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| February 2013 Edition |  |
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Greetings from the CSE Chair |
 Dear CSE Students, Hope your Spring semester has started off well. Our CSE Department is beginning the semester by searching for a faculty member in the security area. We will be interviewing candidates during the next few weeks. Faculty, staff and students are invited to attend the talks by faculty candidates. Please check your email and the signs posted by the door of the main office of the CSE department for the names of the candidates and the title and location of these talks. Congratulations again to Dr. Kavi and the Net-Centric IUCRC on winning the Tech Titan award. We just received the award check for $20,000 at the end of January. This will be reinvested into the IUCRC. Congratulations to our CSE Cyber Defense Team on qualifying for the Southwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition! Coming up in April, our CSE Department will host the SoMiC Workshop: Security on the Move and in the Clouds for the second year. Undergraduate students should check out the Bug Wars, our new Research Experience for Undergraduates at CSE. Please check out all the news below from our CSE research groups. I hope you will join in the activities being planned for National Engineers Week later in February. You are invited get involved in the activities and events in our CSE Department. You can join the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) or the ACM-W (ACM for Women. ACM is the largest professional organization for computer science and engineering and information technology. Membership in the UNT chapters of both organizations is open to all UNT students with an interest in computing. Check this newsletter and our website to find out what is happening. Please LIKE us on Facebook to get all the latest news and information. Have a good semester in Spring 2013!
Barrett Bryant | |
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Department of Computer Science and Engineering News |
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Tech Titan Award Check presented to Net-Centric IUCRC | ||
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The 2012 Metroplex Technology Business Council (MTBC) Tech Titans of the Future award was presented to Krishna Kavi, Director, in August 2012 at the Tech Titans Gala. The award is given to a university program that educates and trains future technology innovators. MTBC represents and promotes Dallas — Fort Worth area technology companies and STEM education. The Tech Titan of the Futures award recognizes educational institutions that encourage and support students in choosing engineering and technology-related disciplines as a preferred path. This award category spotlights DFW area higher educational institutions’ tech-related curricula and incentives to perpetuate tech-related knowledge transfer. A joint venture between academic, government and commercial institutions, the Net-Centric Software and Systems IUCRC has been formed where the university environment can be used to promote collaborative research between industrial and academic partners. Students work on projects that are sponsored by technology companies such as AMD, Boeing, Intel, Raytheon, Texas Instruments, and other smaller software developers. The Center is expanding with the addition of new universities and new industrial organizations. The next semi-annual IAB meeting of the Net-Centric IUCRC will be held April 2 and 3, 2013. The meeting will take place at the Holiday Inn at St. Louis Airport. ↑ | |||
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CSE Cyber Defense team qualifies for Southwest Regional CCDC | ||
The Cyber Defense Team from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering has passed the qualifying round and will compete in the Southwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) on March 9 and 10 in San Antonio, TX. The qualifying round was held on January 25 and 26. Teams from the following universities will be competing:
Dr. Mahadevan Gomathisankaran is the faculty sponsor for the team. The following CSE Students will participate in this competition:
Congratulations to the team on passing the qualifying round and good luck in the final competition in March! ↑ | |||
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Security Workshop in April 2013 |
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For more details about the conference please check the website. Proposed session or poster titles and abstracts should be submitted to David.Keathly@unt.edu or Ram.Dantu@unt.edu no later than March 10, 2013. Final notification to presenters will be made by March 15, 2013. ↑ | |
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering, in collaboration
with the National Convergence Technology Center at Collin College,
will host the 2nd |
CSE hosts NACLO 2013 | ||
The regional competition for the North American Computational Linguistics, NACLO was hosted on January 31, 2013 by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas. More than 40 high school students from North Texas participated in this competition. NACLO is an educational competition in Computational Linguistics, the science of designing computer algorithms to solve linguistic problems. It challenges students to develop strategies for tackling problems in fascinating real languages and formal symbolic systems. Rada Mihalcea, Associate Professor, and Genene Murphy, CSE Staff, supervised this event, along with the following graduate students: Shibamouli Lahiri, Veronica Perez-Rosas and Ravi Sinha. To see more pictures of this competition, go to this media gallery page. ↑ | |||
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Distinguished Speaker Seminar |
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The next Distinguished Speaker will be Nancy Amato from Texas A&M University on February 22, 2013. She will speak on "Sampling-Based Motion Planning: From Intelligent CAD to Crowd Simulation to Protein Folding". To see other Distinguished Speakers coming in Spring 2013, go to the CSE Seminars page. All students are invited to attend! ↑ | |
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering hosted Associate
Professor Jeff Lei from the University of Texas at Arlington as a
guest speaker on January 25, 2013. His presentation was on
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Undergraduate Students invited to apply for REU |
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This REU program provides the opportunity for 8 undergraduate students to spend the summer as part of a cohort that works on software testing research for 10 weeks from May 21 to July 27, 2013. Participants will work closely with a Computer Science faculty mentor. Applications are due March 1, 2013. For more information, please go to this website. ↑ | |
The Bug Wars is a Research Experience for Undergraduates site project
that exposes students to research on software testing and AI planning through
both competition and collaboration. REU Participants will receive: |
Computer Systems Research Group News | ||
Professor Krishna Kavi presented a paper titled "A description language for QoS properties and a framework for service composition using QoS properties", at the 7th International Conference on Software Engineering, held in Lisbon, Portugal, Nov. 19-23, 2012. In addition, the Computer Systems Research Group published (or will shortly appear in print) the following papers.
