College of Computing and Informatics

The Zika virus is spreading, and its worsening symptoms are causing serious public health concerns. More than a million people have been infected in Brazil alone, and the first American cases are now being reported in South Florida. As researchers and scientists scramble to understand this previously understudied organism, UNC Charlotte bioinformatics professor Daniel Janies is looking to answer two very important questions: how is the virus changing, and where might it go next? Janies explains his research on an Inside UNC Charlotte webcast, starting at 9 a.m., Friday, Aug. 19.

The lack of women in the information technology workforce directly affects the nation’s economic future — only 26 percent of IT professionals are women. This lack of gender diversity is a key factor to the growing shortage of tech talent; future U.S. graduates with bachelor’s degrees in computing can fill only 40 percent of the country’s projected tech jobs.

UNC Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics (CCI) Women in Computing Initiative aims to tackle this national challenge.

Technology can be a force to improve various aspects of a community, and UNC Charlotte is issuing a public challenge for developers to create applications or games to advance a social good.

The UNC Charlotte Data Science Initiative, through its Partnership for Social Good, is sponsoring a virtual hackathon to address economic mobility in the Queen City. Participants will compete for $10,000 in prizes, and their challenge is to create a mobile platform-based application or game that addresses this problem:

Yi Deng, dean of the College of Computing and Informatics, will become the dean of the College of Computing and Informatics at Drexel University, effective Sept. 1.

 Lixia Yao, an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Informatics Department of Software and Information Systems, has received a Career Development Award in Biomedical Informatics from the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.

This highly competitive award is designed to provide junior faculty the support and “protected time” for an intensive career development in biomedical informatics leading to research independence. 

Two doctoral students from the College of Computing and Informatics Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics, Adriano Schneider and Gregorio Linchangco, and visiting research scholar, Dennis Jacob Machado, were part of the winning team that participated in the Zika Innovation Hack-a-thon in Boston.

Mirsad Hadzikadic, executive director of the Data Science Initiative and director of the Complex Systems Institute, will moderate “Ideology, Conflict and Hope: The Bosnia Project” at 5 p.m., Tuesday, April 26.

Yong Ge, an assistant professor in the College of Computing and Informatics Department of Computer Science, has developed a tool that leverages social media data to help analyze use patterns of illegal drugs by young adults across the country. The National Institute of Health funded his work.

The College of Computing and Informatics recently received a Blue Diamond Award for being a top producer of IT talent.

CCI, nominated in the category of human capital, was honored for its Business Partners Program.

The Blue Diamond Awards are sponsored by CA Technologies, a Charlotte-based company that creates software that fuels transformation for global companies and enables them to seize opportunities of the application economy.

Two researchers from Brazil are working with Daniel Janies, the Carol Grotnes Belk Distinguished Professor of Bioinformatics and Genomics, to better understand the genes that allow amphibians to generate and resist the poisons they use for defense.