Syracuse University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Information Studies (iSchool) have been ranked 26th for Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs by U.S. News & World Report for 2024.
Syracuse University moved up eight spots in the rankings from 2023.
In the rankings for Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs for Veterans, Syracuse University was ranked 14th, an increase of one spot from 2023.
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Professor Farzana Rahman was honored by the Technology Alliance of Central New York (TACNY) as the organization’s College Educator of the Year at the 23rd Celebration of Technology awards banquet in October 2023.
Rahman joined the College of Engineering and Computer Science in the spring of 2020. Since then, she has taught critical core gateway courses involving foundational knowledge of the computing discipline to all three majors of the EECS department. Central to her teaching approach is an active learning style, which pairs hands-on programming exercises with challenging projects that demand students to cultivate skills in problem-solving, debugging, and software engineering in general. She is dedicated to creating equitable education and learning experiences for all students by providing inclusive, educational opportunities that support women, genderqueer, non-binary, underrepresented and minority (URM) students.
As a diversity spokesperson of the department, Rahman spearheads various DEIA initiatives. One of her most impactful initiatives is Research Exposure on Socially Relevant Computing (RESORC), funded by Google Research, to increase both the exposure and visibility of undergraduate research at EECS. With more than 200 students participating in RESORC over the past 3 years, she has designed and facilitated multiple virtual workshops to help undergraduate students develop computing identity, research skills, practice teaching strategies, and explore research topics in the computing and engineering domains. The project formalizes best practices in research experiences to reach more students, particularly women from historically excluded groups and prepares them for graduate study.
Rahman’s research and mentoring initiatives have been supported by many funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation, Google, NCWIT, Google TensorFlow, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities to develop effective pedagogy in undergraduate computer science (CS) education. She’s won the NCWIT Extension Services (NCWIT ES-UP) award, ABI Systers PIO (Pass-It-On) award, Google ExploreCSR Award, and NCWIT educator award. She published numerous peer-reviewed articles in venues, including the Special Interest Group of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM SIGCSE), IEEE RESPECT, and IEEE Frontiers in Engineering Education, the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference.
Her overarching research interests are:
To explore the impact of active learning pedagogy in undergraduate computing courses.
The effectiveness of online and inverted classrooms.
How different pedagogical practices can increase underrepresented student performance in computing courses.
How effective re-entry pathways can facilitate the transition of returning women in computing-based discipline.
Within weeks of arriving in London, computer science student Jovanni Mosca ’24 knew his semester abroad would be a life changing experience. He was living just outside central London, had traveled to multiple other countries in Europe and getting an up-close look at how global companies operate.
“We have a global major since we are creating software and technologies that spread around the world but we often don’t have knowledge of all the context that our work is going to be part of. So this is a valuable experience,” says Mosca.
A program uniquely designed for Syracuse University computer science students allows them to take courses they need in London and stay on track for a four year graduation. Kwaku Amofah-Boafo ’24 was thrilled to be taking his required classes mixed in with experiences across the United Kingdom.
“The best part of Study Abroad is interacting with the city,” says Amofah-Boafo. “Seeing that my major is computer science, visiting these places has given me the opportunity to see if I want to work abroad or work oversees in the future.”
Syracuse University’s London Center is based out of Faraday House in the West End. Students can take classes there and receive support from Syracuse University faculty and staff.
“I feel like Faraday House is your own little home space in London,” says Mosca. “Having the diverse faculty is cool. They are people of all different backgrounds who are either working in industry or teaching.”
“The classes are smaller, you interact more and I think that leads to better experiences in the classroom and the work you do,” says Amofah-Boafo.
The Syracuse Abroad computer science program is London is designed for the fall semester of a student’s junior year.
“Getting a chance to see what it is like to live here on a day to day basis and see people working has made me think about it in the future,” says Amofah-Boafo.
“It is an opportunity that will change your life, how you look at the world and it is invaluable,” said Mosca.
Yuzhe Tang, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, and his research team have been awarded a grant by the Ethereum Foundation for research to advance the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem. This grant will support Tang and his Ph.D. students in designing, developing, and evaluating the security hardening code to protect the Ethereum network stack.
