November 2005 Edition

Greetings from the CSE Chairman

Dear CSE Students, As Fall 2005 comes to a close, I hope you have had a productive semester. By now, you have completed faculty evaluations in your CSE classes. If you are an undergraduate student, you will be asked to complete an exit survey that will tell us if our courses are meeting its goals. Below you will read more about our exit survey and how important it is to our undergraduate program. Some instructors have chosen to give you a paper survey and others will ask you to complete the survey online. Either way you take it, your exit survey will help us improve our undergraduate courses. I hope you have registered for your Spring 2006 classes. There has been a change in university policy about canceling classes due to low enrollment. Starting with this registration, if there are not sufficient students in a section at the end of regular registration, January 13, 2006, the class will be cancelled. Undergraduate classes must have at least 12 students and graduate level courses must have a minimum of 7 students to make. So, please register early enough to help ensure that the courses you need will be available. This newsletter includes several opportunities for you to become involved in our department. Students may participate in research activities and student groups, such as ACM. As you will read below, undergraduate students will have the opportunity to participate in two new forums organized by our Undergraduate Advisors. Computer Science and Engineering female students may also apply for our new CSEagles program. Again, I hope you have had a good semester and are looking forward to Spring 2006. Krishna M. Kavi Professor and Chair

	Department of Computer Science and Engineering News
	Google Awards Grant to Rada Mihalcea
In September 2005, Rada Mihalcea, CSE Assistant Professor, received $107,112 from Google Inc. in support of her research, "Finding Important Information in Unstructured Text: Algorithms for Keyphrase and Sentence Extraction." She plans to use the award to continue her research during the next two years. "We want to develop ways to better access the information in books. This could take the form of back-of-the-book indices or succinct summaries," said Mihalcea in the UNT publication, InHouse. "We are hoping that this research will enable new ways of accessing the information that is stored in very large documents such as books. This won't replace book reading, but it will be a valuable interface that people can use to better determine if they are interested in a particular book." For more information about this grant, read this UNT press release or this story in the North Texas Daily. For more details on the Rada Mihacea's research group, visit http://lit.csci.unt.edu. ↑

Programming Team Finishes Third in ACM Regional Programming Competition

Jack Lindamood, John Rizzo and Michael Mohler with their third place prizes. The UNT team of Jack Lindamood, John Rizzo and Michael Mohler are to be congratulated on their third place finish at the ACM Regional Programming Competition at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, LA on November 11 and 12, 2005. This team solved 6 of 8 problems and finished behind a Rice University team who solved 7 of 8 problems and a University of Texas at Dallas team who also solved 6 of 8 problems, but in slightly less time. This is the best finish for UNT at this contest in the past 6 or 7 years. Two other UNT teams also competed. Team CSEagles consisted of Tyler Cole, Chris Gibson and Hector Guillermo Cuellar Rios. Team CSEagles II included Chris Sims, Andrew Dittman and William Garner. These first time competitors, including several freshmen and sophomores, gained a lot of experience for future contests. Our ACM region, which consists of Oklahoma, Texas and Louisiana, had approximately 50 teams from about 25 schools competing this year. In the spring, our programming teams will compete at East Central University, SMU and in the IBM Online World Competition. For more information on competing at programming events, contact the Team Coach, David Keathly, at dkeathly@cse.unt.edu. ↑ CSE Department and College of Engineering Participate in Homecoming Festivities A CSE alumna and her son watch the robots race along with Dr. Robert Brazile, Dr. Oscar Garcia and Dr. Kathy Swigger. Computer Science sophomore, Brittany Bruno, helps a young boy play a game developed by LARC students. The Computer Science and Engineering Department, in collaboration with the entire College of Engineering, participated in the 2005 Homecoming activities this year by hosting a tent in the Mean Green Village on Saturday, November 19. Each Department in the College provided poster displays and brochures and contributed to a continuously-running presentation highlighting some of the features and activities of each department, visible throughout the pavilion via several LCD displays. In addition, CSE faculty and students provided the attention-getters for the pavilion