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| April 2007 Edition | |
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Greetings from the CSE Chairman |
Dear CSE Students, I am pleased to announce that our first undergraduate class of Computer Engineering students will graduate in May. Their graduation will enable us to apply for accreditation for this program. I am also proud of our Texas Codeboys and our Cyber Defense team for their performance in competitions this semester. The Texas Codeboys will be returning to Budapest to compete in The Challenge24 international programming contest in May. Several faculty members and research groups have had some recent achievements which you can read about below. Registration for Summer and Fall 2007 is already underway. I want you to know there are new minimum numbers for classes during Summer. Undergraduate classes must have a minimum of 20 students and the minimum for graduate classes is 10. I encourage you to register early for your classes because university policy cancels classes with low enrollment. Please register early to make sure the classes you need for your degree will be available. Congratulations to our Outstanding CSE Students who were selected by our faculty and recognized on Honors Day and to our Verizon Scholars. I wish you the best of luck to our graduating students and hope you will keep in touch with us. Register on our alumni page and keep your contact information up to date. Send us an email and let us know what you are doing. In the future, we will be sending you alumni surveys to tell us how we did. Your feedback is important because it helps us improve our program. Please continue to support CSE and UNT. Krishna M. KaviProfessor and Chair | |
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Department of Computer Science and Engineering News |
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First Computer Engineering Students to Graduate; Accreditation to Follow |
 The Department of Computer Science and Engineering is proud to graduate its first class of Computer Engineering students this May and August. Shown in the picture are (back row L-R) Jose Macias, Spence Virdell and Bradley Cromwell; (front row L-R) Mitra Mahdavian, Danny Hall and Jessica Hayden. After graduation, all six students are planning to attend graduate school, at least three of them at UNT, one at Stanford and two at Texas A&M in Texarkana. Along with this graduation comes the first time that UNT can apply for accreditation for the Computer Engineering program from the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) of ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology). During this semester, faculty members have been completing documents for the ABET Self-Study Questionnaire and collecting samples of students' assignments, projects, quizzes, and exams. ABET will assign a team of evaluators to review UNT's request for accreditation. After examining the ABET Self-Study, which must be submitted by July 1, the team of ABET evaluators will visit the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in Fall 2007. At that time, the team will review all of the materials collected from Spring 2007 and meet with CSE students, faculty members, the administration of the College of Engineering as well as the top administrators at UNT. The B.S. in Computer Science has been accredited since 1986 and was most recently reaccredited in 2003. Since the B.S. in Computer Engineering began in Fall 2003, it has been the goal of the department to get the program accredited at the first opportunity. Accreditation means that students, parents and prospective employers can rest assured that the program adheres to a set of well-established guidelines, evaluation and assessment procedures, and that the faculty, courses and support services are of the highest quality. It also means that accredited programs across the nation can be compared on a standardized basis. ↑ | |
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The Texas Codeboys Build a UNT Legacy | |
The Texas Codeboys competed for a second time over the first weekend in March in the Preliminary Online Qualifying Round for the Challenge24 competition. They placed 3rd out of approximately 160 international teams and were again the only USA team to place. This qualifies them to attend the final round of Challenge24 in Budapest, Hungary to be held in May. Results are at HERE. The Codeboys qualified for the final round last year and became the first USA team to ever compete in the final round in the six year history of the contest. They finished 14th in the field of the top 32 teams. Just two weeks prior to this contest, the Texas Codeboys competed in the International Online Programming Contest and finished 4th in this international contest in a field of 634 registered teams. They were the top USA team, followed in 7th place by a team from the University of Central Florida. These rankings can be seen at HERE. In last year's IOPC they finished 12th and were again the top USA team, and they finished 6th in the 2005 contest and first in the US. The Texas Codeboys are John Rizzo, a Computer Science senior; Michael Mohler, a Computer Science graduate student; and Jack Lindamood, a computer science alumnus now attending graduate school at UTD. These three have been competing together regularly for the past 3 years, and in combination with other students during their entire tenure at UNT and beyond. As an interesting note, Jack Lindamood competed this year with a UTD team and placed 1st in the ACM and IBM sponsored Regional Contest and qualified to attend the 2007 International Finals in Tokyo. The rest of the Codeboys at UNT finished 3rd in the Regional competition with a different partner. They are coached by David Keathly, CSE lecturer and undergraduate advisor. There are many other victories in their individual and collective pasts, including 2 year reigning (and undefeated) champions at the SMU metroplex Programming contest and individual victories in TopCoder contests and the Google Code Jam in 2006 to name just a few. They have certainly set the bar high as a challenge for future UNT programming teams to reach. Their efforts have brought national and international recognition to the UNT campus as a whole, and to the relatively young College of Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering as well. ↑ | ||
