Student and Faculty Accomplishments

Academic Year 2024-25

Christian Yun , an 91 first-year student and a CS Club member, won third place at Berkeley’s Hackathon, beating out ~2,100 other teams and winning a share of a $146,360 prize pool by building an ML image recognition tool to promote sustainability.

Likhitha Yelamanchili (MSCS student), Ching-Seh (Mike) Wu, Chris Pollett, and  Robert Chun , "Multi-Label Text Classification with Transfer Learning.",  the 9th IEEE/ACIS International Conference on Big Data, Cloud Computing, and Data Science (IEEE BCD 2024), Kitakyushu, Japan, July 16-18, 2024.

Congratulations to Dr. Wendy Lee, Dr. Nada Attar, Dr. Melody Moh, "WIP: Python for Everyone as a Mathematics GE Course: Broaden Participation and Enhance Data Science Career Pipeline.",  got accepted for the Frontiers in Education (FiE)  Conference.

Congratulations to Katerina Potika, Neeraj Kulkami, Petros Potikas, "Learning to Play the Trading Game: Exploring Reinforcement Learning-Based Stock Trading Bots, Neeraj Kulkarni, Katerina Potika and Petros Potikas." won best paper award in the 10th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Machine Learning Applications (July 2024).

Congratulations to Yichen Lin, Petros Potikas, and Katerina Potika, "Opinion Graphs Construction for Reviews using Transfer Learning and Large Language Models.", to appear in Artificial IntelligenceXScience, Engineering, and Technology (September 2024)

Congratulations to Rekha Rani, and Katerina Potika. "Smart City Wildfire Risk Analysis with Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making.", International Journal of Semantic Computing 18(3), Special Issue, to appear September 2024.

Congratulations to Suneuy Kim, "Exploring the Synergy Between NoSQL Teaching and Research", accepted for IEEE FIE 2024

Congratulations to Sayma Akther, one of these paper she mentored has been accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Network Security (ICDSNS-2024).

Congratulations to Doug Case, participated in the USATF (USA Track & Field) Masters Outdoor National Championship this summer, got 13th place for his age group in the men's 400 meter dash and also also part of a 4 by 400 meter relay team that got a medal for taking second place.

Congratulations to Ronald Mak, got a neww book published last spring, titled "Object-Oriented Software Design in C++". 

Congratulations to Philip Heller, now working with a United Nations task force, crafting a report to member nations in North America on how to simultaneously achieve climate mitigation, maintain biodiversity, and support indigenous peoples. He is writing the section on coral reefs.

Dr Katerina Potika is in the progrress of SI journal submission (Information Journal) with Dr. Bill Andreopoulos. Final stage with minor revisions.

Dr Katerina Potika is the progress in the grant submissions as co-PI for one research NSF with Dr Bill Andreopoulos, one educational NSF with Dr. Magdalini Eirinaki and the University of Pittsburgh, and one Concept Outline for the NSF ExpandAI with Dr. Subhankar Dhar and Dr. Magdalini Eirinaki.


Academic Year 2023-24


Congratulations to Dr. Wendy Lee and Aadit Kapoor(MSBI Student) for being awarded the 91 Research and Innovation Student RSCA Fellowship for the academic year 2024-2025. 


O. Jurečková, M. Jureček, F. Di Troia, R. Lórencz, and M. Stamp, Classification and online clustering of zero-day malware, to appear in Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques.


R. Mehta (MSCS student), O. Jurečková, and M. Stamp, A natural language processing approach to malware classification, to appear in Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques.


B. Dalton (MSCS student) and M. Stamp, Classifying World War II era ciphers with machine learning, to appear in Cryptologia.


A. Sharma (MSCS student), M. Jureček, and M. Stamp, Keystroke dynamics for user identification, to appear in Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.


V. Malhotra (MSCS student), K. Potika, and M. Stamp, A comparison of graph neural networks for malware classification, Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques, July 2023.


Y. Peerthum (MSDS student) and M. Stamp, An empirical analysis of the shift and scale parameters in BatchNorm, Information Sciences, August 2023. 


Congratulations to CS Prof. Navrati Saxena who won the 1st Place in Technology Applications Concept Only CTU 2023 Challenge: Closing the Gender Digital Divide, co-organized by USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and  IEEE CTU (Connecting the Unconnected); she also won the 2023 IETE-CDIL Award for Industry-2023 under the Best Industry-Focussed Paper.


Congratulations to Prof. Navrati Saxena's paper entitled "A New Design and Analysis of Power Saving for IoT Gateway" published in May-June 2022 issue of IETE Technical Review Vol 39, No 3., won the IETE-CDIL Award for Industry-2023 under the best industry focussed paper this year. [J. Chandroth, Navrati Saxena, A. Roy & E. Rastogi (2022) A New Design and Analysis of Power Saving for IoT Gateway, IETE Technical Review, 39:3, 577-585, DOI: 10.1080/02564602.2021.1880343]


Congratulations to Prof. Nada Attar, working with Darra Hofman (School of Information), Souvick Ghosh (School of Information), and Michele Villagran (School of Information) awarded a Responsible Computing Challenge Award by Mozilla for a collaborative research project title: " CIRCLE: Cross-campus Interdisciplinary Responsible Computing Learning Experiences." , for 1-year (July/2023 - June/2024), in the amount of $150,000


Congratulations to Dr. Faranak Abri, winner of an NSF award along with co-PI Dr. Naman & Dr. Jones (from Texas Tech University), in the amount of $200,000 (each), for Collaborative research: SaTC: CORE: Small: Analytical Models for Conversational Social Engineering Attacks for 3 years (October 2023 to September 2026).


