Stony Brook University Computer Science

  Thursday, 23 November, was a special night for the female students in Computer Science when they got together, and with Professor Aruna Balasubramanian, in what they all hope will be the first of many such events. SiEun Park (CS, U3):  Last Thursday, female students and Prof.  Aruna Balasubramanian from the computer science department gathered together for the first time. Even though they are from diverse backgrounds, the reason they came together is to foster community, collaborate, and empower. The event was organized by CS Juniors and Seniors and supported by the department. The event started off with introducing each member regarding their biography, the reason they chose CS, and any problems they are facing. Because it was the first-ever time for getting together, it provided a unique platform for female students to connect, share experiences, and inspire one another in their pursuit of excellence in the field. One of the key objectives of the event was to create a supportive network that would enable female students to share insights, exchange ideas, and form lasting connections.  The night was mainly led by Prof. Balasubramanian, visiting professor from Stony Brook University, NY. Prof.  Balasubramanian aims to address problems which CS female students face. In CS, women are underrepresented, so it is important to make sure that they are also provided a supportive environment to thrive. She is a part of WiCS (Women in Computer Science) association in Stony Brook University, and other associations which help to connect CS female students. She talked about how our students get to join such meetings in order to receive support from one another. Professor Aruna Balasubramanian: Computer science as a discipline has historically suffered from underrepresentation of many demographics. In 2019, the department of Computer Science at Stony Brook formed a diversity committee to broaden participation in Computer Science, and I chair this committee. My goal in SUNY Korea is to reach out to the Women students in the department, who are severely underrepresented.  The women students in the department self-organized and planned a dinner event for a first ice-breaker meeting. I am meeting many of the students for the first time, so the goal of the dinner was to introduce myself and make sure the students are comfortable sharing their experience with me. The students were extremely forthcoming and really bright; it ended up being a very fun evening. This is only the first step. Our plan is to meet regularly over the year to understand the challenges faced by students and to create a support system that is self-sustaining.    

  Professor Yoon Seok Yang from the Computer Science Department was a featured speaker at the Korea Times Forum: Survival and Growth Strategies in the AI Era, which took place on Wednesday, October 18th, at the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry building in Seoul. Professor Yang took part in the initial panel discussion, which focused on the transformative influence of AI technology on human society and addressed the ethical concerns accompanying its advancement. Along with Professor Yang, Uhm Yul, Director General of the Artificial Intelligence Policy Bureau at the Ministry of Science and ICT, Chang Joong-ho, a professor at Seoul School of Integrated Sciences & Technologies (aSSIST), and Kim Myoung-shin, Principal Policy Officer at LG AI Research were also esteemed participants of the discussion panel.  Professor Yang highlighted: “I have worked in Silicon Valley for over ten years, and I was part of the AlphaGo developing team, and all developers say that the AI developing trend is so fast that even they don’t know how and when AI will become the dominant force in the future world.  AI innovation holds significant potential across diverse industries. Specifically, it plays a pivotal role in the medical industry, aiding the development of new drugs and medical treatments; contributes to risk assessment and investment analysis within the financial industry; and its language model technologies reshapes operations within the business sector. These advancements all influence our present way of life.   When considering the ethical factors, we cannot stop the growth in technological advancement; rather we need to focus on minimizing side effects through regulations. Emphasizing the risk factors is crucial when developing new technologies, and simultaneously, safeguarding personal information must be a paramount concern." Professor Yoon Seok Yang is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at SUNY Korea, Stony Brook University. Professor Yang completed his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University. Prior to his academic role, he contributed as a research scientist at the Neuromorphic Computing Lab at Intel Labs in California, and worked in Google as a silicon and research engineer in the Tensor Processing Unit.  To access more about forum click this LINK.