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UNT Team Places Third in Cyber Defense Competition | ||
UNT hosted the Southwest Regional College Cyber Defense competition March 23-25, 2007 at Research Park. This was one of five regional competitions in the nation and this was also the largest with ten teams competing. Each team consisted of eight members set up in separate rooms with six computers each, imitating a business network and web page with the goal of updating the network while protecting it at the same time for three days. A "red team" made up of five security specialists tried to disrupt the networks in several ways that simulated hacker attacks in the real world. UNT's cyber defense team placed third overall in the competition and they also won an award from Cisco for utilizing its products the best. Texas A&M University's team won first place and they will advance to the national finals in May in San Antonio. The team from the University of Texas at San Antonio placed second. This was the first time UNT had hosted the competition, giving the school's computer science program recognition in the region. Dr. Tate said, "It raises visibility and people got to come to UNT. Many people mentioned that they were very impressed with the way we did the competition and our facilities." Dr. Tate would like to thank the students in the picture below for their invaluable help before, during, and after the competition. ↑
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Dr. Ram Dantu's Article is Number One in Top 25 at ScienceDirect |
In January 2007, Dr. Dantu served as a panelist for the National Science Foundation (NSF) at its Cyber Trust PI meeting in Atlanta. His topic was "What threats wake you up in the night?" The following month, Dr. Dantu was an invited speaker for the Internet2 meeting in Minneapolis, where his presentation was "Securing Multimedia Services." In March 2007, the National Science Foundation (NSF) made a continuation grant of $66,065 for Dr. Dantu's Colloborative Research: CRI: A Testbed for Research and Development of Secure IP Multimedia Communication Services. Dr. Dantu has had two conference papers presented this Spring in IEEE conferences. In January 2007, he co-authored a paper with recent UNT graduate, Srikanth Palla, on "Unwanted SMTP Paths and Relays" at the 2nd International Conference on COMmunication System software and MiddlewaRE (COMSWARE 2007). Also in January, he co-authored "Automatic Calibration Using Receiver Operating Characteristics Curves" for the First Workshop on Information Assurance Middleware for COMmunications (IAMCOM) with UNT graduate students, Prakash Kolan and Ram Vaithialingam. This Spring, Dr. Dantu has had two papers published in prestigious journals. In March, Dr. Dantu and Prakash Kolan co-authored "Socio-Technical Defense Against Voice Spamming" in the ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems. In April, Dr. Dantu along with University of Texas at Dallas assistant professor, Joao Cangussu, and UNT graduate student, Sudeep Patwardham, published "Attack Containment using Feedback Control" in IEEE Transactions on Dependability and Secure Computing. In addition, three patents were recently granted to Dr. Dantu during this semester:
In May 2007, Dr. Dantu will have two other conference papers at IEEE conferences. He is the co-author along with Prakash Kolan and CSE assistant professor, Robert Akl, of "Classification of Attributes and Behavior in Risk Management Using Bayesian Networks" at the International Conference on Security Informatics (ISI) in New Jersey. For the IEEE Trident, Dr. Dantu is the co-author of "Goliath: A Configurable Approach for Network Testing" along with Joao Cangussu and Wade Fagen, a student of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. ↑ | |
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Dr. Ian Parberry Named Microsoft MVP Again | |
Dr. Parberry also served on the conference steering committee and helped to persuade a long-time colleague, Maria Klawe, President of Harvey Mudd College, to be the Keynote speaker. Dr. Klawe presented a dynamic talk, "Games, Gender and Why It Matters." Later Dr. Parberry presented his paper on "SAGE: A Simple Academic Game Engine" which he developed with his team of UNT students, Jeremiah Nunn, Joseph Scheinberg, Erik Carson, and Jason Cole. The SAGE engine allows universities with new game development programs and inexperienced faculty to quickly get up to speed using techniques Dr. Parberry has found to be most successful in his 13 years of teaching game development at UNT. Dr. Parberry, the author of three books on game programming, has been recognized by Microsoft as a Most Valuable Professional for four consecutive years and has received funding from Microsoft Research. Dr. Parberry's former UNT Ph.D. student (2005), Dr. Tim Roden, of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, also presented a paper, "Educating Game Programmers," at the conference. ↑ | ||
