September 2007 Edition

Greetings from the CSE Chairman

Dear CSE Students, I want to welcome you to our Department of Computer Science and Engineering and give you an update on the state of our department. Our enrollment is holding steady with about 600 undergraduate students and 171 graduate students. Our research funding has increased this year. From January to August 2007, we have been awarded over $1.7 million. You can read about several of our new research grants below. To compare how our department has done over the last few years, click HERE for a detailed report. Our CSE department is changing and improving. We are applying for accreditation for the B.S. in Computer Engineering program. The ABET Computer Engineering visiting team will be here October 21-23, 2007. The team may want to meet with some of our Computer Engineering students and they may come to a class chosen at random. Also, over the summer, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board approved a plan that will change our B.A. in Computer Science to a B.A. in Information Technology beginning in Fall 2008. This new program is the only one in the state of Texas with an undergraduate degree in IT and I believe it will be very attractive to prospective students and will help our department to grow even more. There are many opportunities for you to get involved with us. Talk with your professors here about their research and see if you can take an active part. Join the student organizations such as the IEEE CS, the Robotics Society, or ACM. Read below how you can try out for the UNT Programming Team this Friday, September 21. This year you can help promote our EChallenge camps by making trips to local schools. Later in the year, students will be needed to help develop mobile camps for weekends and summer 2008. I hope you have a good semester and I look forward to seeing you around the CSE department. Krishna M. Kavi Professor and Chair

	Department of Computer Science and Engineering News
	B.A. Changing to Information Technology
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board approved the department's degree change from a B.A. in Computer Science to a B.A. in Information Technology. This decision comes as result of two years of working with faculty, employers, and educators from around the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex to change this degree program. This program will be in effect beginning Fall 2008, at which time the current B.A. in Computer Science will accept no new students (it will totally phase out before Fall of 2010). The idea to change the B.A. began in July 2005 when some members of the CSE Advisory Council met at Research Park to discuss a radical "inside out" approach whereby students are not exposed to the traditional science of Computer Science during the first two years. The curriculum begins with two courses in Information Technology that introduce students to the design of enterprise information systems and distributed systems. These courses are lower division "capstone" style courses where the primary focus will be a large team development project. At the end of the program, students will be required to take a two-semester senior capstone course sequence, similar to the sequence in computer engineering. In addition, students will complete a 9 hour specialty sequence of their choice within the IT and Computer Science area. This will provide the student with depth of knowledge in one particular focus area. The students will also take 3 hours of "global perspective" courses which could include foreign language, international business, or related courses. The most innovative aspect of the program is the 18 hour supporting specialization sequence that permits students to take courses outside of their major but in support of an applications area for their IT skills. Sample programs have been identified in areas such as Information Security, Pre-Med, Pre-Law, Management (pre-MBA), Criminal Justice, Bioinformatics, and others. Transfer students may also be able to use specializations from Associates degree programs such as Networking as long as the courses are from a properly accredited community college. This feature gives students maximum flexibility in designing a degree program to meet their specific career interests. For more information about this B.A. in IT, please contact either Ryan Garlick or David Keathly, Advisors for the CSE Department. ↑

NSF Awards Grant to Dr. Kathleen Swigger

The National Science Foundation has awarded $499,252 to Dr. Kathleen Swigger to study the performance of student work teams in four countries as the teams write software. The project will create curriculum materials to teach students the best ways to work more effectively in global software teams. The students working on this project will be from UNT, Panama, Great Britain, and Turkey. Dr. Swigger said, "Outsourcing is not going to go away. There is a growing need to ensure that computer science students are taught the necessary skills to deal with this new type of programming. Students need to know how to use technology to work in culturally mixed and geographically distributed work teams, because distributed software development is becoming the norm." Dr. Swigger says her research will have implications for geographically distributed collaborative learning teams in general, and furthers UNT's reputation as a student-centered, public research university. She adds the project has drawn interest from several major DFW employers. "Travelocity, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin do similar projects at their companies, and they are acting as advisors on the project." ↑

