Computer Science

In the News Computer Science Program

December 2024

• Conference paper: "Predicting ChatGPTs Ability to Solve Complex Programming Challenges" by Nguyen Ho, James May, Bao Ngo, Jack Formato, Linh B. Ngo, Van Long Ho, and Hoang Bui, to appear in Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data.

November 2024

October 2024

• Conference paper: "FACE: a Framework for AI-driven Coding Generation Evaluation" by Bao Ngo, Jack Formato, James May, Nguyen Ho, Hoang Bui, and Linh B. Ngo published in the proceedings of the 40th CCSC-Eastern Conference.
  
  
• Conference poster: "Understanding Immediate Weekend Hits and Cult Classics using Natural Language Processing Script Analysis" by Heather Cassel, Minh-An Pham, Hung Nguyen, and Linh B. Ngo presented at the 40th CCSC-Eastern Conference.
  
  
• Competitive Programming: First place for team ByteMe: Mary Bauman, Daniel Stein, Nolan Prochnau 

August 2024

• A new department space for graduate students was opened to support their research, collaboration, and academic studies.
  
  
• The department is excited to welcome Mr. Phillip Fuchs and Mr. Joseph Cutrone as adjuncts for the upcoming semester.

July 2024

• Dr. David Cooper gave the tutorial “Beyond Tutor Logs: Utilizing sensor data for measuring student behavior” at Education Data Mining (EDM) 2024.

May 2024

 

• Matt Boraske defended his Master’s Thesis, The Efficacy of Defending Large Language Models for Interpersonal Conflict Resolution.  Dr. Burns advised the thesis.  Drs. Bhuiyan and Chen served on Matt’s thesis committee.

April 2024

 

• Drs. Cui, Chen, Kim led the 9th iteration of the WCPC West Chester Programming Contest on April 17.  Demetrius Semanko achieved the highest ranking among 36 competitors.

 

• Drs. Kim and Ngo led the 6th WCU Meet & Greet in a virtual format and facilitated this forum where CSC upper-level students spoke on recent experience in internship engagement and the interview process.

March 2024

• A group of CSC students attended University of Delaware’s HenHacks 2024.  Matt Boraske (’24) and Connor Saunders (’23) were part of a team who won first place for best CS Education Technology tool for their submission Type Evolve.

• CSC co-sponsored the 2024 Viking Coding Contest, for local high school students, organized by the local West Chester Area School District.  The event featured 163 student contestants, 18 teachers, and 16 local schools.

• Parievda visited with CSC majors as part of a Lunch & Learn and Q&A series, sponsored by the WCU Twardowski Career Development Center.

• Dr. Bhuiyan organized this year's CSC Colloquium, which featured a research talk by Matthew Frazier'17 and his current PhD research at the University of Delaware, "Investigating Conversational Agents to Support Secondary School Computer Science Exploratory Search."

• Drs. Cui, Chen, Kim led the 8th iteration in the WCPC (West Chester Programming Contest).  The contest saw the the second largest number (39) of students.

February 2024

 

• Dr. Burns testified on a panel at a PA House Majority Policy Hearing on Artificial Intelligence, which was organized by Representatives Pielli, Merski, and O’Mara.

• Deloitte Consulting visited with CSC majors as part of a Lunch & Learn and Q&A series, sponsored by the WCU Twardowski Career Development Center.

December 2023

• Dr. Si Chen was interviewed by KYW Newsradio for a story on cybersecurity awareness and recent data breach incidents.

• CSC congratulates our fall graduating class of 28 undergrads and 5 grad students! 

 

• Dr. Burns served as a panelist at Abraham Lincoln High School in Philadelphia, as part of their activities for CSEd Week, which is an annual program dedicated to inspiring K-12 students to take interest in computer science.

November 2023

• Dr. Cui and students from our Women in Computer Science Club introduced programming and robotics to local middle school students at WCU’s Super Science Saturday.

 

• Dr. Cui led a robotics bootcamp where our majors performed various tasks such as maze completion and automatous navigation through sensor data.

October 2023

• Chuck Winters and Nicholas Alvino from Lockheed Martin gave a Tech Talk on Chrome Extension Viruses as part of our Lunch & Learn series with local industry.