The CSRL lab is hosting 4 graduate students from the University of Pisa. Giuseppe Regina, Stefano Pianelli, Giandomenico Pisano and Domenico Pace will spend Spring 2013 semester at UNT, conducting research under Dr. Kavi's supervision. They will then use the results of the research towards their MS Theses at the University of Pisa. ↑ | |||
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News from Dependable Computing Systems Laboratory (DCSL) | ||
DCSL members Ziming Zhang and Qiang Guan made multiple paper presentations at the 31st IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC 2012) in Austin, TX in December 2012. Two important papers that are related to the PhD dissertations of Ziming and Qiang were presented at the conference:
Husanbir Pannu also presented two papers at IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2012) and International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA 2012) in December 2012.
Graduate student Ziming Zhang passed the PhD Proposal examination on December 6, 2012 by giving a dissertation proposal on Adaptive Power Management for Auto-Configuration in Cloud Computing Systems, to his PhD Committee, consisting of Drs. Song Fu (advisor and committee chair), Yan Huang, Krishna Kavi, and Saraju Mohanty. Congratulations to Ziming! ↑ | |||
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Information Management and Knowledge Discovery Lab News |
 The Information Management and Knowledge Discovery Lab (IMKD) has been busy. Dr. Huang received a two-year Texas Department of Transportation grant to study how mobile phones and embedded sensors can help with a travel survey. Travel surveys are important for obtaining current and reliable data on traffic movements and play a key role in transportation planning, modeling, and air quality analysis. PhD student Jason W. Powell and Dr. Yan Huang attended 20th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems on November 6-9 2012 in Redondo Beach, CA. Jason Powell presented his paper: "Detecting Regions of Disequilibrium in Taxi Services Under Uncertainty" co-authored with Dr. Huang. Dr. Huang worked with students and collaborators at Fudan University China and won the second place prize in the 2012 ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS CUP competition. The competition is on map matching which requires aligning GPS points to road segments fast and accurately. The submitted entry is based on Hidden Markov Model and multi-threading technologies and achieved both high accuracy and high matching speed. IMKD lab welcomes new PhD student Zhi Liu. Zhi graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in the Summer of 2012 with a BS in Computer Science. HIT is ranked in the top five in Computer Science in China. He was recommended by a HIT faculty member that Dr. Huang met when she visited Microsoft Research Asia in summer of 2011. ↑ | |
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New members join LIT Lab |
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Welcome to all the new LIT members! ↑ | |
Dr. Rodney Nielsen joined the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering in Fall 2012. He received a dual PhD in Computer Science
and Cognitive Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in
2008. Dr. Nielsen joined Dr. Rada Mihalcea and Dr. Paul Tarau in the Language
and Information Technologies ( |
News from NanoSystem Design Laboratory (NSDL) |
 The NanoSystem Design Laboratory (NSDL) had a very productive year of 2011-2012. During this time, 6 peer-reviewed journal papers were published and 16 conference publications were presented. A book was co-authored by Prof. Mohanty and additionally two patents were filled through UNT. NSDL has now 3 PhD, 2 masters, and 2 undergraduate students actively engaged in cutting edge research in nanoelectronics. Selected journal and transaction publications which include student co-authors are the following:
NSDL PhD candidate, Geng Zheng, made two presentations at GLSVLSI 2012 in Salt Lake City, UT. In particular, the following paper is related to his PhD dissertation:
Another NSDL PhD candidate Karo Okobiah made the following presentation at the International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED) held at Santa Clara, CA:
Both Geng and Karo also made presentations at IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI 2012) which was held at Amherst, MA. Two papers were also presented at a VLSI Design Conference held in Hyderabad, India to which student members of NSDL traveled. ↑ | |
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UNT Award Nominations Due March 1 | ||
Nominations are due March 1, 2013 at 5 pm in the SGA Office in Union 322AA. Nomination forms are available at this SGA website. Winners will be announced at UNT Honors Day on April 5, 2013. Good luck and let the nominations begin! ↑ | |||
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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 in Fall 2012. PhD Graduates in Fall 2012
Prakash Duraisamy Dissertation: "3D Reconstruction using LiDAR and Visual Images" Major Professor: Bill Buckles Dr. Duraisamy is a Visiting Scientist at MIT 
Chee Wee (Ben) Leong Dissertation: "Modeling Synergistic Relationships between Words and Images" Major Professor: Rada Mihalcea Dr. Leong is a on the Research staff at NLP/Speech Group at ETS Research. Website 
Li Li Dissertation: "Source and Channel Coding Strategies for Wireless Sensor Networks" Major Professor: Bill Buckles ↑ | |
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CSE Students defend PhD Dissertations |
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Congratulations to these PhD students for defending their dissertation in January 2013! 
