Greetings from the CSE Chairman
Dear Alumni and Friends, Our first alumni email newsletter was such a success that we decided to send you a second edition. We heard from many alumni, including those featured in this edition. Several alumni and friends showed their support by sending donations to the department. I hope you will continue to stay in touch with us and find ways that you can contribute to our program here at UNT. Thanks to those of you who registered in our Alumni Database. If you haven't registered yet, please go to our Alumni Database. With this information, we can continue to send you future editions of this newsletter, as well as our mailed Alumni Newsletter. To update information you have previously entered on our website, visit Alumni Update. We do not have email addresses for all of our graduates, but we are actively searching for them. Until we have them all, I ask your help by forwarding this email newsletter to other UNT Computer Science Alumni. I hope they will respond by registering their updated information so that they can be added to our list. We encourage all of you to show your support and keep in touch with us by telling us what you are doing, how your education at UNT aided you in your work, and how you would like to see our program change. We also encourage you to share news of our department with prospective students. Recruiting new students is an important way of contributing to our program. Thank you for being an active supporter and a friend of CSE and UNT. Krishna M. Kavi |
Department of Computer Science and Engineering NewsBachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science Accredited for 18th YearThe Computing Accreditation Commission (CAC) of the Accreditation Board
for Engineering and Technology (ABET) granted accreditation to the University
of North Texas Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science for the 18th
consecutive year. The designation recognizes the high quality of the
department's programs, faculty,
Dr. Thomas Irby, as Chairman of the Undergraduate Committee, was the Coordinator for the ABET accreditation. Dr. Irby said, "The continued accreditation of the B.S. in Computer Science degree is important because it provides an independent assessment of the quality of the program. The amount of work required to prepare the accreditation documents and materials is substantial. The process gives us the opportunity to evaluate what we are doing and to make sure that our programs continue to be up to date and relevant in today's world." Read the entire article here: http://web2.unt.edu/news/story.cfm?story=9004 Dr. Dantu to Chair IEEE Workshop on VoIP Security
Dr. Ram Dantu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, will chair the VoIP security workshop on December 3, 2004, in conjunction with Globecom, an IEEE conference to be held in Dallas at the Hyatt Regency Dallas at Reunion Hotel. The event will facilitate the exchange of key issues and solutions between universities, government agencies, service providers and equipment manufacturers, and may result in the publication of a book on the topic.
Colonel Gibson, Project Director of DARPA, will deliver the keynote speech: "Protecting the Telecom Infrastructure." Dr. Dantu and Prakash Kolan from UNT will present "Detecting SPAM in VoIP Networks." For contact information and further details, please refer to this link: http://www.cs.unt.edu/~rdantu/VoIPSecurityWorkshop.htm. Dr. Sweany Researches Compiler Optimization
Cell phones are everywhere. And the features available in cell phones increase with each new generation of phones. But what forms the "guts" of a cell phone? A Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip. DSP chips need to be powerful so that the phone works and has as many features as possible. At the same time, DSP chips need to limit the amount of power they consume. You don't want to have to re-charge your battery after 5 minutes of phone use. Many people realize that producing high-performance, low-power, low-cost DSP chips is necessary for cell phone applications. What many people don't realize is that how we translate software written in "people-friendly" languages into "computer-friendly" language is a very important factor in cell phone performance. Programs that do such translation are called compilers. Within the field of ILP compilers, Sweany has worked mostly in register assignment and instruction scheduling, defining ways to improve global scheduling, software pipelining, and partitioning of computation among ILP clusters. He and co-workers have built the Rocket C compiler which is retargetable to a wide range of ILP architectures. For more information about Dr. Sweany and his research, visit his website at http://www.cs.unt.edu/~sweany/ New Laboratory Established by Dr. Mohanty
Ian Parberry and Timothy Roden's Paper Presented in Liverpool
"Computing visibility is vital for real-time 3D graphics applications such as games," said Roden. "Without it, it would be impossible to render complex indoor scenes at interactive frame rates. We can also use visibility data for other tasks. For example, we might use a potentially visible set to compute the actions of AI-controlled agents moving through a 3D environment. This research is aimed at creating a faster algorithm that can be used in non-rendering tasks where a PVS is needed." Roden is a Lecturer and Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UNT. Roden's advisor and co-author of the paper is Professor Ian Parberry. Roden and Parberry are excited about the prospects for the future of entertainment computing research. The Liverpool paper represents the fourth paper the pair have had accepted this year related to entertainment computing. The paper is available for download at http://www.cs.unt.edu/~roden. Other Faculty PresentationsDr. Robert Akl's paper "Impact of Interference Model on Capacity in CDMA Cellular Networks," presented at SCI 04: Communication and Network Systems, Technologies and Applications, in July 2004, was selected as best paper of those presented in the session: Tele-Communication Systems, Technologies and Application II. Dr. Akl presented "Subscriber Maximization in CDMA Cellular Networks" at CCCT 04: The International Conference on Computing, Communications, and Control Technologies, held in August 2004, in Austin, Texas. He also presented his "Current Research in Wireless at UNT" on October 8, 2004, at Nortel Networks, in Richardson, Texas. For more information about these presentations, please see the website at http://www.cs.unt.edu/~rakl/publications.htm. Dr. Robert Brazile and Dr. Kathleen Swigger co-authored "Using X-Query to Describe Mappings from Global Schemas to Local Data Sources." Their paper was presented by Dr. Brazile's Ph.D. student, Xiaobo Peng, at the IEEE International Information Reuse and Integration Conference held in Las Vegas, NV from November 8-10, 2004. More information about this conference is available at http://www.cs.fiu.edu/IRI04/. Dr. Philip Sweany co-authored "Automatic Data Partitioning for the Agere Payload Plus Network Processor" which was presented at the Workshop on Compilers and Tools for Constrained Embedded Systems in September 2004 in Washington, D.C. This workshop was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Compilers, Architectures, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES 2004 - http://www.casesconference.org/cases2004/). |
and curriculum.
