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| September 2005 Edition | |
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Greetings from the CSE Chairman |
Dear CSE Students, 
Welcome to the Fall 2005 semester. We are glad you have chosen to study Computer Science and Engineering here at UNT. Our department is growing as several professors have joined our CSE family. I am happy to report we have 63 new computer engineers and 127 new computer science majors in our department, which represents a total increase of approximately 38% over Fall 2004. Our CSE department has many success stories to share. In 2004-2005, our CSE faculty received $450,000 in research grants and published nearly 60 papers. During the summer, we hosted RoboCamp 2005, which you can read more about below. This newsletter also highlights several faculty members and their research. As you will read below, there are many opportunities to get involved in our department. You can volunteer for SCOPES or DC BEST. You can become an Ambassador for our CSE department and earn a scholarship. You can join our IEEE and ACM student organizations. You are invited to join in the life of our CSE department. Again, I welcome you and look forward to seeing you this semester. Krishna M. Kavi | |
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Department of Computer Science and Engineering News |
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CSE Department Welcomes New Faculty |
Dr. Bahr's research interests are reconfigurable architectures for embedded computing and software engineering for embedded simulation. He is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. In Fall 2005, he is teaching CSCE 3610, Machine Structures, and CSCE 5420, Software Development. Dr. Bahr's webpage can be found at http://www.cse.unt.edu/~hab/.
His research interests include VLSI Design and CAD, FPGA Synthesis, and Electronic Design Automation. He has published several research papers in areas of VLSI Design Automation. His paper was nominated for the best paper award at the Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference in 2003. He is a member of IEEE and ACM SIGDA. Dr. Li is teaching CSCE 3730, Reconfigurable Logic, this semester. His faculty website is located at http://www.cse.unt.edu/~hli.
Dr. Shields also holds a law degree from Southern Methodist University. Although he has never practiced, his studies included course work in Intellectual Property and E-Commerce. Dr. Shields values teaching and university environments very much. Facilitating and participating in the learning process is a great joy to him. This semester Dr. Shields is teaching one section of CSCE 1010, Introduction to Computers, and two sections of CSCE 1030, Computer Science I. His website is http://www.cse.unt.edu/~shields. | |
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RoboCamp 2005: A CSE Success | ||
The Computer Science and Engineering department hosted two one-week camps this summer for 9th to 11th grade young women with a focus on Robotics and Computer Science. This program, which will be repeated again next year, was funded as part of a grant from the Texas Coordinating Board for Higher Education as part of the Technology Workforce Development Program. The camps were held at the Research Park and at the UNT Dallas Campus. The department worked with the Cross Timbers Girl Scout Council to help promote the event. Each camp was attended by approximately 17 young women who built small robots and programmed them to use various sensors, including touch, visible light and infrared, and to perform various tasks, including a student-generated idea for creating RoboArt. The students also participated in seminars on a variety of topics, including preparing for college and Women in Computer Science and Engineering. CSE students also helped with the camp as teaching assistants. The grant, awarded to Dr. Robert Akl and David Keathly, also includes components to further assist in the recruitment of women and minorities in Engineering and Computer Science. The mobile laboratory and the robots used for the camp will form the basis for a series of recruiting trips and seminars throughout the DFW area during the academic year to help foster interest in Engineering and Computer Science at local middle schools and high schools. Additional information regarding RoboCamp, including pictures from the event and video clips from CNN Coverage, can be found at http://www.cse.unt.edu/robocamp2005. | |||
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Ram Dantu Researches VoIP Security |