Dr. Saraju P. Mohanty Receives NSF Research Grant

Dr. Saraju P. Mohanty received a NSF research-grant to support his research in nanoscale CMOS modeling and estimation. The project titled "A Comprehensive Methodology for Early Power-Performance Estimation of Nano-CMOS Digital Systems" will span over three years, 2007-2010. The primary goal of this project is to facilitate the estimation of power and performance of digital systems described in MATLAB/Simulink when constructed using nano- CMOS technology. The research will result in the development of new building blocks, collectively grouped as a new MATLAB toolbox, called Power Box. Power Box will be fully parameterized for power and performance to facilitate fast modeling and estimation of systems. The proposed research involves the design and development of theory, algorithms, implementations, and experiments, with sufficient scope for education and training of undergraduate and graduate students in VLSI design and system modeling. This project can effectively serve the large, complex, digital system design and simulation community of researchers, in both academia and industry to boost further research and to reduce design cycle time. ↑

Dr. Buckles and Dr. Yuan Collaborate on Grants

Photo by Andrew McLemore Dr. Bill Buckles and Dr. Xiaohui Yuan were awarded a National Science Foundation grant of $75,000 for a project that will map the effects of flood damage. Their project, "A New Tool for Economic and Environmental Planning: Expanding the Boundaries of LiDAR," will use LiDAR, or "light detection and ranging," to create a 3D image of varying terrain to predict the path of floodwater during hurricanes and other floods. In addition, Dr. Buckles and Dr. Yuan were awarded a supplemental grant for a collaborative project with researchers at the Hefei University of Technology of China. This project is sponsored by both the NSF and the National Nature Science Foundation of China (NSFC). They were awarded $49,800 by the NSF and the Chinese partner was awarded ¥50,000 by the NSFC. This supplemental project will focus on extending their results to the visualization of the city model and the simulation of disaster scenarios, such as flooding. During this project, Dr. Buckles and Dr. Yuan expect a visit from their Chinese partner in the middle stage of their research. During the later stage of the project, Dr. Buckles and Dr. Yuan plan to visit their partners in China for discussion and result integration. ↑

Dr. Huang's Joint Project is Funded by NSF

The National Science Foundation has issued a $250,000 award to the proposal by Dr. Yan Huang (PI, Computer Science), Dr. Miguel Acevedo (Geography/BEE), Dr. Xinrong Li and Dr. Shengli Fu (Electrical Engineering), and Dr. Ruthanne Thompson (Biology). This three-year project will develop a publicly available environmental monitoring computing research testbed that incorporates an open sensor network system and tools with intertwined wired and wireless sensors. The immediate research and education projects enabled include energy efficient map interpolation, robust localization models, code designs for cooperative communication in wireless sensor networks, simulation models for near real time environmental monitoring and modeling, and modeling for K-12 teachers/students. The project team also includes researchers and personnel from Biology (Dr. Tom Waller), Computing Support and Service, the City of Denton, Texas, the National Park Service, and the National Weather Service of Texas. ↑

Software Development Partnership Expands with NSF Grant

The National Science Foundation has awarded a $10,000 planning grant to allow UNT to expand its current partnership in a Net Centric Software Consortium. Dr. Krishna Kavi is the Principal Investigator and the initial director of the Net Centric software consortium that was established with the four major universities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The current partners are the University of Texas at Dallas, the University of Texas at Arlington, and Southern Methodist University. UTD and SMU also received $10,000 from NSF to collaborate with UNT as well as Arizona State University, University of California at Irvine, and Southern Illinois University to form an Industry/University Collaborative Research Center (I/UCRC). Each university partner has one year to recruit at least five industrial members, paying annual membership dues, before the I/UCRC can be established. The universities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area will concentrate on developing high-quality software for new generation applications that involve systems on a network (Net Centric systems). The US Department of Defense has expressed strong interest in the research. Dr. Kavi says, "We are inviting about 200 companies here in the Dallas-Fort Worth area to join the consortium. In February 2008, a meeting will be held to explain the I/UCRC concept, benefits for industry and how they can join the center. In short, by joining the consortium, industry will have royalty-free access to the research we are conducting in the center." Dr. Kavi predicts the consortium will be known as a leading research alliance in the United States, conducting significant research projects for the federal government and industrial customers and attracting the best research faculty and students from all over the world. The consortium will also help in creating a trained workforce to meet the needs of US industries. For more information on the North Texas Net Centric Systems Consortium, go to http://www.csrl.unt.edu/~kavi/NetCentric/. ↑

