2024 OMSCS Annual Report

2024 was a momentous year for OMSCS, as the program celebrated its 10th anniversary. In addition to launching new courses and seminars—and even a new specialization—we hosted our 2nd annual OMSCS Conference and added a few new faces to our team. Keep reading for even more about OMSCS in 2024, including enrollment stats, published research, and relevant articles from last year!

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2024 Enrollment Stats

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Fall 2024 Enrollment Stats

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10th Anniversary

Reception

On April 29, OMSCS hosted a reception at the Biltmore Hotel to celebrate the program reaching 10 years and over 10,000 graduates! Doubling as a welcome reception for the annual OMSCS Conference, the reception saw attendance from many OMSCS students and alumni. Hosted by David Joyner, the reception featured talks from Zvi Galil, Sebastian Thrun, Alex Orso, and Provost Steven McLaughlin, and President Ángel Cabrera was in attendance, as well! Attendees were treated to dinner and photo ops with Buzz and the Ramblin' Wreck. For more about the featured attendees, click here.

Write-Ups

Revolutionary Program Celebrates First Decade of Expanding Access to CS Education

When Georgia Tech founded the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program ten years ago, it was something new. Where previous programs tried to replicate the in-person experience, OMSCS has built techniques, technologies, and communities centered around the online experience.

OMSCS Celebrates a Decade of Community and Innovation

The second annual Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) Conference at Georgia Tech marked a milestone in the program’s history, celebrating its 10th anniversary and the graduation of over 10,000 students.

Learning at Scale: Researchers Examine the Evolution of Affordable At-Scale Degree

As Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program marks its 10th anniversary, College of Computing’s David Joyner and Alex Duncan are examining key trends in the groundbreaking program that has transformed graduate education.

CS 8803 O21: GPU Hardware and Software

This course explores the software and hardware aspects of GPU development.

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CS 8803 O23: Modern Internet Research Methods

This is a research oriented course that covers new developments in Internet measurement techniques, with an emphasis on topics related to reliability, freedom and security of modern Internet platforms.

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CS 8803 O24: Intro to Research

This course serves as a general introduction to research methods and CS research more specifically.

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Seminars

OMSCS also introduced a handful of new Seminars in 2024!

CS 8001 OCH: Building Applications with ChatGPT	This seminar provides a comprehensive understanding of building applications with ChatGPT.
CS 8001 OHD: HCI Design, Justice-Oriented Design, and Critical Computing	This course provides an understanding of recent approaches to research and major topics in design and human-computer interaction (HCI) research.
CS 8001 OIC: Introduction to C Programming	This seminar, intended for students used to high-level languages such as Ruby and Python, will teach C, the lingua franca for systems programming over the past forty years due to its elegance, efficiency, and low-level (close to the hardware) capabilities.
CS 8001 OLM: Large Language Model	This seminar delves into the realm of LLMs, focusing on how we can apply key concepts of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to LLM research.
CS 8001 OLP: The Language of Proofs	The language of proofs is designed to fulfill prerequisites to succeed in the Graduate Algorithms class of the OMSCS program.
CS 8001 OPH: PhD Applicants	In this seminar, led by Dr. Nick Lytle, students planning to apply for PhD programs in Fall 2024 will meet to review statements of purpose, discuss application processes, and discuss PhD prospects.
CS 8001 ORI: Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction	In this seminar course, students will delve into recent papers and explore current cutting-edge research in robotics.
CS 8001 OST: Social Media and Technology	This seminar explores the many intersections between politics and social media, through discussions of academic research and non-academic multimedia pieces.
CS 8001 OUI: Designing and Building User Interfaces	This seminar aims to provide students with both conceptual knowledge of user interfaces and practical experience in building user interfaces.

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Project Showcase

Every Fall and Spring semester, OMSCS runs a project showcase where students get to show off the incredible work they've done in their courses. One project is voted on by students to receive the Students' Choice Award; in addition, the OMSCS staff select one project to receive the Staff Choice Award. The 2024 winners included projects focused on automated plant identification, donut freshness classification, a Fourier transform explorer, and a virtual escape room design to teach American Sign Language! Congratulations to the 2024 winners!

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OMSCS Buzz Podcast

2024 was an exciting year for OMSCS Buzz! The podcast boasted over 375 followers, and it was streamed in 33 countries. Notable episodes included interviews with prominent OMSCS faculty such as David Joyner, Rich Vuduc, and Thad Starner, as well as interviews with students, alumni, and other faculty from the OMSCS community. Check out the 2024 year in review below.

