News

The James G. Costigan endowed scholarship was established in 2005 and specifically supports SLU undergraduate students with demonstrated financial need* who are majoring in computer science. This competitive scholarship is typically awarded to students who will become juniors the following year, and is renewable for a student’s senior year, presuming continued academic success. This year, applications must be completed online by Monday, March 25, 2019. The award amount has not yet been determined for last year, but for AY18-19, scholars received $4000.

Dr. Ted Ahn and Dr. Erin Chambers were recently honored by the VP-Research at the 2019 Scholarly Works and Grant Winner Reception. Dr. Ahn received an award for Non-Traditional Scholarly Works for his LONGO software: an R package for interactive gene length dependent analysis for neuronal identity. Dr. Chambers received Honorable Mention for her publication of the paper "On the Complexity of Optimal Homotopies" in the 2018 Symposium on Discrete Algorithms.

Starting in Fall 2019, SLU will be offering a Bachelor of Science degree in Data Science, delivered through the partnernship of the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. The creation of this program is reflective of the growing influence of large-scale data collections and analyses throughout society, the advances in statistical and computational techniques that are used to gain new knowledge and make better predictions through with the use of large data collections, and the need for ethical considerations in the use of such data.

Dr. Flavio Esposito has been awarded $100,000 from the NSF to study how learning theory can be leveraged to better manage edge networks. The project, part of the NSF US-EU Internet Core & Edge Technologies, will launch a new research collaboration with Dr. Michele Rossi’s team at the University of Padua, Italy.

The department is pleased to announce that the Boeing Corporation has donated to renew the BOLD (Boeing Opportunity for Leadership Development) scholarship program at Saint Louis University. Multiple scholarships will be awarded for the current academic year, with online applications due by October 12, 2018.

We are very pleased to be hiring a new tenured or tenure-track faculty member in the Department of Computer Science, with a start date of August 2019. We are interested in candidates with a demonstrated record of addressing biological problems and omics data sets with computational approaches. Outstanding candidates at all levels are encouraged to apply.  For full consideration, applicants must apply at jobs.slu.edu by January 6, 2019. For additional information about our department, its academic programs, and this new faculty position see cs.slu.edu/hiring.

Dr. Kate Holdener joins our department in Fall 2018 as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Before joining the department, Dr. Holdener completed her PhD in Computer Science at Missouri University of Science and Technology and subsequently worked in industry for ten years at Exegy in various roles such as Software Engineer, Senior API Engineering, and Product Manager. Her research interests focus on the automation of software engineering processes, software development methodologies, and on application of evolutionary algorithms to software engineering.

Dr. Reza Tourani joins our department in Fall 2018 as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, having finishing his PhD in Computer Science at New Mexico State University. Dr. Tourani's research interests focus on computer networking and communication, particularly in the area of secure communication architectures, anonymous and secure communications, and futher Internet architecture.

Drs. David Letscher and Erin Chambers have been awarded $270,000 from the NSF to use topological tools to study the architecture of plant root systems. This grant is part of a larger collaborative project involving Dr. Tao Ju in the Computer Science department at Washington University and Dr. Christopher Topp at the Danforth Plant Science Center. 

Ricardo Saucedo (rising senior majoring in Computer Science) presented his summer research project titled "GayTwitter: An Investigation of Biases Toward Queer Users in Natural Language Processing Models and AI Technologies"at the McNair Scholar Resarch Symposium on Friday July 27th. Ricardo's project, supervised by Dr. Kevin Scannell, examined how automated techniques that compute positive and negative sentiment scores for various terminology are influenced by the selection of sources.

Four students in the Master's program for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology attended the Computing Research Association Grad Cohort for Women (CRA-W), held April 13-14 in San Francisco. The CRA-W Grad Cohort aims to increase the ranks of senior women in computing-related studies and research by building and mentoring nationwide communities of women through their graduate studies.

Dr. Flavio Esposito from Computer Science and Dr. Vasit Sagan from Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences have been awarded $75,727 to build a Big Data Management Architecture for Integration and Analytics in Support of Research and Education for the Missouri Transect project: “Climate, Plants, and Community”.

Students collaborating on research with Dr. Flavio Esposito have presented a variety of results at professional meetings this fall.

Mary Hogan (B.S. 2017) presented a poster at the 23rd ACM Annual International Confernece on Mobile Computing and Networking (MOBICOM 2017) at Snowbird, Utah. The work, authored with Dr. Esposito, was titled "A Portfolio Theory Approach to Edge Traffic Engineering via Bayesian Networks."

Thomas Merod (B.S. 2019) and Jiayi "Holly" Wang (B.S. 2017) traveled to Toronto, Canada to present a poster titled "A Behavior-Driven Approach for Expressive Intent Specification in SDN and NFV" at the GENI-NICE workshop in conjunction with the 25th IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols.

Later this semester, Kyle Coleman (B.S. 2018) will be traveling to the 18th ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conference in Las Vegas to present work coauthored with Dr. Esposito and Dr. Rachel Charney titled "Speeding up Children Reunification in Disaster Scenarios via Serverless Computing." Kyle was also one of six authors for work presented in October at the 4th National Workshop for REU Research in Netowrking and Systems.

The department is pleased to announce that the Boeing Corporation has donated to renew the BOLD (Boeing Opportunity for Leadership Development) scholarship program at Saint Louis University. Each of 29 scholarships will award $4785, with applications due by October 2, 2017.

Dr. Flavio Esposito has been awarded $ 203,815 to study robustness of virtual cloud-computing networks that could be deployed in cases where traditional networks suffer from high congestion, such as at times of crisis or natural disasters. This award is part of a cumulative $950,000 award in collaboration with the University of Missouri-Columbia.

David Ferry joins the department in Fall 2016 as an Instructor of Computer Science. Mr. Ferry is completing his doctoral program in Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests involve real-time systems, parallel runtime systems, and cyber-physical system design. His doctoral work involves real-time hybrid simultation in an earthquake engineering laboratory environment. Prior to his doctoral work, he had completed a bachelors in Mathematics and Computer Science at Truman State University.

Dr. Flavio Esposito joins our department in Fall 2016 as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Before joining the department, Dr. Esposito completed his PhD in Computer Science at Boston University, and subsequently worked for three years in St. Louis at Exegy Inc as a member of their Advanced Technology Group. Dr. Esposito's research program focuses on virtual network architectures and cloud management programmability.  He has authored 25 journal and conferences papers on such topics.

Saint Louis University's Bioinformatics and Computational Biology program has been awarded a $649,681 grant by the National Science Foundation for the Bioinformatics Training with Industry Support and Engagement (BITWISE) project. The grant provides funding over five years, with more than $500,000 going directly to student scholarship and support of participants in SLU's Master of Science program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB).