Announcements

04.01.12

Dear Friends,

Many thanks to those who attended the 11th NMSU/UTEP Workshop on Mathematics, Computer Science, and Computational Sciences, and to those who encouraged their students to present and to attend.

Many thanks to Karen Villaverde and Tony Wang for the excellent local organization.

As in the previous years, some participants want us to select the date of the next meeting ASAP, so that they do not schedule something else on that day.

The next UTEP/NMSU workshop is usually held around early November in El Paso, at a Saturday when no football game is scheduled on campus. But this year, the first Saturday, November 3, is listed as an open date, which means that it is possible that later on a game will be scheduled. So, let us have the next workshop on Saturday October 27, when a football game with UTEP participation is scheduled in Houston.

Please mark your calendars, and please inform interested folks about it.

04.01.12

Christopher Kiekintveld, Assistant Professor of Department of Computer Science, was awarded the 2011 David Rist Prize, the major prize awarded by the Military Operations Research Society.

"The Rist Prize, named after David Rist (an early Director of MORS) and first presented in 1965, is awarded annually. The Rist Prize recognizes the practical benefit sound operations research can have on real life decision making and seeks the best implemented military operations research study ...

The winners of the 2011 award are Prof. Milind Tambe, Prof. Fernando Ordonez, Mr. Manish Jain, Mr. James Pita, Prof. Christopher Kiekintveld, Erroll Southers and James B. Curren for their work 'Software Assistants for Patrol Planning at LAX, Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS), and Transportation Security.' "

"GUARDS - Game Theoretic Security Allocation on a National Scale" by James Pita, Milind Tambe, Christopher Kiekintveld, Shane Cullen, and Erin Steigerwald won the Best Paper Award at the Innovative Applications track of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems AAMAS'2011. He has won a similar Best Paper Award at the AAMAS'2009 as well!

Challman Scholarship has been awarded to Arianni Dubord

03.09.12

Adriana has been selected as a 2012-2013 Microsoft Scholarship recipient. Adriana was chosen because of her impressive academic record and her strong interest in making contributions to the software industry. We are very proud of Adriana's accomplishments.

02.06.12

On February 10th, 8 high-school girls of the El Paso-Las Cruces region will be honored as winners and runners-up of the competition for the local affiliate (El Paso-Las Cruces) of the NCWIT Awards for Aspirations in Computing, see a href="http://ncwit.org/award">http://ncwit.org/award".

The event will take place in the Chemistry and Computer Science Building at UTEP (corner of Hawthorne and Rim) from 5pm to 7pm:
* 5pm to 6pm: Reception and poster presentations by UTEP students
* 6pm to 7pm: Awards ceremony with keynote speaker Dr. Elsa Villa, Co-Director of the Center for Research in Engineering and Technology Education (CREaTE) at UTEP.

01.23.2012

"The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) -- a standing committee of CRA -- is pleased to announce a new website to allow researchers to advertise undergraduate summer research positions and to allow students to find such opportunities:.

We're writing to ask you to please let your colleagues know about this resource. Instructions for faculty (and other research supervisors) on how to post a summer research opportunity are provided below. There is no charge for this service.

These listings will appear from a link on the CCC's relatively new Computer Science Research Opportunities & Graduate School (CSGS) website, located at , and we would also be grateful if you would let your students know about this resource. The site has information on summer research opportunities, a Q&A on "why do research," and links to many recurring summer programs (e.g., NSF REUs, CRA-W, CREUC Canada, among others). It also has information and advice on applying to graduate school in computing fields (including Q&As with faculty from around the country as well as current Ph.D. students) and a "Day in the Life" Blog where a few graduate students are sharing their experiences as they proceed through grad school. Ultimately, the objective of the CSGS website is to help promote a healthy pipeline of talented young people into careers in computing research.

Your help in letting your colleagues know about the listing service (again, instructions for posting opportunities are below) and letting your students know about the CSGS website will be a valuable service to our community. Please feel free to e-mail CCC Council member Ran "RON" Libeskind-Hadas () or me with any questions or suggestions.

How to post a research position or program (for research advisors or research program directors):

This site is intended for colleges, universities, and labs to post summer research positions for undergraduates. Corporate research labs are encouraged to post, too, but the positions should be for research groups and not for summer jobs in general.

1. Go to http://cra-ccc.org/ugresearchopps/
2. On the right side, click on "Register to Post."
3. Fill in the form that appears and then check your e-mail for the auto-generated password from CRA. It may take a few minutes for the e-mail password to arrive.
4. The e-mail will also contain a login link. Click on that link, and login with the username and password sent to you.
5. Once logged in, you will be alerted that you can change your password, and you may do so if you wish.
6. Click on "Post your Project" and fill in the form to submit your position. You will be prompted to enter the project title, a brief description, and a few other pieces of information that will let students know how to contact you.
7. You can edit your posts using the same login link.

Thank you in advance for helping us spread the word.

With best wishes,

Erwin Gianchandani, Ph.D.

Director, Computing Community Consortium
Computing Research Association
1828 L Street, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036

Phone: (202) 266-2936
E-mail: erwin@cra.org
Online: http://cra.org/ccc & http://cccblog.org

fall.11

Our colleague, Dr. Vladik Kreinovich, and his former PhD student, Gang Xiang, are two of the authors of the following book to appear: "Computing Statistics under Interval and Fuzzy Uncertainty", Springer Verlag, by Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, Berlin Wu, and Gang Xiang. Congratulations to them!

Brief description to appear on the back cover:

In many practical situations, we are interested in statistics characterizing a population of objects: e.g., in the mean height of people from a certain area.
Most algorithms for estimating such statistics assume that the sample values are exact. In practice, sample values come from measurements, and measurements are never absolutely accurate. Sometimes, we know the exact probability distribution of the measurement inaccuracy, but often, we only know the upper bound on this inaccuracy. In this case, we have interval uncertainty: e.g., if the measured value is 1.0, and inaccuracy is bounded by 0.1, then the actual (unknown) value of the quantity can be anywhere between 1.0 - 0.1 = 0.9 and 1.0 + 0.1 = 1.1. In other cases, the values are expert estimates, and we only have fuzzy information about the estimation inaccuracy.
This book shows how to compute statistics under such interval and fuzzy uncertainty. The resulting methods are applied to computer science (optimal scheduling of different processors), to information technology (maintaining privacy), to computer engineering (design of computer chips), and to data processing in geosciences, radar imaging, and structural mechanics.

S. Arunagiri, Y. Kwok, R. Portillo, S. Seetharami, and P. Teller received the Best Paper award for the Software track of the SBAC-PAD conference for the paper on their work on I/O scheduling! Congratulations to them!

Dr. Pat Teller's PhD student Yipkei Kwok awarded a Cluster 2011 Student Travel Grant.

Game Developers session at Glitch in Cd. Juarez, 13-14 October.

7.18.11

Professor Nigel Ward appointed Chair Computer Science. Congratulations!

7.15.11

Dr. Eunice Santos has been appointed Founding Director of UTEP Institute of Defense and Security.

5.23.11

Professor Freudenthal has been elected President of the UTEP Chapter of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society

5.05.11

Over the past two years, CS undergraduate enrollment has risen from about 200 to over 300.

4.06.11

Four graduate students, Carmen Avila, Cuauhtemoc Munoz, Melisa Vela, and Cesar Yeep, have been admitted to the First Summer School on Formal Techniques (May 23-27 at Menlo College, Atherton, California) . Sponsored by NSF, the school will focus on formal verification techniques such as model checking, satisfiability, and static analysis.

4.01.11

Undergraduate George Moreno has been awarded one of the most competitive scholarships available through the Department of Defense and the American Society for Engineering Education: the Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship. This provides a full ride and a generous stipend, and a guaranteed offer of a civilian position in a DoD laboratory or agency after graduation. George is working on a double major in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.

3.29.11

Dear Friends, I have just learned, from the latest issue of AI Magazine published by the international Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), that our own Chris Kiekintveld was selected to give one of the tutorials at the 25th Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI-11 in San Francisco, California, in August 7-11, 2011. This tutorial will be on Security Games, the main topic of Chris's research. Congratulations to Chris.

3.21.11

Professor Ceberio has been elected to the Board of Directors of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS).

3.18.11

Summer internship plans include: Google for Shreyas Karhedkar; State Farm for Leandro Gallegos; the Army Research Labs for Joshua McCartney, Esthela Gallardo and Francis Onate; Texas Instruments for Jorge Berumen, the Undergraduate Summer Institute in Computational Science and Engineering (at Stanford University, sponsored by the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center), for Ana Quevedo, Joel Quintana, Adriana Contreras, and Jose Segura, the Institute of Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California for Geovany Ramirez, and a REU in the EUREKA Program at UT Austin for Diego Aguirre.

Summer 10

REU Summer program wraps up.

12.06.10

Dr. Gates has been appointed to the CSAB Board of Directors. (CSAB is the lead society within ABET for accreditation of BS programs in computer science, information systems, software information, and information technology. A federation of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society, it has responsibility for developing accreditation criteria and for the selection and training of program evaluators.)

10.30.10

Former Chair Dan Cooke has passed away.

10.05.10

Francisco Zapata has received a Conacyt Scholarship. These scholarships, from the Mexican Government, cover tuition, medical insurance, and living expenses for three years.

09.30.10

Dr. Gates will receive the Anita Borg Social Impact Award at the 10th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC) in Atlanta, Georgia this September. This award, given by the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) honors an individual or team that has caused technology to have a positive impact on the lives of women and society or has caused women to have a significant impact on the design and use of technology. "As the founder of the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions, Ann Gates' leadership is making a significant social impact by increasing the number of Latinos and Latinas graduating from college and seeking graduate studies in STEM fields." The Anita Borg Social Impact Award is underwritten by Microsoft. >more<

Two UTEP papers received meritorious paper awards at the recent 2010 Conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS'2010) in Toronto, Canada: "Extending maximum entropy techniques to entropy constraints" by Gang Xiang and Vladik Kreinovich, and "A line of sight algorithm using fuzzy measures," by Tanja Magoc, Ari Kassin, and Rodrigo Romero.

