1

Computer ScienceComputer ScienceDepartment

2

Dear Alumni & Friends

It gives me great pleasure to send you our newly designed newsletter, which highlights theactivities pursued by students and faculty of the Oklahoma State University ComputerScience Department during the past year.

Our undergraduate enrollment continues to grow and our students have not had anydifficulty in finding jobs in industry. Our ACM student organization had a very activeyear connecting with industries and sponsoring a variety of activities including aprogramming contest and hackathons.

In research, several exciting projects have been undertaken by faculty, some of which arefunded by the ~1M new awards received during the past year.

Several of the projects provide direct support to solve practical industry problems. Therewere two NSF supported REU site projects conducted during the summer whichencourage and support undergraduate student research.

We have received approval to offer a "Graduate Certificate in Big Data Analytics" whichis a new graduate certificate program.

I am happy to report that our Department is growing and we look forward to connectingwith you in the coming year.

Best Regards,

K. M. GeorgeProfessor & HeadComputer Science Department

3

On December 2, 2016, an Open House was held by the faculty who are part of the newly establishedCenter for Cyber Physical Systems. This new Center focuses on research, education and outreach inthe emerging areas of Cyber Physical Systems and Internet-of-Things spanning several processdomains. The faculty who are part of this new Center include Dr. Blayne Mayfield (Co-Director),Dr. J. Cecil (Co-Director), Dr. Chris Crick, Dr. Eric Chan-Tin, Dr. Johnson Thomas and Dr. DavidCline. The five labs which comprise this Center include theRobotic Cognition Lab, the Big Data and Scalable ComputingLab, the Digital Entertainment Lab, the Networking and SecurityLab and the Virtual Reality and Information Centric EngineeringLab.

Several labs which are part of this Center held demonstrations tohighlight the research and educational activities they are involvedwith. Students from Computer Science and various engineeringdepartments attended this event.

New Center Open House

Students were introduced to exciting virtual worlds inmanufacturing, space systems and surgery using an array oftechnologies: non immersive, semi immersive and mixed realityenvironments; they interacted with virtual solar systems,automated manufacturing factories and NASA’s Deep SpaceHabitat environments using the advanced PowerWall VirtualReality system wearing stereo eyewear and controllers. Otherdemos included interacting with Microsoft’s Hololens whichsupports Mixed Reality based simulation.

Key highlights included students exploring and interacting withan HTC Vive Virtual Reality headset where they picked up,throwing, and catching objects insider virtual worlds.

Students were introduced to robotics research includingdemonstrations involving the humanoid torso robot Baxterengaged in a tabletop manipulation learning fromdemonstration task.

Students were given demonstrations of FluidPassword (abrowser plugin to automatically change a user’s password aftera login), introduced to Tor (which was used to highlightanonymity issues on the Internet) and also shown how toperform website fingerprinting to break anonymity.

4

A new certificate program in Big Data Analytics (coordinated by Dr. Johnson Thomas)is being offered for graduate students; this program emphasizes education, research,service and outreach related to big data analytics including the capture, curation, storage,search, transfer and analysis of large and complex data sets that have direct relevance toeveryday situations and problems. The graduate certificate in Big Data Analytics may becompleted in conjunction with the Masters degree in Computer Science. Moreinformation can be found at http://www.cs.okstate.edu/bigdatacert.html.

Please contact Dr. Johnson Thomas for additional details (gradcoord@cs.okstate.edu)

Our Department’s Distinguished Alumni Award Winner forthis year is Geoffrey Simpson.

Geoffrey is the founder (or co-founder) and CEO of threedifferent start-up companies. His companySpikedMace.com is the newest, and its main product,SimpleCallTracker.com is one of the leading solutions forinbound call tracking for local and long distance numbers.He is also the co-founder of SkaFlash, which provides aneasy way to collect and maintain email addresses in person.His most successful product is Diner Connection, which isan online app that provides wait-list management and otherservices for restaurants.

Geoffrey graduated from our computer science department in 1997 and also completed anMBA from OSU in 2006. Apart from programming, he is an avid marathon runner havingrun over 20 marathons and ultra marathons. He is also an artist having had his workdisplayed in various galleries inTulsa.