OMSCS Buzz Year in Review

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Research

Research faculty on the OMSCS team publish research regularly. Here are some pertinent publications from 2024.

Intelligent Feedback and Evaluation for the Assessment and Improvement of Student Peer Reviews	David A. Joyner, Gabriel J. Pérez Irizarry, Bobbie Eicher, & Nick Lytle IEEE Digital Education and MOOCs Conference (DEMOcon)	Research into peer evaluation shows positive effects on student achievement and attitudes. To foster authentic peer reviews, students need to know their peer reviews will be seen and graded. However, the time-consuming nature of assessing feedback makes it impractical for instructors to evaluate thousands of feedback items generated by students in massive online courses. This paper describes the development of a deep learning (DL) tool to help assess the quality of feedback written by students in a peer-review system.
Ten Years, Ten Trends: The First Decade of an Affordable At-Scale Degree	David Joyner & Alex Duncan ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S)	Ten years ago in 2014 saw the launch of the first in what would become a trend to launch online, at-scale degree programs (mostly at the graduate level) by leveraging MOOC pedagogies and platforms. Using publicly-available data, this paper describes ten trends that characterize the first decade of one such program in computer science in order to assess the audience and performance of students who elect to enroll in such programs.
Newly Created Assignments and The First Repository Effect on Inter-Semester Plagiarism	Keith Adkins & David Joyner ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S)	In this paper, we present an empirical study based on data that we collected over five semesters while addressing plagiarism within our large online computer science graduate program. We compare plagiarism rates between two courses: one integrating new assignments and the other continuing to reuse older assignments.
Open, Collaborative, and AI-Augmented Peer Assessment: Student Participation, Performance, and Perceptions	Chaohua Ou, Ploy Thajchayapong, & David Joyner ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale (L@S)	This large-scale longitudinal study explores the effects of open, collaborative, and AI-augmented peer assessment in a large online graduate course with 1,636 students across 12 semesters from 2018 to 2022.
When Chatting Isn’t Cheating: Mining and Evaluating Student Use of Chatbots and Other Resources During Open-Internet Exams	David Joyner, Zoey Anne Beda, Michael Cohen, Melanie Duffin, Amy Garcia Fernandez, Liz Hayes-Golding, Jonathan Hildreth, Alex Houk, Rebecca Johnson, Kayla Matcheck, & Ana Santos Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM)	This study examines log data from proctored examinations from two classes offered as part of a large online graduate program in computer science. This study mines these data regarding what resources use during examinations and evaluates whether access to more sophisticated AI tools has had a notable impact on student performance, as well as how they use these tools. This study also examines what other resources students access, providing insights into the need for localization and accessibility technologies.

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Articles

OMSCS students, alumni, faculty, and staff were in the news throughout 2024—check out these articles featuring folks from across the OMSCS community!

