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| September 2011 Edition |  |
Dr. Tamara Schneider is new Lecturer
CSE Department celebrates 40th Anniversary
CSE Students invited to picnic on September 12
Dr. Mikler gives keynote address at UNT Convocation
UNT CSE Summer Programs
LARC News
News from the Language and Information Technologies Group
Computer Systems Research Group News
News from NanoSystem Design Laboratory (NSDL)
Dr. Paul Tarau presents 6 new research papers
Convergence Technology Center grant continues
Chi-Chen Chiu publishes research paper
Advisor's Corner
Career Fair at Discovery Park on September 22
Need Help in CSE Courses? Visit the Help Lab!
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Greetings from the CSE Chair |
Dear CSE Students,
Welcome to Fall 2011! I am glad to be at the University of North Texas as Chair of your Department of Computer Science and Engineering. First of all, I want to invite you to attend our CSE Picnic on Monday, September 12, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. We are planning to have some fun so I look forward to meeting you there. Congratulations to Ram Dantu and Armin Mikler on their promotions to Full Professor and Ebru Çankaya on her promotion to Senior Lecturer. Welcome to Tamara Schneider as our new Lecturer and Rekha Bhowmik and Kevin Chen joining us as Adjunct Faculty. Other faculty changes include Richard Goodrum now being Adjunct Faculty and Research Associate and Yan Huang is on Faculty Development Leave this semester. I invite you to read about the activities in this newsletter and on our website to get involved in what our CSE department has to offer. On Facebook, "like" the UNT Department of Computer Science and Engineering to get all the latest news and information. I hope you have a good semester and I look forward to serving as your Chair. Barrett Bryant | |
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Department of Computer Science and Engineering News |
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Welcome Dr. Barrett Bryant as new CSE Chair |
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Dr. Barrett Bryant joined the UNT Department of Computer Science and Engineering as Professor and Chair on August 1, 2011. He was formerly a Professor of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Dr. Bryant received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 1983 and 1980, respectively. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 1979. At UAB, Dr. Bryant served as Associate Chair and undergraduate program director. He was an ACM Distinguished Lecturer twice, received two University-wide teaching awards, and was nominated for three Dean's teaching awards at UAB. He advised 14 Ph.D. and 36 M.S. students, published over 130 refereed articles in books, journals, and conferences, and was PI or co-PI on research grants totaling over $9.3 million. Dr. Bryant's research interests are programming languages and compiler design, component-based software engineering, and formal methods in software engineering. In addition to his Chair duties, Dr. Bryant is teaching CSCE 5450 Programming Languages this Fall. For more information about Dr. Bryant, please go to his website. ↑ | |
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Dr. Tamara Schneider is new Lecturer |
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Dr. Tamara Schneider joins the CSE faculty as a Lecturer. Dr. Schneider received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas in December 2010. Following her graduation, she was a post-doctoral research associate with the UNT Computational Epidemiology Research Laboratory. Her research is in analyzing and optimizing regional bio-emergency response plans, disaster preparedness and synthetic cities. Dr. Schneider is teaching two sections of CSCE 2100, Computing Foundations I, and CSCE 4600/5640, Introduction to Operating Systems/Operating System Design. More information about Dr. Schneider is available at her website. ↑ | |
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CSE Department celebrates 40th Anniversary |
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The Department of Computer Science and Engineering was founded as the Department of Computing Sciences in 1971. When the department moved to the newly formed College of Engineering in 2002, the name was changed to what it is today. A history of all the faculty who have served in the department is given on our website. We will be celebrating this throughout the year with a number of special events. ↑ | |
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CSE Students invited to picnic on September 12 |
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The Department of Computer Science and Engineering invites all CSE Students to attend a Welcome picnic on Monday, September 12 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the covered pavilion at the back of Discovery Park by the entrance to Materials Science and Engineering. The first 200 students will receive the department's new 40th anniversary T-shirt. Food, drinks and place settings will be provided. Students are invited to bring a side dish or a dessert to share with everyone. How about a game of volleyball between the students and faculty? Sounds like a fun time so we hope you will join us! ↑ | |
