computer science

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Qinru Qiu Named as a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery

Qinru Qiu Portrait

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.”

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Receives Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies

Ferdinando Fioretto

Electrical engineering and computer science Professor Ferdinando Fioretto and his research team received the 2022 Caspar Bowden PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies for  their paper “Decision Making with Differential Privacy under the Fairness Lens.”  The award was presented at the annual Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.

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.”

Syracuse University Ranked #24 for Best Online Graduate Information Technology Programs by U.S. News and World Report for 2022

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.

The full rankings, released earlier today, are available on the U.S. News & World Report website.

The College of Engineering and Computer Science offers online master’s degree programs in cybersecuritycomputer science and computer engineering.

The iSchool offers M.S. degree programs in applied data scienceinformation management and library and information science online.