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Computer ScienceComputer Science

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Dear Alumni & Friends

It is my privilege to present to you the 2018 edition of the Cyber Cowboys Newsletter. The newsletterhighlights the activities of the Department of Computer Science. The faculty has decided to change thename of the Department from "Computer Science Department" to "Department of Computer Science".This is consistent with how all the other departments in the College of Arts and Sciences are named.

The department had a good year in terms of enrollment and external funding. The following are thehighlights:

1. Students and curriculum: The Department had 244 undergraduate majors, 47 masters studentsand 15 PhD students enrolled during Fall 2018. The Department was able to award merit basedscholarships to several students. The Department has initiated the process to apply for the ABETaccreditation. Request has been submitted for approval to offer an online BS degree program inComputer Science. The ACM student chapter continues to be very active. The undergraduateadvisor MS. Cara Brun and our new faculty member Dr. Esra Akbas are leading the effort toestablish an ACM-W group.

2. Faculty activities: During FY 2018, the Computer Science faculty collectively submitted more than20 proposals for approximately $9M. Several projects received funding from NSF and privateindustries. The faculty published several peer reviewed papers and made presentations atnumerous conferences. Dr. J. Cecil is leading the cyber manufacturing research activities whileDr.Chris Crick is leading the robotics and machine learning research thrusts. During the summer2018, we conducted two NSF supported REU sites.

3. Faculty changes: Drs. Eric Chan-Tin and David Cline left the Department. Dr. M. H. Samadzadehretired. Two new faculty members, Drs. Esra Akbas and Wei Zhang joined the Department.

I am happy to report that our Department is growing and we look forward to connecting with you in thecoming year.

Best Regards,

K. M. GeorgeProfessor & HeadComputer Science Department

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Avinash Gupta

Avinash Gupta is pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science in ourdepartment. He completed his Bachelors in Industrial Engineeringfrom Tribhuvan University, Nepal and Masters in Product Design andManufacturing from Visvesvaraya Technological University, India.He research interests include Virtual Reality, Information Modelingand Internet of Things. He is currently working as a GraduateResearch Assistant for Dr. Cecil on a project which focuses on creationof Network based Collaborative Simulation Environments forOrthopedic Surgical Training. This project involves the use ofemerging VR technologies such as Vive, HoloLens, Leapmotionamong others which he enjoys working with. The cutting edge research being conducted inthe Computer Science department inspires him to strive for bigger and more challenginggoals. He also feels that the best thing about the department is the helpful and caring natureof the people here.

Congrats, Graduates!

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Our Department’s Distinguished Alumni AwardWinner for this year is Joe Carroll.

Carroll is the Manager of Technology Services atCITGO Petroleum. Joe has over 32 years of ITexperience supporting the Oil and Gas Industry. Joehas worked in various IT roles which includeApplications Development, Technical Infrastructure,Hydrocarbon Supply Chain Applications and ITManagement. Joe has managed application teams thatsupport the Finance, HR, Hydrocarbon Supply Chain,Mid-Office, Marketing and various other business units. Joe is on the Sr. ITLeadership team and participates in the PMO, Strategic Planning, IT Budget Planningand Preparation, Vendor Management and Compliance with IT General Controls.

Joe is a Member of the Computer Science Academic Advisory Board for OklahomaState University, a Board Member of the Gutierrez Energy Management Institute(GEMI) at the University of Houston's C.T. Bauer College of Business. Joe serves asthe ASUG Community Chair for the Oil & Gas Special Interest Group and is amember of The Houston Chapter for the Society of Information Management. Joeholds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Oklahoma State Universityand a MBA from the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston.

Joe Carroll

This fall, Dr. Esra Akbas joined the Oklahoma StateUniversity Department of Computer Science. Shecompleted her masters degree at Bilkent University inTurkey, and her doctoral degree at Florida StateUniversity, Tallahassee. Her areas of research are datamining and machine learning using large-scale datasets,specifically within graph mining and social networkanalysis and applied machine learning. We welcome herto our department, and look forward to working with her.

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Current Projects & Activities

In this project, Dr. Akbas is collaborating with a researcher from the University ofAlabama in Huntsville to develop an attributed hierarchical sentient document graphfor factual data. Using graph queries, behavior to sentient documents can be added torefute or affirm the truth of statements for factual data.

Dr. Crick’s students spent a week in Colorado this summer as part of a multi-university flight campaign that collected hundreds of hours of meteorological data tostudy thunderstorm formation and other severe weather phenomena. His labdevelops artificially intelligent coordination and planning techniques so that manyautonomous robots can work together to search and survey a large volume ofairspace. They decide where to go and where they are likely to find interesting databased on real-time sensor readings, both their own and those that other robots havetold them about.

Additionally, , oneof the undergraduates who worked in theCS department over the summer as partof Dr Crick's NSF-funded ResearchExperiences for Undergraduates (REU)program, was invited to present his workat the annual conference of the Councilon Undergraduate Research inWashington, DC.

In this research, Dr. Akbas is working with colleagues from University of CentralOklahoma and Purdue University to develop a new method of identification usinggraph representation of fingerprints, which includes considering patterns, pores andother other unlabeled, uncategorized topological features.