LIT Research Group Has Busy Summer

A get-together at Rada's place The Language and Information Technology group (http://lit.csci.unt.edu) spent the summer working on several exciting research projects, and the group members participated in several international events: In May 2007, Andras Csomai attended the International Conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society in Key West, Florida, where he presented his and Rada Mihalcea's work on unsupervised back-of-the-book indexing. The paper was awarded the "best paper award" in the natural language processing track. In June 2007, Hakan Ceylan and Rada Mihalcea attended the Association for Computational Linguistics conference in Prague, Czech Republic. The LIT group had five papers presented at the event: "Explorations in automatic book summarization", by Rada Mihalcea and Hakan Ceylan, published in Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. "Learning Multilingual Subjective Language via Cross-Lingual Projections", by Rada Mihalcea, Carmen Banea and Janyce Wiebe, published in Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics. "UNT: SubFinder: Combining Knowledge Sources for Automatic Lexical Substitution", by Samer Hassan, Andras Csomai, Carmen Banea, Ravi Sinha and Rada Mihalcea; "UNT-Yahoo!: SuperSenseLearner: Combining SenseLearner with SuperSense and other Coarse Semantic Features", by Rada Mihalcea, Andras Csomai and Massimiliano Ciaramita; and "SemEval-2007 Task 14: Affective Text", by Carlo Strapparava and Rada Mihalcea, all three papers being published in Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on the Semantic Evaluations of Text. In July 2007, Andras Csomai attended the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education in Marina del Rey, California, where he presented his and Rada Mihalcea's work on linking educational materials to encyclopedic knowledge. In September 2007, Carmen Banea, Samer Hassan and Ravi Sinha will attend the IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing in Irvine, CA, where they will present their work on unsupervised graph-based word sense disambiguation, by Ravi Sinha and Rada Mihalcea, and random-walk algorithms for improved text classification, by Samer Hassan, Rada Mihalcea and Carmen Banea. During summer 2007, Michael Mohler and Christian Loza worked on their MS theses, focusing on different research aspects of natural language processing for languages with scarce resources. They have also participated in the UNT - National Polytechnic Institute Mexico City (NPI) exchange, which included a two-week visit of our colleagues from NPI. Rada Mihalcea gave two keynote talks, at the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering: Principles and Techniques in Cluj-Napoca, Romania (June 2007) and at the Third International Workshop on Cross-lingual Information Processing in Camogli, Italy (July 2007). She was also a lecturer at the Seventh European Summer School Eurolan 2007 (August 2007). Also noteworthy is a new project that Rada Mihalcea and Kino Coursey will start working on this fall: a THECB-funded project on learning object repositories (with William Moens from SLIS as PI). ↑

EChallenge Camps Offered During Summer 2007

The CSE Department and the College of Engineering sponsored a series of seven summer camps in 2007 collectively known as the EChallenge Camps. All camps target young women entering the 9th to 12th grades in order to encourage them to consider education in careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics disciplines. Anchoring the sequence was the return of Robocamp for the third year, as well as a new Advanced Robocamp for returning students. CSExperience camp was also offered with a focus on programming concepts and graphics using the Alice programming environment (http://www.alice.org). The final camp was Eng-inuity! inspired by the PBS series Design Squad with a focus on engineering design concepts in a fast-paced hands-on design and prototyping experience. The girls were challenged in all camps to create designs that would benefit humanity and the environment and were awarded prizes for the best designs. The Eng-inuity! camp was featured in an article for Education Week magazine. Pictures, videos, the article, and more can be found at http://www.cse.unt.edu/echallenge2007. Dr. Robert Akl and David Keathly are the directors for the camps. This year they plan to begin promoting the camps early with trips to local middle schools and high schools, as well as developing mobile camps for summer and weekend programs to be staffed by college students. If you are interested in learning more, or helping with camps in the future, contact David Keathly (dkeathly@cse.unt.edu). ↑

	Dr. Tarau Presents Paper in Portugal
Dr. Paul Tarau presented the paper "A Logic Programming Framework for Combinational Circuit Synthesis" at the International Conference on Logic Programming, ICLP'07 in Porto, Portugal September 8-13. He also chaired the session on "Implementation" at the same conference. For more information on Dr. Tarau's conference, see http://www.dcc.fc.up.pt/iclp07/program.html">. ↑

