Announcements

Summer 2008 internships awarded: Princess C. Trillo at the Arctic Region Supercomputer Center, Nicolle Whitman at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, Jaime C. Acosta at the Pitt LearnLab.

A warm welcome to our new staff members: Martha Loyosa and Bobby DeWees.

The Affinity Research Group Model: Creating and Maintaining Effective Research Teams, by Ann Q. Gates, Steve Roach, Elsa Villa, Kerrie Kephart, Connie della Piana, and Gabriel della Piana, all with the University of Texas, El Paso, is to be published by the IEEE Computer Society.

"A cooperative learning approach to involving students with diverse backgrounds, an Affinity Research Group (ARG) is an effective means of ensuring student engagement. Through a structured team approach, students learn how to conduct scholarly research, lead effective team discussions, kick off a research project, and much, much more!"

This book was written with the support of the National Science Foundation.

Fares Fraij, UTEP CS Ph.D. 2005, has been appointed Dean of the College of Computer Engineering and Information Technology at Al-Hussein Bin Tala University.

Alejandro Castenada and Pete Ramirez will intern with Microsoft this summer.

Frank Licea has accepted a summer internship at IBM Austin.

Steven Gutstein has been offered a summer internship with Dr. David Morgenthaler's research group at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver.

Maria Ruiz, Nidia Pedregon and Elsa Tai have all been selected to participate in Google's 1st Workshop for Women Engineers. As participants they will receive admittance to the Google Workshop for Women Engineers, an all-expense paid trip to San Jose, CA. They will also enjoy tours to the Googleplex, have the opportunity to meet with Google engineers in their fields, and further explore potential career opportunities or internships with Google. Google Inc. has established the Google Workshop for Women Engineers to promote and identify technical research aptitude in women, to encourage the increase female representation in science and engineering, and to provide an educational program to embrace the potential of women in shaping future technologies to academically outstanding women students. (Dec 21, 2005, Sue Walker)

The election results are in, and Dr. Gates is now the Secretary of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Computer Society. This means that she will be on the Executive Committee of the Society, which is IEEE's largest, with some 90,00 members. Congratulations Ann!

Dear Friends,

It is my pleasure to announce that the family of Ron Challman, our long-term instructor, has kindly donated scholarship funds for funding a junior, senior, or graduate CS student. This year, this scholarship will go to Nidia Pedregon.

Congratulations to Nidia and many thanks to Ron Challman's family. This is a wonderful tribute to the great teacher he was. (Vladik Kreinovich, 9-7-2005)

President Diana Natalicio and Robert Amezcua (Vice President of pSeries Operations, IBM Systems & Technology Group) will host the announcement of an IBM Corporation / UTEP Shared University Research (SUR) Grant, Friday, September 23, 2005, at 9:30 a.m, at the El Paso Natural Gas Conference Center (Wiggins Street, across from the UTEP Library). Reservations are required: please contact Scott White at 747-8244.

I am pleased to announce that Thamar successfully defended her dissertation. Please congratulate her when you see her in the hall! (Dr. Gates, 9-7-2005)

Two UTEP papers were accepted to the Workshop on Operating System Interference for High Performance Applications, being held September 17, 2005 in St. Louis, Missouri: "Automatic I/O Scheduler Selection for Latency And Bandwidth Optimization" by Seelam Seetharami and Jayaraman Sureshbabu, and "Profiling Memory Subsystem Performance in an Advanced POWER Virtualization Environment", by Diana Villa and Mitesh Meswani.

Two UTEP papers have been accepted to ACM SigDOC 2005, September 21-23 in Coventry: Co-generation of Text and Graphics, by Professor Novick and Brian Lowe, and Usability over Time, by Valerie Mendoza and Professor Novick.

Gilbert Ornelas, Christian Servin, and Jorge Ivan Vargas were awarded NSF "Bridge to the Doctorate" fellowships for 2005-2007.