The job outlook for computer science students remains very favorable, as reported in The Market for Computing Careers

Nitaya Buntao, a researcher from Bangkok, Thailand, will be visiting UTEP for the 2010-2011 academic year. Her area of interest is combining interval and probabilistic uncertainty and the application of this combined uncertainty. (Dr. Kreinovich)

Sio-Long Lo, a researcher from Macau University of Science and Technology, Macau, China, is coming to UTEP to work with us at TRACS on fuzzy techniques, from July 6 through September 15. (Dr. Kreinovich)

Jaime Nava has been selected as a 2010-2011 Google Scholar, with an award of $10,000, by the Hispanic College Fund. >story<

Dr. Roach has been awarded an NSF grant entitled "Science Masters Program: Student Support to Enhance Graduate Programs in Systems and Software Engineering" for $700K over three years.
>press release<

The new CCS building tops out today, May 21, 2010. >story< >video<

Undergraduate Ben Walker has been awarded a $2000 scholarship from the International Test and Evaluation Association, in recognition of his development, with Professor Ward, of a new method for evaluating the potential benefit of various proposed new information sources in speech recognizers.

Good News! The University of Texas at El Paso has been designated as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education for academic years 2010-2015 by the National Information Assurance Education and Training Program (NIETP). (Dr. Longpre, April 29, 2010) >more<

Recent Travel Awards: Bivas Das (MS Candidate) and Manuel Corona (BS Candidate) have been awarded student travel grants by the USENIX Association to attend the highly competitive Symposium on Network Design and Implementation (NSDI). Two other students have received ACM-W travel awards: Shubhra Datta to attend AAAI 2010, and Alexandria Ogrey to attend Educon in Madrid.

Jaime C. Acosta's dissertation, "Using Emotion to Gain Rapport in a Spoken Dialog System", has been selected as the University Outstanding Dissertation for 2009. His achievement will be marked at the Spring 2010 Honors Convocation.

2010 Summer Internship News: Joel Quintana to the University of Illinois; Geovanny Ramirez and Jason Zheng to the USC Institute for Creative Technologies; Ben Walker to the University of Houston, Downtown. In addition, three CS undergraduates will attend the eight-week AHPCRC Summer Institute for Undergraduates in Computational Science and Engineering, expenses and stipend paid: Edgar Caballero, Esthela Gallardo, and Joshua McCartney.

Dr. Santos will receive the IEEE Computer Society's 2010 Technical Achievement Award for pioneering contributions to Computational Social Network Systems". >details<

CS Alumni featured by E-visions. >here< and >here<

Dr. Roach has been appointed Associate Chair. Dr. Cheon will take over as Undergraduate Program Director.

CS Alumni Richard and Cynthia Coy (Campos) are featured in the Engineering Vistas newsletter (Winter 2009, page 3).

The new transformer was delivered today. Power limitations will soon be a thing of the past. (January 20, 2009)

The University of Texas at El Paso is offering a new graduate degree in software engineering starting this spring semester. It is a software engineering degree for practitioners who want to get in-depth training in software development standards and methods. The degree has a strong focus on the practice and practical application of software engineering to the development of software systems.

Course are scheduled to be convenient for students with full-time jobs. In Spring 2010 three courses will be offered: Software Engineering (CS 5380), Management (CS 5384), and Requirements (CS 5385) (although for registration purposes, all are listed as CS 5390). They are each one day per week, either M, T, or W, from 6-9pm.

Applications are handled through the standard graduate school application process. Some additional information is available at the departmental admissions page.

Dr. Ceberio has received an NSF CAREER Award. (press release)

Professor Kreinovich has been invited to give a talk at the Erice School on Granular Computing, a week-long workshop in Italy. This is his third invited talk this semester: the previous two were at the Sixth International Conference on Computability and Complexity in Analysis (Ljubljana, Slovenia), and at the Eighth International Conference on Parallel Processing and Applied Mathematics (Wroclaw, Poland).

Alejandro Vega has been awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2010 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Research Awards. >more<

Amritam Sarcar has been selected as Banner Bearer for Fall 2009 Commencement, in recognition of his academic achievements. As Banner Bearer he will carry the Graduate School Banner and lead the Graduate School into the Don Haskins Center at commencement on Saturday, December 12, 2009. He will also have the distinction of being the first graduate student to cross the stage at the 7:00 p.m. ceremony. His thesis is on Runtime Assertion Checking for JML on the Eclipse Platform using AST Merging.

Professor Gates has been named one of its Distinguished Alumni by the NMSU Alumni Association: "This award recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves and thus brought honor and distinction to their Alma Mater." The award will be presented at NMSU's 2009 Homecoming.

The National Science Foundation has funded the Time-Based Language Modeling project for $450k over 3 years. Nigel Ward and co-PIs David Novick and Olac Fuentes aim to develop shallow cognitive process models representing what happens, moment by moment, in the minds of people engaged in dialog. Doing so is expected to help improve speech recognition accuracy, improve the usability of spoken dialog systems, and help advance the scientific understanding of these important aspects of human behavior.

Pat Teller has just been informed that she has been awarded a DOE grant for roughly $650k for 3 years. Also, Sarala Arunagiri is co-PI on the project. The project is entitled "I/O Coordination to Improve HEC System Performance: A Marriage of Analytical Modeling, Control Theory, and Differentiated I/O Performance." Please join me in congratulating Pat and Sarala on this award! --- Dr. Santos, September 10, 2009.

My good friend and co-author, Professor Hung T. Nguyen from New Mexico State University, is planning to officially retire in July 2010. In anticipation, he has decided to donate a large portion of his professional library to the library hosted by our Department's TRACS Center (Center for Theoretical Research and its Applications to Computer Science). He will start bringing books and journals starting today. Many thanks! (Dr. Kreinovich, August 31, 2009)

Dr. Freudenthal and Pinheiro have been selected as participants in 2009 Frontiers of Engineering Symposia, FOEE and JAFOE, respectively.

From the press release: "Forty-nine of the nation's brightest young engineering researchers and educators have been selected to take part in the National Academy of Engineering's (NAE) first Frontiers of Engineering Education (FOEE) symposium. Engineering faculty members in the first half of their careers who are developing and implementing innovative educational approaches in a variety of disciplines will come together for the 2-1/2-day event, where they can share ideas, learn from research and best practice in education, and leave with a charter to bring about improvement in their home institution. The participants were nominated by fellow engineers or deans and chosen from a highly competitive pool of applicants."

The 2011 conference of the North American Fuzzy Information Processing Society (NAFIPS), will be held in El Paso, Texas, on May 22-24. This is the major North American conference in the fuzzy research area, and it usually attracts strong participation by researchers from all over the world. Drs. Kreinovich and Ceberio will be the main local organizers.

Jaime C. Acosta will present his research this fall at three venues: the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech), at the International Conference on Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction, and at the Workshop on Measuring Mobile Emotions at Mobile HCI, in Brighton, Amsterdam, and Bonn, respectively. The three papers will cover the first fruits of his doctoral research, on improving spoken dialog systems by detecting the user's affective state and determining how to add suitable emotional coloring to the system's utterances in response.

Ricardo Portillo (B.S. and M.S., UTEP and now a Ph.D. candidate spending the summer at Oak Ridge National Lab) received notice today that he is the receipient of a $10,000 Scholarship from Google as a 2009-2010 Hispanic College Fund Scholar. (Dr. Teller).

It gives us great pleasure to inform you that the National Science Foundation has approved funding for UTEP's Bridge to the Doctorate program for academic years 2009-2011. This award will support twelve graduate students in STEM fields to complete their MS studies and start their Ph.D. work. Students who are selected as fellows will receive each year for two years: full tuition and fees, a $30,000 stipend, a $1,000 lab supply allowance, a $1,000 textbook allowance, full participation in the NSF Joint Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., research conference participation and support, and developmental workshops and activities.

Applicants must meet the following requirements: 1. U.S. Citizen or Permanent Resident, 2. Past LSAMP, FaST, SULI, or REU Scholar, 3. 3.0/4.0 or higher undergraduate cumulative GPA, 4. A maximum of 9 Ph.D. credit hours earned. In addition, the student must have applied or have been accepted to a UTEP STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) graduate program for fall 2009 or spring 2010. The applicant must be fully committed to pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of choice.

Applications for Fall 2009 are due on July 24th. Contact Ariana Arciero, Assistant Director, of the UT LSAMP Office. (Benjamin Flores and Helmut Knaust)

Professor Teller has been named a member of the Texas Advanced Computing Center's (TACC) Advisory Board. (Press Release)

Masters student Christian Servin chosen to be the Graduate School Banner Bearer at Commencement.

Professors Cheon and Roach have received an NSF award to work on "Integrating Functional Program Verification Techniques into Computer Science Programs". The fundamental goal of this project is to raise the competence of software developers to create and verify reliable software by improving the ability of undergraduate computer science students in reasoning about the correctness of computer programs. To reach this goal, this project has one technical objective and two educational objectives. The technical research objective is to develop practical verification techniques suitable for teaching in undergraduate computer science courses. The educational research objectives are to develop and disseminate learning modules and materials on program verification and to integrate formal program verification - reasoning based on mathematics - into the undergraduate computer science and engineering curriculum.

Dr. Panoff of Shodor will give three talks on outreach in the STEM disciplines on April 30th, at 9:30, 2 and 4, all in Engineering Annex A-227.