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LIT collaborates with IPN in Mexico City | |
According to recent studies (http://www.ethnologue.com) there are more than 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. From these, only about 15 to 20 languages can currently take advantage of the benefits provided by machine translation or other language processing tools. The "Babylon" project carried out by the Language and Information Technologies lab is trying to address this problem, targeting the construction of large amounts of word and phrase aligned parallel corpora, especially for languages where currently there is little or no parallel text available (parallel texts, also known as bilingual corpora, are bodies of text available in two or more languages). Three UNT students, Christian Loza, Michael Mohler, and Cameron Palmer, together with Rada Mihalcea, are working on this project jointly with colleagues from the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) in Mexico City, developing methods for building parallel corpora for languages with scarce resources. They are currently working on two languages from Latin America: Quechua, spoken by 14 million people in 14 countries, mainly in Bolivia and Peru, and Nahuatl, spoken by 1.5 million people in Mexico. As part of the "Babylon" project, the UNT team spent two weeks in Mexico City carrying out research together with the IPN group, and interacting with other Mexican institutions interested in this project. The project is funded by the UNT "Hispanic and Global Initiative" program. ↑ | ||
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News from Dr. Huang's Research Group |
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Exit Interviews and Surveys Help Improve Our Undergraduate Program |
How did we do? That is the question we are asking you. As part of the graduation process, graduating seniors are invited to come to the department for an exit interview. Please call the department at 940-565-2767 and make an appointment to meet with an advisor to complete an interview and let us know how you feel about the courses in our curriculum and any suggestions you may have about future courses. You should complete your appointment no later than Wednesday, May 2, to be in time for graduation. Every semester students are asked to evaluate instructors. 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. At the end of the semester, 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. Thank you for participating and helping to improve our CSE department. ↑ | |
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Graduating Graduate Students Invited to Exit Meeting on May 3 |
Dr. Armin Mikler, Graduate Studies Coordinator, invites all graduate students who are graduating this semester to come to an Exit Meeting on Thursday, May 3 from 2:00-3:00 p.m. in the CSE department's main conference room, NTRP F223. 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. Dr. Mikler looks forward to meeting with our graduate students who will be leaving us soon and getting their feedback about their experience in our CSE department. ↑ | |
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Student News | |
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Outstanding CSE Students for 2006-2007 | |
Maria Asencio — Outstanding Undergraduate Student in Computer Science
Danny Hall — Outstanding Undergraduate Student in Computer Engineering
Srikanth Palla — Outstanding Master's Student in Computer Science
Yanos Saravanos — Outstanding Master's Student in Computer Engineering
Xiaobo Peng — Outstanding Outstanding Ph.D. Student in Computer Science
Outstanding Students Recognize Faculty Members at Honors Day These students were asked to name faculty members who were a source of inspiration and support during their time at UNT. These CSE faculty members were recognized at Honors Day: Dr. Robert Akl, Dr. Robert Brazile, Dr. Ram Dantu, and Mr. David Keathly. Congratulations to these faculty members on receiving this honor. ↑ | ||
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Undergraduate Verizon Scholars Named |
The Undergraduate Committee selected Hector Cuellar and DeAnna Peterson as our Verizon Scholarship students. Each will receive a $1,000 scholarship for 2007-2008. Hector is a junior majoring in Computer Science and Math at UNT. He represented UNT in two ACM regional competitions, getting fourth place in 2006. He has a 4.0 GPA. DeAnna Peterson is a rising junior majoring in Computer Science. She is in the honors program and was a programming team member for the ACM regionals this year. She has also earned the Gates Millennium Scholarship offered by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Negro College Fund. She has a cumulative GPA of 3.814. ↑ | |
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Summer and Fall 2007 CSE Courses |
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CSCE 3010 |
One of the more difficult engineering courses, CSCE 3010 Signals and Systems, will be taught this summer by Dr. Akl. If you are in the Computer Engineering program, then CSCE 3010 is a required course for you. Why struggle with it for 4 months in a regular semester when you can take it in the summer and be done with it in only 2 months? It will be offered on Mondays and Wednesdays from 10:00-11:50 a.m. ↑ | |
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CSCE 3030 |