by providing a Robot Race where visitors could bet on the winning robot for prizes. The robots and maze are part of the equipment used for the RoboCamp Summer Experience for young women sponsored by the department. Student-developed games from the LARC were also on display at two gaming centers where visitors could try out the games with assistance from CSE students. Additional monitors provided onlookers with a duplicate view as the players battled killer squirrels, invading aliens and samurai warriors. During the event many of our faculty and students had a chance to visit with prospective students, alumni and retired faculty, and spread the word about UNT's newest college. ↑ Saraju Mohanty Builds Research Group Saraju P. Mohanty, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, joined the CSE faculty in Fall 2004 when the department began its graduate program in Computer Engineering. Dr. Mohanty received his Ph.D. from the University of South Florida, Tampa in 2003 with a Master's from Indian Institute of Science, Banaglore, India. He is the author of 30 refereed ACM/IEEE transactions and ACM/IEEE conference papers. During the last year, Dr. Mohanty has presented papers in three ACM/IEEE conferences. He presented "A Dual Dielectric Approach for Performance Aware Gate Tunneling Reduction in Combinational Circuits" at the 23rd IEEE International Conference of Computer Design (ICCD), San Jose, CA in October 2005. He presented "Analytical Modeling and Reduction of Direct Tunneling Current during Behavioral Synthesis of Nanometer CMOS Circuits" at the 14th ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis (IWLS) with partial travel support from ACM-SIGDA held in Lake Arrowhead, CA in June 2005. He presented "Reduction of Direct Tunneling Power Dissipation during Behavioral Synthesis of Nanometer CMOS Circuits", at the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI) held in Tampa, FL in May 2005. Dr. Mohanty served as DAC/ISSCC student design contest judge for the 42nd design automation conference in 2005 and technical review committee member for Global Signal Processing Expo and Conference (GSPx), 2005. Dr. Mohanty has established a very strong research group, which includes one Ph.D. and 6 M.S. Computer Science as well as Computer Engineering students. His research group pursues cutting edge research in several areas, such as CAD and Modeling for Nanoscale, VLSI Circuits, Synthesis and Optimization for Low Power, Power Aware System Design, and VLSI Architecture for Security and Copyright Protection. Further information about his research can be obtained at: http://www.vdcl.cse.unt.edu. This semester Dr. Mohanty has been teaching CSCE 6651, Advanced VLSI Design. In Spring 2006, he will teach two courses, CSCE 4730, VLSI Design and CSCE 5730 Digital CMOS/VLSI Design. These two courses are the core for VLSI curriculum and provide strong foundations to computer engineering as well as electrical engineering students interested in VLSI. ↑ Computer Security Program Expanding Stephen R. Tate, Associate Professor, has been working to expand both research and educational opportunities in computer security. In working with Ph.D. student Vandana Gunupudi, Dr. Tate is preparing to release SAgent, a major security framework implementation for the JADE mobile agent platform. This software will be the first major easy-to-use implementation of cryptographic protections for general mobile code computation, and papers describing the system design and experimental results have been submitted for publication. In addition to publications and presentations at recent conferences such as the International Conference on Information Security, and the Symposium on Information and Security, Dr. Tate has served on the program committee of many security conferences, including among others the International Workshop on Security in Networks and Distributed Systems, and the IASTED International Conference on Communication, Network and Information Security. Dr. Tate also is on the founding editorial board of a new journal, the Journal of Information Assurance and Security (JIAS). Dr. Tate is launching a new research initiative in hardware-assisted security, looking into ways of increasing security and trust in distributed applications by making small changes in computer hardware. The first major step of this initiative is a Spring 2006 offering of CSCE 6933, an advanced topics course in hardware-assisted security. This course will be seminar-style, examining current research in this area, and students will be encouraged to "push the boundaries" with the goal of producing publishable research results. On the educational side, Dr. Tate was involved in the first Texas Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, coaching a team of 8 students (6 from CSE and 2 from the College of Business's Information Technology and Decision Sciences program) that participated in this contest in San Antonio in April. In this first-of-its-kind contest, student teams spent