, Louisiana in November.

The IEEE TCSC annual Young Achiever in Scalable Computing Award recognizes up to 5 individuals who have made outstanding, influential, and potentially long-lasting contributions in the field of scalable computing within 5 years of receiving their Ph.D.

The IEEE TCSC is an International Forum within the IEEE, aimed at fostering research and education in Scalable Computing. TCSC is interested in all areas of scalable computing, including but not limited to, high performance computing systems, Cloud computing systems, Grid, algorithms, applications, scheduling and workflows, and various others.
Watson Inducted into the Texas Tech Teaching Academy

Dr. Richard Watson, associate professor of computer science, has been inducted into the Texas Tech Teaching Academy. He was selected because he has demonstrated a significant commitment to teaching excellence. The mission of the Teaching Academy is to advocate for teaching excellence, promote service related to the university's teaching mission, advise and mentor colleagues and others, and share knowledge about teaching strategies and their implementation as appropriate.
Texas Tech to Build Faster, More Efficient Supercomputer Prototype

Dr. Yong Chen, assistant professor and director of Data-Intensive Scalable Computing Laboratory at Texas Tech University, is leading a team of researchers in a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant titled, “Development of a Data-Intensive Scalable Computing Instrument (DISCI) for High Performance Computing.”

The goal is to develop a new supercomputer prototype that could lead to more efficient data-intensive computing – and speed-up the scientific discovery cycle.

Read the full story on Texas Tech Today.
Registration for Fall 2014

For a full listing of advisors, registration dates, and special information for graduating seniors, visit the Undergraduate Advising page.
Texas Tech and Angelo State Cybersecurity Collaboration

Texas Tech University, in conjunction with Angelo State University, has received a $385,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to address the workforce needs by reaching out to community and private colleges in the West Texas area. Read more in the Texas Tech Discoveries article.
Zhang Wins Paper of Excellence Award

Shiqi Zhang, a graduate CS student, won a Paper of Excellence award at the International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL). His paper was titled "ASP+POMDP: Integrating Non-monotonic Logical Reasoning and Probabilistic Planning on Robots."
Holman Wins Best Graduate Student Paper Award

Daniel Holman, a graduate CS student, won a Best Graduate Student Paper award in the symposium session titled "Remote Sensing of Evapotranspiration Community," at the American Society of Agronomy: ASA, CSSA and SSSA International Annual Meeting.
Kahl Receives SMART Scholarship

Patrick Kahl, a doctoral student, has been awarded a scholarship from the Department of Defense Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship for Service Program.
Gianoutsos Receives Award from Secretary of the Interior

Nick Gianoutsos, a 2005 M.S in CS graduate, recently received an award from the Secretary of the Interior for his work aboard the NOAA research vessel M/V International Peace collecting samples in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Read about his work on a NOAA blog.
Quasny Featured in NASA Video

Todd Quasny, a 2001 B.S. in CS and 2003 M.S in CS graduate, is featured in a video about NASA’s International Space Station Mission Control Center. Click here to watch the video.
Shiqi Zhang Receives AAMAS Scholarship

Shiqi Zhang received a AAMAS scholarship ($860) from the Eleventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2012. AAMAS is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems.
Colmenares Places Third at Poster Competition

Eduardo Colmenares, a Ph.D. computer science student, won third place at the in the Engineering II category of the Texas Tech Graduate Student Research Poster Competition for his poster on research completed with Dr. Per Andersen.
South Presenting at National Conference

A paper by David South, a junior computer science major, was selected from among 3,500 abstracts across the nation to be presented at the 2012 NCUR on March 29−31 in Ogden, Utah. The paper is titled "Integration of the Alice 3D Programming Environment with Robotics to Stimulate Interest in Computing."