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Students in a new course taught by Dr. Cecil entitled ‘Modeling of Cyber-Physical Systems’interacted with NASA Johnson Space Center engineers as part of class project activities.Working in teams, the interdisciplinary students (including both undergraduate andgraduate students from electrical, computer engineering and computer science programs)designed 3D virtual reality mock-ups to support the study of transportation and habitatdesigns for astronauts to live on the moon. The activities culminated in students visitingJohnson Space Center, Houston to present their 3D designs to NASA engineers. Asher

Lieberman (Deputy Branch Chief, DynamicSystems Test Branch) coordinated theinteractions for NASA. JSC (Houston).Undergraduate students played a key role indeveloping initial simulation environmentsstudying assembly of habitats using robotson the moon surface. Some of the studentswere co-authors in a resulting paper whichwas presented at the 2018 IEEE SystemsMan Cybernetics Conference held inMiyazaki, Japan in October 2018.

Jacob Boyer, The Boeing Company

Joe Carroll, CITGO Petroleum Corporation

Michael Hanska, Cerner

Todd Pugh, SST Software

Kurt R. Schmeckpeper, Motorola Solutions

Geoffrey Simpson, SpikedMace.com

Daniel Summers, EXXONMobil

Dan Yost, Tri-8 Inc.

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This group of Computer Science Students attended the inaugural hackathon in February 2018. It is hosted at the

University of Oklahoma, Norman. The 24-hour event allowsparticipants to collaborate, build, and share projects with otheruniversity students from across the nation. It provides a comfort-able learning environment for all hackers to use their creativityand innovation at its full potential.

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In this NSF Cyber Manufacturing project, Dr. Cecil and his students are Building oneof the first comprehensive Internet-of-Things (IoT) based cyber physical test bedbased on Industry 4.0 principles. The manufacturing domain involves assembly ofmicron sized devices using distributed cyberand physical resources linked through nextgeneration networking approaches based onSoftware Defined Networking (SDN) andcloud technologies. Several key milestoneshave been achieved by this project includingdemonstrating the feasibility of such emergingSDN principles to support 3D Virtual Realitybased simulation interactions amongdistributed engineers.

We are thankful for our alumni and sponsors for donating to our department. Their donationshelp the Department of Computer Science programs that are critical to the success of graduateas well as undergraduate education, which (among other things) improve the quality ofdepartmental research, some of which is presented in this very newsletter. Their generosityincreases the chances of our students in fully realizing their potential. Consider supporting theDepartment of Computer Science through OSUGiving, or learn more on our website:cs.okstate.edu/giving.html.

Our graduate students participated inan inaugural poster presentationactivity held in December 2018 basedon their creative component work aspart of their graduation requirements.

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Dr. Cecil and his research team arecontinuing to work with orthopedicsurgeons to build Virtual Reality basedsimulators for training medical residents.The training simulators have been builtusing haptic, VR and mixed realityplatforms. Recently, the team visitedsurgeons and residents at Mountain ViewRegional Medical Center, Las Cruces(New Mexico) where they interacted withresidents who used these simulators andprovided feedback on the content and userinterface of the simulators.

The emergence of 3D Printing as well as IoT and Cloud technologies are transformingthe manufacturing practices worldwide. As part of an NSF project in cybermanufacturing, Dr. Cecil is exploring the design of a cloud-based IoT framework tosupport 3D Printing activities. At the center of this approach is the design of a 3D ShapeModification App (for Android platforms) which can run on smart phones; the generalidea is based on the recognition of the fact that most designs today are variations ofexisting designs. The overall process being explored is that once a part design has beenmodified to the satisfaction of a user (who can be anyone, not necessarily an engineer),the next step would involve retrieving a similar design on the web or other cloud baseddata bases. This can be achieved using existing shape retrieval tools; subsequently,additional modifications to the design can be completed if necessary. The final stepwould be to manufacture the modified design using cloud based interfaces supporting3D printers located at distributed sites.

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Devon Energy

Computer Science Department

Congratulations to (pictured),Seongsoo Kim, Rachel Higgins, and Pil Parkfor securing a scholarship from Devon Energyin the area of Computer Science for the 2017-2018 academic year.

Congratulations also to Jenna Coons, SamuelWood, Alexander McCoy, and Brandon Wongfor securing a scholarship from Devon Energyin the area of Computer Science for the Spring2018 semester.

ConocoPhillips

Congratulations to (left) forwinning the Sharon L. Daniel Scholarshipfor Computer Science for the 2018-2019academic year.

Congratulations to (right)for winning the Computer Science EndowedScholarship for the 2018-2019 academic year.

Congratulations to for securinga scholarship from ConocoPhillips in the areaof Computer Science.

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Recently Published Papers

Cecil, J., Gupta, A., Pirela-Cruz, M., & Ramanathan, P. (2018). An IoMT-based cyber trainingframework for orthopedic surgery using next generation internet technologies. Informatics in MedicineUnlocked, Vol. 12, 2018, pp. 128-137.