Congratulations to Prof. William Andreopoulos, winner of an NSF award, for 6-years (7/15/2023 - 6/30/2029), in the amount of $2,499,411, for S-STEM: Empowering Low-Income Students to Succeed in Engineering and Computer Science


Divyashree Jayaram (MSCS student), Saad Jeelani (BSCS student), and Dr. Genya Ishigaki, have a paper accepted for presentation at the 2023 IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom), December 4-8, 2023: Container Caching Optimization based on Explainable Deep Reinforcement Learning.


Academic Year 2022-23


Vedashree Bhandare (MSCS student) and William Andreopoulos, “Finding BERT errors using activation vectors”, the 9th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Service and Applications, Athens, Greece, July 17-20, 2023. [Best Paper Award]


Ching-Seh (Mike) Wu, Sasanka Kosuru, and Samaikya Tippareddy (MSCS student), “Bird Species Identification from Audio Data,” the 9th IEEE International Conference on Big Data Service and Applications, Athens, Greece, July 17-20, 2023.


Congratulations to Prof. William Andreopoulos, winner of an NSF award, for 6-years (7/15/2023 - 6/30/2029), in the amount of $2,499,411, for S-STEM: Empowering Low-Income Students to Succeed in Engineering and Computer Science


Ching-Seh (Mike) Wu, Sasanka Kosuru, and Samaikya Tippareddy (MSCS student), “Identification of Bird Species using BirdClief Voice Data,” the 12th ACM International Conference on Data Science, Technology, and Applications, Rome, Italy, July 11-13, 2023.


Rohan Mohapatra (MSCS student), Austin Coursey, and Saptarshi Sengupta, “Large-scale End-of-Life Prediction of Hard Disks in Distributed Datacenters”, the 9th IEEE International Conference on Smart Computing (SMARTCOMP 2023), Nashville, Tennessee, USA, June 26-30, 2023.


Prof. Saptarshi Sengupta has been awarded a $3,000 Student RSCA Assistantship to support an undergraduate student working on a Prognostics research project in Spring 2023.


Congratulations to Prof. Fabio Di Troia, winner of an NSF REU Site Grant award, for 3-years (4/1/2023 - 3/31/2026), in the amount of $373,981, on Undergraduate Research Experience for Women in Machine Learning-based Cybersecurity


William B Andreopoulos was awarded $12,000 with PI Leila Khatib for the 2022-2023 CSU-WATER Faculty Research Incentive program “Development of Toehold Senor for RNA virus in Waste and Recycled Waters”. The project will increase knowledge on water-related issues. 


Mark Stamp has been awarded a $3,000 Student RSCA Assistantship to support an undergraduate student working on a research project in Spring 2023

Eric Liang (high school student) and Mark Stamp, Predicting pedestrian crosswalk behavior using convolutional neural networks, to appear in Traffic Injury Prevention

Nhien Rust-Nguyen (grad student), Shruti Sharma (grad student), and Mark Stamp, Darknet traffic classification and adversarial attacks, to appear in Computers & Security.

Huy Nguyen (grad student), Fabio Di Troia, and Genya Ishigaki, Generative adversarial networks and image-based malware classification, to appear in Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques.


Prof. Wendy Lee has received funding from Google Cloud Platform Education Grants ($2,100) to enhance CS 123B (Bioinformatic II) teaching resources in Spring 2023.


Prof. Wendy Lee has been awarded a $3,000 Student RSCA Assistantship to support an undergraduate student working on a Bioinformatics research project in Spring 2023. 


Sai Manasa Gadepalli, a senior in BSCS, has won the 2023 Doris A. Howell Foundation – CSUPERB Research Scholar Award in the amount of $3,500 to support her research project with Prof. Wendy Lee, titled “Comparative transcriptomic analysis of Bisphenol A (BPA) variants exposure in estrogen-receptor positive breast cancer cells.” The California State University Program for Education and Research in Biotechnology (CSUPERB) partners with the Doris A. Howell Foundation for Women's Health Research () to fund promising undergraduate student research projects in topics related to women's health.


Phil Heller and his former MSBI student Jonathan Oribello, along with many scientists at NASA and affiliates, are co-authors on 2 articles that have been accepted with minor revisions by Nature Machine Intelligence (impact factor 25). The articles are titled "Biomonitoring, Artificial Intelligence, and Precision Health in Deep Space" and "Biomonitoring, Artificial Intelligence, and Self-Driving Labs in Deep Space".


Aarohi Chopra (MSCS student), Aadit Kapoor (BSCS alum/MSAI student), and Prof. Wendy Lee have a poster accepted for presentation at the 35th Annual CSU Biotechnology Symposium (January 13-14, 2023 in Santa Clara, CA): "SRASearch - an enriched NCBI SRA search with a transformer-based neural network"  


Ching-Seh (Mike) Wu, Samuel Chen, and Sushmit Gaikwad (MSCS student), “A Heuristic Intrusion Detection Approach Using Deep Learning Model,” IEEE 37th International Conference on Information Networking (ICOIN 2023), Bangkok, Kingdom of Thailand, January 11-14, 2023, 6 pages