February 2007   CSE News Alumni News College of Engineering News UNT News Greetings from the CSE Chairman Dear CSE Alumni and Friends, With the beginning of 2007, I want to share some enrollment data with you about our CSE department. Our undergraduate enrollment for women in Computer Engineering has doubled from 8% in Fall 2005 to 16% in Fall 2006. Our minority enrollment has been steady at approximately 33%. In Computer Science, our undergraduate minority enrollment has increased slightly from 31% to 33% and our female enrollment has also increased from 10% to 12%. On the graduate side, our female population in Computer Science has grown from 19% in Fall 2005 to 26% in Fall 2006. The number of graduate women in Computer Engineering has held steady at just above 40%. We are making progress in attracting qualified women and minority students to our CSE program. Many exciting things have happened since the Fall 2006 semester ended. I am pleased to announce that UNT has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with three other area universities to form a Net-Centric Software Engineering Consortium. During the semester break, I traveled to Taiwan and made contacts for future student exchanges. Dr. Oh received news of a NSF grant for his research. Our department will host the 3rd Southwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition in March 2007. Dr. Steve Tate was instrumental in bringing this competition to UNT for the first time at Research Park. You can read more details about these happenings and other news below. The UNT College of Engineering is planning several activities for National Engineers Week, February 19-23, 2007. You are invited to attend our annual College of Engineering luncheon at Research Park on Wednesday, February 21, from 11-1 p.m. Following the luncheon, we are hosting a Graduate Studies Open House from 1-2 p.m. on the same day. If you are thinking about attending graduate school, I invite you to this event to get more information about our graduate program. Other activities have been planned and you can read more information below. I hope you will participate in these events during National Engineers Week. Krishna M. Kavi Chairman

Department of Computer Science and Engineering News UNT Signs Agreement to Form Net-Centric Software Engineering Consortium Dr. Krishna Kavi has announced that the University of North Texas has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with three other area universities to form a Net-Centric Software Engineering Consortium. The other universities are the University of Texas at Arlington, the University of Texas at Dallas, and Southern Methodist University. Research in new software engineering methodologies is needed. Net-centric operation is an emerging paradigm and family of tactics, techniques, procedures, and capabilities that use a networked environment to meet new and evolving challenges through information integration and adaptive solutions. Net-centric computing focuses on the network as a way of integrating diverse resources and services. Its primary goal is to support dynamic creation of solutions to unanticipated threats and malfunctions. Applications of net-centric systems range from emergency response systems to defense systems, medical and healthcare systems, transportation systems, and other mission- and safety-critical systems. Now that the four universities have signed this agreement, the group is working to develop industry membership agreements. They plan to submit a proposal to the National Science Foundation's CISE (Computer and Information Science and Engineering) Computer Research Infrastructure program. They also plan to develop a Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC). The North Texas Daily published an article about this collaboration HERE on February 1, 2007. For more information about this consortium, go to http://www.csrl.unt.edu/~kavi/NetCentric/. Dr. Oh Awarded NSF Grant for EMIS Project Dr. JungHwan Oh, a new faculty member whose research focuses on medical imaging, was awarded a National Science Foundation grant for $73,708 for his project, "Endoscopic Multimedia Information." Dr. Oh is the Principal Investigator along with Wallak Tavanapong and Johnny Wong of Iowa State University and Piet C. de Groen of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. Dr. Oh said many advances in video technology are being incorporated into current healthcare practice. Endoscopes are used for a number of formerly open surgical procedures, including resection of gallbladders, retrieval of donor kidneys, coronary artery bypass grafting and minimally invasive neurosurgeries. During an endscopic procedure, a tiny video camera at the tip of the endoscope produces a video signal inside the human body. Video data provided during these procedures are not systematically captured for real-time or post-procedure reviews and analyses. No hardware or software tools have been developed to capture, analyze, and provide user- friendly and efficient access to the content on these videos. The aim of this project is to develop an Endoscopic Multimedia Information System (EMIS) to capture high quality endoscopy videos, analyze the captured videos, and provide efficient access to the valuable content of these videos. Other support for this project is from the Mayo Clinic, Grow Iowa Values Fund, Iowa State Research Foundation and the University of Texas at Arlington. More information about the EMIS project can be found at Dr. Oh's faculty website: http://www.cse.unt.edu/~jhoh/. Dr. Kavi Visits Universities in Taiwan Dr. Kavi with Professor Chin-Teng Lin, Dean of College of Computing at National Chiao-Tung University In December 2006, Dr. Kavi traveled to Taiwan to visit several universities and make contacts for setting up student exchanges. At National Chiao-Tung University, Dr. Kavi met with the Dean of the College of Computing and his former student and host, Dr. Deng-Jyi Chen. At Fu Jen University, Dr. Kavi signed a Memorandum of Understanding on behalf of UNT for student exchanges to take place. Dr. Kavi also visited National Taiwan University, Dong-Hwa University, and TungHai University in Taiwan. He is exploring internship possibilities for students visiting universities in Taiwan. Dr. Mohanty Gives Talks in India In December 2006, Dr. Saraju Mohanty delivered invited talks at two prestigious institutes in India, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. The title of the talk was "Secure Digital Camera", an apparatus (system-on-a-chip, SoC) with standard features of a digital camera and a built-in facility for live, real-time, low-cost, low-power digital rights management (DRM), a concept introduced by Dr. Mohanty. In addition he presented two papers at a conference in VLSI, the international conference on VLSI design at Bangalore, India. The titles of his talks were, "Simultaneous Power Fluctuation and Average Power Minimization during Nano-CMOS Behavioral Synthesis" and "Metrics to Quantify Steady and Transient Gate Leakage in Nanoscale Transistors: NMOS Vs PMOS Perspective". These are co-authored by Dr. Mohanty and Dr. Kougianos. These papers were selected through a double blind review process with acceptance ratio of 31%. UNT to Host the 2007 SW Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Contest The University of North Texas will host the 3rd Southwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Contest on March 23-25, 2007. In this contest, student teams will be given pre-configured, running systems, networked into the contest infrastructure. These systems supply a set of services to the network, and the goals for each team are to: Complete various business/technical tasks ("injects") which are given to the teams during the contest. Keep the services running and available. Keep attackers out-a "red team" of attackers will be trying to cause trouble throughout the contest. Points are awarded or deducted for each of the goals, and the winner is the team that has the most points at the end of the 3-day contest. For more details about the contest, please go to: http://www.cics.unt.edu/ccdc/. The winner of this regional contest will receive an invitation to compete in the national contest to be held April 13-15, 2007 in San Antonio, TX. LIT Research Group News The members of the Language and Information Technology group are working on various research projects in natural language processing. Here are their most recent achievements: Kino Coursey's work on integrating machine learning techniques with common-sense knowledge bases has been accepted at the Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) workshop on Common Sense. Kino will attend the IUI conference in Hawaii to present his work. Andras Csomai's work on unsupervised methods for building back-of-the-book indexes is described in a paper that has been recently accepted for publication by the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society. Andras will present the paper in May in Key West. Rada Mihalcea's work on a method that integrates the Wikipedia resource into a system for automatic word sense disambiguation is described in a paper accepted for publication by the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Rada will present the paper in Rochester in April. Rada Mihalcea will also present her research (joint work with Stephen Pulman) on modeling features of verbal humor at the International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing in February in Mexico City. The paper received one of the three "best paper" awards given by the conference. Also noteworthy is the grant that Rada Mihalcea received from the "Hispanic and Global Studies Initiative Fund" for the project "Babylon: UNT-Mexico Collaboration for Research on Languages with Scarce Resources". This was a competitive grant application process, with only 10 out of 38 applications being recommended for funding. The funds will be used to support a student exchange between the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of North Texas and the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in Mexico City, and will contribute toward developing a research collaboration between UNT and IPN.