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Dr. Mikler gives keynote address at UNT Convocation |
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Dr. Armin Mikler gave the keynote address at the UNT New Student Convocation on August 24, 2011. Freshmen and transfer students filled the UNT Coliseum and were officially welcomed by Dr. Dale Tampke, Dean of Undergraduate Students, and Dr. Warren Burggren, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. For pictures of the UNT Convocation, please go to the CSE media gallery. Dr. Mikler was selected to deliver this address since he received the 'Fessor Graham Award at the UNT Honors Day Convocation in Spring 2011. This award is the highest honor given to only one faculty member each year by the student body at UNT. This was the first time a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has received this prestigious award. ↑ | |
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UNT CSE Summer Programs |
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UNT faculty members Robert Akl and David Keathly, along with their camp staff, hosted four Robocamps and three Xbox Game Development camps this summer. Funding was provided by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Texas Workforce Commission. A total of about 125 students attended the camps, which celebrated their 7th year of operation. More details about Robocamp can be found at http://capstone.cse.unt.edu/robocamp/. ↑ | |
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LARC News |
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UNT's Laboratory for Recreational Computing was represented this summer at the Second International Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games in Bordeaux, France in June 2011. Dr. Ian Parberry gave a presentation called "What Does the Art and Science of Procedural Content Generation Bring to Game Design? (And Vice-Versa)" in the panel session "Should Procedural Content Generation or Game Design Change Procedural Content Generation?" See the video of Dr. Parberry's talk. Ph.D. student Jon Doran and Dr. Parberry's paper "A Prototype Quest Generator Based on a Structural Analysis of Quests from Four MMORPGs" is on pp. 1-8 of the Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games. See the video of the talk. Ph.D. student Dhanyu Amarasinghe and Dr. Parberry's paper "Towards Fast, Believable Real-Time Rendering of Burning Objects in Video Games" appears on pp. 256-258 of the Proceedings of the 2011 Foundations of Digital Games. Dhanyu and Dr. Parberry have another paper "Fast, Believable Real-time Rendering of Burning Low-Polygon Objects in Video Games which will appear in the Proceedings of the 6th Annual North American Game-On Conference in Troy, NY in October 2011. Also, being presented at the conference in Troy is a paper "Very Fast Real-Time Ocean Wave Foam Rendering Using Halftoning" by MS student Mary Yingst, LARC Research Associate Jennifer R. Alford, and Dr. Parberry. PhD student Joshua Taylor and Dr. Parberry will also present this paper, "Procedural Generation of Sokoban Levels", at the Troy conference. Ph.D. student Joshua Taylor and Dr. Parberry have a paper "Randomness + Structure = Clutter: A Procedural Object Placement Generator Using Petri Nets" to appear in the Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Entertainment Computing in Vancouver, Canada in October 2011. Congratulations to LARC Alumnus, Criss Martin, who became a game programmer at Gateway Gaming in Plano, TX. He becomes LARC Alumnus #59 to join the game industry. ↑ | |
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News from the Language and Information Technologies Group |
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The highlight of the Summer semester for the Language and Information Technologies group was a new PhD in the group: on August 5, Dr. Hakan Ceylan (pictured on right with Rada Mihalcea) has successfully defended his dissertation on the extractive summarization of literary novels. We also had several other achievements: Samer Hassan and Rada Mihalcea's paper on "Salient Semantic Analysis" has been published in the Proceedings of the competitive conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2011). Samer presented the paper in San Francisco in July. Ben Leong and Ravi Sinha spent their summers doing internships at Microsoft, in the research group and the software development group respectively. These are very competitive internships, which represent a great learning experience while at the same time exposing students to the work being done in major companies. Tze-I (Elisa) Yang, together with Andrew Torget and Rada Mihalcea, published a paper on "Topic Modeling