• Dr. Dong Xie from the Computer Science Department at Penn State University Park gave a talk, "Demystifying the Ph.D." to our upper-level students in the department who are considering graduate and doctoral programs.

September 2023

August 2023

• The department is offering some brand new courses for the fall, including an undergraduate topics course on Data Science (CSC495, taught by Dr. Amiruzzaman) and a graduate security topics course on Cloud Access Control (CSC603, taught by Dr. Chen).

• Approximately 115 first-year students, 25 incoming transfers, and 12 graduate students will compose the incoming cohort of students in fall 2023. Welcome!

• The department is excited to welcome Mr. Michael Wacey as an adjunct for the upcoming semester.

July 2023

• On July 24, Dr. Cooper gave a talk entitled “Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Identity Inclusion” to the Westtown-East Goshen Rotary club.  The talk concluded with a lively discussion about the present and future of AI.

• Dr. Bhuiyan presented his paper “Precise Scheduling of DAG Tasks with Dynamic Power Management” at ECRTS 2023, a prestigious venue in Real time system research.

• Graduate student, Rishita Gadde, had her research paper published “Estimate House Price Using Machine Learning” in Research Briefs on Information & Communication Technology Evolution (ReBICTE), under the advisement of Dr. Amiruzzaman.

• Dr. David Cooper is collaborating with Temple University to send four West Chester CSC students to the Stars Celebration and ACM Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing.  The conference will take place in mid-September.

June 2023

• A PowerVault MD1420 was added to the department computing facilities to increasing computing capacity for hosting large open-datasets and student course/research projects.  The additional computing power will facilitate work in big data, machine learning, computer vision, stream processing, and other data science classes and student research projects.

May 2023

• The CS Department awarded 72 undergraduates degrees in computer science during spring commencement.  Congratulations and best wishes! 

• Barbara Dyroff received the Graduate Student Association Award for Excellence in Scholarship and/or Creative Activity and is recognized by the Computer Science Department for her exceptional creativity in building an analysis system on Data Warehousing under the guidance of Dr. Burns.

 

• The following students were recognized by the Computer Science Department in our 22-23 academic year-end awards: Outstanding Junior Award - Abigail Clemens, Kristian Sigismondi; Outstanding Senior Award - Garrett Wei, Kevin Jusino, Sean Whoriskey; Outstanding Research Award - Brian Montecinos-Velazquez; Outstanding Graduate Student Award - Eshwar Mamillapalli, Tyler Moser, Vijayendra Avina.

April 2023

 

• The graduate level security class hosted a virtual talk by Tianhang Zheng titled “Reveal and Alleviate Data Privacy Concerns in This Deep Learning Era” focusing on data privacy concerns in the field of deep learning.

• The Upsilon Pi Epsilon Computer Science Honor Society held its 6th induction ceremony, initiating 27 undergraduate and graduate students for their academic merit and commitment to ethical computing. Jessica Arriaga will serve as the UPE honor society president for the AY23-24 academic year.

• Graduate student Brian Montecinos-Velazquez (advised by Dr. Ngo) has received the University 2023 Student Research, Scholarly, and Create Activities Award. He will be presenting his work during the Research and Creative Activities Day on April 20th, 2023.

• Dr. Rizal Mohd Nor gave a virtual talk titled “Exploring Blockchain Technology: Applications and Security” on blockchain security and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of consensus mechanisms, cryptography, smart contract security, and privacy-enhancing technologies.

• The Computer Science Department held the 5th WCU Programming Contest (WCPC), sponsored by Department of Computer Science, Computer Science Student Club, and CELT Professional Development, on Friday, April 7. Ten CS students participated in the competition and four contestants solved all five problems. Our CS students (Mary Bauman, Mayur Suresh, Steven Wetten) served as judges for the contest. The department also held the 3rd WCU CS Meet and Greet (WCSMG) social event on the same day. During the event, five CS students shared their internship experience, interview process and lessons learned with other rising senior/junior/sophomore students.