Also in June 2005, Dr. Dantu served as a panelist for "What do you mean 'Secure VoIP?'" at the 5th International Enterprise Networking and Services Conference at Supercomm, the largest telecommunication conference, for which more information can be found at http://www.ieee-entnet.org/. At MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in July 2005, Dr. Dantu and Prakash Kolan, CSE Ph.D. student, presented "Detecting SPAM in VoIP Networks" at the SRUTI (Steps to Reduce Unwanted Traffic on the Internet) workshop, sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association. IT reporter Tim Greene wrote about the workshop and Dr. Dantu's research here in Network World. This article also appeared here in TechWorld, an online publication in the United Kingdom, and here in ARNnet, an Australian online journal. These workshops have been very productive for writing National Science Foundation funding proposals. Dr. Dantu submitted a proposal to the NSF on research infrastructure for VoIP Security with collaborators from Columbia University, Purdue University and University of California at Davis and UNT as the lead organization. In August 2005, the NSF awarded Dr. Dantu a grant of $60,150 for conducting research in voice spamming. For an IEEE Network Magazine Special Issue on Securing Voice over IP, Dr. Dantu is serving as Guest Editor. The paper submission deadline is October 2005 and the issue will be published in 2006. For more information about submitting a paper go to this website. This Fall Dr. Dantu is teaching CSCE 5520, Wireless Networks and Protocols, and CSCE 6581, Advanced Computer Networks. For more information about Dr. Dantu's research, please visit his webpage: http://www.cse.unt.edu/~rdantu/. | |
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Rada Mihalcea Reports on the Language and Information Technologies Lab |
Members of the Language and Information Technologies (LIT) research lab
(left to right): Samer Hassan, Andras Csomai, Chris Loza, Andy Borman,
Prof. Rada Mihalcea, Kino Coursey, Prof. Jiangping Chen. Missing from the
group picture, shown in the upper-right corner: Prof. Paul Tarau, Ben
Leong, Prof. Elizabeth Figa, Ehsan Faruque. Collaborators: Courtney
Corley. The Language and Information Technologies (LIT) group is working on many exciting projects addressing topics in natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. The members of the LIT group had many recent accomplishments, including conference and workshop presentations, system demonstrations and tutorials. The group's recent work on word sense disambiguation resulted in a paper that will be presented in October 2005 by Rada Mihalcea at the HLT/EMNLP (Human Language Technology/Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing) conference in Vancouver, Canada, as well as a demonstration of the SenseLearner system made at the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) conference at the University of Michigan in June 2005 by Rada Mihalcea and Andras Csomai. An investigation of the application of measures of text semantic similarity to the recognition of paraphrases and textual entailment has resulted in a paper by Courtney Corley and Rada Mihalcea published in the ACL workshop this summer, and another paper that will be presented at the RANLP (Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing) conference in September 2005 in Bulgaria by Courtney Corley, Andras Csomai and Rada Mihalcea. Still along the lines of exploiting semantic resources, but this time involving visual representations, a system for creating illustrated semantic networks was described in a AAAI (American Association for Artificial Intelligence) spring symposium paper presented by Andy Borman, Rada Mihalcea and Paul Tarau. The LIT group has also developed a system for automatic summarization. Rada Mihalcea and Paul Tarau presented a paper at the IA (Intelligent Applications) conference in Washington, D.C., describing the application of the system to multi-document summarization. Another paper by the same authors will be presented in October 2005 at the IJCNLP (International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing) conference in Korea showing the application of this system to texts written in other languages. Demonstrations of the summarization system were made at the recent ACL and AAAI conferences. Rada Mihalcea and Samer Hassan will present how systems for automatic summarization can be used to significantly boost the accuracy of text classifiers at the RANLP conference this month. The construction of parallel texts for languages with scarce resources is another significant research effort by the members of the LIT group. Chris Loza has been working hard this summer to collect texts for Quechua, Aymara (both native languages spoken in Bolivia), and Spanish. Work on this topic will be presented by Chris Loza and Rada Mihalcea at CILLA II, the Second Conference on Indigenous Languages of Latin America to be held in Austin in October 2005. Rada Mihalcea was also involved as a co-organizer of an ACL workshop on "Building and Using Parallel Texts for Languages with Scarce Resources" held at the University of Michigan in June 2005. Computational humor and, in particular, humor recognition is the topic of another current research project. In collaboration with Carlo Strapparava of IRST (Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e Tecnologica), an artificial intelligence research center in Italy, Rada Mihalcea has shown for the first time how machine learning techniques can be successfully applied to humor recognition, with the results of this research being published in the annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society held in Italy in July 2005, and the HLT/EMNLP conference mentioned earlier. Other recent accomplishments include the participation of Jiangping Chen in the TREC (Text REtrieval Conference) question answering evaluations; a presentation about the automatic acquisition of commonsense knowledge given by Kino Coursey at Cycorp, a company that researches artificial intelligence, in Austin and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in Washington, D.C.; a tutorial given by Rada Mihalcea at the ACL and AAAI conferences on word sense disambiguation; another tutorial at Eurolan on how to add a new language on the NLP map; and an upcoming RANLP tutorial on graph-based algorithms for NLP. For more details on the LIT research group, visit: http://lit.csci.unt.edu | |
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Ian Parberry's Summer of Microsoft |
 This summer Dr. Ian Parberry obtained funding from Microsoft for two new projects. The first project involves the creation of a pedagogical game engine that can be used to teach game programming to undergraduate students. Work is already underway on this project, and can be viewed at http://larc.csci.unt.edu/edge. The second project involves using game technology for algorithm animation, one of Dr. Parberry's favorite subjects. The funds are being used to hire three students in Dr. Parberry's lab. Microsoft funded two separate trips to its Redmond campus this Summer. The first trip was to attend the Microsoft Faculty Summit July 17-19. Dr. Parberry's team displayed a poster there on the pedagogical game engine, which can be seen at the above URL. Dr. Parberry said, "The Faculty Summit was an exciting time with many interesting research talks, and most notably a breakout session on computer game programming in computer science education, at which I gave my talk from SIGCSE 2005. The high point of the meeting was the banquet, held on a boat cruise in Puget Sound." During his second trip to Redmond, Dr. Parberry attended Microsoft DirectX Meltdown July 26-27. He described his trip, "There were many fascinating talks about the changes ahead for DirectX in the next year, some of which I can even talk about. I came home with an Xbox 360 game controller on a USB cable and some interesting pictures of me shooting pool with the Superheroes of Game Development. And, for once, it wasn't raining in Seattle." | |
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Other Faculty News |
Robert Akl, Assistant Professor, was invited to serve as Distinguished Speaker at College Colloquium Series at the University of Arkansas in April 2005. Dr. Akl was also the invited speaker at Southern Methodist University for their Spring Seminar Series in March 2005. The title of his presentation was "WiFi and WCDMA Network Design." The presentation is available online at http://www.cse.unt.edu/~rakl/publications.htm. Yan Huang, Assistant Professor; Brian Harrington, CSE Ph.D. student; Nandika D'Souza, UNT Materials Science Associate Professor; and Robert Brazile, CSE Associate Chair, presented "Querying the Content of Images in Material Science: An Integration of SQL and Map Algebra" at the 17th International Scientific and Statistical Data Management (SSDBM) Conference held June 2005 in Santa Barbara, CA. Yan Huang, Assistant Professor, Liqin Zhang, CSE Ph.D. student, and Ping Yu, CSE M.S. student, presented "Can We Apply Projection Based Frequent Pattern Mining Paradigm to Spatial Co-location Mining?" at the 9th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) in Hanoi, Vietnam in May 2005. Krishna Kavi, CSE Chair, was quoted in this article, "Tech Beyond Black Boxes? It Just Won't Fly" in CNet News in August 2005 on the possibility of using an air-to-ground connection instead of relying on the black boxes currently used in airplanes. Ian Parberry, Professor, was invited by the College of Information and Mathematical Sciences at Clayton College and State University in Atlanta, GA in April 2005 to deliver a colloquium on game programming education and discuss their plans to start a game programming curriculum. He gave two presentations during his visit: "Experience With an Industry-Driven Capstone Course on Game Programming'' and "The Joy of Math for Game Programmers." Kathleen Swigger, Associate Dean of Research for the College of Engineering and CSE Professor; Robert Brazile, CSE Associate Chair; Brian Harrington, CSE Ph.D. student; Xiaobo Peng, CSE Ph.D. student; and Ferda Alpaslan, UNT CSE Alumna and Professor at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, presented "A Case Study of Student Software Teams Using Computer-Supported Software" at the IEEE 2005 International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (CTS 2005). The conference was held in May 2005 at the Adam's Mark Hotel in St. Louis, MO. | |
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Grant Funds New Curriculum in Computational Sciences |
