New CSIS Courses Offered in Fall 2016

CSEP’s Computer Science & Information Systems has two new offerings for students in the Fall 2016 semester:

Image Processing and Computer Vision (CSC 548)

Programming proficiency will be the prerequisite.

Dr. Michael Farmer will be the instructor for this course. Dr. Farmer has been working in this field of computer vision for 30 years and he interested in this field and continuing research.

This course will cover a range of topics related to image processing and computer vision: the image generation process, noise and image filtering, edge detection, texture description, image segmentation, image registration and tracking, motion detection, feature extraction and classification. Topics may vary based on time and student interests.

Dr. Farmer wrote a book about computer vision, Application of Chaos and Fractals to Computer Vision, and he was published fall 2014. In past a lot of students published papers on computer vision and presented them at conferences. Presently many students are actively doing research on evidence accumulation which ties with computer vision as their independent study with Dr. Farmer. In addition to this, there are many real time applications to this computer vision. For example, back-up cameras for cars, pedestrian detection for automobiles. The whole automation industry uses computer vision. Any mobile robot can use computer vision.

Dr. Farmer is excited about this course and hopes he can inspire future generations of image processing. If you are interested in the field of artificial intelligence and the sub-field of computer vision, then you should take this class.

Social Computing (CIS 517)

Dr. Charlotte Tang will be the instructor for this course. This course has no prerequisites.

Dr. Tang is the leading guest editor of a special focus issue of the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association, titled Interactive Systems for Patient-Centered Care to Enhance Patient Engagement. The special focus issue accepted 17 articles that included research in engaging patients through pervasive mobile technologies.

This course will include: study of large-scale socially aware information systems; online behaviors and structural complexities on different social computing platforms; theories and principles behind technology diffusion into society; socio-technical design of technologies for online communication and computer supported collaborative work.

Everyone uses social computing. There is still a lot of research going on about social computing. There are many companies developing social computing applications, so they are hiring a lot of people both on design and actual development. They also need employees to analyze how effectively people are using social computing applications.

Dr. Tang creates very interesting assignments for the students. For example one assignment requires the students to make projections to imagine how social computing will be in another 10 or 15 years. Students will work on a group research project.

Students will enjoy this course because it includes participation and discussions. If you want to find out about how friendship forms, how you would become friends with others and if you want to find out about your role that you play in your network then you should come to this class.

For more information on courses, visit sis.umflint.edu or catalog.umflint.edu

The information for this post was complied by CSIS graduate student Srikanth Reddy Bogala.