CS Career Prep Course Leads to USF Alum’s Startup

Rong Liew, USF MSCS 2020 alum recently founded and launched Showwcase, an all-in-one platform for tech workers. We caught up with Rong to learn about his journey, from class idea to a new startup hiring Software Engineers, Data Analysts, Internships, and Design.

How did Showwcase start?

Showwcase was an idea that started in class LS307. Taking Professor Jon Rahoi’s Career Prep course, it was a weekly activity for us to go through resumes in class, with the goal of improving each student’s chance of landing that dream job. The issue, however, was that everyone had a different resume format, had no idea what to include, had dozens of resumes stored on their laptops (without a version control system to manage this), and ultimately, that resumes were not representative of the skills, knowledge, and abilities, possessed by our classmates. Continue reading “CS Career Prep Course Leads to USF Alum’s Startup”

Jobs & Internships

Despite the unique challenges our students and recent alumni faced this spring and summer with job and internship searches, we are thrilled with the success of our students and alumni. Below are just some of the companies where our students interned as well as the companies our alumni recently joined as new, permanent employees. You can find many more USF CS alum on our LinkedIn page here!

Where our students interned!

Where our recent alum are now!

Fall 2020 Faculty Research & Publications Update

USF Computer Science faculty are not only fantastic teachers, but are active researchers. Below are some research publications and other work that our faculty have completed so far this year. If you would like to learn more about their research, join us every Tuesday this fall at 9AM (PDT) for our new Research Seminar (contact Gian Bruno for details and zoom link).

David Guy Brizan – Research Publications

  1. A Badgujar, S Chen, A Wang, K Yu, P Intrevado, DG Brizan, “Quantum Criticism: A Tagged News Corpus Analysed for Sentiment and Named Entities,” Natural Language Computing Advances (NLCA) 2020.
  2. K Sonar, P Intrevado, DG Brizan, “The Seven Critical Axes of Information For Yelp Restaurant Reviews,” in International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (ICMLA) 2020.
  3. A Badgujar, S Chen, P Khambatta, T Tran, A Wang, K Yu, P Intrevado, DG Brizan, “QUANTUM CRITICISM: AN ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL NEWS REPORTING,” Machine Learning and Applications (MLAIJ) 2020.

Patricia Francis-Lyon – Research Publications

Jeff Johnson – New Book Edition

Kristin Jones – Digital Humanities Collaborations

  • The Berkeley Revolution: my 100% custom WordPress website for Prof. Scott Saul’s American Lit class at UC Berkeley.
  • The Oakland Artists Project: I heavily customized an existing WordPress theme for Professors Ajuan Mance and Kirsten Saxton at Mills College (for a Digital Humanities class that I also previously co-taught with them).

Alark Joshi – Research Publications

  • Thanawut Ananpiriyakul, Josh Anghel, Kristi Potter, Alark Joshi, “A Gaze-Contingent System for Foveated Multiresolution Visualization of Vector and Volumetric Data,” Visualization and Data Analysis 2020 1 (02), 1-10
  • Alark Joshi, Marissa Schmidt, Shane Panter, Amit Jain, “Evaluating the benefits of Team-Based Learning in a Systems Programming Class,” Frontiers in Education 2020.
  • Preim, Bernhard, and Alark Joshi. “Evaluation of visualization systems with long-term case studies.” In Foundations of Data Visualization, pp. 195-208. Springer, Cham, 2020.

Sophie Engle – Research Publications

  • Sophie Engle, Sami Rollins, Gian Bruno, Xornam Apedoe, Matthew Malensek, Christina Tzagarakis-Foster, Alark Joshi, “Engendering Community to Computer Science Freshmen through an Early Arrival Program, ” American Society for Engineering Education 2020. 
  • Darius Coelho, Rubin Trailor, Daniel Sill, Sophie Engle, Alark Joshi, Serge Mankovskii, Maria Velez-Rojas, Steven Greenspan, and Klaus Mueller, “”Blockchain for Collaborative Visual Analytics”, 17th International Conference on Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering, 2020.