on Historical Newspapers" in the ACL workshop on "Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities." Elisa presented the paper in June in Portland. Ben Leong and Rada Mihalcea's paper on "Going Beyond Text: A Hybrid Image-Text Approach for Measuring Word Relatedness" was accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2011). Rada will present the paper in November, in Thailand. Carmen Banea, together with Rada Mihalcea and Janyce Wiebe from University of Pittsburgh, authored a paper on " Sense-level Subjectivity in a Multilingual Setting," which was accepted for publication in the IJCNLP workshop on "Sentiment Analysis where AI meets Psychology" (SAAIP 2011). Rada Mihalcea was a keynote speaker at the conference on Knowledge Engineering: Principles and Techniques, held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She presented recent research work done in the LIT group on "Multilingual Subjectivity." Samer Hassan and Rada Mihalcea's journal paper on "Learning to Identify Educational Materials" has been accepted for publication in the ACM Transactions on Speech and Language Processing. ↑ | |
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Computer Systems Research Group News | ||
Dr. Krishna Kavi, Net-Centric IUCRC Director, received two new research grants from NSF. In one case, he is part of team that was awarded $975K for 3 years. The team includes faculty from UTD and SMU, in addition to Dr. Kavi. UNT's share is $191K. In a separate project, Dr. Kavi received $98K for 2 years from NSF. Both projects aim to explore how applications behave when using Cloud computing. Specifically the teams will develop tools to measure such properties as execution times, vulnerability to security attacks, reliability and dependability of applications when they are deployed on different Cloud platforms. Dr. Kavi is continuing to work on a project funded by AMD. In this project, Dr. Kavi and his students are exploring how to organize memory using emerging technologies that permit stacking DRAM circuits on top of processor cores. Dr. Kavi and Dr. Robert Akl are working with Raytheon on developing sensors to detect movement of fingers and forearm so that hand signals used by soldiers can be translated into electronic signals and communicated to other soldiers who are out of sight. The NSF Net-Centric Industry/University Cooperative Research Center will hold its next semi-annual Industrial Advisory Board meeting at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ on October 18-19, 2011. The Computer Systems Research Group has published the following papers: T. Janjusic, K. Kavi and B. Potter. "Gleipnir: A memory analysis tool", Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS 2011), June 1-3, 2011, Singapore, pp 2058-2067. M. Dubasi, A. Fawibe, O. Garitselov, K. Kavi, I. Nwachukwu, O. Okabia, V. Prabhu. "Parabilis: Speeding up single-threaded applications by extracting fine-grained threads for multi-core execution", Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Computing (ISPDC 2011), July 6-8, 2011, Cluj Napoca, Romania. I. Nwachukwu, K. Kavi, A. Fawibe, C. Yan. "Evaluation of techniques to improve cache access uniformities", Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP-2011), Taipei, Taiwan, Sept 13-16, 2011. The group also has the following journal paper accepted for publication: I. Nwachukwu, K.Kavi, A. Fawibe and C. Yan. "Performance improvement schemes for direct mapped caches", Accepted for publication in the Elsevier Journal of Computers and Electrical Engineering. Contact Dr. Kavi for more information on any of these projects. ↑ | |||
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News from NanoSystem Design Laboratory (NSDL) | ||
As strong demonstration of leadership research in low-power electronics, NSDL director Dr. Saraju Mohanty has been appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Low Power Electronics (JOLPE). JOLPE is a top-notch international journal that publishes peer-reviewed papers focused in the areas of low-power VLSI including AMS electronics and digital electronics. As the first assignment he is working on to bring special issues under the title "Power, Parasitics, and Process-Variation (P3) Awareness in Mixed-Signal Design". In addition, Dr. Mohanty also guest edits a special issue for the ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC) based on the selected papers from the IEEE-CS technically co-sponsored International Symposium on Electronic-System Design (ISED) 2010 in which he served as a program chair. NSDL alumna, UNT's first woman Ph.D. with VLSI specialization, Dr. Garima Thakral, has been employed with Aperia Solutions. NSDL welcomes two new Ph.D. students. Geng Zheng joined NSDL to conduct his Ph.D. research in Verilog-AMS behavioral modeling. Karo Okobiah, who was awarded as the best Computer Engineering Masters student at the last Honors Day celebration, joined for the Ph.D. in the area of Kriging metamodeling for analog circuit. Oleg Garitselov's polynomial and non-polynomial metamodeling research has already resulted in 3 highly-selective publications. In the last academic year, NSDL members published 7 peer-reviewed journal papers and 9 highly-selective conference papers. Most of these conferences follow the double-blind review process with a typical 30% acceptance ratio. NSDL has a Facebook page in an effort to popularize science and engineering with the public. The research and education outcomes of the funded research projects are presented for worldwide usage. ↑ | |||