Computer Science major Sooa Kim won 1st place in the 2023 Jeju Digital Social Innovation Hackathon Competition. The Hackathon competition, hosted by the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, was held on September 21st – 22nd. The theme of this year’s competition was proposing ideas for products or services that solve societal issues using digital technology. Sooa Kim came in first by proposing a customized power monitoring platform. “In Jeju, which has declared carbon neutrality since 2012 and is actively working to expand new and renewable energy sources, citizens can use the time-of-use electricity rate system that takes into consideration the characteristics of new and renewable energy. The time-of-use rate system is a shifting of electricity rates based on the season and time of day, and the ultimate goal is to match the supply curve of renewable energy and the demand curve for electricity. Accordingly, we proposed “Jirit” (찌릿, the sound of an electric shock), a customized power monitoring platform that encourages citizen participation by providing real-time monitoring of power usage and user-centered data analysis that induces demand response using incentives. Through this, we can expect economic benefits for electricity users and a carbon reduction effect through the time-based rate system. It was a meaningful time to address the shortcomings of the existing power analysis platform with technology optimized for Jeju Island's unique power system. I had the opportunity to receive feedback from professional mentors regarding the issues that needed improvement when the platform is put into use, and this led me to consider a more user-centered approach.    

A new brain-inspired computing research lab, led by Prof. Yoonseok Yang, has recently been established in the department. The Brain-Inspired Computing Lab (BCL) is focused on developing new computing technologies inspired by the human brain. The BCL has joined the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC), a consortium of academic, government, and industry groups around the world that are working to advance neuromorphic computing. The lab has already attracted four undergraduate students and one PhD student. Prof. Yang is a leading expert in neuromorphic computing. His research has focused on developing new hardware and software platforms that can mimic the way the brain processes information. The BCL's work is expected to make significant contributions to the field of neuromorphic computing and could lead to the development of new and powerful computing technologies. Lab link: https://sites.google.com/view/suny-bcl/home    

  During the summer Prof. Byungkon Kang held special lecture sessions for students invited from the Incheon Academy of Science and Arts (인천과학예술영재학교). The 17-hour lecture spanned two days from Jul. 17th to the 18th touching on a list of subjects including introductory machine learning, natural language processing, and probabilistic reasoning. Lecture sessions were accompanied by hands-on programming exercise sessions where the participants were shown how to implement basic machine learning systems using PyTorch. The lectures were concluded by project-oriented workshops to help students apply AI techniques to solve various engineering and scientific problems.  

  Prof. Byungkon Kang is part of a team that has won a major grant from the Institute for Information & Communication Technology Promotion (IITP).   The project (IITP grant RS-2023-00259678) is a joint effort by Inha University, Incheon National University, and SUNY Korea. It is intended to support graduate students including employees at local industries as part-time graduate students. Such part-time students will be eligible for up to 90% tuition support by this project. Regular graduate students can also be supported as RAs. The annual budget allocated to SUNY Korea amounts to 100M KRW (about 75K USD). The theme of SUNY Korea's part is designing safety and convenience features of smart vehicles. Such features include, but are not limited to, the following scenarios: Hazardous situation detection, safety-aware path planning, and designing cost-effective on-board recognition systems. We expect this project to be a multi-disciplinary research involving many sub-areas of AI (such as computer vision, decision making, natural language understanding, etc.) and possibly other engineering fields (such as mechanical and electrical engineering).    

Exchanges of students and faculty between SUNY-Korea and the “Home Campus” at Stony Brook re-affirm the very-close link between both institutions and offer opportunities for numerous enriching experiences, academic and non-academic, for all involved.  Such exchanges have always been envisaged (and the department has had visiting faculty from the Home Campus), but, unfortunately, they became impossible during the COVID pandemic.  So, the department is now especially pleased to announce that professors Aruna Balasubramanian and Niranjan Balasubramanian will be with us for the Fall-2023 and Spring-2024 semesters.  They will teach several undergraduate and graduate courses and also collaborate on research with the local faculty.   (From left to right) Prof. Aruna Balasubramanian / Prof. Niranjan Balasubramanian Prof. Aruna Balasubramanian received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and has been with SBU since 2015.   Her work incorporates elements of both networking and systems in the context of mobile devices. The goal of that work is to design mobile protocols/systems that radically improve performance. Current mobile system designs make assumptions that, while true for the wired environment, are not valid for the mobile environment. Instead, she wants to re-architect mobile systems to better support current and next-generation applications. Dr. Balasubramanian's recent projects include MobileHub (reduces energy consumption of always-on sensing applications by leveraging heterogenous hardware), WProf (a tool that identifies the bottlenecks during page load), and FindAll (makes mobile applications less reliant on the cloud by building a local search engine on phones, that lets users search locally).   Prof. Niranjan Balasubramanian received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) and has been with SBU since 2015.  His research is motivated by the challenge of building systems that can extract, understand, and reason with information present in natural language texts. His research interests are in two broad areas: NLP and information retrieval. He has worked on different projects in areas like Question Answering at a 4th Grade Level, Event Schema Generation from news stories, Machine Learning for Information Retrieval, Energy-efficient Mobile Search, and Automatic Wikipedia Pages.