Recently Seetharami Seelam presented work related to his Ph.D. dissertation at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa, Canada, which attracted 800 attendees, primarily from industry, including the paper and tutorial presenters. Paper slots were one-hour long! Seelam gave an excellent presentation, "Enhancements to Linux I/O Scheduling", which received alot of feedback and interest. In fact, Andrew Morton, who is "one below" Linus Torvalds, the "father" of Linux, spoke to us after Seelam's talk as he is very interested in the work, wanted to meet the group with whom Seelam works, and is interested in getting Seelam's "patch" to the Linux operating system tested so that it can be considered for placement in the kernel. Also, another group from IBM TJ Watson Research approached us -- they too (in addition to a group that we already are in contact with and another group from IBM-Austin with who we collaborate) are interested in Seelam's work and the DAiSES project, in general. (Also I note that folks at IBM-Austin helped Seelam with this work in several ways, which is why Bill Buros, Linux Technology Center, IBM-Austin, is a co-author.) Congratulations, Seelam! (Pat Teller, July 27, 2005)

IBM Technical Briefings and Seminars

Congratulations to Richard Coy, Raul Cruz, Susi Draper, Myoung Kim, Ahmed Musa, Ashaveena Perumandla, and Juan Ulloa, who presented papers at this year's Las Vegas CS&E multiconferences: The 2005 World Congress in Applied Computing (WCAC'05) and The 2005 International MultiConference in Computer Science & Computer Engineering (IMCSE'05). Collectively, over the two week period, there were 30 International conferences across overlapping aspects of Computing and Engineering and Sciences. I am pleased to report many good comments concerning the quality of the presentations and work of our students. As an organizer involved in the multiconference (Chair of the CIC Annual International Conference), I am pleased that the multiconference provided special funding to our students; in addition to those who presented papers, Angelica Perez was also partially supported as well. On behalf of the students, I also add my thanks to Prof. H.R. Arabnia, Chair of the multiconference, for providing such special funding. (Brian J. d'Auriol, July 6, 2005).

Professors Luc Longpre and Eric Freudenthal were awarded $80k by the Army Research Lab to investigate "Constraint Validation of Role-Based Access Control Policy (RPAC)." RBAC policy is used to enforce security constraints on computing systems. The military has systems with field-reconfigurable policy and they need tools that evaluate whether a candidate policy is consistent with inviolable requirements. To this end, Longpre & Freudenthal will investigate abstractions for expressing these inviolable security and threat protection requirements, languages that expresses these requirements and algorithms that enforce them. Prototype implementations may be provided to ARL for evaluation.

Professors Longpre and Novick have been awarded $300,000 by the NSF to build "A Reconfigurable Computer Network To Support Research".

The project aims to build a heterogeneous high-capacity computer network to serve both of the department's main research areas (High-Assurance Systems, High-Performance Computing), which pose fundamental questions that require running and monitoring large-scale networked computer programs. These computer programs typically relate to research applications across campus, such as bioinformatics, satellite image processing, and computational engineering.

In addition, this network of computers will support student work in a number of courses, probably including CS 4316 Computer Networks, CS 5334 Parallel and Concurrent Computing, CS 5340 Advanced Operating Systems, CS 5341 Advanced Computer Architecture, CS 5352 Computer Security and CS 5382 Topics in Software Design.

The network will be of heterogeneous computers, not connected to the Internet, but connected together in an Internet-like network, and will serve as a test bed for network and grid computing experiments. The research enabled by this project includes the development and testing of security and authentication protocols, the evaluation of privacy loss in releasing statistics in large data sets, software engineering for large-scale data systems, software tools for web services, network performance evaluation, self-organizing systems, efficient grid computing for large-scale modeling. (June 2, 2005)

UTEP has received a 2005 IBM SUR grant for a 16-processor p5 (POWER5) system. MANY THANKS go to Amir Simon and Robert Amezcua at IBM, who worked with us on the proposal. The STAR award granted to me by the University (for which I am very grateful -- THANK YOU to those who helped make this happen!) was used to promise $300,000 in cost share.

This will be used to enhance the system. The award is for a 16-processor, 16GB memory, 1TB disk p590 system. Clearly some of the $ will be used to upgrade disk storage.

Congratulations to everyone! This adds to UTEP's high-performance computing infrastructure -- it gives UTEP a state-of-the-art high-performance system for computational research. Congratulations especially to those whose work is featured in the proposal, i.e., Stephen Aley, Lisa Bain, William Baldwin, Ming-Ying Leung, Francois Modave, Patricia Nava, Michela Taufer, and Diana Villa.

With a smile on my face, Pat Teller, May 23, 2005

The Department of Defense High Performance Computing Modernization Office PET Program has offered Jaime Nava and Nidia Pedregon placement at the University of Hawaii Summer Institute, July 25 - August 5. Nidia and Jaime are both UTEP CS Undergraduate students doing research under the supervision of Dr. Patricia J. Teller. During the summer institute they will visit the Maui High Performance Computing Center, learn to parallelize and run code on Maui's 32-processor supercomputer, and build a mini cluster with 4 desktop PC's, among other tasks. The HPC program will provide travel as well as housing and meals during their stay at the Institute.