March 2023

• As part of the CSC Departmental Research Seminar Series organized by Dr. Bhuiyan, Andrew Schwäbe, an alumnus of the department as well as member of the department’s Industrial Advisory Board, presented an in-person talk titled “Educational Technology and Artificial Intelligence: How A.I. can become the personalized teaching assistant we all need”. Andrew shared his current research from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, which aims to bridge educational psychology theory models of Self Regulated Learning (SRL) with Artificial Intelligence, and the path to understanding how it can assist and enhance learning in the future.

• The Computer Science Department held the 4th WCU CS Programming Contest (sponsored by Department of Computer Science, Computer Science Student Club, and CELT Professional Development) on Wednesday, March 1. Sixteen CS students participated in the competition and 8 of them solved all four problems. Also, our CS students (Mary Bauman, James May, and Connor Saunders) served as judges for the contest.

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January 2023

• A couple of new graduate-level courses are being offered. Dr. Si Chen is offering a topics course on modern malware analysis to introduce CS graduate students to malware concepts, malware analysis, and black-box reverse engineering techniques. Students will also be introduced to types of malware, common attack recipes, some tools, and a wide array of malware analysis techniques. Dr. Ashik Bhuiyan is offering a course on Cyber-physical systems and the integration of algorithms and physical components where both logical and temporal correctness are critical.

December 2022

• At the fall commencement ceremony, Dr. James Fabrey, former departmental chairperson (2002-2020) and retired faculty member, was awarded emeritus designation. Congratulations, Dr. Fabrey!

• 37 undergraduates and 11 graduate students completed their degree requirements, and were awarded degrees at the fall commencement ceremony. Best wishes to all on their accomplishment!

• Mr. Steven Battilana, long time departmental full-time adjunct, retired. Mr. Battilana served the department for over 20 years, and was a professional and friendly colleague. Best of health in retirement!

October 2022

• The Competitive Programming Club sent three teams to attend the programming contest hosted at the 16th Annual Regional Conference for the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, Mid-West Region. The teams are Byte Me (Mary Bauman, Kevin Codd, and Nolan Prochnau), Hacker-Rams (Samual Auman, Adam Hansen, and James May), and Golden Rams 2 (Christopher Calixto). All teams have successfully developed correct solutions to the programming questions, with Byte Me achieved first place standing after the four-hour competition ended. The Competitive Programming Club is coached and advised by Dr. Linh Ngo.

• The Computer Science Department held the 3rd WCU CS Programming Contest (sponsored by Department of Computer Science and Computer Science Student Club) on Wednesday, October 5. Seventeen CS students participated in the competition and 7 of them solved all three problems. They are Adam Faust, Colby Gamble, Noah Marcolongo, James May, Kareem Shahatta, Sean Whoriskey and Stephen Young.

September 2022

• The department held the second WCU CS Meet and Greet (WCSMG) social event, where ten junior/senior students shared their internship experience, interview process and lessons learned with other students

• The Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) has fully reaccredited the B.S. in Computer Science degree through 2027-2028.

• In preparation for creating a STARS Ignite student chapter at WCU for broadening participation in computing, Dr. David Cooper and student leader Emily Miller attended the TAPIA and STARS Celebration conferences. The STARS chapter at WCU will focus on cultural competency in computing in order to address all aspects of broadening participation. 

• Dr. Amiruzzaman published a journal article titled "Use of Twitter among College Students for Academics: A Mixed-Methods Approach" in Social Sciences.

• Dr. Amiruzzaman published a journal article titled "Analysis of COVID-19: An infectious disease spread" in Journal of Internet Services and Information Security (JISIS).

• The department is excited to welcome our largest incoming class: 128 first-year students, 23 transfer students, and 13 graduate students.

• The department has opened a new Apple iMac computer lab, and a computer science common area for students, peers, and faculty collaboration, research, and conversation.

• New courses offered this fall include: iOS application development, a graduate-level data visualization course, and a graduate seminar on cloud access control.

August 2022

• Dr. Amiruzzaman published a journal article titled "A Survey on Steganography and Steganalysis Techniques in Secret Communication" in Research Briefs on Information & Communication Technology Evolution (ReBICTE).