Summer Internship plans include: Joshua Martinez to UT Dallas; Daniel Avila, Amritam Sarcar and Nicolle Whitman to Microsoft; Edgar Padilla and Essau Ramirez to Stanford's AHPCRC (more); and Ricky Portillo to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

NSF has granted $315,000 to fund a Summer REU Program in Applied Intelligent Systems, for three years, under the direction of Professor Fuentes. REU program Homepage

Dr. Ann Quiroz Gates was presented with the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Computing at the 2009 Tapia Conference awards ceremony. The Tapia award recognizes an individual with outstanding achievements in scientific scholarship, a strong civic presence within the scientific community, and a dedication to the attainment of true ethnic diversity in computing and related disciplines. Dr. Gates is the Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at El Paso and past chair of the Department of Computer Science. She directs the NSF-funded Cyber-ShARE Center that focuses on developing and sharing resources through cyber-infrastructure to advance research and education in science, and she leads the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), an NSF-funded consortium that is focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics in computing. (April 20, 2009)

UTEP's new Center for Science, Technology, Ethics, and Policy is now operational. >CSTEP homepage<

Alejandro Castaneda's Masters thesis, entitled " Extracting Trust Network Information from Scientific Web Portals," has been selected as the University Outstanding Thesis for 2008. Congratulations to Alejandro and his thesis advisor, Dr. Pinheiro da Silva! See also Alejandro's Student Profile and the Trust Group Homepage.

Two CS-related job categories appear in the list of the top ten "occupations expected to show strong growth in the El Paso area": Computer systems and network analysts, administrators, with 1,193 new jobs expected over the next ten years, and Computer Software Engineers, with 909 new jobs. (source: Workforce Solutions Upper Rio Grande)

Groundbreaking for the new building was held March 12th. >more<

Dr. Longpre was interviewed by KVIA as an expert on phishing; segment to air March 22, 2009.

The 5th Joint UTEP-NMSU Workshop on Mathematics, Computer Science, and Computational Sciences will be held April 4, 2009, at NMSU. >program<

Dr. Freudenthal has been invited to talk on Programming, Physics, and Fun: An Honest Introduction to Computer Science, at CUNY,March 18, 2009.

Dr. Gates is to be a Plenary Speaker at the Tapia Conference. >conference website<

CoE Press Release: Research being done at The University of Texas at El Paso promises to show how to avoid some of the non-verbal pitfalls affecting interactions between Americans and Arabs. >read more<

Dr. Sassenfeld's project, on the development of a comprehensive database and web-based interface tool for prioritization of repairs and financial tracking of resources for the international space station, has been extended by Boeing for a second phase of work.

The UTEP Center for Information Assurance has been formally chartered. Its mission is to promote education and research in information assurance, computer security, and related fields at The University of Texas at El Paso. Dr. Longpre will be the director. (January 15, 2009) In addition, the CS undergraduate program and its security-related courses have been certified by the National Computer Security Center (NCSC, part of the NSA), as mapping 100% to the Committee on National Security Systems (CNSS) National Standards 4011 and 4013E. This means that, once the certificate process is in place, students completing the undergraduate Computer Science program and whose technical electives include Networking, Computer Security, and Web Based Computing will receive a CNSS endorsed certificate attesting to meeting the standards. >more<

"David Novick's Field Guide to Errors in College Writing: How to Detect and Correct Common Problems" is now available online, here.

I am so pleased to announce that Mitesh Meswani has received a Graduate School Dodson Dissertation Fellowship Award, which gives him support to complete his dissertation. The dissertation work he did in the fall and his SC08 Doctoral Showcase presentation clearly indicates that his work is advancing the state-of-the-art and is ready for further publication. We look forward to the completion of his dissertation in 2009. Congratulations, Mitesh! Pat

Congratulations to Princess Trillo, whose paper, "A Study of the Influence of the POWER5 Dynamic Resource Balancing Hardware on Optimal Hardware Thread Priorities", is the winner for the Undergraduate student category of the International Test and Evaluation Association (ITEA) Student Paper Contest! As the winner of the Undergraduate Student category, Princess and Dr. Pat Teller will attend the scholarship luncheon on Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at the Wyndham Airport Hotel in El Paso, Texas. Princess and Mitesh Meswani, whose paper "Measuring and Validating Metrics Used to Estimate Microarchitecture Resource Utilization: a Case Study of the IBM POWER5 Processor" placed second in the graduate student category of the ITEA Student Paper Contest, will present their papers in a session of the conference after the awards luncheon. Both papers will be published in the Proceedings of the Live-Virtual-Constructive ITEA Modeling & Simulation Conference.

ICT summer internship program now accepting applications. >here<

Professor Novick will be an invited speaker at the Seventeenth Annual WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance, March 29-April 1, in Seattle, Washington. He will speak on "Lessons Learned from Research on 'Help'".

X-L Synergy Engineers Receive SAE International Award for Research
SAE International, reprinted by permission. WARRENDALE, Pa. - Jan B. Beck and David C. Nemir of X-L Synergy in El Paso, Texas, are recipients of SAE International's Colwell Merit Award. They were honored during the SAE Power Systems Conference in Bellevue, Wash., Nov. 11-13, 2008.

The Colwell Merit Award, established in 1965, annually recognizes the authors of outstanding papers presented at an SAE conference or SAE section meeting. The late Arch T. Colwell, who first funded this award, served SAE International in many capacities for nearly 50 years, including a term as President in 1941.

This award is funded through the SAE Foundation. In addition to supporting the awards, recognition and scholarship programs of SAE International, the SAE Foundation develops and funds programs and incentives that foster student interest in engineering, scientific and technical education.

The following recipients are recognized for co-authoring, "Arc Fault Detection through Model Reference Estimation" (SAE paper #2006-01-3090). The paper presents an alternative approach to arc detection in arc fault circuit breakers.

Jan B. Beck is a lead research scientist at X-L Synergy. For the past four years, he has led the company's research and development of arc fault technologies for the residential and aviation markets.

Beck earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees from the University of Texas at El Paso in physics, computer science and computer engineering, respectively. He resides in El Paso.

Professor helps plan computer conference

By Brandi Grissom / Austin Bureau, El Paso Times. Reprinted by permission. Posted: 11/23/2008 12:00:00 AM MST11/24/2010

AUSTIN -- More than 11,000 attendees and about 350 exhibitors came together last week at the Austin Convention Center to talk and learn about supercomputers. University of Texas at El Paso computer sciences Professor Pat Teller spent the past three years making it all come together.

"It's in my nature," Teller said on the final day of the four-day SC08 supercomputing conference. "I really am always looking for a challenge."

Teller, who has been at UTEP for 10 years, was the general chairwoman for the 20th national supercomputing conference.

With the help of about 500 of her peers, Teller planned the conference, which gathered some of the biggest names in technology, including IBM, Intel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA and keynote speaker Michael Dell.

She said she got the computer bug when she was studying business. After one programming class, she changed majors.

"What drew me to computer science," she said, "was the logic, the detail and the potential power of using computers to solve problems."

And solving problems was the focus of the conference, she said.

Groups from all over the country in industry, academia, government and research laboratories pool their knowledge to find possible solutions for problems such as producing energy and predicting weather.

Ricardo Portillo, a UTEP doctoral student in computer science who attended the conference, said the theme this year was developments that allow computers to conduct more specialized operations.

Portillo said he has attended UTEP since he was an undergraduate student and views Teller as a role model. "She's not just faculty; she's an actual big player" in the field of supercomputing, he said. "If I approach her level of success, I'll be a happy person."

UTEP President Diana Natalicio stopped by the conference last week to see the results of Teller's work.

Having a UTEP professor lead a national conference, Natalicio said, gives the school more credibility as it seeks to become Texas' next top-tier university.

"That kind of validation will serve us extraordinarily well," she said, "and I'm really grateful Pat was willing to step up."

Professor Novick has been appointed a member of the EPISD (El Paso Independent School District) Strategic Planning Advisory Committee.

Dear Friends, the 5th Joint NMSU/UTEP Workshop on Mathematics, Computer Science, and Computational Sciences will be held at NMSU on Saturday April 4, 2009. John Harding from the NMSU Math Department and Karen Villaverde from the NMSU Computer Science Department kindly agreed to serve as local organizers. Please mark your calendars. (Dr. Kreinovich)

CS Senior Arthur Walton has had a poster accepted at the 9th Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation, in San Diego in December. The poster is on the evaluation of Fern, an a authorization framework suitable for untrusted content distribution networks, such as peer-to-peer systems. Fern graphs were designed to improve on the previous best data structure, skipgraphs, by Goodrich, Winsboro and Tammasia, when real communication latencies are considered. Arthur extended and substantially re-implemented the original fern prototype and built an extensive performance measurement suite to allow evaluation using Planetlab. He demonstrated that fern is in fact about 3 times faster. Arthur works with Drs. Freudenthal and Longpre.

The ACM Student Chapter is starting up again; ideas for events and activities are welcome.

- Natalia Avila, President; Brian A. Carter, Vice President; Edilberto Aguilar, Treasurer; Arely Mendez, Secretary.

We will be holding two events to honor Dr. Juan E. Vargas Ortega, the first computer scientist to be honored as a UTEP Gold Nugget. All are welcome.

Thursday, October 9, 3:30-4:30 p.m. Geology Reading Room, Reception

Friday, October 10, 1:30-2:30 p.m. CS308, CS Colloquium: My Favorite Data Mining Algorithms. Reception following

Dr. Juan E. Vargas Ortega, a 1973 UTEP graduate, has been named a 2008 College of Engineering Gold Nugget. Dr. Vargas Ortega currently serves as the University Relations Manager at Google. He is also a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches data mining, Bayesian networks, embedded and distributed systems, data structures & algorithms, programming languages, and operating systems.

His research interests include data mining, embedded systems, sensor networks, distributed systems and biomedical engineering. His research is published in more than 60 articles, several book chapters, and many conferences. Prior to Google, he was the Senior Academic Relations Manager for Microsoft Corporation.

He earned a PhD from Vanderbilt University, a master's degree from Centro de Investigacion y Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politecnico Nacional (CINVESTAV-IPN), and a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from UTEP.