We are proud to announce that Prof. François Rameau has, in collaboration with colleagues at Laval University (Canada) and Adobe, co-authored a paper set to appear in the prestigious IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.  The journal is among the most highly ranked in the world: all respected journal rankings place it in the top five worldwide  in computer science (and related fields).   The research, entitled "A Perceptual Measure for Deep Single Image Camera and Lens Calibration", introduces a novel deep learning-based camera calibration method. Additionally, the team developed a new perceptual measure to quantify the impact of camera parameters on human perception for various tasks such as virtual object insertion and compositing.   Additional information can be found on the project webpage: https://lvsn.github.io/deepcalib/    

Prof. Zhoulai Fu has received a Starting Program Grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea to support his research in Numerical Software. His work focuses on developing reliable and efficient numerical software using advanced programming languages and software engineering solutions. The grant provides funding from  late 2022 to early 2025.   Numerical software is used across various fields, including artificial intelligence, engineering, robotics, and medical imaging, but it can produce misleading or erroneous results if not built with care. Professor Fu's project aims to address this challenge by building trustworthy and performant numerical software with formal methods.   As part of this effort, he is investigating the use of pure 16-bit neural networks over 32-bit for image classification problems. Image classification involves automatically categorizing images into predefined categories and is an important problem in machine learning and everyday life, such as in facial recognition. Professor Fu's current work seeks to explore the surprising performance benefits of using 16-bit neural networks over the standard, widely used 32-bit neural networks.    

Prof. Byungkon Kang has received a Starting Program Grant from the National Research Foundation of Korea to support his research on a project that aims to find an algorithm to answer the question 'what do these things have in common?'.  Prof. Kang gives the following description.   Given a collection of items, (such as photographs, books, sentences, etc.) we wish to devise a method to summarize those items in a human-understandable manner. For example, our current focus is on generating a summary sentence for a group of sentences/images of indeterminate number.   Identifying such common information from a collection is one of the properties that characterize intelligence, as it not only looks at superficial features but also at the fundamental representation of the items. To tackle this issue, we borrow various concepts from fields of mathematics and artificial intelligence. Besides text summarization of the given items, we also plan to investigate other applications of our problem. In particular we wish to see if popular data mining and machine learning algorithms can benefit from identifying common features of the given data."   The grant provides funding from late 2022 to early 2025.    

The uGPS project, developed by a team of researchers from AI2S lab, has been presented at the prestigious ACM MobiCom 2022 conference. Led by Professor Jihoon Ryoo, the team includes Ph.D. student Hoyoung Kim and graduate students Seong Hoon Park and Junghun Park.   So, what is uGPS? It stands for "underground GPS"---a system that can provide accurate location information even in subterranean environments, such as tunnels. The team achieved this by using an FPGA-based pseudo satellite signal generation system, which was successfully tested in active tunnels in Korea.   If you're interested in the technical details, the team has published a paper that describes the project in depth. You can access it through the following link [https://idciti.com/uGPS] and the paper [https://bit.ly/3yJXVPK ]. It's fascinating to see how technology is evolving to solve real-world problems like navigation in underground spaces.   Overall, the uGPS project is a remarkable achievement that showcases the potential of innovative solutions to address complex challenges. It will be exciting to see how this technology develops in the future and where else it could be applied.    