New Faces in the CSE Department

Hubert Bahr is back in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering after a year's absence. Dr. Bahr first came to our CSE Department in Summer 2005 as an Adjunct Professor and now he is a Lecturer this semester. 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. 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 2007, Dr. Bahr is teaching CSCE 2610, Computer Organization, CSCE 3610, Machine Structures, and CSCE 4440/5440, Real-Time Software Development. Dr. Bahr's webpage can be found at http://www.cse.unt.edu/~hab/. Ebru Celikel joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering as a Lecturer in August 2007. She has a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Ege University, Turkey, taught 5 courses at the Department of Computer Science at Earlham College in Richmond, IN as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2005-2006, and then has pursued a postdoc study at the University of Texas at Dallas between July 2006 and July 2007. Her current research areas include computer security, database risk analysis, and lossless text compression. Dr. Celikel also holds MBA degree in Marketing, which she believes enriched her way of considering things. Dr. Celikel thinks being in academic environment and exchanging ideas with colleagues and students mean a lot to her. She enjoys the joy of teaching and highly values being a good instructor. As a philosophy of teaching, she tries to open different perspectives of thinking for students to broaden their vision. Dr. Celikel is teaching 2 sections of CSCE 1010, Introduction to Computers, and CSCE 4550/5550, Introduction to Computer Security, in Fall 2007. Her web site is: http://www.cs.unt.edu/~ecelikel. She likes horseback riding, skiing, running (she already has a couple of medals from local Dallas running races), tennis, and reading on psychology and philosophy. Jian Zhang received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Tulane University in New Orleans, LA in 2004 and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Hefei University of Technology in Hefei, China in 1996. Before she joined the department as an adjunct instructor last Spring, she worked at West Virginia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor and at Howard University as a Research Associate. She is currently teaching CSCE 1030, Computer Science I, in the Fall semester. Gary Goodman came to our CSE Department in Spring 2007 as an adjunct, and he is back again this Fall. Dr. Goodman holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Oklahoma State University and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Dr. Goodman taught at the University of Nebraska for two years, leaving to join the ARPA Speech Recognition Project at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also taught some Artificial Intelligence Courses. He came to Denton in 1979 as a principal in a start-up speech recognition company. His other industry experience includes development of automatic call distributors at Teknekron Infoswitch and the architecture of paging and cellular systems while at Motorola, Inc. Research interests include artificial intelligence, speech recognition, pattern recognition, puzzles, and mathematics. This semester Dr. Goodman is teaching CSCE 1040, Computer Science II, and CSCE 5400, Automata Theory. Dr. Goodman's website is located at http://www.cse.unt.edu/~goodman/. When not working Dr. Goodman likes to enjoy his grandchildren, play his guitar, fuse glass, read, and sing with the Texas Millionaires (http://texasmillionaires.com). Stephanie Deacon is the new Graduate Administrative Assistant for the department. She will assist the Graduate Coordinator with Graduate Applications, TA Applications, Textbook Adoptions, and Class Scheduling. She's a bit of a homebody, so if she's not here, she's at home hanging with her kids, quilting, or reading. ↑

Friends We'll Miss

Dr. Tom Irby has left the CSE Department after 31 years to take a position closer to his home and family in Pittsburg, TX. Dr. Irby was the first faculty member hired by Dan Scott, founding department chairman of the Department of Computer Sciences. During his time at UNT, Dr. Irby saw the department grow from a Masters in Computer Science program with fewer than 20 students to a comprehensive program with almost 800 majors. During his career at UNT, he taught over 10,000 students. In 1986-1987, Dr. Irby served as Chair of the CSE Department; and, in recent years, he served as the Undergraduate Coordinator. Dr. Steve Tate has left UNT to become the Department Head at the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 1993, Dr. Tate was hired by Department of Computer Science at UNT. While he was here, Dr. Tate created the Center for Information and Computer Security, which won recognition by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education. Kathy Bomar served the CSE Department as the Graduate Studies Administrative Assistant from December 2003 until July 2007. Kathy left us to become the Administrative Assistant in the Mechanical and Energy Engineering Department downstairs in the College of Engineering. ↑