Alumni News National Engineers Week 2007 to be held at Research Park February 19-23 The UNT College of Engineering has announced plans for its annual Engineering Week to recruit students and promote the college. There are many exciting events taking place including guest speakers, contests, open houses, free food, and much more. The College of Engineering will have a guest speaker to kick off Engineering Week either on Monday or Tuesday of that week. The second annual no-limit Texas Hold 'Em Poker Tournament will be held Tuesday, February 20, at 6 p.m. in the atrium of Research Park. There will be 50 seats, with prizes for the winner and runners-up. The tournament was a big success last year, and brought some potential Engineering majors to Research Park for the first time. The tournament is open to UNT students of any major. On Wednesday, February 21, the College of Engineering will host a free buffet lunch for students, faculty, and alumni in the atrium of Research Park. On Thursday, February 22, the College of Engineering will sponsor a career fair. The XBOX 360 tournament will be held from 11-2 p.m. in F204 on Friday, February 23. There will be a signup sheet outside Dr. Akl's office at F229. Prizes will include XBOX 360 games. Pizza will be provided for the participants. In addition, the ACM and IEEE Computer Society are planning to sponsor some activities during the week. Guests have also been invited to serve as Professor for a Day in some CSE classes. For an updated schedule of events, please check the CSE Engineering Week information page at http://www.cs.unt.edu/~rakl/eweek.htm. More details will be added daily. CSE Invites Alumni to Graduate Studies Open House on February 21 Have you been thinking about continuing your education by attending graduate school? If so, then you are invited to attend the Graduate Studies Open House hosted by the Graduate Program of the Computer Science and Engineering Department on Wednesday, February 21, 2007 at 1:00 p.m. in Room F223 at the UNT Research Park. The CSE Department offers M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and a M.S. degree in Computer Engineering. Take advantage of this opportunity to find out more about getting your graduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering here at UNT. If you cannot attend, but would like more information about our graduate degree programs, please check our website HERE. If you have further questions, please contact Dr. Armin Mikler, Graduate Studies Coordinator, at mikler@cse.unt.edu. Alumni Focus Sachin Patil graduated with his M.S. in Computer Science in December 2004. While he was pursuing his Masters, he worked as a Technical Analyst Summer intern at ATCIS (After Market Technology Corporation), mainly in Java, web programming, and process automation. In November 2004, Sachin interviewed with Citigroup for a Business Analyst intern position and with American Airlines for a full-time Programmer Analyst position. Right after graduation in December 2004, he accepted the offer with Citigroup and joined as a Business Analyst intern and worked there from January to April 2005. At Citigroup, Sachin acted as an interface between management (collecting requirements) and developers to get different projects and processes implemented. After working at Citigroup, he received a full-time offer from American Airlines and started working for the Core Pricing Team in the IT Dept. He worked on Java and J2EE to develop pricing applications through which American Airlines transacts fare-related information. He was at American Airlines for a year until April 2006. Sachin interviewed with Microsoft and joined Microsoft in April 2006. Microsoft helped him relocate from DFW to Seattle. At first, he was a Software Engineer, as part of the Outlook Express team in shipping Vista (now renamed Windows Mail in Vista). Now he is working in the new Windows Live division. Sachin writes, "It's been a fun journey from getting my Masters at UNT and now onto working for one of the best technology companies, Microsoft." We want to hear from you! What have you been doing since graduating from UNT? Please send a few paragraphs and a picture to AlumniFocus@cse.unt.edu.

