PURDUE CS E-NEWS AUGUST 2024

News from Purdue University's Department of Computer Science

New faculty join Purdue computer science

Starting this fall, 14 faculty members will be joining our department.

"This remarkable addition of 14 new faculty members highlights our commitment to advancing the frontiers of computer science. Their diverse expertise not only strengthens our department but also accelerates Purdue Computes’ mission to lead in education, research, and innovation. We are excited to welcome these outstanding scholars to our community."

Bertino named the Samuel D. Conte Distinguished Professor of Computer Science

Elisa Bertino, the Samuel D. Conte Distinguished Professor of Computer Science

Elisa Bertino was officially ratified to the Samuel D. Conte Distinguished Professor of Computer Science by Purdue University's Board of Trustees. This honor recognizes Bertino's significant impact on the department, the University and the field of computer science.

Professor Lin Tan named ELATES Fellow in national leadership program

Dr. Lin Tan, the Mary J. Elmore New Frontiers Professor of Computer Science

Nominated by Lucy Flesch, the Frederick L. Hovde Dean of Computer Science, Lin Tan has been selected for the 2024-25 class of Drexel University’s Executive Leadership in Academic Technology, Engineering, and Science (ELATES) program. ELATES is a national leadership development program designed to promote women in academic STEM fields and to elevate faculty allies of all genders into institutional leadership roles.

Purdue CS Bridge program empowers new computer science, data science and Ai students

Genna Yavaraski, head teaching assistant for the 2024 Bridge Program, helps Bridge Program student, in lab.

Year after year, the Bridge Program helps incoming computer science, data science and AI students with little to no prior programming experience succeed in their classes. The impact of this program can be seen in the group of undergraduate teaching assistants, lead by Genna Yavaraski, many of whom are Bridge Program alumni.

AI may create a tidal wave of buggy, vulnerable software

  • In an article discussing the viability of using AI to develop software, research done by Purdue CS Professor, Tianyi Zhang is cited. "Purdue University tried to see how well ChatGPT could diagnose coding errors, and found that it was wrong 52% of the time..."

IEEE Computer Society Journals Lead Industry with Impact Factor Rankings

  • Purdue CS Professor and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computer Society, Christopher W. Clifton remarks on 12 IEEE CS journals claim top rankings in their fields; IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) earns highest impact factor among IEEE CS journals

Future Trends in Generative AI: Shaping Tomorrow's Business Strategies

  • In this blog post, Purdue CS alum, Rick Abbott, discusses future developments of generative AI technology, and its impact on businesses.

Hello Boilermakers,

Welcome to the Fall 2024 semester, a new beginning, and a time to reflect on the previous year and to set our sights on what is to come.

First of all, I would like to express our sincere gratitude to our Interim Department Head, Professor Chris Clifton, for his hard work and dedication in leading our department over the past year. Our department enjoyed tremendous success in hiring, bringing in 14 talented faculty who will join our ranks and contribute to our tradition of excellence at scale through their research and teaching. Our faculty were featured in hundreds of prominent journal and conference publications, highlighting our high-impact and world-changing research endeavors, and received numerous awards. As a highlight, five of our faculty earned the prestigious NSF CAREER Award for their contributions to computer science.

As many of you are aware, summer was a busy time for Purdue University as we expanded our reach to our new location in Indianapolis, and worked to meet the needs of Boilermakers in our new urban campus. We are excited to have our first cohort of students start their academic careers with us this fall at Purdue Indianapolis. We are equally excited to continue supporting the students from IUPUI with the world-class education that Purdue University is known for.

This semester we welcome our most selective group of new students to date. With over ten thousand applicants, we are confident that the admitted students will help our department achieve new heights and we look forward to leverage and contribute to University-wide initiatives, such as Purdue Computes and One Health.

Whether you are just starting your undergraduate or graduate career at Purdue or about to finish any of our programs, I wish you all the best for the upcoming semester.

Boiler Up, Hammer Down and Hail Purdue!

Petros Drineas, Professor and Head

Purdue Computes in action: Institute for Physical AI

The Institute of Physical AI will couple scientists from across Purdue who bring interdisciplinary thinking and problem-solving to solve issues at the intersection of AI and a variety of critical functions, such as more efficient pharmaceutical manufacturing, digital forestry and more efficient transportation." - Karen Plaut, Executive Vice President for Research

Leveraging Purdue’s signature strengths in materials science, engineering, microelectronics, computer science, agriculture and life sciences, the Institute for Physical AI (IPAI) is committed to solving the world’s toughest challenges.

PURDUE UNIVERSITY IN INDIANAPOLIS

Announcing our next giant leap: a new extension of our flagship campus bringing the academic rigor and accessible excellence we’re known for to central Indiana.

Fueling a transformational growth, Purdue University’s first comprehensive urban campus will offer unique opportunities for Boilermaker students and faculty. We will expand enrollment. We will build startups. We will create new knowledge. We will connect talents and industry. We will maximize Indy’s unique strengths such as sports and biomedical technology. Purdue campuses now bookend the Hard Tech Corridor: 65 miles connecting Indy and West Lafayette with LEAP Innovation District at the midpoint. We will generate talents, jobs and innovation together in America’s heartland!"

Mung Chiang, President, Purdue University

Science at Purdue University in Indianapolis

Essential understandings of science and lifelong critical thinking skills are developed at Purdue University in Indianapolis’s College of Science. Computational, math and data sciences form the foundation for innovation and thoroughly prepare graduates for careers in dynamic and rapidly changing environments.

Science Majors

Computer Science - Join a legacy of innovation in both advancing scientific research and creating industry applications by learning computing fundamentals.

Artificial Intelligence - Explore the link among cognitive psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence — and investigate AI ethics — for a holistic understanding of how to build and understand systems.