Princess Trillo, a Senior in the Department of Computer Science, was invited to participate in an informative panel about Opportunities for Undergraduate Research in Computer Science (ourCS) at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, October 1-4, 2008, in Keystone, Colorado. As a panel member, she shared her thoughts about her participation at ourCS 2007, which was held at Carnegie Mellon University, October 5-7, 2007, and which was sponsored by Women@SCS, Carnegie Mellon, and Microsoft Research, and her experience as an undergraduate research assistant at UTEP, which is sponsored by the NSF SHiPPER (Spreading High Performance computing Participation in undergraduate Education and Research) grant (PI: Pat Teller). The goal of the panel was to promote ourCS amongst students and professors. OurCS is a conference for undergraduate women in Computer Science that provides hands-on research and problem solving in teams led by researchers from academia and industry. The conference aims to sustain interest in computer science, to provide the opportunity for networking and to hear about graduate school advice and experiences both from faculty and student perspectives. (Pat Teller)

Dear Friends, our interval conference SCAN'08 is coming to an end.

I want to let you know that quite a few CS students presented at this conference, I want to express my sincere thanks to them: Naga Suman Kanagala, Tanja Magoc, Omar Ochoa, Julian Ortiz-Perez, and Christian Servin. Several other students co-authored presented papers, including Edgar Padilla, and Essau Ramirez. I want to also thank our recent graduates Roberto Araiza and Gang Xiang who gave interesting talks, and Salamah Salamah whose paper was also presented (he could not attend in person). Many many thanks! Now on to Martine's Constraints workshop! Vladik

Alumnus Seetharami Seelam, now at IBM, received an Outstanding Paper award at HPCC-08 (the 10th IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications) for "Workload Performance Characterization of DARPA HPCS Benchmarks", for which he was first author. (from his proud "academic parent", Pat Teller, September 28, 2008)

The newly released book Software Engineering: Effective Teaching and Learning Approaches and Practices includes a chapter by Dr. Roach and Dr. Gates on Teaching Software Engineering in a Computer Science Program Using the Affinity Research Group Philosophy.

A search for a Chair for the CS Department has begun: announcement.

Constraint Programming and Decision Making Workshop, to be held at UTEP, Oct 3-4, 2008. >homepage<

ABET has re-accredited the undergraduate program through 2014.

On Friday August 22, Tanja Magoc, a PhD student of Francois Modave, successfully defended her dissertation proposal on computational finance; Dr. Oscar Varela from the Finance Department is an outside member of her committee. And today, we learned that Tanja's paper on computational finance has been accepted as a book chapter for a Springer-Verlag edited book. Congratulations to Tanja (and to Francois)! (Dr. Kreinovich)

Good news! A review team selected 12 of 44 submissions to be presented at the SC08 Doctoral Showcase. Mitesh Meswani's submission, "Improving Throughput of SMT Processors using Application Signatures and Thread Priorities", was one of those selected.

The 4th Joint UTEP/NMSU Workshop on Mathematics, Computer Science, and Computational Sciences will be held November 8th, 2008.

New interdisciplinary MS and Ph.D. programs in Computational Science will start this Fall. Information is available at the Computational Science website.

The Federal Highway Administration has awarded a grant to Dr. Cheu, Dr. Aldouri, and Dr. Ward (Civil Engineering, Geological Sciences, and CS, respectively), to study the "Effectiveness of Visualization to Improve Public Participation in Transportation Planning (Press Release).

Carlos Rubio has been awarded a CONACyT Scholarship.

Dr. Novick will be returning to the department full-time and serving as Chair, effective August 1, after three years in a variety of administrative positions, including Associate Provost.

Dr. Ann Gates has been appointed Associate Vice President for Research effective September 1, 2008. Formerly the Chair of the Department of Computer Science, Dr. Gates directs the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence, which focuses on developing and sharing resources through cyber-infrastructure to advance research and education in science. A member of the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure, Dr. Gates leads the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions, an NSF-funded consortium focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics in computing. In addition to helping faculty develop their research programs, Dr. Gates will assist the University in the promotion and coordination of multidisciplinary and multi-investigator proposals and projects like the Cyber-ShARE Center, which involves researchers in computer science, computational mathematics, environmental science, and geological sciences. (Roberto Osegueda, Vice President for Research)

A new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Computational Science will start this Fall.

Planning for the new Chemistry and Computer Science Building is progressing smoothly. The new $70.2 million, 140,000 square foot facility will be located at the Northwest corner of Hawthorne and Rim, adjacent to the new Engineering Annex, and overlooking the arroyo, Sunset Heights, and Juarez.

As befits its location at the southern gateway to campus, the building will be an architectural beauty, complete with roof spires. The building will be L-shaped, partially wrapping around the Engineering Annex, and the space in between will be landscaped as a two-level courtyard, complete with greenery, seating and a water feature. While the sides of the building facing out will be in traditional Bhutanese style, the sides facing the courtyard will be curtain walls with hallways running along, lined with windows all the way to provide a sense of space and openness and to bring in light. The building will have numerous study spaces scattered strategically along these corridors and near the labs, with comfortable chairs and tables to support quiet study, study groups, and informal meetings. A first floor hallway will continue out as an elegant pedestrian bridge, connecting with Engineering.

Computer Science offices will be located primarily on the third floor, with some research labs on the second floor and the teaching labs and classrooms on the first floor.

Groundbreaking is likely to occur on November 12 or 13, 2008, with the CS department expected to move in sometime in 2011.

Dr Gates has been elected Senior Member of the IEEE (July 9, 2008).

This is the fifth year Pat Teller has received a contract from the Department of Defense (DoD), High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) User Productivity Enhancement and Technology Transfer (PET) activites through Mississippi State University. Pat is the PI of a project entitled "Simplifying Performance Tool Usage in Eclipse IDE", which represents collaborative work with the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (David Cronk and Shirley Moore) and ParaTools (Sameer Shende. Allen Malony, and Wyatt Spear. Ricardo Portillo, Ph.D. candidate at UTEP, will be be a member of the project's research team.

UTEP has been awarded an NSF Grant for $148K to work on "CPath - CDP: An Integrated, Multidisciplinary, and Cross-Fertilizing Model for Computing Education", with Dr. Modave as Principal Investigator and the co-PIs being Eric Freudenthal, Vanessa Lougheed, and Oscar Varela. The project will develop a comprehensive approach to introducing aspects of computation and algorithm design to students in a wide variety of scientific disciplines. In a collaboration among the Departments of Computer Science (College of Engineering), Biological Sciences (College of Science), and Economics and Finance (College of Business Administration), the project will develop a new computational curriculum suitable for students whose careers will overlap computation and other fields. The work will include development of short tracks for students who are principally "housed" by a different department, and explorations in synergistic curriculum combinations that effectively prepare students for interdisciplinary work. >College Feature Article<

Congratulations to Vladik Kreinovich for representing Computer Science in a $1.2 M grant from the Department of Health and Human Services National Institute of General Medical Sciences. The grant, which begins July 1, is investigating ways to incorporate mathematics, computer science, and chemistry into biological sciences. The grant is being led by Stephen Aley and includes Ming-Ying Leung and Liz Walsh. (Dr. Gates, June 23, 2008)

SC Education 2008 Workshop to be held at UTEP: High Performance Computing in Nano and Bio Sciences Research and Education. >more<

Dear Friends, for those who could not attend today's reception for grant writers, here is the good news:

• our College of Engineering received a special recognition as the best college in grant writing
• our Department of Computer Science received a special recognition as one of the two most grant-successful departments on campus (Biology is the other one)
• in the College of Engineering, our own Ann Gates received a special recognition as one of the two most grant-successful researchers in the College (the other recognized researcher was Soheil Nazarian from Civil Engineering)
• in the College of Engineering, our own Paulo Pinheiro da Silva received a special recognition as one of the two most grant-successful young researchers in the College (the other recognized young researcher was Parisa Shokouhi from Civil Engineering)
• Many congratulations to Ann, to Paulo, and to everyone who participated in grant writing efforts!

Vladik (April 18, 2008)

Today Yoonsik Cheon passed the exam to become an IEEE-CS Certified Software Development Professional. Congratulations! (Dr. Gates, April 11, 2008)

I'm pleased to announce that Steve will be receiving the 2008 Chancellor's Council Outstanding Teaching Award! He will be honored at Convocation this month. (Dr. Gates, April 11, 2008)

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.

Professor Pinheiro gives an invited talk, A Quest to Understand and Accept Scientific Results, at SRI. more

The Second Joint UTEP/NMSU Workshop on Mathematics and Computer Science was held Saturday, 17 November. The abstracts are now available. >link<

Roberto Araiza successfully defended his dissertation today. Congratulations to Dr. Araiza! (Dr. Kreinovich, Nov 16, 2007).

Jaime C. Acosta has been awarded support covering full tuition for the duration of his studies, plus one year of paid leave to work full time on his Ph.D. research, all from the ACTEDS program (Army Civilian Training, Education and Development System).

The third floor display cases now contain recent research posters; please take a look.

Aida Gandara and Christian Servin have been named as two of UTEP's seven AGEP scholars! (September 28, 2007)

Professors Novick and Ward have been awarded a grant for $181,000 to work on "Active Listening and Trust Across Cultures". This work addresses the desire of the Department of Defense to advance the science underlying human interaction and lay the foundation for improving the effectiveness of interviews, especially those where the interviewer and interviewee come from different cultures. This project builds on the resources and methods developed by Novick and Ward for their DARPA and ICT sponsored studies of active listening in Arabic and English, which in turn build on their work on methods for improving turn-taking and utterance timing for making spoken dialog systems more usable.

Congratulations to Abel Licon (CS undergraduate), David Mireles (CS undergraduate), Ricardo Portillo (CS Ph.D. Student), Vladimir Soto (CS undergraduate), and Maria del Carmen Ruiz Varela (CS Ph.D. Student), who were selected to be SC07 Student Volunteers! SC07 is in Reno, NV in November. In addition, Mitesh Meswani, Sarala Arunagiri, and Pat Teller will attend SC07. This year (as in the last three years) UTEP will share in a research booth (this year: 20x20!) with the University of New Mexico, New Mexico State University, and New Mexico Institute of Technology (High-end Computing Along the Rio Grande) as well as ASU and University of Oklahoma. (Dr. Teller, September 21, 2007)

The department received $346,364 from NSF for CCLI Phase 2: Increasing Attractiveness of Computing: The Design and Evaluation of Introductory Computing Coursework that Elicits Creativity. This is for the Georgia Tech -inspired Python course that is being used to attract students into our major through the university cluster program and the computer literacy course. Eric Freudenthal is the PI, and I am a co-PI. We are also collaborating with John Fernandez from TAMU-CC. As many of you know, Aida Gandara has been teaching the computer literacy course, and Kay Roy is now teaching both the literacy course and the university program course. (Dr. Gates, September 18, 2007).