three days locking down and managing a small corporate-style network from attacks by a professional penetration testing team while still keeping the network functioning and available. Dr. Tate described the experience at the Colloquium for Information Systems Security Education in Atlanta, on a panel which was the highest evaluated panel discussion at the 4-day event. Dr. Tate is currently organizing a team for the next competition, to be held in March 2006, and interested students are encouraged to contact him. ↑ SCOPES 2005 Hosted by UNT CSE Department Dr. Roy Ju delivers the keynote address. The 9th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems, also known as SCOPES 2005, was held in Dallas from September 29 through October 1, 2005. Many of the CSE faculty were involved in hosting this conference, including Dr. Krishna Kavi serving as one of the two General Conference Chairs; Dr. Phil Sweany as a Program Co-Chair; Dr. Hubert Bahr as Local Arrangements Chair; and David Keathly as Finance Chair. The conference drew attendees not only from the Dallas area, but also from across the United States and many parts of Europe. Keynote speakers were: Dr. Roy Ju, formerly with Intel and now with Google, Inc., who spoke about "A Programming System for Network Processors"; and Dr. Wayne Wolf from Princeton University on "Embedded Video Computation: Challenges to Software and Hardware Designers." A tutorial entitled "Code optimizations for efficient embedded systems" was held on Thursday. The sessions on Friday and Saturday included Real-Time Systems, Optimizations and Memory Systems, as well as a Panel Discussion on "Software Engineering for Embedded Systems: How useful are the new paradigms?" This was the first time the workshop has been held in the United States, having been hosted the previous eight years in Europe. There were approximately 50 people in attendance, including students from UNT and University of Texas at Dallas. The workshop also received financial support from the National Science Foundation and ARTIST2. ↑ Other Faculty News Krishna Kavi, CSE Chair, served on the Program Committee for MEDEA-2005 held September 17-21 in Saint Louis, MO. Afrin Naz, CSE Ph.D. student, Krishna Kavi, Wentong Li, CSE Ph.D. student, and Mehran Rezaei, Ph.D. 2004 and Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Texas at Arlington, authored "Making a Case for Split Data Caches for Embedded Applications." Afrin Naz presented this paper at the Workshop on Memory performance dealing with applications, systems and architecture (MEDEA- 2005), which was held in conjunction with Parallel Architectures and Compiler Technology (PACT-2005) conference. Krishna Kavi also served on two other program committees during the second half of 2005: IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, IRI-2005, August 15-17, 2005, Las Vegas; and the International Conference on Algorithms and Architectures for Parallel Processing, ICA3PP-2005, October 2-5, 2005, Melbourne, Australia. Rada Mihalcea, Assistant Professor, was a guest editor of a special issue of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering on "Parallel Texts" (Cambridge University Press), which appeared in September 2005. Armin Mikler, Associate Professor, and Courtney Corley, CSE M.S. student, authored "Predicting Human Papilloma Virus Prevalence and Vaccine Policy Effectiveness in Demographic Strata." Courtney presented the paper at the IEEE 5th Symposium on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering held October 19-21, 2005, in Minneapolis, MN. Armin Mikler was invited to give a talk "From Mathematical Models to Computational Epidemiology" at the National Cancer Institutes in Washington, D.C. on October 31, 2005. Dr. Mikler also presented "Computational Epidemiology: Facilitating Epidemiological Research through Computational Tools" at Iowa State University in Ames, IA on November 10, 2005. ↑ Upcoming CSE Activities   Exit Surveys Help Improve Undergraduate Program As the semester draws to a close, it is a good time to step back and evaluate what you have accomplished. The Computer Science and Engineering department is doing the same as part of our continuing assessment and improvement effort. To ensure the quality of our program and to determine how it should be changed and improved, we seek information from a number of sources including our recent graduates, our advisory board, area employers, and most importantly, from you, our current students. You have a unique perspective that is crucial to this effort. Earlier in the semester, you were asked to fill out an evaluation of your instructor. This information is used by the department to evaluate the effectiveness of instructors, to recognize outstanding teaching and to identify and correct any problems that may exist. After Thanksgiving, undergraduate students will be asked to fill out an exit survey which asks for an evaluation of how effective the course has been in helping you achieve the desired outcomes for that