	Student News
	Afrin Naz Receives PhD and Teaching Position
Afrin Naz received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at the UNT graduation in August 2007. Dr. Krishna Kavi was her major professor and advised her dissertation: "Split Array and Scalar Data Caches: A Comprehensive Study of Data Cache Organization." Her research interests include computer architecture, parallel and distributed systems, compilers and embedded system designs. Dr. Naz has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Math and Computer Science at Drake University in Des Moines, IA. ↑

UNT Programming Teams to Form

Tryouts for the 2007-2008 UNT programming teams will be held Friday, September 21, starting at 3:00 pm. Plan to meet at Room F218. The programming teams travel to a number of competitions each year and pit their skills against teams from other regional universities. UNT regularly finishes with teams in the Top 3. Teams have even traveled internationally to compete in tournaments. For more information, contact one of the team coaches via email (garlick@cse.unt.edu, dkeathly@cse.unt.edu). ↑

Advisor's Corner - Professional and Honor Societies

The Fall semester once again brings the opportunity for students to become involved in a variety of professional societies, special interest groups and honor societies. These organizations can benefit you in a number of ways. Provide an opportunity to meet students with similar interests to form study groups, project teams and friendships Gain experience as a leader which will benefit you in your future career Network with faculty and industry professionals in your own areas of interest Exposure to new ideas from speakers, field trips, and professional publications Access to online resources such as books and self-paced training courses, as well as student-focused services such as resume reviews, job search and scholarship opportunities Exposure to students, faculty and programs in other departments across campus as you work with other student groups during activities such as Homecoming, National Engineers Week and others Many of our Engineering faculty at UNT are extremely active in various professional organizations at the local, regional, and national levels which provides you as the student with exposure to new ideas and a very diverse experience as you learn and become more engaged in your profession. Within the Computer Science and Engineering Department we have a number of existing organizations that you should consider: IEEE Computer Society UNT Robotics Society Association for Computing Machinery Linux User's Group Information Defense Society Computer Information Systems Organization There are also a number of College-wide organizations: Society of Women Engineering National Society of Black Engineers Soon we will also have a number of honor societies, including Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, and Upsilon Pi Epsilon. These will require you to be nominated for membership. Honor Societies are important not only to prospective employers, but also as a conduit for social networking and interaction with faculty and outstanding fellow students who may be future business colleagues and collaborators. All of these organizations are part of an umbrella group in the College of Engineering called the Council of Engineering Organizations (CEO). Working together, these groups put on a number of activities including the homecoming float, the Spring Engineering Banquet, the Fall Engineering Festival and the activities for National Engineering Week. Please consider joining one of these organizations as an active member of a local chapter and also as a national member. Student membership fees are very low, and come with many outstanding benefits. Contact David Keathly for more information on these organizations at dkeathly@cse.unt.edu, or visit http://web2.unt.edu/ceo/members.php ↑

UNT Team Takes on the Zodiac Killer

Professor Ryan Garlick's Symbolic Processing class in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering is attempting to decode the unsolved 340-character cipher sent by the infamous Zodiac killer to the San Francisco Chronicle on November 8, 1969. The David Fincher movie Zodiac has stirred new interest in the case, and the students hope to use modern techniques on this nearly 40 year old mystery. The bay area serial killer sent an earlier message to newspapers that was successfully decoded, but this text of this message has never been revealed. Even using heuristic methods, the amount of processing required is enormous. Students are hoping to develop methods to reduce the number of keys that must be evaluated. More information will be forthcoming, along with a link to use your computer to help in the deciphering process. If you have access to processing resources that can assist with the project, please contact Ryan Garlick at garlick@unt.edu. ↑

Check Out the CSE Help Lab in F205

Students in Computer Science and Engineering have a valuable tool available to them just down the hall-the CSE Help Lab. Located in Room F205 at the Research Park and open typically from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., you will find a number of CSE Graduate and upper division students able to help you with a variety of problems and subjects. The Teaching Assistant or Grader for your CSE class will hold office hours in this lab at posted times to assist you with specific course assignments. Other help lab staff can assist you in learning how to access and use the various computing resources available in the CSE department. A variety of different computer systems and printers are also available for your use. Be sure to make the Help Lab a regular stop throughout the semester whether you need help with a particular class or just want to make the best use of the resources available to you. ↑