Geoffrey enjoys keeping in touch with the department where he often gives seminarpresentations to students on his evolution towards becoming a software entrepreneur. He isalso a member of our department’s Industry Advisory Board.

He currently resides in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, with his wife, Rebecca and his two boys,Keelin and Zachary.

Congrats, Geoffrey! We are proud of your accomplishments and service.

Geoffrey Simpson

4

5

Rohit Nutalapati

Rohit Nutalapati is a student in the MS program in ourDepartment. His love for math and solving puzzles drove himtoward Computer Science as an undergraduate at GITAMUniversity in India, where he enjoyed experimenting withArduinos and writing mobile apps. At OSU, his thesis researchhas given him an opportunity to develop a model that will permitusers to experience passive haptics (the ability to touch virtualobjects) while walking around freely in a virtual world. During2017, he also has worked as a graduate research assistant withDr. Mayfield on a project that involves user interaction withcomplex, industrial data in a mixed reality environment using a Microsoft HoloLens.Rohit feels that the Computer Science Department’s research-oriented coursestructure provides a strong backbone for learning.

Ben Myers

Ben was born in Ames, Iowa, but grew up in Murphy, TX. HisFather is a systems engineer at Raytheon, while his Mother is thedirector of an early childhood center. He also was an Eagle Scout,and enjoys making puns, much to his friends’ chagrin. Heattended high school at Plano East Senior High; his graduatingclass has the distinction of being the largest graduating class inthe nation of that year.

Ben first became interested in computer science at high school,when he took his first class in the topic.

He currently is serving his second term as the president of Oklahoma State’sAssociation of Computing Machinery chapter, and plans to graduate May 2018.

This summer, he interned at USAA, where he did webapp development utilizing theReact and Redux Javascript libraries. Ben has accepted a full time position with USAAafter graduation, where he will continue the work he began as an intern.

6

Current Projects & Activities

In this research, the focus is to allow autonomous robots to collaborate with each otherand with human teammates. A part of this research conducted by Dr. Crick and hisstudents is funded through a grant from NSF's National Robotics Initiative, and focuseson robotic construction equipment. Humans and robots have different strengths andskills; humans have a stronger grasp of context and big-picture decision making, but arenot actually very good at low-level control. It takes many years for an equipmentoperator to become proficient at manipulating the controls of a motor grader orexcavator, but on the other hand, no robot can coordinate all of the activities on a jobsite. Our research bridges the gap, allowing the robot to plan optimal control inputswithin the larger frame of a human-demonstrated task, and perform faster, safer andmore efficiently than the human could do alone.

Another major NSF-funded project involvesworking with a dozen other researchers toimprove our understanding of atmosphericphysics and severe weather phenomenathrough the use of robotic aircraft. Prof.Crick's focus is on autonomous collaborationamong robots with different capabilities.Large fixed-wing robots may have excellentsensors, but they are too expensive toapproach dangerous weather. Smallquadrotor drones can get closer, but have verylimited flying time. Ground systems havemuch more power and computation available,but limited mobility. The robots should beable to develop deployment schemes that takemaximum advantage of the abilities of each,while incorporating human advice.

7

Our Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) held a programming competition onOctober 4 where students were given three hours to solve problems; a total of 53 studentsparticipated. This event was coordinated by Dr. Eric Chan-Tin, Dr. David Cline along withBen Myers and Andrew Bevelhymer. The top three winners were (left to right) Brandon Wong,Justin Maddox and Hunter Soliday. Prizes were sponsored by Paycom, which included adrone, headset and keyboard.

Dr. Eric Chan-Tin, Dr. Blayne Mayfield, and Dr. J. Cecil and computer science studentsworked with Professor S. O'Hara (School of Architecture) and Dr. J. Jacob (Mechanicaland Aerospace Engineering) and other engineering students on designing a spacehabitat for deep space exploration and for Mars. These activities were part of a XHab(Deep Space Habitat) design projectfunded by the National Space GrantFoundation from NASA. In a relatedactivity, students in a new computerscience course on Cyber PhysicalSystems worked with NASA Houstonon semester long class projectsfocusing on designing space habitatsusing Virtual Reality/AugmentedReality tools; the three student teamsvisited NASA Houston to present theirfinal designs to NASA engineers.