SIGDOC 2007 will be held in El Paso, October 22-24, with Michael Muller as the keynote speaker. SIGDOC is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group (SIG) on the Design of Communication (DOC).

CS4310 (Software Engineering I) will not be offered in Spring 2008. If you plan to graduate in December 2008 and you have not started the 4310-4311 sequence, then you must register for the Fall 2007 course.

The computers on the third floor have been switched from the SE domain to the Miners domain; to log in, use your my.utep password.

Congratulations to Irbis Gallegos who won a First Place Poster Presentation Award for "Towards a General User Tool to Formally Specify Runtime Monitoring Properties for Service-Oriented Applications" at the Seventh Annual MGE@MSA Student Research Conference on April 23, 2007. He also received a stipend of $300. (Ann)

Yoonsik Cheon was awarded an NSF CISE CRI grant entitled "A JML Community Infrastructure---Revitalizing Tools and Documentation to Aid Formal Methods Research." This project will provide a common language and a wide variety of tools to advance and accelerate Java formal methods research. Specifically, the project will (1) enhance JML's infrastructure including its type checker, runtime assertion checking compiler, and IDE support, (2) make JML's software infrastructure more extensible, (3) substantially improve the documentation of the language and its supporting tools, (4) develop course materials and tutorials to facilitate classroom use of JML, and (5) disseminate a well-documented, extensible, open source suite of enhanced JML tools. This 3-year project is a collaboration among several universities, including UTEP, Iowa State, Kansas State, UC-Santa Cruz, Stevens Institute of Tech, and Rose-Hulman.

Gang Xiang successfully completed his defense of his dissertation. Fast Algorithms for Computing Statistics under Interval Uncertainty, with Applications to Computer Science and to Electrical and Computer Engineering". Congratulations Dr. Xiang!

Ann Gates, Vladik Kreinovich, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Aaron Velasco, Craig Tweedie, Leticia Velazquez and Miguel Argaez, and Brian Giza recently received notice from NSF that they have been awarded a $5,000,000 grant to create the Cyber-ShARE Center of Excellence (Sharing resources through Cyber-infrastructure to Advance Research and Education). The Cyber-ShARE Center team will address the challenge of providing information to scientists and other users of cyber-infrastructure (CI) that allows them to make informed decisions about the resources that they retrieve and to have confidence in using results from CI-based applications. They will conduct innovative research to facilitate the development of CI-based applications and increase their use by scientists by enhancing CI results with provenance information, trust recommendations, and uncertainty levels (areas that are recognized as essential for the success of CI); by creating scientist-centered tools and artifacts; and by contributing CI resources to appropriate CI portals including GEON. In addition, the synergistic and multi-disciplinary subprojects will advance knowledge in i) provenance to capture knowledge about uncertainty and trust using results from discipline experts; ii) the physical properties of the Earth by studying CI-based techniques and approaches for integrating data with varying accuracy and sensitivity; iii) optimization of data streams and sensor arrays in ecological and environmental networks by targeting improved characterization of environmental phenomenon and processes. Many of the Center researchers have been involved in national CI efforts, and they will work with an educator who has expertise in technology and science education to create unique and effective CI-based teaching components.

Congratulations to all! This is another great accomplishment of multidisciplinary collaboration spanning three colleges for UTEP. The Cyber-ShARE Center should be a centerpiece for the new Interdisciplinary Engineering and Science Building. It will provide the virtual and real "sticky space" and infrastructure to bring scientists, engineers, and educators together towards a common goal. (Richard T. Schoephoerster, Dean, College of Engineering, July 28, 2007)

Professor Kreinovich's article, Interval Methods In Knowledge Representation, is one of the Top Accessed Articles in the International Journal of Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-Based Systems.

Please join me in congratulating David Mireles, who was selected to receive a $5,000 Hispanic College Fund Scholarship from Google. David Mireles is an undergraduate research assistant co-supervised by Michela and myself and supported by grants from Ming-Ying, Michela and Pat. Congratulations David! (Dr. Thamar Solorio, July 16, 2007)

Dear Friends, I want to share with you the excellent news that Geovany Ramirez has been awarded a CONACYT Doctoral Fellowship. (Professor Fuentes, July 13, 2007)

The department extends its thanks to Steve Roach and Yoonsik Cheon who submitted a successful proposal to the Rockwell Collins University Grants program. The funding will support cooperative learning training for faculty and the purchase of tools to enhance our ability to teach testing in the curriculum. (Professor Gates, Chair, June 2007)

Rafael Escalante has been awarded a scholarship to attend the NAACL Summer School in Human Language Technology, at Johns Hopkins University.

SCAN 2008, the 13th GAMM - IMACS International Symposium on Scientific Computing, Computer Arithmetic and Validated Numerics, will take place at The University of Texas at El Paso, from Sept. 29 to Oct. 3, 2008. SCAN'08 Homepage

Masters student Jaime C. Acosta has been chosen as Graduate Student Marshal for the College of Engineering for the 2007 Spring Commencement.

UTEP is part of the recent award to administer the Army's High Performance Computing Research Center, with the prime contractors being Stanford University and HPTi, a company in the DC area. UTEP's participation centers on two research projects, one focused on multicore technology (Dr. Teller) and one focused on the use of HPC in biological systems research (Dr. Taufer), and one education proposal involving summer programs (Gabby Gandara). As part of this award, the projects at UTEP will have the use of a cluster and visualization equipment will be delivered to UTEP. The award covers a period of five years with an option for five additional years. (April 2007)

Congratulations to Maria on the highly competitive CONACyT Ph.D. Fellowship! --- President Diana Natalicio, April 22, 2007.

(Maria del Carmen Ruiz Varela, who is in the CS PhD program, has been awarded a CONACyT PhD Fellowship for three years, starting this fall.)

Congratulations to Ben and all our students who were honored at Convocation yesterday. I would also like to extend congratulations to all faculty mentors.

- Benjamin Flores, Distinguished Service to Students
- Salamah Salamah, Outstanding Graduate in Computer Science
- Anais G. Rivera, Outstanding Senior in Computer Science
- Richard Zamudio, Department Outstanding Thesis in Computer Science
- Seetharami Seelam, Department Outstanding Dissertation in Computer Science

(Ann Q. Gates, chair)

William Hunt has been awarded an ITEA scholarship.

The Challman Award for 2007 has been given to Christopher Cuellar.

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.

Lillian Torres will intern at Hewlett-Packard in Vancouver Washington.

David Mireles, an undergraduate in the Global Computing Lab under the supervision of Thamar Solorio and Michela Taufer, and Cesar E. Yeep an undergraduate in the Machine Learning Group under the supervision of Olac Fuentes and Thamar Solorio, have been awarded a prestigious fellowship for the 2007 Data Sciences Summer Institute (DSSI) at the Multimodal Information Access and Synthesis (MIAS) Research Group of the University of Illinois at Urbana, Department of Computer Science.

David and Cesar will spend two months at the the University of Illinois at Urbana and will be Undergraduate Research Fellows supported by a monthly stipends. (Dr. Taufer)

1st Joint NMSU/UTEP Workshop on Mathematics and Computer Science to be held April 14.

Texas Instruments has announced a $30k gift to support the participation of students in operating systems projects and research related to embedded systems. This grant was funded to increase the number of students graduating with skills relevant to the development of operating systems suitable for limited memory/power/connectivity applications. These projects are likely to involve use of the 10 OMAP-based PDA development kits donated by TI in the fall of 2006. (Professor Freudenthal, April 2007)

I'm pleased to announce that Salamah was offered and has accepted a tenure-track position at Embry Riddle. He will be leading the Software Engineering group there. (Dr. Gates, April 2007)

Michael Durcholz to intern in the SICA program at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

UTEP Computer Science sent a team of students to compete at the 2007 Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition, March 23-25.

The competition consisted of the following: 1. Complete various business/technical tasks ("injects") which are given to the teams during the contest, 2. Keep the services running and available (web, mail servers, dns, remote access, and more), and 3. Keep attackers out -- a "red team" of attackers was trying to cause trouble throughout the contest.

The UTEP team consisted of two grad students, Steve Gutstein and Guillermo Lopez, and 6 undergrad students: Hieu Duong, Frederick Kautz, Carlos Natividad, David Nevarez, Erik Madrid, Marcus Valenzuela. Also attending as coach/organizer (part of the "white team") were Eric Freudenthal, Luc Longpre, and Tom Mikelson. (pic)

The team competed with teams from New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma. The team ranked 5th out of 10, which is very good considering it was our first team participation at such an event and that many of our team members were novice. More importantly, it was a great learning experience for all team members. (Dr. Longpre, March 2007).

Please join me in congratulating David Mireles, who has been selected as a 2007-2008 Microsoft Technical Scholarship recipient. David, who has been working with Dr. Solorio, will received tuition support and will participate to a 12-week internship at Microsoft this summer. Congratulations David! (Dr. Taufer, March 2007)

Our CS Graduate Admissions Acceptance Estimator was featured in the March 2007 Communications of the ACM.

UTEP to host a NCSI Workshop on Parallel and Cluster Computing, May 20-26. >more<

We are forming a team for the Southwest Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC) to be held on the weekend of 23 March. Details are here; contact Carlos Natividad (canatividad @ utep . edu) ASAP if you'd like to join. Beginners are welcome. (March 9, 2007, Professor Freudenthal)

Maria Varela Ruiz and Ricardo Portillo will intern this summer at Sandia National Laboratories.

Alejandro Castenada, Maria Varela Ruiz and Ricardo Portillo will intern this summer at Sandia National Laboratories.