course. Some instructors have chosen to do the survey online and other surveys will be completed on paper in the classroom. Each course has outcomes which are measurable skills or activities that you should accomplish during the course. The outcomes of all the courses in the curriculum are designed to ensure that, by the time you graduate, you will have mastered the objectives of the degree. The course exit survey lets us know how you think you are achieving these outcomes and lets you tell us how you think the course could be improved. Both faculty and course evaluations give you the opportunity to do more than just check boxes. Your written comments are taken seriously when reviewed by the department. Please take the time to let us know what's on your mind. You don't have to wait until the end of each semester to give feedback. At any time you can send an email or letter to the department chairman or to the undergraduate or graduate coordinator. In a discipline such as ours, where things change rapidly, it is important that our courses and activities change too. Your input, along with the information we gather from other sources, is the way we make sure that the changes improve the overall quality of the program. One of the requirements of our accreditation by ABET (the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) is that we have a program of continuing assessment and improvement. Your part in this is very important. We will be letting you know on the department web site and through newsletters what changes we are making and why they will improve the program. Thank you for participating and helping to improve our CSE department. ↑ Applications for CSEagles Due December 5 Applications are currently available for the new CSEagles program created as a result of a Texas Technology Workforce Development Grant received this year by Dr. Robert Akl and David Keathly. This program will award ten scholarships of $1,000 each ($500 per semester) to women enrolled full-time in the Computer Science or Computer Engineering programs at UNT. Those chosen will be required to participate in a number of recruiting and mentoring activities throughout the normal academic year to support the department in attracting and retaining female students. Additional eligibility requirements for the program as well as expectations and duties can be found here. Applications are available here. Applications should be submitted by email to dkeathly@cse.unt.edu by noon on December 5, 2005. There will be a training course in December and duties will begin in the Spring 2006 semester. ↑ Undergraduate Advising Forums Announced The CSE Undergraduate Advisors are pleased to announce two new services for students. The first is a set of online forums available at http://www.cse.unt.edu/forums beginning Spring 2006. One forum will provide a regularly updated list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), while the other will provide a means for students to pose questions to the advisors and receive a response, as well as be able to view past questions and responses. The second service is the introduction of once-a-semester "town hall" style advising meetings where your questions can be addressed live with the departmental advisors. The first of these will be held Wednesday, December 7 from 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm in NTRP F223. Come talk to the advisors about courses, degree plans and career questions. For more information contact David Keathly (dkeathly@cse.unt.edu) or Dr. Ryan Garlick (garlick@cse.unt.edu). ↑ UNT CSE Graduate to Present Colloquium Professor David S. Rosenblum will present "Content-Based Publish/Subscribe: Achievements and Challenges" at a CSE Colloquium on Friday, December 9, at 10:30 a.m. in NTRP B155. The following paragraph is an abstract of Professor Rosenblum's talk. For nearly a decade there has been a great deal of research on content- based publish/subscribe, in which a network of specialized routers is used to support publish/subscribe-style communication within distributed applications deployed over wide-area networks. This research has produced a number of novel router architectures, matching algorithms, routing protocols, implementation prototypes and other results that have been designed to achieve high throughput, scalability and expressive power in specific deployment scenarios. But the research has also revealed some difficult challenges stemming from the intrinsic content- based nature of the communication style, including challenges related to security, to mobility, and to the proper alignment of application characteristics with infrastructure characteristics. This talk will present an overview of this line of work, discussing the successes and limitations of past results as well as key problems that must be addressed in future work in order for content-based publish/subscribe to realize its true potential. Professor Rosenblum received a B.S. summa cum laude in 1982 and M.S. in 1983 in Computer