Dr. Chan-Tin has been investigating how to accurately predict the rate of penetration,ROP, based on the time, depth, and formation data sets of nine oil well data sets.Different machine learning algorithms and attributes (such as RPM, Weight on Bit,etc...) have been systematically used.

8

Consumers are increasingly concerned about the safety and wholesomeness of the foodthey eat. Food safety can be improved by delivering whole-chain traceability ofproducts, from field to table. Dr. Mayfield and his colleagues in the OSU Division ofAgricultural Sciences & Natural Resources are designing and implementing a pilotproject that provides whole-chain traceability for melons, an important Oklahomaproduct. Using block-chain technology, accurate product information tracking willkeep consumers well-informed about the Oklahoma melons they purchase, and itfacilitate the identification and recall of products in case of outbreaks of salmonella, e.coli, etc. This project is funded by the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food,and Forestry.

This project, directed by Dr. George, involves conducting a multi-phase project thatwill attempt to use the sensor measurements to predict certain unfavorable events froma large data set of rig sensor values.

The HoloLens is an augmented/mixed reality headset produced by Microsoft. While itis a novel and exciting product, the CPU, GPU, memory, and rechargeable power sourceembedded within the headset limit its ability to process and visualize data. Dr. Mayfieldand his team of GRAs are working with a company in Oklahoma City to discover anddevelop ways to use the HoloLens to visualize industrial data that normally would betoo large or complex to be displayed and manipulated on a HoloLens.

In this project, Dr George & his students are testing an embedded system program forATtiny84 MCU to determine reasons for system failure.

Ann Lewis, EXXONMobil

Todd Pugh, SST Software

Michael Hanska, Cerner

Dan Yost, Tri8.com

Kurt Schmeckpeper, Motorola Solutions

Jacob Boyer, Boeing

Joe Carroll, CITGO Petroleum Corporation

Geoffrey Simpson, SpikedMace.com

8

9

Dr. Johnson Thomas and his graduate students at the Big Data and Scalable ComputingLab are investigating various aspects of big data including cognitive computing andanalytics, providing data integrity in big data systems, efficient processing in Hadoop,security in big data systems using block chaining and other approaches.

In this NSF project, Dr. Cecil and his students areexploring the design and implementation of anInternet-of-Things (IoT) based cyber physicalframework in the context of Industry 4.0 supportingthe agile assembly of Micro Devices. Suchframeworks hold the potential to facilitate rapidand agile collaborations among distributedengineering partners. An advanced Test Bed isunder development including an array of cyber andphysical components which collaborate using cloud based principles and emerging NextGeneration GENI Internet technologies. An information centric engineering approachhas been adopted to design the cyber physical interactions, which provide a foundationfor implementing this cyber physical framework. The cyber modules are capable ofassembly planning, path planning, Virtual Reality based assembly simulation andphysical command generation. The physical assembly activities are accomplished usingmicro assembly work cells. An IoT based cyber physical test bed has been created to testand validate the design and implementation aspects of the proposed framework.

Professors Cecil and Mayfield are involved with an unique NSF funded initiative aimed at encouraging OSU students to become entrepreneurs in cyber manufacturing and IoT fields; students are introduced to entrepreneurial activities through senior level and graduate courses where they develop new ideas and business plans to launch cyber and physical products including ‘apps’; they will also explore establishing new startup companies for their products. In fall 2017, student teams worked on the concept of a smart refrigerator (as part of a new course taught by Dr. Cecil) and are making progress towards demonstrating their prototype.

10

This NSF project being investigated by Dr. Cecil and his students deals with the creationof an innovative 'app' which will allow users from a cross section of backgrounds todesign and build parts interactively in a 3D environment. A core aspect of this 'app'would be accessibility and simplicity in modifying a given design. The app would becapable of running on both the android and iPhone platforms along with being able tobe run on the web. Unlike cumbersome CAD tools, the app being developed will allowthose in the maker community and other users to interact intuitively in a 3D environmentwhere they can modify existing designs using a touch screen interface on a smart phoneor tablet; a base set of designs will be provided which can be modified interactively.