Ravi S. Sinha (right) Dissertation: "Finding Meaning in Context using Algorithms in Monolingual and Crosslingual Settings" Major Professor: Rada Mihalcea Defense Date: January 22, 2013 
Carmen Banea (left) Dissertation: "Extrapolating Subjectivity Research to Other Languages" Major Professor: Rada Mihalcea Defense Date: January 29, 2013 ↑ | |
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PepsiCo Scholarship awarded to Lisa Reynolds | ||
CSE Students were invited to apply for the PepsiCo scholarship in Spring 2013. The scholarship is for Juniors and Seniors who are majoring in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Information Technology with a cumulative 3.5 GPA. Students must provide recent activities related to professional or community service, including activities in the CSE Department and the College of Engineering. Finally, students must ask a CSE faculty member for a recommendation. The Undergraduate Committee will decide the winner. ↑ | |||
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UG Student wins two conference scholarships |
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Beatriz Gomez, a CSE undergraduate student working in
Dr. Qunfeng Dong's
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CSE Students win ACM scavenger hunt |
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To successfully solve the puzzle, students had to decode a substitution cipher that led to a hidden web page, find another hidden page by identifying a jumble of letters as a binary tree and traversing it, and locate a message hidden on campus from GPS coordinates that were only available after running a Python program hidden in the source of one of the pages. After all of these clues were decoded, the final step was to send an email to an address only available after putting the puzzle pieces together printed from each step in the process. The winner was Aaron Buchanan with help from Natalie Parde. They managed to solve all of the clues in just under 10 hours. They received gift certificates for UNT diploma frames from Wordyisms.com. ↑ | |
Computer Science week was the second week in December, and while
students are usually busy taking final exams, the UNT chapter of ACM
and Dr. Garlick put together a computer science related scavenger hunt
for students to have a little fun with between exams. |
Advising Corner |
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The College of Engineering advisors on the first floor can also help with many general questions. Also be sure to review the FAQ of common questions and problems on the CSE website to see if we have already answered your questions. Use all of the resources available to you in an effective way in order to make your stay with us as stress-free and productive as possible. Also please know that we are not doing the overrides for full classes as has been done in the past. Class sizes have been increased to allow for all available seats. So be sure to register during early registration as soon as you are eligible to insure that you get a seat in the classes you want and need. If payment is an issue, explore the installment plans and short term loans offered by the Student Accounting office. These are low cost and effective ways to extend the bulk of your payment into the following semester so you can register early and not be dropped from your classes for non-payment. Finally, be sure and check the summer class schedule when it becomes available. We offer a number of CSCE classes that can help you catch up and graduate earlier, or replace a grade for a class you did not do well in. This is also a good time to catch up on math or science classes you need or fill in some core classes. We hope you have a fantastic spring semester! ↑ | |
Welcome to the Spring 2013 semester! You have probably noticed that
there is only one undergraduate advisor this semester and with limited
office hours. This means if you have advising needs you need to plan
ahead in order to get things done in a timely fashion. Many questions
can also be answered via email to |
UNT Toulouse Graduate School announces first Graduate Exhibition on March 3 |
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The poster option of the Graduate Exhibition will be held March 3 in the Student Union. The poster option is open to all masters and doctoral students. The poster registration date is February 11 at 5 pm and the date for submitting the poster content is February 13 at 5 pm. Printing costs associated with poster content submitted prior to that date and time will be paid by the Toulouse Graduate School. First place award will receive $500, 2nd place awards (multiple) will receive $250, and 3rd place awards (multiple) will receive $100. For more details, see this Toulouse Graduate Exhibition website. Good luck to all our CSE Graduate Students! ↑ | |
CSE Graduate Students are invited to showcase their research to the
larger UNT community. The Graduate Exhibition celebrates research in
all its aspects as an essential and exciting part of graduate
education at the UNT. The Graduate Exhibition places special emphasis
on communicating research and creative endeavor to a general audience