Dr. Philip Sweany's research focus has been compiler optimization for
architectures with instruction-level parallelism (ILP), such as Texas
Instruments' C6000 series of DSP processors.
The VLSI design and CAD Laboratory was established at the Computer Science and
Engineering Department (F231) in Fall 2004. The laboratory homepage is located
at 
Faculty members Ian Parberry (right) and Timothy Roden had a
paper presented at the Second Annual International Workshop in Computer Game
Design and Technology. The November conference was hosted by John Moores
University in Liverpool, England. The paper, entitled "Portholes and
Planes: Faster Dynamic Evaluation of Potentially Visible Sets," describes
a new algorithm for computing visibility in indoor 3D environments.
Alumni NewsKathy [Rodriguez] Foster (M.S. 1979) graduated from Stephen F. Austin with a B.S. in Computer Science in 1974. Her first job after graduation was research programmer in the UNT Computing & IT Center in Denton. After obtaining her M.S. at UNT, she went to work at Texas A&M University as an administrative application programmer. She became a Database Analyst working with IMS databases while at A&M. In 1985, she taught computer classes to U.S. military personnel for Texas Central College in Munich, Germany. In 1986, she returned to the U.S. and began working for Texas Instruments in Plano. She has been a database analyst since 1981, working on IMS, DB2, and Oracle databases. She is also a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at TI. She is on the CS Advisory Council at Stephen F. Austin State University, and has accepted an invitation to join the CSE Advisory Council at UNT. Kathy lives in Frisco. She has two sons and one grandson. Her son, Carlos Rodriguez, graduated from A&M and works in Austin. Her son, Nick Rodriguez, works in Plano.
David Samuel Rosenblum (B.S. summa cum laude 1982, M.S. 1983) received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1988. In January 2004, he moved to the UK to take a position as Professor of Software Systems at University College London (UCL), one of the top universities in the country. He is also Director of London Software systems, a joint research institute of the Software Systems Engineering Group at UCL and the Distributed Software Engineering Group at Imperial College London.
In 2000, while he was working as a Trainer, Microsoft moved the family to Washington. After two years traveling the world as a trainer, Sean joined the Alliance support team, where he supports Windows for Microsoft's 20 largest customers. As of 0ctober 18th, he works in the Office Live Meeting product group doing escalation support for Microsoft's new web-based conferencing service. |
Sean Wheeler (B.S. 1988), after graduating from UNT, worked in
various programming and IT capacities for CompUSA, SAABRE, a small
Novell reseller and Octel Network Services (now Avaya). Since February
of 1995, he has worked for Microsoft in various product support positions
supporting the Windows family of products. His areas of specialty have
been kernel debug and network protocol analysis. Shortly after starting
at Microsoft, he began dating his future wife, Kristy Armstrong (M.Ed.
1990 UNT). They were married in June 1996 and now have a 3-year old
son named Benson.