July 2022

• Dr. Amiruzzaman published a journal article titled "A Methodological Analysis of Blockchain-Based Smart Contracts in International Trade" in International Journal on Perceptive and Cognitive Computing

June 2022

• Dr. Amiruzzaman is going to present his research paper entitled "AVES: A data-driven approach for airman certification" at the 2022 AIAA Aviation Forum.

• Dr. Amiruzzaman published a journal article titled "Logical analysis of built-in DBSCAN Functions in Popular Data Science Programming Languages" in MIST International Journal of Science and Technology (MIJST).

May 2022

• Dr. Amiruzzaman published a journal article titled "VisualCommunity: a platform for archiving and studying communities" in Journal of Computational Social Science.

• The CS Department awarded 65 undergraduates and 23 graduate students degrees in computer sciences during spring commencement. Congratulations and best wishes!

• Dr. Richard Burns was promoted to Full Professor.

• Dr. Linh Ngo was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor.

• Sherry Patterson, a longtime adjunct instructor in our CS Department, retired. We wish her health and happiness in retirement.

April 2022

• Dr. Amiruzzaman presented his research paper entitled "The Relationships between College Course Decision-Making and Academic Performance: A Multiple Regression Analysis" at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) conference.

• Dr. Amiruzzaman's research assistant Heena Begum is going to present their research work entitled "Understand Statistical Concepts Using Visualization and Interactive Learning" at the Research & Creative Activity Day at West Chester University.

• The department held the first WCU CS Meet and Greet (WCSMG) social event where eight graduating seniors presented their job search experience, and they shared their interview skills and resume writing tips with our rising senior/junior/sophomore students. The first ever WCSMG was on Friday, April 29, 2022.

• The Computer Science Department held the 2nd WCU CS Programming Contest (sponsored by Department of Computer Science and Computer Science Student Club) on Wednesday, April 27. Eight CS students participated in the competition and 5 of them solved at least one problem among three. They are Mary Bauman, Vijayendra dushyanth raj Avina, Shaun Derstine, Garrett Wei, and Nathan Parlett in the order of ranking.

• Our CSC Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) Honor Society held our annual induction ceremony on Monday, April 25. Congratulations to our UPE induction class of 2021-22!

• Our CS faculty (Dr. Liu Cui, Dr. Si Chen and Dr. Jongwook Kim) won the 2022-23 CELT Professional Development Grant Award. They proposed a project titled "Accelerate Students’ Programming Skills with Extra Curriculum Activities" to fill in a gap between course assignments and the programming skills that students are required for job interviews and at work.

• Dr. Si Chen and Dr. Liu Cui's new publication, titled "Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF) The New Swiss Knife for Cybersecurity Education," won the faculty best paper award at the 37th Annual Conference of The Pennsylvania Association of Computer and Information Science Educators (PACISE 2022).

March 2022

• The Computer Science Department held the first WCU CS Programming Contest (sponsored by the Computer Science Student Club) on Wednesday, March 23. Eighteen CS students participated in the competition and 6 of them solved both problems. They are Vijayendra Avina, Garrett Wei, Brian Giovinazzo, Brian Rogers, Mary Bauman, and Stephen Young in the order of ranking.

• The Computer Science Department held the monthly "Practice-A-Thon: tackle Data Structure" event (March 2022) under Dr. Liu Cui's guidance. Khup Tuang solved all six problems. Connor Sauders was the first solver of problems #941 and #977.

February 2022

• The Computer Science Department held the second monthly "Practice-A-Thon: tackle Data Structure" event under Dr. Liu Cui's guidance. Nathan Loebertman is the only one who finished all three problems for the programming practice in February.

• Kristian Sigismondi, Trevor Marshall, Jacob Winemiller, Gabriel Thompson, participated in the NCAE Cyber Games on 2/26/2022. With only 5 people (10 people allowed for each team), they took 4th place among all 11 teams. Only one position away from going to national competitions!

• The Computer Science Department became a member of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT, "en-cee-wit"). NCWIT is the only national nonprofit organization focused on women's participation across the entire computing ecosystem. By becoming an NCWIT member organization, we are joining a community of 1,500+ colleges and universities, tech companies, non-profits, and others committed to equity in computing and technology. Dr. David Cooper is our core member representative.