Sciences from North Texas State University (now UNT) and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Currently, he is Professor of Software Systems in the Department of Computer Science at University College London and is Director of London Software Systems, a research institute established jointly by the Software Systems Engineering Group at UCL and the Distributed Software Engineering Group at Imperial College London. His research interests are in distributed event-based computing and software validation. He currently holds a Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society of the UK. Before joining University College London, Professor Rosenblum was Chief Technology Officer at PreCache Inc., a startup company working in publish/subscribe technology. In 2002 he received the International Conference on Software Engineering's Most Influential Paper Award for his ICSE 1992 paper on assertion checking in C programs. He is an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology and is currently the Chair of the ICSE Steering Committee. He is a Fellow of the IEEE (effective 2006), a Fellow of the IEE and a Chartered Fellow of the BCS. ↑ Fall Exam Schedule for Research Park Classes COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING FINAL EXAM SCHEDULE - FALL 2005 (verify with your instructor) Class normally meets at:   Has final exam: Evening Classes Earliest usual class time during finals week MW(F) 8:00 a.m. 8 - 10 a.m. on Monday, December 12th MW(F) 9:00 a.m. 8 - 10 a.m. on Wednesday, December 14th MW(F) 10:00 a.m. 8 - 10 a.m. on Friday, December 16th MW(F) 11:00 a.m. 10:30 - 12:30 p.m. on Monday, December 12th MW(F) 12:00 noon 10:30 - 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 14th MW(F) 1:00 p.m. 10:30 - 12:30 p.m. on Friday, December 16th MW(F) 2:00 p.m. 1:30 - 3:30 p.m. on Monday, December 12th MW(F) 3:00 p.m. 1:30 - 3:30 p.m on Wednesday, December 14th MW(F) 4:00 p.m. 1:30 - 3:30 p.m. on Friday, December 16th TR 10:00 a.m. 8 - 10 a.m. on Tuesday, December 13th TR 12:00 a.m. 10:30 - 12:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 15th TR 2:00 p.m. 1:30 - 3:30 p.m. on Tuesday, December 13th TR 4:00 p.m. 1:30 - 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, December 15th ↑ Join the ACM Student Chapter The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), founded in 1947, has had a major role in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students worldwide. Over 80,000 members and the public turn to ACM for the industry's leading Portal to Computing Literature, authoritative publications and pioneering conferences, providing leadership for the 21st century. The UNT student chapter of the ACM coordinates several activities, such as high school programming competitions, student/faculty mixers and development projects. ACM's goal is to facilitate the means to give our student members a competing edge to future employers. Employers always look for extracurricular work, especially that involving team work. Membership in the ACM includes benefits such as access to thousands of research papers, reduced costs for attending conferences, networking opportunities, and more! Any persons interested in applying for membership should visit our ACM chapter website at http://acm.csci.unt.edu, and contact one of our officers for details. ↑ Scholarship Opportunities in Computer Security As a part of UNT's designation as a Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education by the National Security Agency, U.S. citizens studying computer security at UNT are eligible to apply for scholarships through the Department of Defense (DoD) Information Assurance Scholarship Program. These scholarships cover all tuition and room and board expenses, as well as pay a stipend to students, and are designed for students with two years of study remaining in their degree program (either undergraduate or graduate). In return for the scholarship, students agree to work as an intern for a DoD organization between the two supported years, and commit to two years of employment by the DoD after graduating. These are very generous scholarships, but are competitive on a national scale. Top students with two years remaining in their degree program are encouraged to contact Dr. Tate in room F227 (or by email at srt@cs.unt.edu) for more information. ↑ Spring 2006 CSE Courses   CSCE 4010 to be Online for the First Time Beginning in Spring 2006, the Computer Science and Engineering ethics class will be offered online using WEBCT Vista. The online version was developed by Dr. Robert Brazile, Associate Chair of the CSE department, and Courtney Corley, a CSE master's student. The content of the class has been expanded to be interesting to all engineering students because it is now a required class. Dr. Brazile has been teaching the Social Implications for Computing class for several years. He has enjoyed the discussions and interactions with the students while learning about these topics. Dr. Brazile hopes the online class will also be enjoyable and interesting for students. If you have any ideas for improving the class, please send your suggestions to Dr. Brazile at brazile@cs.unt.edu. ↑ CSCE 4930.002 Survey of Computational Sciences This is a new course that will be a 2000 level course when added to the permanent curriculum. Here is your chance to get 4000 level advanced credit for it. The following topics will be covered: Introduction (1 week)   Why not just do experiments?   