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Dr. Paul Tarau presents 6 new research papers |
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During the Summer, Dr. Paul Tarau has presented the paper "Integrated Symbol Table, Engine and Heap Memory Management in Multi-Engine Prolog" at the International Symposium on Memory Management in San Jose, CA, the paper "Coordination and Concurrency in Multi-Engine Prolog" at the 6th International Federated Conferences on Distributed Computing Techniques in Reykjavik, Iceland as well as a paper at the International Conference on Logic Programming LPMAS'2011 workshop and two papers at the CICLOPS'2011 workshop in Lexington, KY as part of an NSF-supported project. The paper "Emulating Primality with Multiset Representations of Natural Numbers" describing new results on Computational Mathematics aspects of the same project are presented by Dr. Tarau at ICTAC'2011 in Johannesburg, South Africa in early September. ↑ | |
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Convergence Technology Center grant continues |
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UNT CSE has received an additional $24,905 as part of the three year sub award from Collin College to participate in the Convergence Technology Center. The CTC is an NSF funded center as part of the Advanced Technology Education Program. David Keathly, Senior Lecturer, is the UNT Principle Investigator and a Co-PI on the NSF grant. The center works with other colleges around the country to help establish programs and curriculum in Convergence Technology areas, like networking, security, VOIP and mobile platforms. The group is currently working on the next grant application to move from a regional center to an NSF National Center. UNT's BAIT program plays a large part in the efforts for this center as it provides a transfer point for students completing Associates Degrees and Certificates in Convergence Technology, as well as being a model program for other 4 year schools in the partner college geographic areas. Mr. Keathly has been a featured speaker at a number of conferences representing both UNT CSE and the CTC, including the Hi-Tech conference this summer. ↑ | |
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Student News |
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Congratulations to CSE graduates |
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Congratulations to all of our Department of Computer Science and Engineering graduates from Spring 2011 and Summer 2011. Our Ph.D. graduates are pictured below. Ph.D. Graduates in Spring 2011
Ph.D. Graduates in Summer 2011
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Roopa Vishwanathan
Ning Xu
Chengyang Zhang
Oluwayomi Adamo
Samer Hassan
Yao Shen |
Chi-Chen Chiu publishes research paper |
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A CSE undergraduate student in Dr. Qunfeng Dong's research group, Chi-Chen Chiu, has recently published a research paper in BMC Bioinformatics. Chiu has made significant contribution to this paper, in which he earned his co-first authorship. The paper describes a novel bioinformatics tool for visualizing genome synteny data. Currently, Chiu is working on another manuscript in which he will be the first author. ↑ | |
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Advisor's Corner |
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There are a lot of changes in the course requirements for the 2011-2012 year, and more are coming for the BA-IT and the Computer Engineering program in the 2012-2013 catalog. Remember though that once you have a degree audit performed, you will be locked into a particular catalog year and are not required to upgrade or use the new requirements unless they benefit you. If you want to upgrade, you need to speak with an advisor to change your catalog year. Many of you may notice also that Math 2770 is no longer offered. There are a number of paths to replace this course depending on your catalog year and other completed courses. For Fall 2011 you can take CSCE 2100 to replace Math 2770 if you have already completed or are currently enrolled in CSCE 2050. If you have not completed either MATH 2770 or CSCE 2050 then beginning in the Spring of 2012 you will take both the CSCE 2100 and 2110 courses. In the Spring 2012 semester, there will be a special section of CSCE 2100 for those needing a replacement for MATH 2770 only. Watch the schedule of classes or check with your advisor for more information. ↑ | |