The Ministry of Science and ICT and Korea Radio Promotion Association have selected the AI2S lab (led by Prof. Jihoon Ryoo) as one of the national XR-labs.  XR stands for mixed reality, virtual reality, and augmented reality. This recognition is a testament to the lab's excellence in the field of XR.   The lab's META-Factory project is a noteworthy initiative that aims to automate large factories using XR techniques. This is an innovative approach that can revolutionize the manufacturing industry by enhancing productivity and efficiency.   To support this project, the team has secured funds to help graduate students grow as XR scientists. The lab had already initiated this effort in 2020 by providing support to over 30 SUNY Korea students, including both undergraduate and graduate students. This is a great opportunity for aspiring XR scientists to gain hands-on experience and contribute to a cutting-edge research project.   Overall, AI2S lab's selection as a national XR-lab and the META-Factory project's funding are significant achievements that highlight the lab's leadership in the field of XR. We look forward to seeing the results of this project and the impact it will have on the manufacturing industry.    

  Sije Park, Abhishek Gaire and Seungjun Chae from SUNY Korea, and Labesh Baral from SBU in New York, achieved the highest award, “Undergraduate Best in Show” in the Hack@CEWIT that was held in-person on March 3-5, 2023 at Stony Brook University. The Hack@CEWIT is organized in partnership with industry leaders such as IBM, IEEE, Major League Hacking, NASA, and many others, making it one of the premier hackathons at Stony Brook, United States. Around 300 undergraduate and graduate students participated in this Hackathon; among the 16 prizes, Sije’s team attained the highest award. In this Hackathon, Sije’s team was awarded for their project on “Smart Fridge”. Smart Fridge was inspired by the major issue of food waste and inefficient grocery shopping. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, every year 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted due to discretionary purchases. To exacerbate matters, food waste contributes to climate change as a large amount of methane gas is produced when decomposing food in landfills. Therefore, Sije’s team developed a technology that will help solve this issue for environmental sustainability and economic efficiency. Their team used a combination of technologies, including Amazon Textract OCR tools and AI-powered algorithms, to create a seamless user experience web app. The web app addresses this issue by using OCR technology to scan grocery receipts and track foods before they expire. Using an AI-powered recipe generator, users can discover new recipes based on their ingredients and food items that will expire the quickest. The app also allows users to save their favorite recipes and track their eco points. For more information about the Hackathon: https://www.cewit.org/hackatcewit/ For more information about “Smart Fridge”: https://devpost.com/software/smart-fridge-7m1qsi 

  One of the best decisions you will ever make is to attending SUNY Korea, because not only is it a top-tier university system, but it also allows you to join an exceptional community to help build a global network for your international career. Janar Osmonaliev is a CS graduate who got accepted to Meta. Here is his story at SUNY Korea and a message to his colleagues who major in Computer Science. Q.   Why did you choose to attend SUNY Korea? I always wanted to study overseas, either in the United States or South Korea. So, in that sense, not only did SUNY Korea align perfectly with my goals, it also offered me the best of both worlds. It is also worth noting that SUNY Korea provided me with a scholarship and financial aid during my studies, which was very crucial. Q.   What are some of your valuable achievements during university? Personally, I think that successful completion of class projects with professors/students is an important one. They might seem insignificant from a macro perspective, but those small chunks of experience and knowledge helped me get where I am today. Q.   What is your most memorable experience at SUNY Korea? Ha-ha, I do not think it’s possible to pick only one, there are just so many. But what I can say is that all of them were shared with my close friends and the staff I have met at SUNY Korea. Also, shout out to Student Affairs and Career Center teams, you guys are amazing! Q.   I heard that you got a job at Meta. Congratulations! What was your motivation for applying to Meta? I guess it’s no secret that FAANG (used as a general term for top tech companies in the U.S. here) is the most sought-after place to work among engineers. It is a place where you can truly achieve your full potential and bring a positive impact to the world with your skills. Q.   How has SUNY Korea prepared you for a career at Meta? FAANG companies have a very competitive applicant pool. Students need a very solid expertise in the engineering field they are interested in. Luckily, I was taught by some of the most passionate professors. I want to express my gratitude to Prof. Kwon for solid algorithms/data structures foundation, Prof. Omondi for nurturing a strong sense of principles/morals, Prof. Ryoo for giving extraordinary projects that improved my problem-solving skills, and finally Prof. Kuhn for mentorship and support of my initiatives. Q.   Meta has a reputation for asking difficult interview questions. How did you prepare for the job interview? The job interview process was almost 2 months long - it was very challenging. I was interviewing in the Front End Engineering pipeline. Although I cannot share the details of the process, I would advise students to have an excellent understanding of JavaScript, specifically the features of ES6. Q.   What will your job responsibility be at Meta? I am currently going through the bootcamp process, soon to select a team to join. I am really passionate about design and overall product quality. Therefore, I want to work on user-facing products with high impact. Q.   Where do you see yourself in five years? I think it is an inherent human nature to strive for bigger and bigger achievements. Within the next 5 years, I want to gain more ownership of a product/service that I am passionate about. Apart from career growth, I also want to grow as a person and pursue a noble goal. I hope to dedicate more time towards nurturing enthusiasm for technology within the younger generation of people in Kyrgyzstan. Q.   Do you have a message for SUNY Korea students? Be bold. Do not settle for mediocrity. Do not spend time trying to fit in. And finally, if you are passionate about something, try to bring something new or do it differently.