The 20 Linux PCs in Lab CS300 have been replaced with new machines.

Some news about our students: Trilce Estrada, Richard Zamudio, David Flores, and Daniel Catarino are authors of three papers that have been accepted in three important workshops, PADSS'07, PCGrid'07 and HPGC'07. Pat Teller, Andre Kerstens, and Michela Taufer are co-authors in all three papers. In one paper David Anderson (UC Berkeley) is co-author, in another paper Karan Bathia and Brent Stearn (SDSC) are co-authors, and in the third paper Charlie Brooks and Roger Armen (the Scripps Research Institute) are co-authors.

Ph. D. student Irbis Gallegos featured at the Graduate School website, here.

The most viewed article in Reliable Computing over the past 90 days is "Towards Optimal Use of Multi-Precision Arithmetic: A Remark", by our own Dr. Kreinovich, with Siegfried Rump. (link)

Good news from one of our graduates, Wendy Korn. After working as an undergraduate researcher with Dr. Teller, she graduated and went to work at IBM-Austin. Because of her experience in performance analysis/evaluation, she worked with senior people in the area and did very well. She recently left IBM to go with another company. But, before she left, she wrote a paper that will appear in ACM SIGARCH News, in the first issue of 2007, about the new SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks. (Dec. 1, 2006)

Professors David Novick and Nigel Ward will give invited talks at the International Workshop on Cross-cultural and Culture-specific Aspects of Conversational Backchannels and Feedback, December 5-7, 2006, at the Institute for Creative Technologies, in Marina del Rey, California.

Irbis Gallegos received a best poster award at the 2006 MGE@MSA/WAESO Research Conference held on April 21, 2006 at Arizona State University for his work on Discovering Observable Entities From Use-Case Scenarios.

Dr. Gates was included in Hispanic Business magazine's "100 Influentials List 2006", a list of 100 people honored for their efforts in raising the Hispanic profile and for serving as role models. Specifically noted were her contributions to education, including her work on the Affinity Research Group model, a framework created to successfully involve undergraduate and graduate students in research.

Gates will also be honored by the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on Oct. 19 at the 8th Annual Biz Tech Expo.

We received the first shipment of OMAP-based Cell/PDA development kits donated by Texas Instruments. These kits include: an OMAP-based TI CPU (an ARM derivative), a touch-screen, a GSM phone subsystem, a Bluetooth subsystem, and lots of ports (audio, USB, serial, Ethernet, CF, mini-pci). I plan to integrate these devices into the curriculum for Graduate Operating Systems, and maybe also use them with undergraduate students. TI also hopes to be able to support two students who show promise in their use of these systems through (1) tuition support at UTEP and (2) internships at TI. For those of us unpacking these impressive toys, it feels a bit like Christmas. (Dr. Freudenthal, September 2006)

JML (the Java Modeling Language) is becoming mainstream; the second edition of Tucker and Noonan (Programming Languages, Principles and Paradigms, 2e, McGraw Hill, 2007), includes a whole section devoted to JML, based largely on Dr. Cheon's dissertation work on JML and its runtime assertion checking. This work being continued here at UTEP, in the UTJML Project.

Carlos Rubio and Joaquin Aguilar receive fellowships to attend the Fourteenth ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (Inspirations Program).

All new machines (faster, more compact) installed in Lab 300B. Clients only changed; no server or software changes. Questions to Leo. (Sept 29, 2006)

Richard Zamudio (PhD student), David Flores (Master Student), Karina Escapita, Daniel Catarino, and Abel Licon (undergraduate students) have been selected to participate in the SC2006 Student Volunteer Program. SC06, the premier international conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis, takes place in November 2006 in Tampa. More than 10,000 participants are expected to attend this event. Our students will assist with the administration of the conference together with other students from universities all over the country and will receive in exchange, free conference registration, housing for out-of-town volunteers and most meals. Besides serving as volunteer students at SC06, Karina, Daniel, Abel, David and Richard will attend interesting talks and help Pat, Andre, and I with the UTEP booth that for the third year presents the research in high performance computing at UTEP in the exposition area of the conference. (Dr. Taufer, September 2006).

Dr. Teller and Taufer have have been awarded an S-STEM NSF grant. The title of the grant is: SHiPPER: Spreading High-Performance computing Participation in undergraduate Education and Research. The grant aims to create and consolidate a community of UG and graduate students who will pursue advanced degrees in fields that combine expertise in high-performance computing and other scientific and engineering disciplines. (Sept 25, 2006)

Sample September Output and Activities:

Conference and Workshop papers:
    "The Effectiveness of Threshold-based Scheduling Policies". Trilce Estrada, D.A. Flores, M. Taufer, P.J. Teller, A. Kerstens, and D.P. Anderson. in eScience 2006.
    "Workflow-Driven Ontologies: An Earth Sciences Case Study". Leonardo Salayandia, Paulo Pinheiro da Silva, Ann Gates, and Flor Salcedo. in eScience 2006.
    "Fairness and Performance Isolation: an Analysis of Disk Scheduling Algorithms". Seetharami Seelam and Patricia Teller, in the Proceedings of the International Workshop on High Performance I/O Techniques and Deployment of Very Large Scale I/O Systems (HIPERIO'06) to be held in conjunction with CLUSTER 2006, September 25-27, 2006, Barcelona, Spain.
    "Rate- Controlled Scheduling of Expired Writes for Volatile Caches". Seetharami Seelam, Jayaraman Suresh Babu, and Patricia Teller , in the Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST'06), September 11-14, 2006, Riverside, CA.
    "Prosodic Feature Generation for Back-channel Prediction." Thamar Solorio, Olac Fuentes, Nigel Ward, Yaffa Al Bayyari. Interspeech 2006.
    "A Case Study in the Identification of Prosodic Cues to Turn-Taking: Back-Channeling in Arabic." Nigel G. Ward and Yaffa Al Bayyari. Interspeech 2006.

Activities:
    Ward, Al Bayyari, and Solorio presented work on "Learning to Show You're Listening: A Trainer for Back-Channeling in Arabic" at the University of Pittsburgh, Sept 22, 2006.    
    (It's not research but ...) Dr. Modave won the Chile Pepper Bike Ride (100 miles) by 8 minutes on September 24th.

Linux Instructional Lab now fully operational; questions to Jose.

Many of you may have heard in the news over the weekend that NASA announced that Lockheed Martin was awarded a multi-billion dollar contract to build NASA's manned lunar spaceship. UTEP CS was included in the contract: Steve Roach will lead a Software Engineering effort, and Rodrigo Romero is also included in the grant. There are also efforts by other faculty in the College. Great news for UTEP! (Ann, September 2006)

Richard Zamudio and Omar Ochoa win AGEP Fellowships. (August 2006)

The department has received a Texas Technology Workforce Development Grant award for $284,882 to support three activities: Peer-Led Team Learning in CS1-CS3, an internship program for 30 high school students in collaboration with NewTec (a joint venture owned by Computer Sciences Corp., Lockheed Martin, TRAX International and Northrup Grumman), and funding for undergraduate research involvement using the Affinity Research Group model. The funding is for a two-year effort.

The team that put together the proposal includes: Steve Roach (PI), Judy Rienhartz (Associate Dean of Education, co-PI), David Carrejo (Asst. Professor, Education), Elsa Villa, and Ann Gates. (Aug 7, 1006)

Dr. Longpre will be giving an invited talk on Measuring Privacy in Statistical Databases at the NSF-sponsored workshop on Computational Methods for Security in a Web Environment, to be held in Arica, Chile.

I would like to share with you more great news. Daniel Catarino, an undergraduate student in our department and research assistant in the GCLab, has been awarded with a 2006-2007 Hispanic College Fund (HCF) Scholarship supported by Google. This year it was particularly challenging: HCF got 11,000 applications and selected only 500 scholars, making the selection process extremely competitive. (Michela Taufer, July 17, 2006.)

Martine and I are very pleased to announce that Trilce Estrada (PhD student in my group) and Luis-David Lopez (PhD student in Martine's group) have been awarded Conacyt fellowships. This is a very prestigious three-year fellowship that is given in Mexico to PhD students who study in USA. We wish Trilce and Luis-David a very fruitful time at UTEP and a very successful PhD work. (Michela Taufer, July 12, 2006.)

Dear Friends, I am very pleased to share with you this very good news. Adrian Garcia, an undergraduate in our department, has been selected to participate in the High Performance Computing in Action Summer Institute at the University of Hawaii. I want to thank Francois for joining me in writing the letters of recommendation for Adrian and I wish Adrian a fruitful time at the University of Hawaii. (Dr. Taufer, July 10, 2006).

Dear Friends, I have just learned that at the recent prestigious 19th International FLAIRS Conference on Artificial Intelligence our own Olac Fuentes received the Best Poster Award, for the paper "Automated Classification of Astronomical Objects in Multispectral Wide-field Images", by Jorge de la Calleja and Olac Fuentes. Congratulations to Olac! (Dr. Kreinovich, May 17, 2006)

Hieu Duong, Jerald Brady, Michael Havens, and Alexandra Ogrey (all undergraduates in CS) were awarded scholarships to attend the Texas A&M Center for Information Assurance and Security's intensive 3-week "Information Assurance Summer School." (Dr. Freudenthal, May 5, 2006)

Dr. Taufer receives ARP funding to work on RNA Secondary Structure Prediction Using a Grid of Heterogeneous Computers.

Carlos Natividad has been awarded a 2006 summer internship with the Alaska Research Summer Challenge.

I am pleased to announce that Fares Fraij received the University's Outstanding Dissertation for 2005 for "Verification of Transformation Rules of the Higher Order Transformation Language TL". Congratulations also to his dissertation chair, Dr. Roach! (Ann Quiroz Gates, Head, April 6, 2006)

Dear Friends, This is just to let you all know that our own Ann Gates has been recently invited to join NSF's Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure. Some background is here. This is an extemely prestigious and very important position. Congratulations to Ann! (Dr. Kreinovich, March 23, 2006)

Alejandro Castaneda will be the Banner Bearer representing the College of Engineering at Spring 2006 commencement.