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Career Fair at Discovery Park on September 22 | ||
The Career Center and Office of Internships and Cooperative Education will host an Engineering and Computer Science Career and Internship Fair on Thursday, September 22, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Discovery Park Commons. This is a great opportunity for senior students to find a job and the rest of the student body to get exposed to employer recruiting activities and the interview process. The UNT Career Center will host an Engineering and Technology Industry Interviewing Day on Friday, September 23. Computer Science, Technology and Engineering firms will participate. Employers interested in students in various engineering and technology majors for internships and full-time jobs post day-long interview schedules. Interview schedules can be viewed in the Eagle Network in the INTERVIEWING section of the student’s account. ↑ | |||
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Need Help in CSE Courses? Visit the Help Lab! |
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Students in Computer Science and Engineering have a valuable tool available to them just down the hall in the CSE Help Labs located in Room F205 and F257 at Discovery Park. The Help Lab staff can assist you in learning how to access and use the computing resources available in the CSE department. A variety of different computer systems and a printer are also available for your use in the F205 Help Lab. As last semester, F205 will be staffed from 10 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Monday – Thursday to help you with problems in your programming courses. For problems in theoretical courses, such as CSCE 2050, 2100, 3110, 4110 and 5150, TA's will be available in room F257. Please check the availability on the lab door. Be sure to make the Help Lab a regular stop throughout the semester whether you need help with a particular class or just want to make the best use of the resources available to you. We also have regular labs for our 1020/1030 courses are located in F218 and F222. Please check your course syllabi for the correct lab time. ↑ | |
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College of Engineering News |
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CENG Receives Major Gift |
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UNT Alumnus and entrepreneur, Charn Uswachoke, pledged $22 million to the University of North Texas in August 2011. Uswachoke said, "I wanted to help the next generation have a better education so that we all can have a better world. UNT is a top-quality school and continues to grow and strengthen as it expands into new areas." The College of Music will receive $10 million, the College of Engineering will receive $6.5 million, and the College of Business will receive $5.5 million. The College of Engineering will use $5 million to create the Charn Uswaschoke Center for Energy Efficient Materials, a center that will help UNT and its materials and science engineering department become a leader in energy-related materials research, and $1.5 million to create an endowed professorship in materials science and engineering to attract a top researcher to head the center. For more information on this gift, see this UNT press release. ↑ | |
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Zero Energy Research Lab to benefit CENG students |
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The University of North Texas has begun construction on a state-of-the-art Zero Energy Research Laboratory to be located at UNT's Discovery Park. The facility is designed to test emerging technologies that allow building systems to have a net-zero consumption of energy, and once completed will be the first of its kind in the United States. The lab will be an invaluable asset to the students in UNT's College of Engineering, especially those in the Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering. UNT became the first university to offer degrees in mechanical and energy engineering in 2006, and currently has more than 290 students in the program. The Zero Energy Research Laboratory will be an important facility for UNT's research cluster in Renewable Energy and Conservation. The university created the seven-person team in 2010 to study technology strategies that address the region and nation's 21st Century conservation needs. For more information on this new lab, see this UNT press release. ↑ | |
Discover UNT's Center for Student Affairs at Discovery Park and find out about Geek Week coming September 26-30, 2011 |
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The CSE Student Email Newsletter was assembled and produced by Genene Murphy and Don Retzlaff. It is a publication of the UNT Computer Science and Engineering Department. Contact the department at csenewsletter@unt.edu. http://www.cse.unt.edu — UNT Computer Science and Engineering Department — September 2011 |
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