Claim your seat now for CSCE 3030 Parallel Programming! Explore the fascinating world of programming for scientific computing applications on grids, clusters and supercomputers! Learn techniques to transform your everyday humdrum algorithms into bit crunching parallel monsters! This course is an upper division elective for Computer Science students and a specialization area course for Computer Engineering students. It is currently scheduled to be offered in both the summer and fall semesters. Why flip burgers this summer when you could be blasting bits at blazing speeds? Enroll now-your seat is calling.... ↑ | |
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CSCE 5760 |
Dr. Li and Dr. Kavi will offer a new graduate course this summer, CSCE 5760 "Design For Fault Tolerance". This course will cover hardware and software methodologies for specifying, modeling, and designing fault-tolerant systems. The material presents a broad spectrum of hardware and software error detection and recovery techniques that can be used to build reliable systems. The lectures discuss how the hardware and software interplay, what techniques can be provided in COTS hardware, what can be embedded into operating system, and what can be provided via distributed software layer and in the application itself. ↑ | |
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CSCE 5933 |
Data mining (CSCE 5933.001) will be offered in Fall 2007. Data mining, with its foundations in statistics, machine learning, AI, and algorithms etc., is a multi-disciplinary effort in finding hidden, interesting information from large datasets. It is currently one of the most active research fields in computer science. This course will provide a broad and rapid introduction to the field of data mining. We will provide a general introduction to main data mining tasks, e.g., classification, clustering, association rules, and outlier detection, and some of the latest developments, e.g. mining spatial data, stream data, and biomedical data. The prerequisite is knowledge of algorithms and basic concepts of database systems. Students will have access to SPSS Clementine, a state-of-the-art software for course projects. ↑ | |
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College of Engineering News |
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New Associate Dean for Outreach and Public Relations |
Miguel has M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Mexico. Miguel brings over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications and semiconductor industries with several companies, including AT&T Bell Laboratories, DSC Communications, Alcatel, and two startups. His experience includes executive management and key contributor roles in Research and Development, Systems Engineering, Product Strategy, Marketing, Business Development, and Sales in domestic and international assignments. Miguel's major goals at UNT include the following: increasing the participation of minorities and women at the UNT College of Engineering to reflect their community representation; increasing the private and public sectors' knowledge of what the UNT College of Engineering can offer; recruiting the partnering of corporate and government sponsors with the UNT college of Engineering, to enhance UNT's contributions to economic development. ↑ | |
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Get Started on your Career Today |
Are you ready to begin your professional career in the field of Computer Science or Computer Engineering? If so, UNT's Internship and Co-op office can help! Whether you want to just work this summer or you'd prefer work year-round, employers are looking for you. Currently, UNT students are working for companies such as the IRS, J.P. Morgan Chase, IBM, Fidelity Investments, Cisco, CitiCapital, Northrop Grumman, Pepsico and Sabre. "Each semester we have some really great internships, but it's a shame when some end up going unfilled," says Kurt Krause, Associate Director for the Internship and Co-op office. "Right now we have postings with Alcatel- Lucent, Dallas Semiconductor, Frito Lay, J.C. Penney, L-3 Communications, Raytheon, Verizon, and many more-and all of these jobs are related to Computer Science or Computer Engineering. Employers are not looking for someone to get their coffee for them-this is meaningful work." To talk to Kurt or learn more about UNT's Internship and Co-op program, call 940-565-2715 or e-mail Kurt at kkrause@unt.edu. ↑ | |
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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 - April 2007 |
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According to the website, ScienceDirect, Dr. Ram Dantu's article
"EAP Methods on Wireless Networks" published in the Journal of Computer
Standards and Interfaces was the number one article downloaded in the list
of the Top 25 Hottest Articles. Dr. Dantu's co-authors for this article were Gabriel
Clothier and Anuj Atri. The ScienceDirect website showing this article in
first place is located 
Hector Cuellar from Dr. Huang's group has won a prestigious undergraduate
Research Internship for Black, Hispanic, and Native American Students from
IBM Research center. He will spend this summer at the Almaden Research
Center, one of eight IBM Research Division facilities worldwide and a
premier industrial research laboratory, at San Jose, CA. Hector has been
involved with a project that monitors environments using large-scale sensor
Networks. He has been working on migrating a mySQL database to a postgreSQL
database to facilitate the deployment of SWE (Sensor Web Enhancement)
confirmed web service. His experiences at both UNT and the Almaden Research
Center will help him prepare for graduate school.