CS CHEER (loud and in unison!) (for TCM and other special occasions)

One bit, two bits,
A nibble, a byte
UTEP C-S
Fight Fight Fight

I would like to acknowledge and thank Rodrigo Romero for organizing the CS session for Engineering Expo. I hear that it was a success. The students involved were Irbis Gallegos, Richard Zamudio, and Jerald Brady. In addition, three teams from the CS3432 class presented their robot projects. My thanks to Rodrigo and the students who volunteered their time to help promote CS. Your efforts make a difference! (Dr. Gates, Feb 20, 2006)

Omar Ochoa has been awarded an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award. Congratulations! (Dr. Gates, Feb 10, 2006)

Some recent theses and dissertations now available online in the UTEP Digital Commons.

Dear friends, I have just learned that a paper "Interval-based multicriteria decision making" by our own Martine Ceberio and Francois Modave appeared in the prestigious Elsevier-published book "Modern Information Processing: From Theory to Applications" edited by Bernadette Bouchon-Meunier, Giulianella Coletti and Ronald Yager, recognized leaders in the area of uncertainty. According to Elsevier flier, this book is a collection of carefully selected papers drawn from the program of the International Conference on Processing and Management of Uncertainty IPMU'04, which was held in Perugia, Italy. Congratulations to Martine and Francois for the great recognition! (Vladik, Feb. 9, 2005)

The Planetlab consortium is donating two dual-core Pentium-D hosts for installation at UTEP. These two computers will become part of the 600+ node planetary scale distributed experimental testbed used for research in self-organizing distributed systems. (Eric Freudenthal, Feb 8., 2005)

Luis Garcia receives a GEM MS Engineering Fellowship sponsoring by IBM, which also provides two paid summer internships. (Sue Walker, Feb 3, 2005)

In collaboration with Denis Soden from IPED and Yi-Chang Chiu from Civil Engineering, Eric Freudenthal was awarded a grant of $180lk by AAI Corporation to investigate homeland-defense and civilian applications of unmanned aerial vehicles.

Lab 300 has been remodeled to include a small teaching room in the Northeast corner. Soon the computers from room 308 will be moved there, then room 308 will be turned into the new Computer Security and Networks Laboratory. Later in the semester the Sun workstations will be replaced with Linux machines. (Feb 1, 2005)

We are having our Third General Meeting this coming Friday, January 27th at 1:30 in CS 308. Rosalba Scotto, Business Manager from EDS for the El Paso and Juarez centers will give a talk about the company and projections for the next few years. Here is some background. (Salwah Velador, ACM Student Chapter President)

Professors Ward and Novick, together with Professor Amastae in Linguistics and Professor Lucker in Psychology, have been awarded $419,876 to work on the prosody of turn-taking, with application to the extension of a training system for learners of Arabic. >more<

In partnership with IBM's Academic Initiative, Computer Science hosted four technical briefings in 2005. In addition, a number of briefings are being planned for 2006. IBM's Academic Initiative (link) promotes open standards technology in higher education to train the IT workforce for emerging jobs, give required skills to future IT workers, and assist in making curricula relevant for the anticipated jobs. See the coverage in the El Paso Times. (Rodrigo Romero, January 10, 2005)

Sheline John to co-op at IBM in Rochester Minnesota for 6 months.

Our Fall 2005 Graduates: Fares Fraij (Ph.D.), Annette Arrigucci, Sanjeev Chopra, Richard Coy, Ashaveena Perumandla (M.S.), Travis Carr, Angel Contreras, Jesus Corral, Gladis De Santiago, Edith Elizalde, Jose Fernandez, Vincent Fonseca, Jesus Gamez, Omar Garcia, Sarah Guerrero, Edgar Luna, Edgar Morales, Adrian Murguia, Smitha Nair, Norma Ortiz, Saul Portillo, Rodrigo Ramirez, Michael Rivera, Axel Rodriguez, Luis Sanchez, Baltaar Santaella, Christian Servin, Mario Zamora (B.S.). Congratulations all!

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)

Dr. Gates has been named co-chair (CS Program) of the 2006 Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE). >conference web site<

Dr. Teller was elected General Chair of 2008 Supercomputing Conference, to be held in Austin.

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!

CHC60: The IEEE Computer Society 60th Anniversary History Competition opens >more<

UTEP joins PlanetLab; invents new control switch, the Planetlabber. >more<. (September 20, 2005)

Two NSF-funded RA positions are available immediately to study software specification and verification methods. (pdf announcement)

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)

Nova feature.

I am very pleased to announce that Florence Challman has donated $25,000 to create an endowed scholarship to honor the memory of long-time friend and colleague in the CS Department, Ronald Challman. As per her request, the scholarship will support a junior or senior majoring in CS. Preference will be given to a student who is in need of financial assistance in order to attend UTEP on a full-time basis. (Benjamin C. Flores)

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)

The NSF will support Professors Cheon and Teller's work on the Unification of Verification and Validation. (details)

Please join me in congratulating Michela, Martine, (and me)! We just got notification that the NSF awarded a sizeable grant to us and collaborators Charles L. Brooks of The Scripps Research Institute and David P. Anderson of The University of California, Berkeley. The project is called: "SCI: Collaborative Research: DAPLDS - a Dynamically Adaptive Protein-Ligand Docking System based on Multi-Scale Modeling" (link). Michela is the project lead. (Dr. Teller, August 31, 2005)

The paper "Towards a Cross-Platform Microbenchmark Suite for Evaluating Hardware Performance Counter Data", by Roberto Araiza, Maria Gabriela Aguilera, Thientam Pham, and Patricia J. Teller, has been accepted for presentation at the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference 2005, in Albuquerque.

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

HOSTED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO-COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT, IN COLLABORATION WITH THE SOFTWARE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ORGANIZATION OF EL PASO (SITO)

Developing on Open Standards Databases

July 12, Undergraduate Learning Center (UGLC), room 128, Time: 2:30p-6:00p

This briefing illustrates the features to look for in a database solution depending on the requirements of your application. Whether you are looking to develop on Linux or Windows, develop on open standards to ease portability and deployment, need low management with self-tuning and self-configuring autonomic capabilitie

Process and Portfolio Management

August 9, Undergraduate Learning Center (UGLC), room 220, Time: 2:30p-6:15p

There are various roles that members of a development team play. In order for each participant to be a successful contributor, project management is essential to better plan, implement, measure and execute the goals of the project. The objective of this briefing is to focus on the latest tools available for technical project managers and lead developers to help them minimize project risk, adapt to project change, ensure clear communication across the team, measure progress objectively, and make fast decisions based on real data. Attendees will be made familiar with tools that address the specific needs of project managers.

Building Better Software Faster with the IBM Software Development Process

September 13, Union Building East, room 313 (Templeton Suite), Time: 9:00a-12:30p

The software architect and the software developer are key roles for successful software development. The architect is responsible for turning requirements into analysis and design models. The software developer is responsible for designing and implementing an executable code solution, testing the resulting components, and analyzing runtime profiles to debug errors that might exist. A software developer may also be responsible for creating the software's architecture and for employing rapid application development tools. This briefing will demonstrate the IBM Rational Software Development tools, their broad range of functionality and their use throughout the entire software development process, focusing on application modeling, design, development, coding, testing, and deployment. The attendee will get an understanding of the breadth and depth of the Rational tools, how well they're integrated, and how easy they are to use.

Implementing a Service-Oriented Architecture

October 11, Union Building East, room 313 (Templeton Suite), Time: 9:00a-4:30p

A SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) is a component model that inter-relates the different functional units of an application, called services, through interfaces and contracts between these services. The interface is well defined in a neutral manner that is independent of the hardware platform, the operating system, and the programming language the service is implemented in. This neutrality is known as loose coupling between services. The benefit of a loosely coupled system is its agility and its ability to survive changes in the structure and implementation of the services that make up the whole application. Loosely-coupled systems are necessary if a business application is to become agile and based upon the needs of the business to adapt to changes in its environment such as changing policies, business strengths, business focus, partnerships, industry standing, and other business-related factors that influence the nature of the business. This briefing provides an in-depth look at SOA, starting with the basics of the technologies, and focusing on tools for designing and constructing a SOA. The briefing closes with a review of best practices, resources, and calls to action.

Seminars are offered at no cost. Please RSVP at: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/views/global/techbriefing.jsp

Map of UTEP campus: http://www.utep.edu/search/campusmap.aspx

For more information:

Dr. Rodrigo Romero, Computer Science Dept.
University of Texas at El Paso
500 W. University Dr.
El Paso, TX 79968
Phone: 915-747-8819
Fax: 915-747-5030
E-mail: raromero2@utep.edu

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.

Jose Luis Lopez was awarded a Texas Space Grant Consortium Graduate Fellowship. (June 8, 2005)

Jose Luis Lopez is interning in Austin, TX, with IBM in the UNIX Software Build department, leading a "Speed Team".

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.

Christian Servin, Jesus Corral and Luis Perez, all CS undergraduates, have been selected to participate in the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) REU internship 2005. They will have the chance to travel to Alaska to gain real-world experience in a high-tech field working with high-caliber computing professionals. For more information about the ARSC REU program: http://www.arsc.edu/programs/interns/aboutARSC.html

Oscar Mondragon was given the University Outstanding Dissertation Award for 2004 for his work, "Elucidation and Specification of Software Properties Through Patterns and Composite Propositions to Support Formal Verification Techniques". Oscar's advisor was Professor Gates.

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).
I have just been informed that among the five most viewed article from Reliable Computing, Kluwer-published journal (that are listed on the journal's webpage (http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1385-3139), are two papers with UTEP authors.
One of them is our joint paper with Martine in which Martine is the first author:
Martine Ceberio and Vladik Kreinovich, "Fast Multiplication of Interval Matrices (Interval Version of Strassen's Algorithm)", Reliable Computing, 2004, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 241-243.
We wrote this paper when she was still a visiting professor. Congratulations to Martine on a great start!
Another paper is our joint paper with Luc, in which the first author is Hung T. Nguyen, our colleague from New Mexico State University:
Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, and Luc Longpre, "Dirty Pages of Logarithm Tables, Lifetime of the Universe, and (Subjective) Probabilities on Finite and Infinite Intervals", Reliable Computing, 2004, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 83-106.
Vladik

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.

