April 2026 Newsletter

What's Inside This Issue

• Important Information
• Updates
• Achievements
• Student Highlight

Important Information

• Osprey for a Day — April 3rd
• SoC Symposium — April 20th

Achievements

Congratulations to Dr. Kahanda Indika for his paper, “Evaluating Embedding Fusion Across Species with Unequal Encoder Capacity for Automated Protein Function Prediction,” being accepted to FLAIRS-39.

Congratulations to Dr. Zornitza Prodanoff for securing funding from the UNF Foundation Board for the proposal, UNF Quantum Initiative: Building Education, Research, and Community Partnership.

Congratulations to Visiting Instructor Scott Piersall on his manuscript, “Improving MPI Error Detection and Repair with Large Language Models and Bug References,” being accepted to the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.

Congratulations to Dr. Karthikeyan Umapathy on presenting two papers at Southern AIS 2026 for work based on the CAP 6100 User Experience Design course research project. Graduate students Anjali Prakash and Rylee Asphinwall are first authors on the papers, respectively.

Congratulations to Dr. Indika Kahanda for being named an Honors Innovation Fellow for his COP3530 Data Structures course in the Hicks Honors College’s AI and Pedagogical Innovation initiative.

Congratulations to Dr. Youngzhao Wang for being named an Honors Innovation Fellow for his CAI4105 Machine Learning course in the Hicks Honors College’s AI and Pedagogical Innovation initiative.

The paper, “Requirements Classification Using Fine-Tuned Transformer Models: A Comparative Study of BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT-4o,” by Poonkuzhali Vasudevan, Sandeep Reddivari, Sanjay Ahuja, and Nan Niu was accepted to the 2026 ACM Southeast Conference. Poonkuzhali is a master’s student recently graduated from the School of Computing. Congratulations!

Congratulations to Ella Luedeke and Dr. Indika Kahanda for their paper, “RAMP: Exploring the Feasibility of Detecting Physics Student Misconceptions in Writing Assignments Using Large Language Models,” being accepted to FLAIRS-39.

Congratulations to Anne Howell and Dr. Indika Kahanda on their paper, “FuseGO: Evaluating Embedding Fusion Across Species with Unequal Encoder Capacity for Automated Protein Function Prediction,” being accepted to FLAIRS-39. Additionally, Howell has also been awarded the NSF Student Travel Award for this paper.

Congratulations to Dr. Xudong Liu and John Butoto for their paper, “Dwell Time Estimation Using Periodic Image Captures and Deep Learning,” being accepted to FLAIRS-39.

Congratulations to Dr. Xudong Liu and Ashritha Kotagiri for their paper, “Multi-Label Heart Disease Classification Using Electrocardiograms and Machine Learning,” being accepted to FLAIRS-39.

Student Highlight

When starting one’s time in higher education, life does not always go to plan. In the case of Angela Lian, a fourth-year information science major, that certainly is the case. Lian initially planned on being with UNF for two years to gain her associate degree and then transfer to a different university. However, her life circumstances changed, and she made the decision to finish her four-year degree with the School of Computing.

She said that one of the biggest factors leading her to stay with UNF was the School of Computing professors and instructors. Lian praised not only the teaching abilities of faculty such as Instructor Lentz, but also the accessibility of faculty to help students in every phase of their education and the dedication they have to student success. Lian has been heavily involved with the School of Computing through her volunteering as an honors student.

Something that she encourages new students to do is look into all of the paths that UNF and the School of Computing offer to them. She emphasized the importance of seeing one’s advisor for resources to help students succeed. Resources such as tutoring and the writing center were highlighted as underutilized yet important to being successful in higher education.

Lian’s time at UNF is coming to a close as she walks the stage on May 1 for graduation. Following graduation, she plans to take a gap year to spend with family and work on her portfolio before attending the UCF Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy for her master’s degree.