Volunteer for DC BEST 2007

High school students work together at the DC BEST kick-off on September 15. Photo by Chrislynn Mabel If you were at Research Park on Saturday, September 15, in the morning, you probably ran into the high school students at the DC BEST kick-off day. DC BEST (Denton County Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology) is a nonprofit organization that organizes a robotic competition among middle and high schools. DC BEST provides free of charge to schools the supplies, the game field, the technical support and the overall environment where these school teams can compete in a robotics tournament. At the kick-off on Saturday, the rules of the upcoming robotics game were explained, the students got to see the game field, and supplies for the competition were given to the schools. The next event of this six week competition is Mall Day when the high schools will actually practice with their robots on the actual game field. This will be held Saturday, October 20, 2007 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at Golden Triangle Mall in Denton. A week later on Saturday, October 27, Game Day will be held at the UNT Coliseum from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. At least twenty schools are expected to participate. Volunteers are needed to help with Mall Day and Game Day. Volunteers are needed to run the event and to serve as judges and referees. DC BEST is a nonprofit organization that is run completely by volunteers. If you are interesting in helping, please contact Leticia Anaya, Assistant DC BEST Director, at Lanaya@unt.edu or (940) 565-2022. For more information on DC BEST, see THIS NT Daily article. DC BEST 2007 is being sponsored by the UNT College of Engineering, Bell Helicopter, Nucon Steel, Southern Stretch Forming & Fabrication Inc., Hayes, Berry, White & Vanzant Firm, Peerless Manufacturing Co, United Copper Industries, Inc., C&G Electric, Inc., XTo Energy, Pye TeSelle, and Sam Atkinson. ↑

	College of Engineering News
	Founding Dean Oscar Garcia to Step Down
Oscar N. Garcia, Founding Dean of the College of Engineering, announced in August that he will step down at the end of the 2007-2008 academic year to return to the faculty to teach and assist colleagues and students with research. Dr. Garcia said, "After four years of developing a new College of Engineering at UNT, all of us in the college feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in all the great things that have been achieved," said Garcia, who specifically was recruited to UNT to launch operations for the new college. During his tenure at UNT, Garcia has been charged with developing both student recruitment and fund-raising campaigns for the college. Additionally, he has been instrumental in recruiting top faculty for the college, which now includes nearly 50 members. The college also more than doubled its restricted research dollars to $4.1 million in 2007, up from $1.9 million in 2003. Garcia also oversaw the renovation of the former Texas Instruments building at UNT Research Park. UNT President Gretchen M. Bataille said, "Under Dr. Garcia's leadership, our College of Engineering has expanded far beyond the initial offerings of computer science, materials science and engineering technology degrees to offer students a variety of degree programs and has played a significant role in advancing research at UNT. Dr. Garcia has done an outstanding job helping to establish a solid foundation for the College of Engineering to build upon in the future." To read the entire UNT press release about Dr. Garcia, please click HERE. ↑

Dr. Garcia Names New Associate Dean for Research and Thanks Dr. Swigger

Dr. Oscar Garcia has named Dr. Bill Buckles as Associate Dean for Research at UNT's College of Engineering. Dr. Buckles came to UNT in August 2006 as a Professor. Before coming to UNT, Dr. Buckles was at Tulane University where he was the Yahoo! Founders Chair in Computer Engineering. Before that, he taught at the University of Texas at Arlington. He received his PhD in Industrial Engineering from the University of Alabama at Huntsville in 1981. His research has been supported by NASA, NSF, the State of Louisiana, and, on several occasions, the Missile Defense Agency. Twice he has been honored with national technical achievement awards from NASA. He has been a visiting professor at the Techhochshule in Aachen Germany, the GMD (Germany's version of NSF), the Free University of Brussels, National Central University of Taiwan, and Fulbright Fellow at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. Dr. Kathleen Swigger was the first Associate Dean for Research at the College of Engineering. Dr. Garcia expressed his appreciation to Dr. Swigger, by saying, "We are tremendously grateful to Kathy for her four years of work in helping us increase our research productivity and recruit graduate students. It has worked!" ↑

Master's Degree for Electrical Engineering Added

The UNT College of Engineering is now offering a master's degree in electrical engineering. The Electrical Engineering Department expects about 20 students to be in the program. A total of 150 undergraduate and graduate students are pursuing degrees through this department. For more information about this new program, please read this UNT press release: HERE or go to the department's website at http://www.ee.unt.edu/. ↑

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 - September 2007