As part of a NSF / US Ignite initiative, Dr. Cecil and his students are investigating the creation of a Next Generation Network based Virtual Reality (VR) based simulation training framework that can be used by medical residents for training in orthopedic surgery. Some of the networking techniques can be viewed as belonging to umbrella of smart cyber physical technologies and Internet-of-Things (IoT) based practises; they exploit the capabilities of Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI)'s national test bed infrastructure. Specifically, we have shown that the ultra-fast communication networks are effective in linking expert surgeons in different hospitals with medical residents at many geographically distributed locations. The high-definition multimedia streaming and haptic interfaces associated with the VR environment enable trainees to remotely observe, participate and practice surgical techniques using advanced Internet computing technologies and principles including Software Defined Networking. We are collaborating with Dr. Miguel Pirela-Cruz (Texas Tech Health Sciences Center) in El Paso as part of this initiative. The use of such advanced

cyber infrastructure also lays the foundation for reducing health care costs in hospitals and medical education programs. It is also a precursor to the creation of smart cyber cities where the use of such advanced cyber physical tools will become commonplace.

11

The Computer Science Department at OSU wasrecently awarded a new NSF REU Site: BigData Analytics at Oklahoma State University(March 2017 to February 2020, $356,618, PIs:Eric Chan-Tin, K.M. George, Chris Crick).The REU site is a ten-week summer programfor ten undergraduate students. Participants inthe program will contribute to research projectsin big data analytics. This summer 2017, tenstudents from OSU, OU, Langston, NSU,UCO, and ORU, participated. MG Hirsch alsopresented a poster at the Council forUndergraduate Research REU in October 2017.

Dr. Cecil conducted a summer NSF REU Site program focusing on introducing undergraduate students (including those with physical challenges) to research activities in Information Centric Engineering including design of VR / AR based simulation environments for manufacturing, health and space systems.

REU Site Activities

We are thankful to our alumni and sponsors for donating to our department. Theirdonations play a key role in both undergraduate and graduate educational activities.Consider supporting the Computer Science Department through OSUGiving, or learnmore on our website: cs.okstate.edu/giving.html.

12

Recently Published Papers

Jiangmin Yu, Michael Farcasin, and Eric Chan-Tin. “Wireless Interference Prediction for EmbeddedHealth Device”, IEEE Wireless Mesh and Ad-hoc Networking (WiMAN) 2017.

Luis Anthony Sierra and Eric Chan-Tin. “Well Drilling Speed Prediction”, Poster at Halliburton LIFE,August 2017.

Michael Farcasin, Akhileshwar Guli, and Eric Chan-Tin. “Fluid Passwords – Mitigating the effects ofpassword leaks at the user level”, arXiv:1708.09333 [cs.CR], August 2017.

Sayanti Roy, Emily Kieson, Charles Abramson and Christopher Crick. Semantic structure for roboticteaching and learning. Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and HumanInteractive Communication (RO-MAN), 2017.

Sayanti Roy, Harshal Maske, Girish Chowdhary and Christopher Crick. Teaching and learning usingsemantic labels. Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2017.

S M al Mahi, Matthew Atkins and Christopher Crick. Learning to assess the cognitive capacity of humanpartners. Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2017.

Christopher Cushing, Tarrah Mitchell, Carolina Bejarano, Ryan Walters, Christopher Crick and AmyNoser. Bidirectional associations between psychological states and physical activity in adolescents: anmHealth pilot study. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, vol. 42, no. 5, pp. 559-578, June 2017.

Christopher Cushing, Arwen Marker, Carolina Bejarano, Christopher Crick and Lindsay Huffhines.Latent variable mixture modeling of ecological momentary assessment data: Implications for screeningand adolescent mood profiles. Journal of Child and Family Studies, vol. 26, no. 6, pp. 1576-1572, June2017.

Jyotsna Paryani, Ashwin Kumar TK, KM George, "Entropy-based Model for Estimating Veracity ofTopics from Tweets", Nguyen et al. Eds., Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, LNAI 10449, Springer

Vishali Narayana, Ashwin Kumar TK and KM George, "Measuring Message propogation and userinfluence in twitter data”, Proceedings of the International Conference on Applied Computing 2017, 18-20October, 2017, Algarve, Portugal.