Why/ how use computers to enhance Scientific exploration   Data Analysis Numerical Computing (2 weeks)   Physics/Chemistry   Statistics/Social Sciences   Numerical Approximations Modeling and Simulation (3 weeks)   Agent Based Models   Cellular Automata High Performance Computing, Supercomputing, Grids and Clusters (2 weeks)   Game of Life Demo / motivation for distribution   Mosix   MPI   @home Visualization (1 week)   Data Representations   Geographic/Demographic Representation   Rendering Techniques   Rendering tools (GNUPlot, Matlab, etc) The course has no formal prerequisites and will be light on programming. Modeling tools and simulations and other types of interactive work will be used. Applications in Life (Biology, Chemistry, environmental), Physical (physics, materials) and Social Sciences (sociology, economics, etc) will be covered. Enroll in this fun class soon. David Keathly and Armin Mikler will be co-teaching this special topics class. ↑ CSCE 5200 Information Retrieval and Web Search In Spring 2006, Rada Mihalcea will offer a graduate course on "Information Retrieval and Web Search." The course will cover traditional material, as well as recent advances in information retrieval, the study of indexing, processing, and querying textual data. In addition to basic retrieval models, algorithms, and system implementations, the course will also address more advanced topics in "intelligent" information retrieval, including natural language processing techniques, "smart" Web agents, and the design and implementation of Web search engines. ↑ College of Engineering News   Society of Women Engineers Form Student Chapter The UNT College of Engineering held its first informational meeting about forming a student chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) on November 10, 2005. Carol Bachman, Project Manager for Peterbilt, and Susanne Nickerson, Associate Design Engineer for Peterbilt, spoke about forming a SWE student chapter at UNT. The objectives of SWE are: To inform young women of the qualifications and achievements of women engineers and the opportunities open to them. Assist women in preparing themselves for the work force. Serve as a center of information on women in engineering. Encourage women engineers to attain high levels of education and professional achievement. Establish network opportunities for student engineers with professional engineers. To receive a SWE student charter, UNT must have a minimum of 10 students who are either freshmen, sophomores, or juniors to join SWE. Seniors and graduate students may also join, but they cannot be counted towards the minimum number to receive a student charter. Student membership in SWE is $20. The group plans to have another meeting after Thanksgiving and invites other students to attend. For more information about SWE, please contact Ms. Leticia Anaya, UNT SWE Student Chapter Sponsor, at Let_ana@msn.com or Lanaya@unt.edu or by calling (469) 831-2453 or Ms. Haritha Namduri, UNT SWE President, at hn0012@unt.edu. ↑ World Renowned Researcher Joins Electrical Engineering Faculty The College of Engineering's Department of Electrical Engineering has announced that Wuqiang Yang will join the faculty beginning Spring 2006. Dr. Yang is one of the world's leading technology researchers. Most recently he has served as a professor of electronic instrumentation in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Dr. Yang plans to create an internationally recognized research center at UNT by organizing a tomography consortium with several North American universities and companies. He has won several awards in the field of electrical capacitance tomography (ECT), a new technique for gathering information about the contents of closed pipes or vessels and producing cross-sectional images. Dr. Yang is using ECT to work with homeland security and also with the oil industry to visualize gas and oil pipelines. Dr. Yang received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Tsinghua University in Beijing. He has received several awards for his contributions to the development of ECT technology. Recently the International Center for Scientific Research in France has recognized Dr. Yang as one of the top 20 technology researchers in the world. For more about Dr. Wuqiang Yang joining the College of Engineering, please read this UNT press release from November 2, 2005. ↑ 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 newsletter@cse.unt.edu. http://www.cse.unt.edu UNT Computer Science and Engineering Department - November 2005