CSE Student NewsCSE Department Actively Seeks New StudentsThe Computer Science and Engineering Department is actively seeking new undergraduate and graduate students. If you are part of a business whose employees might be interested in graduate programs, we would be happy to make a presentation at your site, or host interested persons at the Research Park. If you know students or teachers at area high schools or junior colleges who would like to host a presentation on Engineering Education and opportunities at UNT, or perhaps even a guest lecturer on a technical topic, we would be happy to participate in those activities as well. Please email suggestions and contact information to either David Keathly (dkeathly@cs.unt.edu) or Ryan Garlick (garlick@cs.unt.edu). Game Programming Contest AnnouncedDr. Ian Parberry's Game Programming class and Max Kazemzadeh's Game Art class will hold a contest for the best 2D sprite or 3D billboard game demo made in class for Fall 2004. The contest will be held Tuesday, December 7, 6:00-8:50 p.m. in Room 130 of the Environmental Education, Science and Technology Building, located at the corner of Avenue C and Hickory Street on the UNT campus. Prizes will be awarded by a panel of judges from the game industry. Attendance is open to the public. Read more about this contest at http://larc.csci.unt.edu/contest2004f/. Students Learn C++ with Connect Four
Students in Professor Ryan Garlick's CSCI 1120 class are putting their C++ skills to use in a Connect Four Tournament. Given a game board object and assigned a color, each student creates a program to return the column in which to drop their token. Students' programs are then paired against one another in a single elimination tournament in which the first to get four tokens in a row wins. A time limit of 10 seconds per move is enforced to ensure the use of heuristics rather than an exhaustive search of all board possibilities. The project is designed to teach object oriented programming and encourage exploration of algorithms outside the scope of the class. The finalists employed sophisticated methods of evaluating potential moves, recursively scoring potential boards several moves ahead. Tournament winner John Rizzo's program was wrapped in an interactive graphical application and used as the opponent at recruiting event kiosks. For more information on Professor Garlick and his classes, go to http://www.cs.unt.edu/~garlick/. ACM Students Compete in Regional Programming Competition
"The Lambda Functions" are Matthew Watson, Michael Mohler and Dean Kusler. Team "Well Defined" members are Mitra Mahdavian, John Rizzo and Jack Lindamood. Congratulations on a job well done! IEEE Computer Society Becomes A Reality
Calling all UPE Alumni
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Two 3-person teams from the UNT Chapter of the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM) attended the ACM Regional Programming Competition
held at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA on November 5 and 6,
2004. Team "The Lambda Functions" placed 13th overall out of over 85 teams
from more than 30 universities in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Mississippi,
and Alabama. They also received an award for solving one of the eight
contest problems with the second fastest time. Team "Well Defined" placed
14th overall. UNT was one of only 3 universities to have more than one
team place in the Top 20. All three were Texas schools.
On November 15, the IEEE Computer Society culminated its "BE THE FIRST"
campaign by receiving the magic 12th signature on its charter petition.
Now the group can finalize the paperwork to be submitted to the national
office, as well as to the UNT Student Organizations office. At a recent
meeting, the founding officers were selected: Andrew Riehm, Chairman;
Luis Santa Cruz, Chairman-elect; Kyle Wright, Secretary; Brandon Wulf,
Treasurer; and Robert Church, Webmaster and IEEE Ambassador. The officers
will complete the chartering process during the remainder of the Fall 2004
semester, and plan to start hosting speakers and other programs in the
Spring.
The UNT Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE), the Computer Science Honor
Society, is seeking alumni members who would be willing to assist with an
Induction Ceremony in the Spring of 2005. The Chapter has been inactive for
several years, but we are reviving and revitalizing it in order to recognize
our best and brightest students. Potential inductees will be identified at
the end of the Fall 2004 semester and all of the charters and other paperwork
will be renewed with both the National Organization and the University.
Your assistance would be greatly appreciated! Please email
College of Engineering NewsElectrical Engineering Degrees Approved for
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UNT College of Engineering
University of North Texas NewsUNT Wind Symphony and Symphonic Band to Perform December 2The University of North Texas Wind Symphony and Symphonic Band, directed by Eugene Corporon and Dennis Fisher, respectively, will perform at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 2, 2004. The performance will be held in the Winspear Performance Hall at the Murchison Performing Arts Center on the UNT campus. To purchase tickets online or to find out about other UNT concerts, please go to http://www.music.unt.edu/events/index.shtml or call (940) 369-7802. Mean Green Football Team Wins Fourth Sun Belt Conference Championship; Will Play in Wyndham New Orleans Bowl on December 14North Texas clinched its fourth straight Sun Belt Conference championship and a berth in the Wyndham New Orleans Bowl with a 51-29 victory against Idaho at Fouts Field on November 13. Freshman running back Jamario Thomas set a North Texas record for rushing yards in a single game with 291 yards and single season with 1,709 yards. To read more about the Mean Green football team's championship and the New Orleans Bowl, go to http://www.meangreensports.com/. |
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The CSE 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 csci@cs.unt.edu. http://www.cse.unt.edu UNT Computer Science and Engineering Department |