January 2022

• Dr. Amiruzzaman published a journal article titled "Geo-Context Aware Study of Vision-Based Autonomous Driving Models and Spatial Video Data" in IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

• The Computer Science Department held the first "Practice-A-Thon: tackle Data Structure" during the winter session 1/3/2022 - 1/21/2022. Under Dr. Liu Cui's guidance, ten students participated in the event, and four of them solved more than 5 challenging problems. They are Antonio Bonilla-Garcia, Kayla Washington, Garrett Wei, Tyler Prehl.

• Congratulations to our department's fall 2021 graduates! 35 students completed their BS, and 8 students finished their MS.

December 2021

• Dr. Amiruzzaman is going to present his research paper entitled "Interactive Visualization and Capturing Geo-Coded Multimedia Data on Mobile Devices"
  at the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction (IHCI-2021).

• Dr. Amiruzzaman is going to present his research paper entitled "Leveraging Decentralized Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain Technology in International Trade" at the 2021 International Conference on Cyber Security and Internet of Things.

• Dr. Amiruzzaman published a journal article titled "Blockchain letter of credit: A transaction-level analysis" in Journal of Engineering Science and Technology.

• We are pleased to announce that Mallika Tarigopula, a CSC undergraduate student, is selected to serve as the Commencement Speaker at the CSM ceremony on December 19, 2021. We are looking forward to Mallika's greetings and wishes to her classmates!

• Akash Kumar successfully defended his graduate thesis titled “Playing Pong with Q-learning”. His thesis committee members were: Dr. Richard Burns (chair), Dr. Si Chen, Dr. Linh Ngo. Akash will be entering a PhD program in January at Penn State University. Best wishes and congratulations!

November 2021

• Dr. Amiruzzaman is going to present his research project entitled "Evaluation of DBSCAN algorithm on different programming languages: An exploratory study" at the 5th International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Information & Communication Technology (ICEEICT 2021).

• Dr. Amiruzzaman is going to present his research project entitled "An assessment and comparative analysis of trade finance initiatives utilizing distributed ledger technology" at the 2nd International Recent Trends in Engineering, Advanced Computing and Technology Conference (RETREAT 2021).

• West Chester University of Pennsylvania has been designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (CAE-CD) for the Certificate in Computer Security through academic year 2026. The reaccreditation effort was led by Dr. Liu Cui.
• The abstract submitted by Dr. Bhuiyan and his graduate research assistant Harshavardhi Valmiki, was accepted for a poster presentation at the 2021 PASSHE STEM Student Research Conference at Kutztown University. Dr. Amiruzzaman's research assistant Heena Begum also has a poster accepted and will be presenting.

October 2021

• Dr. Amiruzzaman's research paper was accepted at the 2nd International Workshop on Adaptive Cyber Learning 2021 -- part of the 6th IEEE Cyber Science and Technology Congress 2021
• Dr. Amiruzzaman's research paper was accepted at the IEEE VIS: Visualization & Visual Analytics 2021. VIS is the premier conference in the field of information and scientific visualization.
• Dr. Bhuiyan's research paper was accepted at the 42nd IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS). RTSS is the premier conference (CORE Rank: A*) in the field of real-time and embedded systems.
• CSC faculty members, Dr. Bhuiyan and Dr. Amiruzzaman, jointly received the 2021-2022 eTextbook stipend/grant from the West Chester University.

August 2021

• CSC welcomes 90 new first-year undergrads, 24 transfer students, and 20 new graduate students for the Fall 2021 semester.

• Three new faculty members, Dr. Md Amiruzzaman, Dr. Ashik Bhuiyan and Dr. David Cooper join the CS Department as Assistant Professors

• Dr. Richard Epstein is retiring at the end of the summer 2021 semester. Dr. Epstein joined the department back in 1991, and has been at WCU for 30 years. He was the longstanding instructor for a number of courses, including CSC301 (Computer Security), CSC402 (Software Engineering) and CSC555 (Software Engineering – at the Graduate level). We wish Dr. Epstein all the best for the new chapter of his life.