Ethereum is a network made up of several communities and toolsets that allow users to communicate or make transactions with digital money. Since the network is decentralized, users are in complete control of their data and what’s being shared, so they don’t need to give up any personal information – all users need to access Ethereum is an internet connection.
Denial of service security is critically important to the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem, and the research will explore ways to protect the Ethereum network from cyberattacks, involving systematic vulnerability discovery using applied formal methods. As cyber criminals attack networks like Ethereum and security concerns grow, Tang believes this research could have a lasting impact on the current landscape of cybersecurity and blockchain platforms.
“With this grant, we can help solve some of the most critical problems in the real world. We expect to continue developing code merged into Ethereum codebase,” Tang says. “I am most excited about making real-world impacts out of the research works from my group.”
Electrical engineering and computer science Professor Qinru Qiu has been named a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest and most prestigious association of computing professionals.
Qiu was selected by her peers for her outstanding scientific contributions to computing. The ACM Distinguished Member program recognizes up to 10 percent of ACM worldwide membership based on professional experience and significant achievements in the computing field. To be nominated, a candidate must have at least 15 years of professional experience in the computing field, five years of professional ACM membership in the last 10 years and must have achieved a significant level of accomplishment or made a significant impact in the field of computing, computer science, or information technology. A Distinguished Member is expected to have served as a mentor and role model by guiding technical career development and contributing to the field beyond the norm.
“This is an important and well deserved honor for Dr. Qiu,” said Engineering and Computer Science Dean J. Cole Smith. “Throughout her career she has been an innovator in the field of green computing, and I have been fortunate to learn about some of her contributions in brain-inspired neuromorphic computing techniques. In addition to her brilliant scholarly innovations, the College of Engineering and Computer Science has also benefited from her very significant leadership and instruction efforts. Dr. Qiu is thoughtful and reliable in every component of her job, and we are thrilled to see her honored by the ACM.”
The Caspar Bowden PET award is presented annually to researchers whose work makes an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technology. The judges said Fioretto’s team received the award for advancing the understanding of differential privacy and fairness trade-offs in decision making, providing a theoretical framework and exploring a highly relevant practical problem.
“I am honored for our work to receive this prestigious award which recognizes influential research in privacy-enhancing technologies, especially for a project that means so much to me and my group,” said Fioretto.
The awarded paper was published in the International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2021. It looks at the role of a privacy-enhancing technology (called differential privacy) in the context of Census data release for decision tasks with profound societal benefits. Some of these benefits may be the allocation of funds and resources, the distribution of therapeutics, or the assignment of congressional seats. Fioretto’s research team showed that differential privacy may induce or exacerbate biases and unfairness in many classes of decision processes and proposed a theoretical framework to audit and bound these fairness impacts.
“I am very honored and humbled to receive this prestigious award. This is one of my favorite projects and it involved a lot of hard work. Our results suggest that the US government might need to consider ethical consequences when applying differential privacy techniques to protect our privacy,” said doctoral student Cuong Tran, who was one of the authors of the paper. “I am also grateful to my advisor, collaborators, friends and staff from the electrical engineering and computer science department for helping us push this work into fruition.”
One of the main contributions of their work was to examine the roots of the induced unfairness as well as proposing guidelines to mitigate the negative fairness effects of the decision problems studied.
“I am also happy to see that the analysis proposed in our work has inspired a line of follow-up works in the field of privacy-preserving machine learning to understand why private machine learning algorithms may induce or exacerbate disparate impacts,” said Fioretto. “We are continuing our efforts in this area and are currently working with policy-makers to better understand when and how our solutions may be adopted. I am very excited to see how this direction evolves and look forward to the efforts that our community will make to build better tools to address these fairness issues in privacy-preserving processes.”
Electrical engineering and computer science professor Fioretto has received an NSF CAREER Award to aid in the resolution of challenging optimization problems using machine learning.
Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies (iSchool) and the College of Engineering and Computer Science have been recognized as No. 13 in the rankings for Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs for Veterans and have been ranked No. 24 for Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs by U.S. News & World Report for 2022.