Professor Jung – Conference Presentation

  • Discrepancy Detection in Whole Network Provenance (Raza Ahmad (SRI International), Eunjin Jung (University of San Francisco), Carolina de Senne Garcia (Ecole Polytechnique), Hassaan Irshad (SRI International), Ashish Gehani (SRI International)). The Theory and Practice of Provenance (TaPP) workshop 2020 

Haden Lee – Research Publications

  • Haden Hooyeon Lee, “More Personalized Learning by Reducing Latency in Grading,” In Proceedings of the 16th Annual ACM International Computing Education Research (ICER) Conference (ACM ICER 2020), August 2020, (To Appear).

Vahab Pournaghshband

  • Professor Vahab Pournaghshband recently had his paper, Promoting Diversity-Inclusive Computer Science Pedagogies: A Multidimensional Perspective accepted into ACM ITICSE202 [Link Here]
  • Vahab Pournaghshband and Paola Medel, “Promoting Diversity-Inclusive Computer Science Pedagogies: A Multidimensional Perspective,” In Proceedings of 25th ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), June 2020.
  • Vahab Pournaghshband and Hassan Pournaghshband, “A Project-Based Approach to Teach Security Concepts in Introductory Courses,” In Proceedings of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Rocky Mountain (CCSC-RM 2020), October 2020, (To Appear).
  • Vahab Pournaghshband and Hassan Pournaghshband, “Entailing Security Mindset in Foundational CS Courses: An Interactive Approach,” In Proceedings of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Midwestern (CCSC-MW 2020), September 2020, (To Appear).
  • Vahab Pournaghshband and Peter Reiher, “Protecting Legacy Mobile Medical Devices Using A Wearable Security Device,” In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Networks & Data Communications (CNDC), December 2019.
  • Paul Kirth and Vahab Pournaghshband, “PLDetect: A Testbed for Middlebox Detection using PlanetLab,” In Proceedings of the 12th EAI International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks & Communities (TRIDENTCOM), December 2019.

Benjamin Wells – New Research

  • This is a result in word combinatorics showing that no substitution instance of a certain string occurs in a famous squarefree sequence (the Leech sequence) that uses three letters.
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.12213

Dave Wolber – Book Chapter

Craig Newmark makes generous donation to University of San Francisco’s Women in Tech initiative 2020

The University of San Francisco’s (USF) Women in Tech initiative is thrilled to announce an incredibly generous $300,000 gift from Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and Craig Newmark Philanthropies. This extraordinary gift is a continuation of Newmark’s longstanding commitment to supporting gender equality in technology. His goal is to help more women become interested in coding early on in their educational careers and to aid in the fostering of an inclusive environment for all women in tech. 

Craig Newmark’s donation will directly impact six areas across Computer Science, Data Science, and Engineering for both undergraduate and graduate students at USF. These are:

  • $100,000 in Scholarships: these scholarships make all the difference as to whether women can continue their studies and are prioritized for students with the highest need.
  • $75,000 Research Opportunities for Women and Veterans: these funds pay women and military veterans to work on important research problems in tech. Studies have shown that when women in tech carry out research with professors, this leads to higher retention in technical fields.
  • $50,000 Academic Conference Attendance: these funds enable women in tech to participate in life-changing conferences such as Grace Hopper, and other conferences such as Tapia, Lesbian Who Tech, and Afro Tech. Students receive internships and jobs at these conferences which change their lives!
  • $35,000 Growth of Women in Tech (WiT) student organization: The Women in Tech student organization is the lifeblood of all of these activities. Through peer network support and mentorship, workshops on technical resumes, technical interviews, the annual hackathon, weekly meetings, and much more, WiT helps the recruitment, retention of women and minority students in Computer Science, Data Science, and now the new Engineering department.
  • $25,000 Summer Zero for Women in Engineering: this provides funding for three women to participate in the first Summer Zero program, a 6-week student academic program that aims to retain women and underrepresented groups in the newly launched engineering program, while providing academic support and reinforcement in math, design, programming, and writing.
  • $15,000 Girl Tech Power Coding Camp: this provides funding for middle and high school girls to learn programming with professors and students from the Computer Science department at the University of San Francisco.