• Kathleen Barimani, an administrative assistant of the CS Department, is retiring as of August 20, 2021. Kathleen joined the Computer Science Department in August 2012. Prior to that, Kathleen served for many years in the Registrar’s Office. We wish her a happy, well-deserved retirement.

May 2021

• Best wishes to our May 2021 graduates. The CS Department is proud to recognize the completion of 61 Bachelor's and 9 Master's degrees. The Commencement Speaker for the College's undergraduate ceremony was CS major, Brandon Barker.

• Dr. Si Chen was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor.

• Dr. Si Chen and Dr. Liu Cui delivered an Invited Talk, titled "ARSpy: Breaking Location-based, Multi-player Augmented Reality Application for User Location Tracking," at the Centers of Academic Excellence (CAE) Forum.

April 2021

• Two of our CSC students, Tyler Clark and Kevin Codd (advisor: Dr. Linh Ngo), received the 2021 Student Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activities (SRCA) Award.

• At the 36th Pennsylvania Computer and Information Science Educators (PACISE) Conference, two student-led papers were presented. The paper by Prathyusha Dongari (graduate student) and Dr. Richard J. Burns received the Best Graduate Research paper Award (Statewise Twitter Sentiment Analysis Of 2020 US Presidential Election Using Apache Spark). The paper by Tyler Clark, Kevi Codd (undergraduate students) and Dr. Linh B. Ngo received the Best Undergraduate Research Paper Award (Studying Break-in Attempts Across Multiple Servers Using Apache Spark and Security Logs).

• Two of our competitive programming teams, GO(1)denRams (Mary Bauman, Kevin Codd, and Trush Patel) and WCUGoldenRams1 (Dominic Curcio, Rishi Parida, and Tyler Prehl) participated and placed 3rd and 4th, respectively, in the Competitive Programming Contest hosted at the 36th Pennsylvania Computer and Information Science Educators (PACISE) Conference on April 9th, 2021. Both teams were able to solve the same number of problems, but GO(1)denRams beats WCUGoldenRams1 by 7 minutes on the clock.

March 2021

• One of our competitive programming teams, Golden Rams 3 (Brandon Barker, Alexandra Garibaldi, and Kevin Codd) advised by Dr. Linh Ngo, made it through the regional round of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition (ICPC) to the North America Central Division round.

February 2021

• CSC Computing Coordinator, Dr. Si Chen, launched a new server built for deep learning and high performance computing. It is equipped with two AMD EPYC 7452 (a total of 64 cores) CPUs and with 143 GB memory. The RTX Quadro 8000 graphic card is able to support a full deep learning coding stack, which includes frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Keras.

January 2021

• WCU won the 8th place in the CCSC (Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges) with outstanding students: Brandon Barker, Dominic Curcio, Akash Kumar.

• The CSC Department welcomes approximately 35 new students at the undergraduate and graduate levels to our program.

December 2020

• CSC congratulates 36 graduating seniors who have fully completed their major requirements, including 18 whom also satisfied the Certificate in Computer Security requirements.

• Congratulations to CSC major Amondo Clayton, who is one of 40 WCU students who have been selected to receive this year's West Chester University 1871 Award, which recognizes students who excel in the academic and co-curricular realms.

October 2020

• The Computer Science Competitive Programming Club sent two teams to virtually compete at CCSC-EA. Out of 24 teams, the team of Brandon Barker, Kevin Codd, and Dominic Curcio placed 3rd and Mary Bauman, Rishi Parida, and Andrew Valenci placed 9th.

• Two publications were presented at CCSC-EA (Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges – Eastern Region) 37th Annual Regional Conference:
  Containerizing CS Learning Environments, authored by Dr. Linh B. Ngo, Dr. Richard Burns and Dr. Si Chen.
  Virtual Cluster for HPC Education, authored by Dr. Linh B. Ngo and John Kilgannon (alumni).

• Our third departmental social event was organized with a topic focusing on Information Technology internships. Our student panelists included Amondo Clayton, Stephen Dages, Mitchel Griffith, and Chris Hollowood.