Data Science - Discover the intersection of computer science and statistics in a field that uses quantitative and analytical methods to help provide insights and form predictions based on big data.

Nikhil Anand Dhoka, a Purdue computer science and mathematics student in Indianapolis, is set up for success at the intersection of technology and finance. Learn more about his plan.
Sarah Papabathini, a Purdue AI student in Indianapolis, is making a difference in her community every day as a DREAM Alive mentor, an Indy 500 Festival princess, academic researcher and volunteer.

ACM KDD

The ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference is the premier forum for presentation of research results and experience reports on knowledge discovery, data science, and machine learning.

Approximating Memorization Using Loss Surface Geometry for Dataset Pruning and Summarization | Andrea Agiollo, University of Bologna, Young In Kim, Purdue University, Rajiv Khanna, Purdue University

AGS-GNN: Attribute-guided Sampling for Graph Neural Network | Siddhartha Shankar Das, Purdue University, S M Ferdous, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Mahantesh Halappanavar, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Edoardo Serra, Boise State University, Alex Pothen, Purdue University

USENIX Security Symposium

The USENIX Security Symposium brings together researchers, practitioners, system administrators, system programmers, and others interested in the latest advances in the security and privacy of computer systems and networks.

Understanding the Security and Privacy Implications of Online Toxic Content on Refugees | Arjun Arunasalam, Purdue University; Habiba Farrukh, University of California, Irvine; Eliz Tekcan and Z. Berkay Celik, Purdue University

Finding Traceability Attacks in the Bluetooth Low Energy Specification and Its Implementations | Jianliang Wu, Purdue University & Simon Fraser University; Patrick Traynor, University of Florida; Dongyan Xu, Dave (Jing) Tian, and Antonio Bianchi, Purdue University

ATTention Please! An Investigation of the App Tracking Transparency Permission | Reham Mohamed and Arjun Arunasalam, Purdue University; Habiba Farrukh, University of California, Irvine; Jason Tong, Antonio Bianchi, and Z. Berkay Celik, Purdue University

VOGUES: Validation of Object Guise using Estimated Components | Raymond Muller, Purdue University; Yanmao Man and Ming Li, University of Arizona; Ryan Gerdes, Virginia Tech; Jonathan Petit, Qualcomm; Z. Berkay Celik, Purdue University

CellularLint: A Systematic Approach to Identify Inconsistent Behavior in Cellular Network Specifications | Mirza Masfiqur Rahman, Imtiaz Karim, and Elisa Bertino, Purdue University

D-Helix: A Generic Decompiler Testing Framework Using Symbolic Differentiation | Muqi Zou, Arslan Khan, Ruoyu Wu, Han Gao, Antonio Bianchi, and Dave (Jing) Tian, Purdue University

Cost-effective Attack Forensics by Recording and Correlating File System Changes | Le Yu, Yapeng Ye, Zhuo Zhang, and Xiangyu Zhang, Purdue University

MIST: Defending Against Membership Inference Attacks Through Membership-Invariant Subspace Training | Jiacheng Li, Ninghui Li, and Bruno Ribeiro, Purdue University

Rethinking the Invisible Protection against Unauthorized Image Usage in Stable Diffusion | Shengwei An, Lu Yan, Siyuan Cheng, Guangyu Shen, Kaiyuan Zhang, Qiuling Xu, Guanhong Tao, and Xiangyu Zhang, Purdue University

SAIN: Improving ICS Attack Detection Sensitivity via State-Aware Invariants | Syed Ghazanfar Abbas, Muslum Ozgur Ozmen, Abdulellah Alsaheel, Arslan Khan, Z. Berkay Celik, and Dongyan Xu, Purdue University

Scalable Private Set Union, with Stronger Security | Yanxue Jia, Purdue University; Shi-Feng Sun, Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Hong-Sheng Zhou, Virginia Commonwealth University; Dawu Gu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

SIGGRAPH

ACM SIGGRAPH is a special interest group within ACM, and SIGGRAPH 2024 is the premier conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques worldwide.

Interactive Invigoration: Volumetric Modeling of Trees With Strands | Bosheng Li Nikolas Schwarz Wojtek Palubicki Soeren Pirk Bedrich Benes

Latent L-systems: Transformer-based Tree Generator | Jae Joong Lee Bosheng Li Bedrich Benes

IJCAI

International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence is a non-profit corporation founded in California, in 1969 for scientific and educational purposes, including dissemination of information on Artificial Intelligence at conferences in which cutting-edge scientific results are presented and through dissemination of materials presented at these meetings in form of Proceedings, books, video recordings, and other educational materials.

Designing Behavior-Aware AI to Improve the Human-AI Team Performance in AI-Assisted Decision Making | Syed Hasan Amin Mahmood, Zhuoran Lu, Ming Yin

Vertical Symbolic Regression via Deep Policy Gradient | Nan Jiang, Md Nasim, Yexiang Xue

PURDUE CS | BY THE NUMBERS

UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM

AN ERA OF GROWTH

In the field of computer science, there is a sustained and significant increase in demand for our academic programs. We are thrilled to announce that, once again, we have surpassed our previous records for freshman admission applications, with the total exceeding 11,000. At the start of fall classes, 889 freshman students joined our previous classes for more than 3,000 undergraduates.

This year, freshman women students represent 22% of the undergraduate population and women are 23% among all undergraduate students.

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GRADUATE PROGRAM

Our graduate population has exploded with 538 MS and PhD students for the 2022-23 academic year. This represents a 26% increase in growth from the previous year.

Purdue Computer Science graduate students work in any of the 14 research areas in the department.

Purdue Computer Science offers the traditional PhD and master's degree programs in addition to a professional master's degree in information security.

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