November 11, 2003

Dear Alumni:

This year UTEP's Department of Computer Science reaches "adulthood" by celebrating the 21th anniversary of its founding. I'd like to mark the occasion by bringing you up to date on the department and some of its achievements of the last ten years in particular.

The department, which grew out of a computer science program in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was founded in the fall of the 1982-1983 school year. John Starner was chair, and Andy Bernat and Dan Patterson were the faculty. Ten years later, in the fall of 1993, the department moved from the Engineering Building to its current location in the Computer Science Building, at the top of Hawthorn Street.

Since moving to its current building, your department has more than doubled in size. In the 1994-1995 academic year, the department had 129 students enrolled in its B.S. program, 44 in the M.S. program, and three in its joint Ph.D. program with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In the 2003-2004 academic year we now have 320 B.S. students, 80 masters students, and 15 Ph.D. students. We also have 40 students enrolled in our M.S. in Information Technology. In 1994-1995 we graduated 25 students with the B.S., eight students with the M.S., and no Ph.D. students. In the 2002-2003 academic year, we graduated 45 students with the B.S. and 13 with the M.S. And since 1998 we have graduated five students with the Ph.D.; these graduates are now teaching at great schools such as Texas Tech University and New Mexico State University.

The number of faculty has grown, too. From 1994-1995 to today, we've grown from six tenure/tenure-track faculty to eleven, and from nine FTE total faculty to 16 FTE. In the last six years four of our faculty have taken prestigious positions elsewhere. Dan Cooke and Michael Gelfond are at Texas Tech, Chitta Baral is at Arizona State, and Andy Bernat now serves as Executive Director of the Computing Research Association. We've also hired great new faculty in recent years, including Yoonsik Cheon, Brian d'Auriol, Frank Fernandez, Francois Modave, Steve Roach, Rolfe Sassenfeld, Karen Ward and Nigel Ward. Ray Bell, Ann Gates, Vladik Kreinovich, Luc Longpre, Pat Teller and I round out the full-time faculty.

Our undergraduate degree program was comprehensively revised for the fall of 2001. We've doubled the number of lower-division sections, which are all team-taught, and we've added significant numbers of upper-division electives. As late as 1998-1999, we had "electives" but you had to take them all. Our students now have the opportunity to specialize their education. Our graduate degree program was revised for the fall of 2002. And we expect to have our own separate Ph.D. program in Computer Science by fall 2004, which should make the program even more attractive to prospective students.

The department has garnered a number of big grants and gifts, including $1.25 million from the National Science Foundation to promote graduate education, two NSF ITR grants totaling over $1 million, and $650,000 from IBM for a P690 high-performance computer. And Ann Gates is one of the principal investigators for a $3.4 million NSF award to help recruit, develop and retain women faculty in science and engineering.

Our faculty won all three UTEP faculty achievement awards for 2003, marking our twentieth anniversary with an unprecedented sweep for a single department. Ann Gates won the Faculty Achievement Award for Teaching Excellence, which is the University's top teaching honor for tenured and tenure-track faculty. Ray Bell won the Distinguished Teaching Award, the University's top teaching honor for non-tenure-track faculty. And Vladik Kreinovich won the Faculty Achievement Award for Research, the University's top research award.

The department continues to partner with industry and government. Our Board of Advisors includes IBM, Raytheon, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Agilent and Texas Instruments, Fort Bliss and Sandia National Laboratories, among others. Last year, with our help, Lockheed Martin established its "Storefront" at UTEP, which employs Computer Science students to work on NASA programming projects. Code written by UTEP students has now been deployed as an operational part of the nation's space program.

The coming year looks good for your department. We expect to hire two additional tenure-track faculty for next fall. We expect our separate Ph.D. program in Computer Science will be official. And we will continue to graduate and place great students. We always like to hear from our alumni, too, so please write me with your own news.

Sincerely,

David Novick
Southwestern Bell Professor
and Chair