Cecil, J., Gupta, A., Pirela-Cruz, M., An Advanced Simulator for Orthopedic Surgical Training,International Journal for Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, February 2018, Volume 13, Issue2, pp 305–319.

Cecil, J. (2018), An IoT Based Cyber-Physical Framework for Micro Devices Assembly, ProcediaManufacturing Journal, Vol. 26, 2018, pp. 1265-1277

Cecil, J., Gupta, A., Pirela-Cruz, M., & Ramanathan, P. (2018), An Information Centric SystemsEngineering based Approach and Framework for Orthopedic Surgical Training, IEEE Systems Journal(Accepted, revisions under progress)

Cecil, J., Albuhamood, S., Ramanathan, P., (2018) A Virtual Reality based Cyber Physical Frameworkfor Micro Devices Assembly, TMCE Special Issue “Towards behaviorally adaptive engineering systems”

Cecil, J., Gupta, A., Pirela-Cruz, M., Ramanathan, P., A Network based Virtual Reality SimulationTraining Approach for Orthopedic Surgery, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing,Communications, and Applications (TOMM), Volume 14 Issue 3, August 2018.

Christopher Cushing, Carolina Bejarano, Tarrah Mitchell, Amy Noser and Christopher Crick. Is thereevidence for individual differences in negative affectivity and physical activity across adolescents? Anintensive longitudinal data approach. Journal of Child and Family Studies, vol. 27, no. 9, pp. 2772-2779,September 2018.

Ye Gu, Weihua Sheng, Christopher Crick and Yongsheng Ou. Automated assembly skill acquisition andimplementation through human demonstration. Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol. 99, pp. 1-16,January 2018.

Cecil, J., Cecil-Xavier, A. and Albuhamood, S., An Internet-of-Things (IoT) based framework forcollaborative cyber physical tasks in micro assembly, Proceedings of the International MechanicalEngineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE), Pittsburgh, Nov 2018.

Cecil, J., Krishnamurthy, R., Huynh, H., Tapia, O., Ahmed, T., and Gupta, A., Simulation basedDesign Approaches to Study of Transportation and Habitat Alternatives for Deep Space Missions, IEEESystems Man Cybernetics (SMC) conference, Miyazaki, Japan, accepted for publication in proceedings,Nov 7- 10, 2018.

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Cecil, J., Gupta, A., & Pirela-Cruz, M., Use of Immersive Virtual Reality Technology in the Design andDevelopment of Orthopedic Simulation Environments, 14th IEEE International Conference onAutomation Science and Engineering (IEEE CASE), Munich, Germany, accepted for publication inproceedings, August 20-24, 2018.

Cecil, J., Albuhamood, S, Cecil-Xavier, A., An Industry 4.0 Cyber-Physical Framework for MicroDevices Assembly, 14th IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (IEEECASE), Munich, Germany, accepted for publication in proceedings, August 20-24, 2018.

Cecil, J., Gupta, A., & Pirela-Cruz, M. Ilidan, N., Exploring the Role of Simulation involving SurgicalTraining and Virtual Reality Technologies, IEEE Systems Man Cybernetics (SMC) conference,Miyazaki, Japan, accepted for publication in proceedings, Nov 7- 10, 2018.

Cecil, J., A Conceptual framework for supporting UAV based cyber physical weather monitoringactivities, Proceedings of the 2018 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon), Vancouver,Canada, April 23-26, 2018.

Cecil, J., Gupta, A., Pirela-Cruz, M., Multi-Platform Virtual Reality based Simulator Systems forOrthopedic Surgical Training, Proceedings of the 2018 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference(SysCon), Vancouver, Canada, April 23-26, 2018.

Krishnamurthy, R., Cecil, J, A next generation IoT framework for PCB assembly using cyber andphysical resources, Proceedings of the 2018 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon),Vancouver, Canada, April 23-26, 2018.

Cecil J., Albuhamood, S., A Virtual Reality based Cyber Physical framework for micro devices assembly,accepted for presentation and publication in the proceedings of the Twelfth International Symposium onTools and Methods of Competitive Engineering (TMCE 2018), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, GranCanaria, Spain, May 7 – 11 2018.

Cecil, J., Gupta, A., Pirela-Cruz, M., The Design of IoT based smart simulation environments fororthopedic surgical training, accepted for presentation and publication in the proceedings of the TwelfthInternational Symposium on Tools and Methods of Competitive Engineering (TMCE 2018), Las Palmasde Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria, Spain, May 7 – 11 2018.

Ruchishya Ramineni and K.M. George, "An Approach to Quantifying Information in Tweets",Proceedings of the IADIS 15th International Conference Applied Computing 2018, October 21 - 23, 2018,Budapest, Hungary , pp. 304-312.

Sayanti Roy, Emily Kieson, Charles Abramson and Christopher Crick. A reinforcement learning modelfor robots as teachers. Proceedings of the 27th IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and HumanInteractive Communication (RO-MAN), 2018.

Sayanti Roy, Emily Kieson, Charles Abramson and Christopher Crick. Using human reinforcementlearning models to improve robots as teachers. Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE Conference onHuman-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2018.

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