Two CSE faculty members, Dr. Armin Mikler and David Keathly, received a grant from the Texas Coordinating Board for Higher Education to begin development of a new CSE curriculum in Computational Sciences. The first course, offered Fall 2005, is Bio-Computing. This course has been offered as a Senior-level CSE course and cross-listed as a graduate CSE course. The course is also listed at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in the Biology department. The second course will be offered in the Spring of 2006 as a sophomore level CSE course. This course, tentatively titled A Survey of Computational Sciences, will introduce students to the field of Computational Science and offer a brief glimpse of Computational and Computer Science in a variety of scientific fields, including biology, chemistry, environmental science, geology, sociology, physics, epidemiology and others. Additional funding has been sought to further the development of this curriculum to develop additional depth courses in specific sciences, as well as to develop supporting curriculum and establish instructional and research laboratories in topics such as Super Computing, Cluster and Grid Computing, Computer Modeling and Simulation, and Visualization. For questions and course descriptions visit Dr. Mikler's website at http://www.cse.unt.edu/~mikler, or contact either Dr. Mikler or David Keathly by phone or email. | |
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Tips from the CSE Undergraduate Advisors |
If you do not have a degree plan (also known as a degree audit) on file, schedule an appointment with a department advisor to request this review of the courses you have taken, any transfer credit, and remaining requirements. Be sure to double check your degree plan. Science requirements are listed under two sections: as a University core requirement, and as a computer science or engineering requirement. You do not have to take these hours twice. For example, taking Physics 1710 fulfills a department requirement and a University science requirement. There have been some questions about taking Computer Science III (CSCE 2050). Remember that as the catalog requirements change, you are bound by the requirements in effect during your "catalog year." As CSCE 2050 was introduced in the 2005 catalog, it is not a part of the degree plan for students in a prior catalog year. Thus, CSCE 2050 is not a required prerequisite for 3110 or 2610 unless you are an incoming freshman this year. If you have any questions, please contact either Ryan Garlick or David Keathly by calling the CSE department at (940) 565-2767. | |
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Volunteers Needed for SCOPES 2005 |
The UNT CSE department will host SCOPES, the 9th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems, at the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas from September 29 through October 1, 2005. Dr. Krishna Kavi, Chairman of the UNT Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is Co-General Chair for the conference. Dr. Philip Sweany, Associate Professor in the CSE department, is Co-Chair of the Program Committee. Dr. Hubert Bahr, Adjunct Professor in the CSE department, is the Local Arrangements Chair. David Keathly is the Finance Chair for the conference. Students are needed to volunteer for several different positions during the conference. If you would like to volunteer for SCOPES, please contact Dr. Bahr at hab@unt.edu or by calling the CSE department at (940) 565-2767. A limited number of student registration and travel grants are available. For more information about SCOPES 2005, as well as registration and grant application forms, please go to http://www.scopesconf.org. | |
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CSE Department Ambassadors and Mentors Program |
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering, as part of a grant awarded from the Texas Technology Workforce Development Program, will be forming a group of Ambassadors and Mentors beginning in the Fall of 2005. This group of 10 students, primarily women and minorities, will represent the department at a variety of recruiting and other events around the DFW area, serve as hosts for high school and community college visitors, and mentor incoming women and minority freshman during their first year in the College of Engineering. The students selected will be awarded a $1,000 scholarship for each year that they participate in the program. Please watch the bulletin boards and your email for more information about applying for this new and unique program. You may also contact David Keathly at dkeathly@cse.unt.edu for more information. | |
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College of Engineering News | |
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DC BEST Needs Volunteers | |
The College of Engineering is hosting DC BEST (Denton County Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology) in Fall 2005. BEST is a non-profit volunteer organization run by the schools and for the schools through a grass roots movement. The mission is to inspire students to pursue careers in engineering, science, and technology through participation in a sports-like, science- and engineering-based robotics competition.