 

 

 

Women in Tech Graduate Scholarship Recipients

Through a generous gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the organization of craigslist founder Craig Newmark, five Computer Science graduate students have received a Women in Technology scholarship. This will help to provide the opportunity to excel in their academics and continue their active engagement on campus, ultimately enriching STEM education for everyone at the University of San Francisco.

We asked the recipients to share their thoughts on how the Newmark Scholarship has impacted their studies:

 

“Receiving this scholarship enables me to go into my last year at USF without worrying so much about finances. It’s not only an honor but also takes a huge burden off my shoulders in terms of splitting my time between work, academics and job-hunting. Overall it means I can focus more on getting through this year to graduation and finishing strong!”

 

  • Allison Wong, MS in Computer Science Bridge, Spring ‘20

Continue reading “Women in Tech Graduate Scholarship Recipients”

Meet the MAGICS with Professors Matthew Malensek and David Guy Brizan

The MAGICS lab (Machine Learning, AI, Gaming Intelligence, and Computing at Scale) is focused broadly on research in machine learning, deep learning, AI, natural language processing and big data. The lab’s objective is to convene a group of students and faculty with complementary skills who are interested in learning about and solving broad, data-focused problems through the use of contemporary and cutting-edge algorithms and computational techniques. Both newcomers to the field and seasoned veterans alike are encouraged to join our weekly meetings, which include research presentations as well as tutorials on the latest tools and libraries in ML, AI, and big data. Continue reading “Meet the MAGICS with Professors Matthew Malensek and David Guy Brizan”

Student Profile: Hassan Chadad

CS Graduate Student
Hassan Chadad, MSCS ’19

Hassan Chadad is a graduating Master’s student from Lebanon. As a tutor in the CS Labs, Hassan helps students at all levels to master key CS topics and help them grow as programmers. Hassan has web development experience and is passionate about the education sector, building games and systems that help educate others. Continue reading “Student Profile: Hassan Chadad”

CS Alumni Mentorship Opportunity

This semester, the Department of Computer Science is partnering with the Alumni Mentor Program (AMP) to help graduating seniors leverage the power of the USF alumni network. AMP is built to connect you to alumni mentors for career advancement, community building, and to share with you the unwritten rules of the workplace. Computer Science alumni are eager to connect with you to help you achieve your goals and build your network.
Here are the details:

Continue reading “CS Alumni Mentorship Opportunity”

Apply Now! Undergrad Newmark WiT Scholarships

The Department of Computer Science is now taking applications for the Fall 2019 Undergraduate Newmark Women in Tech Scholarships! These scholarships will cover at least $5,000 in tuition for Fall 2019.

Female undergraduate students in good academic standing majoring in Computer Science or Data Science with sophomore standing or above are eligible to apply.

We will primarily consider financial need, as well as scholarship, service, and diversity when selecting scholarship recipients. The application will ask for:

  • Name, email, student ID, overall GPA, and major GPA
  • Current financial aid information
  • Details about work outside of class

You will be asked to answer the following essays:

  • If awarded, how will receiving this scholarship contribute to your academic success at USF next year? Please keep your response under 300 words.
  • Please describe your scholarship and service, including concrete evidence where possible. This can include a mix of your GPA, individual class grades, class projects, side projects, research projects, internships, community service and volunteer work, and more. Please keep your response under 500 words.
  • How would receiving the undergraduate Newmark Women in Tech scholarship contribute to your career goals after you graduate? Please keep your response under 300 words.

You will also be asked for the contact information of two faculty advocates. Please be sure to reach out to these faculty members BEFORE submitting this application!

For full consideration, applications must be submitted by March 29, 2019. See http://bit.ly/newmark2019 for details.

Continue reading “Apply Now! Undergrad Newmark WiT Scholarships”