UGA’s newest academic unit showcased its research bona fides on Oct. 27 by holding its first School of Computing Research Day in the Memorial Hall ballroom.
Srinivas Aluru, professor in the Georgia Tech College of Computing and executive director of its Institute for Data Engineering and Science, delivered the day’s keynote lecture before a crowd of faculty and students from UGA and beyond. Aluru’s talk, “Machine Learning Approaches for Reverse Engineering Genome-Scale Networks,” traced the evolution in his lab of using various network-learning approaches to analyze and predict gene function.
Following Aluru’s lecture, attendees participated in a computing trivia competition and listened to a panel discussion, “The Future of Data Science and High-Performance Machine Learning: Trends & Directions,” featuring Aluru; UGA faculty members Lakshmish Ramaswamy, Tianming Liu and Prashant Doshi; and Kang Li, chief security officer for CertiK, a company that specializes in blockchain security.
Announced in Spring 2022, the School of Computing is administered jointly by the College of Engineering and the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences. The event featured welcome addresses from SoC interim Director Thiab Taha, as well as engineering Dean Don Leo and Tom Motes, associate dean in Franklin.
This fall there are 1,498 undergraduate computer science majors at UGA, Taha said in his remarks, as well as 235 graduate students and nearly 250 minors. The school currently is home to 35 faculty and, if its hiring plans are realized, could grow by more than 25% by August 2023.
At an evening poster session of student research, the winners included:
- 1st place:D. student Nazish Tahir, “Holistic Utility AI for Robotic Task Offloading to Edge Devices”
- 2nd place:D. student Pranav Pandey, “RGB-D Based Instantaneous Evaluation of Safety in Human-Robot Interaction Settings”
- 3rd place (tie): Graduate student Ting Jiang, “Scheduling Multi-Tenant AI applications on Heterogeneous Edge Devices”
- 3rd place (tie): Undergraduate Michael Starks, “HeRoSwarm: Fully-Capable Miniature Swarm Robot Hardware Design With Open-Source ROS Support”
“Our inaugural School of Computing Research Day was a big success,” Taha said. “There is tremendous excitement among the computing community about the creation of our new school, and this was an opportunity to showcase the quality of our faculty and students. I’m grateful to Dr. Aluru, Provost Jack Hu and everyone else who made time to attend. The best days lie ahead for computing research at UGA.”