September 2020

• Our second departmental social event was organized with a topic focusing on Software Engineering internships. Our student panelists include Alexandra Garibaldi, Andrew Valenci, and Nicholas Edwards.

• Dr. Linh Ngo hosted a department panel on landing internships and student experiences in the interview process. Many thanks to our junior and senior panelists: Alexandra Garibaldi, Andrew Valenci, Brandon Barker, Nicholas Edwards. About 35 students attended including many first and second-year students.

• Dr. Afrand Agah will be virtually presenting her accepted publication, “Discerning Divergent Nodes in Social Networks”, at the 14th International Conference on Social Computing and Applications (ICSSR).

August 2020

• CSC welcomes 84 first-year undergrads, 34 transfer students, and 16 new graduate students for the Fall 2020 semester.

• Dr. Linh Ngo organized and hosted a welcome back Dept Social event on Zoom, to kick start the fall semester.

• Students Sean Flanagan and Biying Chen are recipients of the Repair the World Scholarship.

• Dr. Jongwook Kim joins the CS Department as an Assistant Professor.

• Mr. Thomas Albrecht (2013) and Ms. Madhura Mohile join the CS Department as Adjunct Faculty.

July 2020

• Dr. Cheer Yang virtually presented his accepted publication “Teaching Visual Computing as a Post-Doctoral Area in a Small University” at the 12th Annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies.

• Jon Kilgannon successfully defended his Master’s Thesis titled, “A Machine Learning System for Glaucoma Detection using Inexpensive Computation”. His thesis committee included Dr. Richard Burns (thesis chair), Dr. Si Chen, and Dr. Linh Ngo.

• Dr. Si Chen was elevated to IEEE Senior Member. IEEE stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Senior Membership is bestowed only to those who have made significant contributions to the profession.

• Dr. Linh Ngo, received a Research in Mathematics and the Sciences (RIMS) Award from the College of Sciences and Mathematics, for his project titled “Performance Evaluation of Big Data Infrastructure Deployment via High Throughput Computing Platform.”

May 2020

• Dr. Liu Cui was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor.

• In Spring 2020 Commencement, the Department awarded the B.S. in Computer Science degree to 57 students and Computer Security certificate to 39 students.

April 2020

• It is with bittersweet emotion that we are announcing that Dr. Fabrey, who is celebrating his 45th year teaching anniversary at WCU, is retiring at the end of this Spring20 semester. Dr. Fabrey has led the CS Dept for almost two decades, serving as Chairperson for the last 18 years since 2002. We wish Dr. Fabrey a very well earned and happy retirement.

• Paul Dinsmore, longtime adjunct instructor in our CS Department, is retiring after the Spring 2020 semester. We wish him health and happiness in his retirement.

March 2020

• Congratulations to graduate student Jon Kilgannon who was recognized by the Graduate Student Association for excellence in Scholarship. Dr. Agah, Graduate Coordinator, additionally mentions: “Jon Kilgannon has done exemplary work throughout his graduate career. In addition to mastery (4.0 GPA) of his coursework, Jon has demonstrated an ability to conduct independent research that is worthy of recognition. He was awarded a prize for his poster presentation of “Automated Detection of Glaucoma Indicators with Machine Learning” at the Fall 2019 Research Day symposium, and is currently completing a Master’s thesis on the topic.”

Student Spotlight

• Amondo Clayton, II: He featured in the Spring 2021 issue of WCU Magazine. He graduates with his bachelor's in Computer Science in May 2021 - with minors in White-Collar Crime and Finance - and his master's in summer 2022. Check out Amondo's story.

• Brandon Barker: Highlighted in the May “Success Starts Here” spotlight. Brandon has been utilizing 3D printing technology to make face shields for first responders.

• Amondo S. Clayton, II: For the summer of 2019, during his sophomore year, he successfully secured a ten-week paid internship with Comcast in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While there, Amondo gained hands-on training with SQL, Excel, Pivot Tables, and Tableau. He created visualization reports of new products and services that Comcast and Xfinity were in the process of launching. During his internships, he expanded upon his previous knowledge as he simultaneously learned proprietary software, had fun, and established meaningful connections with others in his field.