Xiaohui Li has finished her Master's thesis and joined Yardi Systems in
Santa Barbara, California since January 2007. Her work on "A Language and a
Visual Interface to Specify Complex Spatial Patterns" has been accepted and
will be presented at the 11th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery
and Data Mining (PAKDD) in Nanjing, China in 2007.
Maria Asencio is a senior double majoring in Computer Science and
Mathematics and plans to graduate this August. She has been involved in
different organizations on campus. She is now the secretary of the SHPE-
Elite organization. As a McNair scholar, she has participated in different
research projects and conferences. She is actively involved in the
development of a mathematical model for the prediction of the vegetation
regeneration after fire and rainfall, a project led by Dr. Monticino in the
Math Department. She has a strong interest and passion in mathematical
modeling and computational science. After graduating, she will join the
Cornell University for pursuing a MS/Ph.D. degree in Statistical Science.
She is a CSEagle Ambassador for the Engineering Department where she has the
opportunity to interact with other female prospect engineers. In her free
time, Maria enjoys spending time with her family and friends watching CSI
and Law & Order TV series. Her dreams are to travel the world, enjoy
natural sceneries, and experience other cultures.
Danny Hall says he has really enjoyed his time at UNT during the last 4 years.
He has gotten to know a lot of the faculty and staff and he really
appreciates their help in obtaining his goal. Danny will graduate this May
with his B.S. in Computer Engineering and he has just received a job offer
that will pay for his M.S. Danny belongs to several different
organizations: IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, and Society of Women Engineering
(SWE). He currently holds two officer positions as the Treasurer for both
the IEEE Computer Society and the Council of Engineering Organizations, and
has held other officer positions in the past. Danny has helped the Council
of Engineering Organizations set up and execute the Career Fair. He also
helped with the DC Best Competition, the Future City Competition, and the
CSE department's RoboCamp during the last two summers.
Yanos Saravanos graduated with his B.S. in Computer Science in August of
2003. He continued his studies at UNT to pursue an M.S. in Computer
Engineering, where he was given the opportunity to work on a wireless sensor
network project with Dr. Robert Akl in the Wireless Sensor Lab (WiSL). He
graduated with his M.S. in December of 2006. As a graduate student, he was
also the president of the UNT Cycling Club and the treasurer of the IEEE
Computing Society. Yanos has been working as a software consultant with
Corning and will begin working at JPMorgan-Chase in July of 2007. He remains
heavily involved with competitive road cycling and triathlons, and also
enjoys his photography hobby.
Xiaobo Peng graduated in December 2006. He had worked as research assistant
for Dr. Swigger and Dr. Brazile for many years. His last project is a web
application with a MySQL database as the back-end for the Radiological
Emergency Preparedness (REP) Program of US DHS. He worked with Dr. Swigger,
Dr. Brazile, Scott Flowerday and Chad Johnston to develop the tool for
evaluating emergency response plans of governmental and private
organizations. Scott Flowerday, REP Program Manager, commented "The program
he developed has resulted in significant cost savings to our program,
reducing staff time spent in compiling our exercise reports and tracking
results. While the database is complex in nature, it has been amazingly
error-free." He personally feels that project is the best thing he has done
in his life so far. He is very proud that he contributed much of his leisure
time to such a project that he deemed very beneficial to the safety of our
society. He is committed to work hard to make more contribution to our
society. After graduation, he joined Become.com, a small comparison-shopping
company at Mountain View, CA.
Dr. Miguel García-Rubio joined the College of Engineering as Associate
Dean for Outreach and Public Relations in January 2007. His main focus is to be
involved with corporations, independent school districts, and government
agencies to promote engineering outreach activities.