Advancing AI in the Classroom	OMSCS alum Michael Washington has been teaching high school math for two decades, but in 2021, he found himself on the other side of the (virtual) classroom as a first-year master’s computer science student at Georgia Tech.
SCI Lecturer Presents Research Exploring the Impostor Phenomenon in CS	The impostor phenomenon, where individuals doubt their accomplishments despite evident success, is a significant issue among computer science (CS) students. OMSCS instructor Fisayo Omojokun was part of a team that recently presented research at the 2024 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, examining the prevalence and impact of the impostor phenomenon in CS students.
SCI Supports Probability School in Cuba Amid Hurricane Challenges	OMSCS instructor Gerandy Brito served on the scientific committee for this year’s EMALCA program, which took place in Havana, Cuba, from November 4 to 8. The program focused on recent developments in probability theory and aimed to inspire future mathematics scholars by connecting them with leading researchers.
Experts Say AI Copyright Cases Could Have Negative Impact on Academic Research	Two years since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, dozens of lawsuits have been filed alleging technology companies have infringed copyright by using published works to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Deven Desai and OMSCS instructor Mark Riedl are Georgia Tech researchers raising awareness about how these court rulings could force academic researchers to construct new AI models with limited training data.
Unveiling METALLIC: A Multi-Million Dollar Investment into Cybersecurity	Researchers (including OMS instructors Wenke Lee, Taesoo Kim, and Brendan Saltaformaggio) are receiving more than $4 million from DARPA to develop a new framework to analyze and model sophisticated attacks on software.
What the CrowdStrike Outage Tells Us About Global Cybersecurity	A software update initiated by a third-party cybersecurity company caused Microsoft systems to crash in July, grounding flights, delaying medical procedures, and drastically slowing business worldwide. OMSCS instructor Alex Orso discusses how the error occurred, how to prevent similar situations, and how Georgia Tech is shaping the future of cybersecurity.
EXCEL Students Design Customized Technologies Through HCI-centered Course	Georgia Tech students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are designing technologies tailored to them while teaching faculty and researchers about their needs in the process. Rachel Lowy, a Ph.D. student in the School of Interactive Computing and OMSCS seminar instructor, piloted a new human-computer interaction design course for IDD students in Georgia Tech’s EXCEL program.
Online Series Offers Unique Opportunity to Hear from Turing Award Winners	Each year, the Association of Computing Machinery presents the Turing Award to one person for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to the computer science (CS) field. It is the highest honor in computing, and some have called it "The Nobel Prize of Computing."
OMSCS Alum Makes a Difference for Children in Kenya	Over the summer, after graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology's rigorous Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program, I embarked on a transformative journey to Africa. Georgia Tech's mission is to develop leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition, and I believe I did just that. Whether it was the exceptional teachers who guided me or the alignment of values between myself and the institution, I felt a profound sense of purpose as I traveled to Kenya to teach children computer science.
University to Confer Honorary Degree in Recognition of Galil's Impact, Legacy	In recognition of his exceptional contributions, one of the country's oldest and most prestigious universities is awarding former Georgia Tech Dean of Computing Zvi Galil an honorary Doctor of Letters degree this month.
Former Teaching Assistant and Student Embark on OMSCS Journey Together	Dhara Shah and Amber Wells, once a teaching assistant (TA) and undergraduate student respectively at Georgia State University (GSU), are now tackling Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program together.
Unique Program Offers Campus Research Opportunities for Online Students	From her home more than 800 miles away, Georgia Tech online master's student Jasmine Tata is monitoring fish in aquariums at Georgia Tech.

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New OMSCS Team Members

Image	Dante Ciolfi Associate Director of Computing for Good Dante has been the Associate Director of Computing for Good in the OMSCS program since 2024. In this role, he mentors graduate computer science students in team and individual projects, primarily in the nonprofit sector. Dante's current research interests are focused on project-based learning at scale and web software equity. He received his M.S. in Interactive Intelligence from Georgia Tech, M.Ed. from Florida Gulf Coast University, and B.S. in Biology from James Madison University. Before joining the OMSCS team, Dante taught computer science at various levels, including high school, technical college, and college.
Image	Bobbie Eicher Associate Director of Research Operations Bobbie Eicher is the Associate Director of Research Operations of the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program, as well as an OMSCS alumna. Her research focuses on supporting adult and online education, including the use of artificial intelligence and designing graduate-level research experiences. She first joined the OMSCS program in 2014, became one of the first of its students to be hired for a Teaching Assistant position, and has continued to work on supporting and improving both individual classes and the program as a whole ever since.
Image	Maria Konte Lecturer Maria Konte is a research scientist at the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech and affiliated with its Institute for Information Security & Privacy. Her research is network security. Her work on network reputation as a measure to defend against cybercriminal infrastructures, appeared at ACM SIGCOMM15, and NANOG62 Research Track. She received the Passive and Active Measurement Conference Best Paper Award 2009 for her work on hosting infrastructures of malicious DNS domains.
Image	Ben Manning AI Specialist Benjamin Manning is a Senior Research Technologist for OMSCS. He is a distinguished Principal Data Scientist and AI Engineer with over 30 years of extensive experience in both industry and academia. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, focusing his research on the integration of renewable energy with advanced computational models. His expertise spans across generative AI and computer vision, with a notable track record in the development and deployment of predictive applications tailored for higher education, defense, and healthcare. Dr. Manning has made significant contributions as a faculty member at several universities, where he has advanced the field of artificial intelligence through both teaching and innovative research projects. In his role at OMSCS, he continues his work on creating impactful AI solutions in the academic sphere and also teaches seminars in federated machine learning, MLOps, and generative artificial intelligence. Benjamin is a Google IOT research award recipient and an O'Reilly diversity scholarship recipient, and he is a strong advocate for accessibility in STEM fields, particularly for wheelchair users.
Image	Chris Wirgler Software Specialist Chris is a research technologist for the OMSCS program. His role is to build applications to support students and faculty. Before joining this team he worked as a TA for the OMSCS program. He earned his master's in Computer Science with a specialization in machine learning.