College of Engineering News PACCAR Foundation Gives $1.5 Million to UNT College of Engineering From L to R, UNT President Gretchen M. Bataille, PACCAR Vice President and Peterbilt General Manager Dan Sobic, Provost Howard Johnson, Dean Oscar Garcia PACCAR, Inc., parent company of Peterbilt Motors Company based in Denton, has announced a $1.5 million donation to the UNT College of Engineering through the PACCAR Foundation. This gift will create permanent endowments to establish the PACCAR Technology Institute at the UNT Research Park and the PACCAR Professorship in the UNT College of Engineering. Approximately $1 million will endow multidisciplinary research at the new institute. The rest of the donation will endow the PACCAR Professorship for a full-time, tenured engineering professor. For more information about this gift, please see this UNT press release HERE. Dr. Nandika D'Souza Receives Agreement of $515,000 from NIST Dr. Nandika D'Souza, Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, has received a cooperative agreement of $515,000 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to study and develop new nanotailored multifunctional materials. The work on this project will be jointly conducted at NIST, near Washington, D.C., and here at UNT. The work will examine how nano particles of various substances can be used in conjunction with polymers to form composites, thin films, or dispersions. Dr. D'Souza says, "We have special systems here to do the combined measurement of these composites." Two post-doctoral researchers will be hired for this project. For more information on this agreement, read the UNT press release HERE.

University of North Texas News UNT Event Calendar UNT President's Tour Continues and Inauguration Announced UNT President Dr. Gretchen Bataille has been visiting with alumni from around the country on her inaugural tour. The first of its kind for a UNT President, the tour kicked off in November in Chicago and followed with a trip to New York City in December. In January, Dr. Bataille visited with UNT alumni in Denver and Washington, D.C. Other dates for her tour are as follows: February 21 - San Antonio February 24 - Houston March 8 - Los Angeles Dr. Bataille hopes to connect with UNT alumni and friends and share her vision of UNT's future. "UNT has a great story to tell," Dr. Bataille said. "We need to be sure we are sharing our successes as well as our needs for scholarships and other support to those who care about the campus. The goal is to solidify our friendships with alums and donors which will result in greater support for our priorities." The tour leads up to Dr. Bataille's inauguration as president, which is scheduled for April 12-14, 2007 in Denton and will focus on raising scholarship money. Dr. Bataille said the tour was primarily her idea because she has seen it work with other new presidents who want to get to know alumni and donors who are not on the campus or in the city or state. For more information about Dr. Bataille's tour and her inauguration, please go to: http://www.unt.edu/president. Rufus Reid to be Guest Artist with One O'Clock Lab Band on March 1 Renowned bassist, Rufus Reid will perform with the One O'Clock Lab Band at 8 p.m. on March 1st at the Winspear Peformance Hall at the UNT Murchision Performing Arts Center. Reid will appear as part of the Glenn E. Gomez Concert Artist Series. Tickets can be purchased online at http://www.music.unt.edu/events/index.shtml or by calling the ticket office at (940) 369-7802.

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 newsletter@cse.unt.edu. If you would like to receive this newsletter as text rather than formatted in HTML, please contact Don Retzlaff at donr@unt.edu. http://www.cse.unt.edu UNT Computer Science and Engineering Department &mdash February 2007