The Department of Defense recently announced that a proposal submitted by UTEP, University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK), and Howard University entitled "Automated Performance Data Collection, Management, and Analysis" has been selected for funding ($208,064 for one year). Pat Teller is the PI, and the Co-PIs are Shirley Moore and Felix Wolf of UTK and Peter Keillor of Howard University.

The proposed work will expand the availability, capability, and usability of performance analysis tools by providing to DoD application developers
* Automated performance data collection via automated instrumentation
* Performance data management including standard schemas for profile and trace data, use of database technology for storage/retrieval of multi-experiment performance data, and tools for combining multi-experiment data
* Automated performance data analysis, including statistical analysis of large-scale performance data, tools for analyzing multi-experiment data, datamining using pattern matching for automated detection of performance bottlenecks, and intuitive visualization of analysis results.

Dear Friends,

I have just received exiciting news that my good colleague Dr. Guoqing Liu from Nanjing, China, has received a grant to come to UTEP as a visiting researcher. He will be in El Paso from July 1 to September 31, 2005. I have known him since 1998, when me met at an international conference on interval computations. Some of you may remember him: he has already visited UTEP as a research scientist in 1999.

While his original area of interest was in interval computations, he is currently working on applications to image and signal processing and other ECE-related areas. With our current emphasis on inter-disciplinary research, I strongly believe that Dr. Liu's visit may be of interest to many researchers both in CS and in ECE. (Vladik, April 4, 2005)

Dear Friends,

Our own Dr. Martine Ceberio has just been invited in Summer 2005 to two top research places around the world as an invited researcher:
* at the end of May, she will spend a few weeks doing her research at the National Institute for Informatics (NII) in Tokyo, Japan, and
* from July 1 to mid-August she will be doing her research in France, at the invitation of Ecole Superieur des Technologies Industrielles Advancees (roughly, Center for Advanced Industrial Technologies).

Congratulations to Martine for this world-wide research recognition! (Vladik, March 25, 2005)

Computer Science Fight Song Lyrics

Down in the west side of our Bhutan campus

Study the programmers who are so grand

Here we come and we learn of the science

Of computation and logical plans

Working all night, the students in CS

Honor the legend'ry college of mines

Loyal forever, we're standing together

Onward to victory Orange and Blue!

(Shout) Bytes, Bits, Bytes! Bytes, Bits, Bytes!

sung to the tune of Marty Robbin's El Paso

copyleft, Freudenthal and Gates, 2005

I just received a list of co-op students in our department and it looks quite nice - we have 11 undergraduate and 3 master's students participating at places like White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin and Cingular Wireless and also at local companies like Sirius Images, AUS Services and EQ Consulting... Just thought I would share this good news. (Sue Walker, Feb 14, 2005)

PS: Students interested in Co-op positions should register with the career center. SW

Fall 2004 URI Awards:

• Martine Ceberio, Next Steps towards Flexibility in Problem Solving.
• Yoonsik Cheon, Complete Automatic Testing of Object-Oriented Programs.
• Eric Freudenthal, DiSPAC: Distributed Security Policy for Alien Code, Exploratory Grant.

On Friday, December 10th the CS Department will have its first Dessert Day. It's a chance for you, our students, to mingle with the faculty, to get together to celebrate the end of finals and talk about your holiday plans - all over a table loaded with all kinds of yummy desserts!

It's 1 - 3 pm, in CS 234. Desserts will be provided by the faculty

All CS students are welcome! (Sue Walker)

Professor Ceberio was awarded a grant by the French Ministry of Research to extend her work on constraints in conjunction with two projects in France. (November 16, 2004)

Dear Friends,

I just wanted to brag :-) (and I think my birthday today give me a good excuse for bragging).

First ACM General Meeting

Friday Sept. 10, at 1:30pm, in room 308.

An overview of research opportunities in the CS department:

2:00 pm : Brian D'Auriol

2:05 pm : Pat Teller

2:10 pm : Eric Freundenthal

2:15 pm : Karen Ward, Javier Aldaz Salmon

2:20 pm : Martine Ceberio, Richard Coy

2:25 pm : Ben Flores (interim chair)

Professor Ceberio will be moderating.

