Department of Computer Science

Prof. Suthaharan will be talking about Big Data classification techniques and technologies at the Triad Developer's Guild meeting on February 19. Big Data classification is one of the challenging problems in the emerging field of Big Data Science and Engineering. Technologies such as Apache Hadoop with Apache Hive are currently used for addressing such problems; however, techniques that can be integrated with these technologies are still needed, leading to extensive research and development objectives. Machine Learning (ML) techniques are being revisited to explore and develop data representation learning techniques for solving Big Data classification problems. In his talk, Prof. Suthaharan will discuss characteristics of Big Data and show that network intrusion traffic satisfies the properties of Big Data. He will also discuss some of the modern ML techniques that can help to solve Big Data classification problems. Finally, he will present some resources that are in the public domain which may help people advance their knowledge in Big Data Science and Engineering. For more information, see the Triad Developer's Guild web site.

On November 30, the department's Industry Advisory Board will be on campus, and will hold a panel discussion for students at 2:30 in Petty 313. The industry members will talk about the current job market, and skills or characteristics industry is looking for in potential hires. This is a great opportunity for Computer Science students! Following the panel discussion, in Petty 223 there will be a reception and informal discussion with students who are completing and presenting their senior projects. All students are invited to attend and see what our seniors have accomplished! Information on these events is available on the event flyer.

Dr. Suthaharan will be offering a special topics class in "Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning" in the Spring 2013 semester. Students will treat network intrusion datasets as Big Data and analyze the datasets using modern Machine Learning (ML) techniques. Several datasets in the public domain will be studied and analyzed. Students will have an opportunity to build an Intrusion Detection System in the Petty 214 lab, generate massive datasets and analyze them for Big Data classification. Students will learn the ML techniques in an algorithmic style rather than mathematically. Undergraduate students should sign up for CSC 495, while graduate students should register for CSC 663. In addition to the regular classwork, the graduate students will read at least two recent papers on the related topics and report their comparison study through class presentations and technical reports. For more information, contact Dr. Suthaharan.

Students from the UNCG Department of Computer Science and the Department of Information Systems and Supply Chain Management program traveled to Hampton, Virginia for the annual STARS Celebration! conference. The students in UNCG's chapter of the STARS Computing Corps work to broaden participation in computing through a variety of outreach and service activities. The participating students attended a variety of workshops and lectures at the conference to help kick off the new academic year's Computing Corps activities.

Former UNCG STARS president, Simone Stephens, was awarded the national Outstanding Corps Student award for leadership and contributions to the Corps mission, and the UNCG chapter was runner up for the best chapter award. The STARS Alliance is an NSF funded project to advance innovation and broaden participation through regional partnerships.

While the UNCG campus slows down over the summer, two UNCG Computer Science professors were busy working to establish international collaborations between our department and some Chinese universities. Professors Lixin Fu and Jing Deng visited several Chinese Universities and gave research seminars in May and June 2012. Both Drs. Fu and Deng visited the Electrical and Electronic Institute and Software Institute at Dalian University of Technologies, and Dr. Fu went on to visit Nankai University while Dr. Deng visited Tsinghua University, Jilin University, and Xi Dian University. Through research meetings, lab visits, and discussions with faculty members and students, they highlighted UNCG, UNCG computer science undergraduate and M.S. programs, and faculty research. We hope to build upon these relationships through collaborative research and possibly student or faculty exchanges.

On Saturday, March 17, 2012, computer science students Lance Everhart, Luke Eldridge, and Dayyan Borhanian took first place in the Triad Regional Programming Contest hosted by NC A&T University. Thirteen teams from 8 schools competed at the contest, and this UNCG team was the only one to complete all nine problems during the 4 hour competition. They narrowly defeated the second place team from High Point University, who completed 8 of the 9 problems. Everhart and Borhanian were also on the team that took first place at the 2011 competition, and this year's win extends UNCG's 1st-place winning streak at the Triad Programming Contest to three years.

Computer Science Master's student Tejaswi Panchagnula presented his project "Evaluation of intrusion detection datasets for accuracy with respect to relevance feature selection," supervised by Dr. Suthaharan, at the Sigma Xi 2011 Annual Meeting and International Research Conference at the Raleigh Convention Center. The event was well-attended, and Tejaswi had the opportunity to describe his work to many interested attendees.