and offers an unusual opportunity for professional development by
challenging graduate students to present their work in clear,
comprehensible terms to people outside their fields. |
Join ACM and ACM-W! |
 CSE Students learned more about the ACM and ACM-W at a meeting on February 5. Quentin Mayo made a presentation about the ACM, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. ACM delivers resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. ACM provides the computing field's premier Digital Library and serves its members and the computing profession with leading-edge publications, conferences, and career resources. There are many benefits of joining the ACM and ACM-W. On February 12 at 11 am, the local UNT Student Chapter is planning to send Military Cards for Valentine's Day. On February 19, members will be able to get some inside advice and secrets on scoring internship and REU opportunities from two experienced graduate students. On February 21, members will attend the Engineering and Computer Science Internship and Career Fair that is part of National Engineers Week. In March, there will be paintball and a potluck! Plus, at most meetings, there is free food! Quentin Mayo is the ACM President. Scott McKeefer is the Vice President. Danielle Gaither is the ACM-W President. Dr. Renee Bryce is the Faculty Advisor. Find out more about UNT's Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and ACM for Women and join today! ↑ | |
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Computer Science Research Conference for UG and Grad Students |
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Several CSE students have participated in this conference in the past. UNT CSE graduates are faculty members in the Computer Science Department at MWSU. The deadline for abstract submissions is are due April 1, 2013 and the conference is Saturday, April 13, 2013. ↑ | |
The
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Raupe Travel Grant Requests due April 5 |
 This grant is ideal for students presenting research, a design, or scholarly paper, but students do not have to be presenting at their desired conference in order to apply to be considered for the grant. The Raupe travel grant is competitive, and SGA will only accept completed applications. For more information, please visit this Raupe Travel Grant website. The deadline to apply is Friday, April 5, at 5 pm. ↑ | |
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College of Engineering News |
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CENG to celebrate National Engineers Week |
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On Monday, February 18, Lockheed Martin will have a recruiter table from 9 am to 3 pm in the Discovery Park Hallway On Tuesday, February 19, from 10 am to 2 pm, ASHRAE will be holding a Projectile Launch in the field outside Discovery Park. From 11 am to 7 pm, come and be entertained by the Tagi 2000 Robot! At 1 pm, free Scrappy ice cream will be served followed by free tacos from El Guapo's at 3 pm. From 1 to 5 pm, come and help build a dalek from Dr. Who in the ExtravaCANza! Cans of food will be collected February 4-18 in boxes at Discovery Park. All food collected will go to the Denton Community Food Center. On Tuesday evening from 7 to 9 pm, come enjoy free pizza and video games! On Thursday, February 21, the Career Center is hosting an Engineering Career and Internship Fair in the hallways of Discovery Park. At 3 pm, come to an open session to find out what it is like to work at NASA with Kevin Tones, a NASA computer engineer, in B142. From 5:30 to 7 pm, the Career Center is hosting a Schlumberger presentation in B190. On Friday, February 22, an outreach project with Singley Academy High School is planned. They need volunteers to help with this so please stop in G140 or email dplife@unt.edu, if you can help! ↑ | |
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News from UNT Society of Women Engineers | ||
UNT SWE just attended the SWE Region C Conference hosted by the Southern Methodist University SWE chapter from February 1 – 3, 2013. This was a great chance for members that were unable to attend the national conference to connect with other SWE members and learn from engineering professionals. The chapter will also provide a workshop at the "Expanding Your Horizons" Career Conference sponsored by the American Association of University Women at Texas Woman's University on February 16 for middle school girls. ↑ | |||
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Deadline for Dean's Scholarship is March 1 |
 Current undergraduate students as well as incoming freshmen and transfer students are invited to apply for the College of Engineering's Dean's Scholarships for Fall 2013. The deadline for applications is March 1, 2013. For more information about College of Engineering scholarships, including the Dean's Scholarship, please visit this website. ↑ | |
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The CSE Student Email Newsletter was assembled
and produced by Genene Murphy and Don Retzlaff.
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