We will have our first TRACS meeting of the year this coming Friday, September 10, at noon (before the ACM meeting), in Comp 221. For those who don't know, TRACS is the theory student research group. All are welcome to attend, in particular graduate students who haven't decided yet in what area they want to work. Dr. Kreinovich, Longpre, Ceberio, and I (along with maybe Dr. Keller in Geology and Dr. Leung in bioinformatics) will talk about our research interests, research in general, what research students can do etc. (Professor Modave, Sept. 8 2004)

Irbis Gallegos, a new entrant to the Ph.D. program this fall, has been selected to receive a Graduate School Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Fellowship for the academic year, 2004-2005. Funds to support these fellowships come from the National Science Foundation and from the Graduate School. The fellowship provides a stipend and special opportunities to receive mentoring in academic work.

Will Enriquez has been awarded a Monbusho Scholarship to attend graduate school in Japan. This provides full tuition, subsidized housing, Japanese language lessons, and a full stipend. Will's plans to do roboit projects to the students. My thanks to Rodrigo and the students who volunteered their time to help promote CS. Your efforts make a difference!cs research, focusing on the `social' aspects of interaction between humans and mobile robots.

Maria Gabrielle Aguilera, "Gaby," applied for the Google 2004 Anita Borg Scholarship. Two $10,000 scholarships were to be awarded -- one to an undergraduate student and one to a graduate student. There were 19 finalists, all of whom were invited to visit Google (all expenses paid). Gaby was among the finalists and left for CA on Thursday. She was treated royally, including being picked up at the airport by a limousine! Gaby had a WONDERFUL time and, the best part is that she was awarded a scholarship. The finalists were so strong that the company decided to award four undergraduate and four graduate scholarships, and Gaby got one of them. Gaby also received Google memorabilia and will be going to the Grace Hopper Conference in October, all expenses paid by Google.

Congratulations, Gaby! (Dr. Teller, May 24, 2004)

Congratulations to all CS graduates of the Class of 2004!

A graduation party will be held on May 8th and we would like to invite all of the CS graduates, CS faculty members, staff, friends and families to attend.

The party will be from 12:30 to 3:00, May 8th, 2004, in the Geology Building patio area. The cost will be $20 for each graduate, plus $5 per extra guest (no more than 5 guests please). There will be hamburgers, hot dogs, salad, cake, chips, cookies .... (Please let us know what you would like to have at the party; we may be able to buy more varieties of food if we have enough money.)

RSVP and pay by May 5th 2004 (no later than 12 noon), to Elsa (etwy@cs.utep.edu) or Tanu (tghosh@utep.edu) or stop by CCIG lab.

It is my pleasure to mention that Elsa Tai has received the Best Research Poster (Engineering) award for her reseach expo poster titled "Computer Security Features on Windows Platform". The poster is on display in the Computer Science Building. Congratulations Elsa, job well done. (May 3, 2004, Professor d'Auriol)

Summer 2004 Internships Awarded:

Ph.D. students: Seelam Seetharami at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center; Mitesh Meswani at Intel Hillsboro (Fall).

MS students: Juan Ulloa at IBM Austin in the Unix Software Build Area; Angelica Perez at IBM Almaden on virtual storage.

Undergraduates: Rick Correa at Los Alamos National Laboratory on security applications; Christian Servin at Applied Research Laboratories (ARL) in Austin, on an intrusion detection system.

Unclassified: IBM, White Sands Missile Range (2), Datamark, Lockheed Martin, University of Alaska, Sirius Images, Texas Instruments, Microsoft, The Math Store Tutoring Center, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.

Congratulations to all!

Undergraduate Advising for Summer and Fall 2004 Semester

Advising for the summer and fall semesters will begin the week of March 8. Please see Beatriz Tarango in the CS main office to sign up. Please contact your advisor to make other arrangements if you are unable to sign up for any of the available periods.

Students with last names begining A-M: Frank Fernandez Students with last names begining N-Z: Ray Bell

Be sure to bring your student ID card to your advising session, and clear any financial holds prior to advising. WE CANNOT ADVISE YOU IF YOU HAVE A FINANCIAL HOLD ON YOUR RECORDS.