  The Department of Computer Science (CS) forms the foundation of your international career. A Korean student who has majored in Computer Science has experienced an international environment at SUNY Korea, which supported her to get a job at LG Energy Solution located in the States. Here is her story at SUNY Korea and how she made it as a Vision Systems Engineer at LG Energy Solution.   Questions about SUNY Q.   Why did you choose to attend SUNY Korea? I always aspired learned various cultures from various people, but I had no chance to study abroad before entering SUNY Korea. As a student who was only preparing for the Korean SAT, it was not an easy decision to go to a foreign country right after graduating high school. When I had these worries, I happened to find out about SUNY Korea, and it was the perfect school to solve my concerns. The number of students per professor is several times less than the average U.S. universities, so it is much easier to interact with professors. Also, with a small number of students, many friends including foreigners can interact more closely. By choosing SUNY Korea, I was able to learn various cultures, English, and even the field that I wanted to learn. Q.   What are some of your valuable achievements during university? There is a saying that a Korean university is hard to enter, but easy to graduate, but a foreign university is not. I totally agree with that saying. However, as graduation is difficult, I could learn a lot about my major in depth. I earned three things during university. I learned how to communicate with people of various nationalities by using English. I learned the life of a U.S. university student. I became a semi-master in computer science. Q.   What is your most memorable experience at SUNY Korea?             The most memorable experience at SUNY Korea is doing team projects and assignments all night at CS commons. Also, I remember studying for exams with my friends in the library all night with energy drinks. Those memories make me feel nostalgic.   Questions about LG Energy Solution Q.   What was your motivation for applying to LG Energy Solution? As a Korean who studied abroad, I hope that Korea companies will expand their market globally. LG Energy Solution aggressively invests in the South America market, and is the number 1 company in the electric vehicle battery market. That’s why I applied to LG Energy Solution. Q.   LG Energy Solution has a reputation for asking difficult interview questions. How did you prepare for the job interview? First of all, I collected as many interview questions as I could from LG Energy Solution through the internet, and I prepared all answers. Also, through the career center, I prepared common questions for the interview and got several tips for it. They coached me in detail about how to deal with unexpected questions, and even how to make eye contact through the video interview, and so on. Q.   What is your job role at LG Energy Solution? My job title in LG Energy Solution is Vision Systems Engineer. Like any large company, LG Energy Solutions also outsources several software programs, including Machine Vision, to its vendors. These necessarily require maintenance through numerous variables in the manufacturing process. My role is to trouble shoot, and analyze/improve those vision systems using computer basis knowledge. Also, I am improving deep learning models for certain process. Q.   Where do you see yourself in five years? In order to build a smart factory, computer vision systems have become an integral part, and the person dealing with them has become important as well. Also, most automakers, including Tesla, want to emulate the manufacturing process of LG Energy Solution, especially for vision systems. In five years, I hope to become an expert in this field and become a person who can greatly help LG Energy Solution maintain the world’s No.1 electric vehicle battery market. Q.   Do you have a message for SUNY Korea students? Enjoy yourself and have fun during your time in college because it is a once in a life time opportunity. But also be sure to work hard.