The DC BEST competition will continue at Mall Day, which will be held Saturday, October 22, from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at Golden Triangle Mall, in Denton. The final event of DC BEST will be Game Day, which will be held Saturday, October 29, from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the UNT Coliseum. The major sponsor for DC BEST is Thomas Herr from Versant LLC, a real estate developer. Other sponsors include Labinal-Corinth, Inc., Bell Helicopter Textron Inc., Peterbilt, and Forney Corporation. From The Colony, TX, sponsors are Wells Fargo Bank, Dr. David Rossen, and Texas Credit Union. If you are interested in being a judge, a mentor or a referee at DC BEST, please contact Ms. Leticia Anaya, DC BEST Director, at Let_ana@msn.com or Lanaya@unt.edu or by calling (469) 831-2453. | ||
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CENG Sponsors Engineering Festival | |
Student organizations within the college provided information about their group for interested students. Representatives from the College, each department, Career Services, the Co-op Office and others also had with information for students at the Festival. Many student organizations also sponsored carnival style games with an engineering twist, such as the floppy disk toss (Software Distribution) and the Engineering Discus (with AOL CD-ROMs) as well as kite flying. The council plans to make this an annual event to welcome Engineering students back to campus at the beginning of each academic year. | ||
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CENG Plans for Homecoming on November 19 |
The College of Engineering will participate in the Homecoming festivities this year with a tent in the Mean Green Village to showcase the accomplishments of the CENG departments. Computer Science and Engineering will be a major participant with hands-on displays of products developed in the Gaming classes and lab, as well as live demonstrations of the robots from the summer RoboCamp. The CSE department is seeking students to help staff the tent and interact with our alumni, parents and interested students. If you would like to volunteer for this event, please contact Genene Murphy or David Keathly in the CSE office at (940)565-2767. | |
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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 newsletter@cse.unt.edu. http://www.cse.unt.edu UNT Computer Science and Engineering Department |
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Hubert Bahr joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in
Summer 2005 as an Adjunct Professor. Dr. Bahr obtained his Ph.D. in
Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida (UCF) in 2004
and his M.S. in Computer Engineering from UCF in 1994. He received his
Professional Engineering License from Oklahoma in 1977 and his B.S.E. from
the University of Oklahoma in 1972.
Hao Li is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering
department. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from
the University of South Florida in 2004. He earned his B.E. and M.S. from
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing China in 1995
and 1999, respectively.
Charles Shields is currently a Lecturer at the University of North Texas.
He earned his B.A. degree in Mathematics from the University of Texas in
Austin, and his Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University
of Texas at Dallas. His research interests in Computer Science include
various topics in Parallel Computation as well as Security.
Ram Dantu, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, has emerged as a leader in the field of Voice over IP (VoIP)
Security. Dr. Dantu chaired the 1st VoIP Security workshop, in conjunction
with Globecom, an IEEE conference, held in December 2004 in Dallas. Then
in June 2005, Dr. Dantu served as the Program Chair for the 2nd Securing
VoIP workshop held in Washington, D.C. More than 260 people from business,
government and academia attended these two workshops which were sponsored
by Nokia, Samsung, Lucent, BearingPoint, Juniper Networks and 10 other
companies. Dr. Dantu was quoted in 