Abhilash Kancharala, Nohjin Park, Jongyeop Kim and Nohpill Park, ''Big Streaming Data Sampling andOptimization'', Vol. 449,2017 Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, Springer. (conference versionappeared in the proceedings of ICITCS 2017)

Zuqiang Ke and Nohpill Park, ''Availability Modeling and Assurance of Map-Reduce Computing'', IEEEDataCom 2017

Ashwin Kumar Thandapani Kumarasamy, Xiaofei Hou, Johnson P Thomas and Hong Liu, "ContentSensitivity Based Access Control Framework For Big Data", Digital Communications and Networks,Special Issue on Big Data Security and Privacy, (Elsevier), July 2017.

12(continued on next page)

13

T.K.Ashwin Kumar*, J.P. Thomas and S Parepally, "An Efficient and Secure Information Storage andRetrieval Framework for Content Centric Networks", Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing(Elsevier), 2017.

Xiaofei Hou, Ashwin Kumar T K, Johnson P Thomas and Hong Liu, "Dynamic Deadline-constraintScheduler for Hadoop YARN", Proceedings 2017 IEEE Conference on Cloud and Big Data Computing(CBDCom 2017)

Cecil, J., Avinash Gupta, Miguel Pirela-Cruz, An Advanced Simulator for Orthopaedic Surgical Training,International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (IJCARS), in press, 2017

Cecil, J., Avinash Gupta, Miguel Pirela-Cruz, P. Ramanathan, An IoT based Cyber Training Frameworkfor Orthopedic Surgery, Cogent Medicine, accepted for publication, 2017

Cecil, J., Internet of Things (IoT) based Cyber Physical Frameworks for Advanced Manufacturing andMedicine, refereed chapter in book, Internet of Things (IoT) & Data Analytics Handbook, (editor: H.Geng), John Wiley & Sons, Jan 2017, pp.,545-556.

Lu, Y., Cecil, J., An Internet of Things (IoT)-based collaborative framework for advanced manufacturing,International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology, May 2016, Volume 84, Issue 5, pp 1141-1152.

Cecil, J., Albuhamood, S., Cecil-Xavier, A., Ramanathan, P., An Advanced Cyber Physical Framework forMicro Devices Assembly, Special Issue on "Advanced CPS for Industry 4.0 -Enabling Technologies,Real-world Implementations, and Impact Assessments", IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, andCybernetics: Systems, Issue: 99, August 2017, pp. 1-15.

Cecil, J., Sweet-Darter, M., Cecil-Xavier, A., Exploring the use of Virtual Learning Environments tosupport science learning in autistic students, Proceedings of the 2017 Frontiers in Engineering FIE / IEEEconference, Indianapolis, Oct 18 - 20, 2017.

Cecil, J., Cecil-Xavier, A., Gupta, A., Foundational Elements of Next Generation Cyber Physical and IoTFrameworks for Distributed Collaboration, Proceedings of the 2017 13th IEEE Conference on AutomationScience and Engineering (CASE 2017), Xian, China, Aug 20 - 23.

Krishnamurthy, R., Cecil, J., Perera, D., An Internet-of-Things based Framework for CollaborativeManufacturing, Proceedings of the 2017 International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition,Miami, Florida, Nov 3-9, 2017.

Cecil, J., Cecil-Xavier, A., Krishnamurthy, R. Emergence of Next Generation IoT based Cyber-PhysicalFrameworks for collaborative manufacturing, Proceedings of the 7th International Conference onInformation Society and Technology (ICIST) 2017, Zdravkovi , M., Konjovi , Z., Trajanovi , M. (Eds.),Kopaonik, Serbia, March 12-15, 2017, Vol.1, pp.251-256.

Cecil, J., Gupta, A., Pirela-Cruz, M., Ramanathan, P., A Distributed Collaborative SimulationEnvironment for Orthopedic Surgical Training, Proceedings of 2017 Annual IEEE International SystemsConference (SysCon), April 24-27, Montreal, Canada.

Cecil, J., Gunda, R., Cecil-Xavier, A., A Next Generation Collaborative System for Micro DevicesAssembly, Proceedings of 2017 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon), April 24-27,Montreal, Canada.

(continued from previous page)

14