The University of Texas at El Paso Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) is inviting all interested parties to apply for membership in this honor society. Requirements for membership are as follows:

Graduate Students must: 1. Have been in graduate residence at UTEP one semester 2. Have completed at least one-half of the number of semester-hours of graduate course work normally required for the Masters degree in Computer Science, irrespective of the graduate degree sought by the candidate 3. Have a G.P.A. of at least 3.5/4.0

Undergraduate Students must: 1. Be a candidate for a Bachelors degree in Computer Science. 2. Have been in undergraduate residence at UTEP one semester. 3. Have completed at least 64 semester-hours of undergraduate course work, including 18 semester-hours in undergraduate Computer Science courses. 4. Have a G.P.A. of at least 3.2/4.0.

Applications must be submitted to Dr. Karen Ward in the Computer Science Department no later than March 12, 2004. Students must also send a departmental transcript to Dr. Karen Ward, Computer Science. Faculty members must submit a document detailing how long they have taught in UTEP CS and their responsibilities in the department. Applications can be found in the CS main office, or contact one of the officers for more information:

Kenneth Sayles, President,
Richard Coy, Vice President
Cynthia Campos, Secretary
Rick Correa, Treasurer

May 2004 Graduates
Applications for graduation are due by February 27th with a fee of $25. Applications will be accepted after february 27th, but will be assessed an additional $15 late fee. The application process can take upto a week, so it is recommended that you begin in early February. Applications are available in Engineering Dean's office (E-230).

Betty Studebaker from the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center will be available to dicsuss internships in Fairbanks, Alaska on Tuesday Nov 24 from 1:00 - 4:15 in room CS221, and from 4:30 - 6:00 in room CS322. (Professor Gates)

Professor Gates was awarded the YWCA Reach 2003 Recognized Achievement for the Category of Education. (November 11, 2003)

Alumni Talk: Former Microsoft Corp. executive and Texas Western College (now UTEP) alumnus Robert O'Rear will present his lecture, "From the Texas Panhandle to the Formation of the World's Largest Software Enterprise," at 4 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 11, at the Undergraduate Learning Center, Room 116, on the UTEP campus.

In 1977, O'Rear became the seventh employee for Bill Gates and Paul Allen's business venture, Microsoft. As the company's chief mathematician and project manager, O'Rear was the co-author of the first version of MS-DOS and placed Microsoft's software in the first IBM personal computer.

After the release of the IBM PC in 1981, O'Rear moved into international sales and marketing, launching Microsoft's offices in Europe. He retired from Microsoft in 1993.

O'Rear, originally from the rural Texas Panhandle town of Wellington, earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics from TWC in 1964 and went on to earn his master's degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1966.

After graduation, he worked for TRW Systems in the aerospace division writing mathematical analysis programs that supported targeting systems for ballistic missiles, spy satellites and the NASA Apollo program.

O'Rear's presentation is part of the UTEP's Millennium Lecture Series. The series focuses on issues and ideas shaping the new millennium and features speakers on a broad range of global topics, including demographics, climate change, information technology, health, and geopolitical and socioeconomic trends.

The lecture is sponsored by the UTEP President Diana Natalicio and the Office of Alumni Relations.

Python Tutorial, 2pm Oct 31, room 319.

Advising will begin this week.

Undergraduates should see Bea in the front office to schedule an appointment. Students A-M sign up with Frank Fernandez, Students N-Z sign up with Ray Bell.

Graduates should drop in on Nigel in room 206; afternoons are best.

The Bioinformatics program will start a new course in Spring 2004 called "Topics in Bioinformatics". The main objective of this course is to give an introduction of bioinformatics to our local undergrads. For CS students, a prerequisite is that they should have taken either probability or cs 3330,

As you probably know, our university has a multi-disciplinary Master program in Bioinformatics, there is a general interest in biology and health-related research. We have also applied for funding to have a bioinformatics minor. Bioinformatics, by its very origin, involves a lot of computing, so the Master program welcomes students both from CS and from the Biology backgrounds. At present, most of the students who go into our Master program are biology students, but some go with CS backgrounds - and they are usually very successful.

This course is taught by Dr. Ming-Ying Leung, the Director of the Bioinformatics program, in collaboration with Dr. Steve Aley and Elizabeth Walsh from Biology.

Since we do not have an undergraduate Bioinformatics program yet, this course had to be listed under some department, so it is listed under Math, but please trust me, this is NOT a high-level math course. The undergraduate advisors will have more information. (Vladik Kreinovich)

Professor Modave was awarded a grant from the Army Research Laboratory to work on New Physical-Statistical Methods and Models for Clutter. (October 15, 2003).