On June 30th Cassini will cross Saturn's ring plane. A point between the F-ring and the G-ring was chosen in part based on the results of analysis software built for NASA by Professor Roach, Carlos Trujillo, and Gabriel Marquez. Professor Roach will be at NASA to witness the historic moment. (Cassini's Orbital Entry Spot)

The goal of the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) AGEP Visitation Programs is to provide undergraduate and masters students with firsthand experience and exposure to graduate education and to recruit students from the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines to Ph.D. programs. This is a four-day program, from September 19-22, 2004. AGEP will provide hotel accommodation, meals, and the cost of round trip transportation for all participants. The deadline for applications to the UTEP visitation program is August 19, 2004. More information is available here.
The Computer Science is authorized to invite 2 or 3 participants. If interested, please first contact Sue Walker, swalker@cs.utep.edu.
Visitation Program participants may also apply to become an AGEP scholar. AGEP scholars receive up to 5 years of funding (tuition plus a yearly stipend) and benefit from an intensive mentoring and retention program, participation in the Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) Program and attendance at professional development seminars and workshops.

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)

Dr. Martine Ceberio (homepage), currently a visiting professor, will be formally joining the department as an Assistant Professor, effective this fall.

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.

Texas A&M will offer a 10 week summer research experience for undergraduates. The experience includes $6000 stipend, plus up to an additional $500 for travel to and from TAMU. More information and application can be found at the program's web page, http://www.cs.tamu.edu/REU. Please note the application deadline is Monday, March 1.

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). December 2004 Graduates
Preliminary graduation packets, consisting of an advisor-signed degree plan and official transcript, are due in Engineering Dean's office (E-230) by february 20th. No late packets will be accepted.

First year MS student Gaby Aguilera has been chosen to participate in the Grad Cohort Workshop of the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), in Seattle.

Elsa Tai has been been selected for Honorable Mention in the Computing Research Association's Outstanding Undergraduate Award for 2004.

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).

UTEP's Interval Computations Web Site was featured in American Scientist, Nov-Dec 2003 issue, in the article A Lucid Interval.

News: Four of our students will attend SC2003 -- Igniting Innovation -- (web site) in Phoenix, AZ, November 17-21. This conference continues the 15-year Supercomputing Conference tradition of highlighting the most innovative developments in high-performance computing and networking.
Mitesh Meswani and Diana Villa (Ph.D. candidates), Maria Gabriela Aguiliera (Master's candidate), and Alonso Eloy Bayona (undergraduate) will be student volunteers. Professor Teller will also attend; she is the Conference Finance Chair .

Wintermester Course
CS 3190 Special Topics in Programming: Introduction to Java
Instructor: Jabel Morales
One credit hour
1:30-3:10 p.m. MUWRF
Prerequisites: Normal prerequisite (CS 3360) waived; Departmental permission required
Description: This course is designed for students who had CS 1401 in Scheme and will be taking CS 2401 in the spring 2004 semester. The course will help these students partly catch up with students who took the Java-oriented CS 1401 in the fall 2003 semester. The course is also suitable for people who are proficient programmers in a language other than Java and who wish to get a rapid introduction to Java programming. Substantial work outside class will be required; students should plan on spending about four or more hours per day outside of class on programming assignments.

Congratulations! The UTEP Office of Scholarships has awarded 20 graduate and 20 undergraduate NSF scholarships for 2003-2004. We would like to congratulate the following CS students who have been selected to receive these scholarships. We are proud of you!
Graduate Awardees: Anthony Castanares, Salamah Salamah, Flor Salcedo, and Carlos Trujillo
Undergraduate Awardee: Ricardo Correa
Students, if you applied and did not receive an award this time around, do not despair! Your application will be re-considered as new slots become available for the Spring.
For more information on how to apply for this and other scholarship and fellowship opportunities, stop by and see Sue-Ann Walker, CS Room 204!

Graduation Procedures (Undergraduate)
December 2003 candidates must fill out a graduation application and obtain a signature by their advisor. Candidates then need to schedule an exit interview with Dr. Novick and obtain his signature. Completed applications with all signatures are due in the Dean's office by October 13. Applications are accepted after October 13, but are assessed a $40 late fee.
May/August 2004 candidates must submit a preliminary graduation packet to the Dean's office by October 3. Packet consists of an official transcript from the UTEP Records office (Goldmine printout is NOT acceptable) and a properly filled degree plan with advisor's signature. Request a transcript for UTEP-use only, which is free of charge. Late packets are NOT accepted. Failure to submit packet may result in delayed graduation.
These processes take several days, so it is safest to begin now. Questions can be directed to ug_advisors@cs.utep.edu, or directly to Mr. Fernandez or Mr. Bell.

Many students have been unable to complete visa procedures in time to enroll for the Fall semester. The CS department policy is to allow all such students to defer admission to the Spring. If you are such a student, please send mail to the Graduate Student Coordinator so she may notify the Graduate School.

Microsoft undergraduate research fellowships for Fall 2003 awarded to Javier Vasquez and Gabriel Marquez (advisor: Steve Roach), Thien Tham (advisor: Pat Teller), and Tasha Hollingshed and Javier Aldaz-Salmon (advisor: Karen Ward). (picture page)

Hewlett-Packard has donated four dual-processor 900 MHz Itanium-2 workstations to provide for academic and research support into High Performance Computing. This Hardware Gift/Grant was part of the Hewlett-Packard Company Advanced Technology Platforms - Itanium 2 2003 Academic Grant Initiative. The Principal Investigator is Brian J. d'Auriol and the Co-PIs are Patricia Teller, Nigel Ward, Jack Chessa, Ann Quiroz Gates, Vladik Kreinovich and Randy Keller. >El Paso Times Article<

On July 2, 2003, two visiting researchers from Brazil - Antonio Carlos da Rocha Costa and Gracaliz P. Dimuro - come to our department; they will stay in El Paso until July 13. (Vladik Kreinovich)

Pat Teller was the recipient of a 2003 IBM Faculty Award for work on "Commercial Workload Performance on the p690 Memory Hierarchy Phase 2 - A General Method of Generating Miss Rate Information for Future System." In addition, an IBM SUR (Shared University Research) grant was awarded to Dr. Teller, her co-PIs, (Biological Sciences faculty) Stephen Aley, Lisa Bain, William Baldwin, and Siddhartha Das, (Chemistry faculty) Boguslaw Stec, (Electrical and Computer Engineering faculty) Patricia Nava and David Williams, and (Computer Science Ph.D. candidate) Diana Villa, and the IBM SUR team, Robert Amezcua, Tracy Diaz, Robert Acosta, and Olga Sundermann Larios. The SUR grant, one of 19 awards world-wide, which brings to UTEP an IBM eServer pSeries 690 (p690), targets collaborative (with IBM) performance-related research, as well as biology and chemistry research. The picture shows Marcos Villareal from IBM-Austin (Marcos is a UTEP alum) training CS sysadmin Jose Hernandez, and IT (Information Technology) sysadmin Ruben Franco, to manage the operation of the 8-processor p690. Marcos' visit was made possible by IBM-Austin. (More at the IBM CAS web site).

I'm pleased to announce that Yoonsik Cheon (Iowa Website) will be joining the department this fall as an assistant professor. He'll work with Steve Roach and Ann Gates in our software engineering research area. My special thanks to Ann and Steve for recruiting Yoonsik. - David Novick

Alumni Please Contact Us!

This fall the Department will be celebrating its 20th anniversary. Alumni, please contact Beatriz (btarango@utep.edu) in the main office with your current e-mail address, so that we may keep you informed of plans. (Of the 954 CS graduates so far, we have contact information for only a fraction.)
Ideas for how to commemorate the occasion are also welcome.

Apr 28  7:00 am - 10:00 pm    Sr,Gr,& Doc    N - Z



Apr 29  7:00 am - 10:00 pm    Sr,Gr,& Doc    A - M



Apr 30  7:00 am -  2:30 pm    Sr,Gr,& Doc    N - Z



        2:31 pm - 10:00 pm    Sr,Gr,& Doc    A - M



May 1   7:00 am - 10:00 pm    Juniors        N - Z



May 2   7:00 am - 10:00 pm    Juniors        A - M



May 5   7:00 am -  2:30 pm    Juniors        N - Z



        2:31 pm - 10:00 pm    Juniors        A - M



May 6   7:00 am - 10:00 pm    Sophomores     N - Z



May 7   7:00 am - 10:00 pm    Sophomores     A - M



May 8   7:00 am -  2:30 pm    Sophomores     N - Z



        2:31 pm - 10:00 pm    Sophomores     A - M



May 9   7:00 am - 10:00 pm    Freshmen       N - Z



May 12  7:00 am - 10:00 pm    Freshmen       A - M



May 13  7:00 am -  2:30 pm    Freshmen       N - Z



        2:31 pm - 10:00 pm    Freshmen       A - M



May 14  7:00 am - 10:00 pm    OPEN TO ALL    A - M



May 15  7:00 am - 10:00 pm    OPEN TO ALL    N - Z



May 16  7:00 am -  6:00 pm    OPEN TO ALL    A - M



May 19  7:00 am -  6:00 pm    OPEN TO ALL    N - Z

When: Friday, March 7th 



	Friday, March 14th



	Saturday, March 15th



	Friday, March 28th 



	Friday, April 4th 



	Friday, April 11th



Times: 



	Fridays:



	  9:00  - 10:30 a.m.



	 10:30 - 12:00 noon



	 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.



	  3:00 - 4:30 p.m.  







	Saturday:



	 9:00 - 10:30 a.m.



	10:30 - 12:00 noon







Where: CS Conference Room for all sessions with the exception of Fridays at 3:00.  This room will be a classroom TBD.







How: 	Step 1:  Students MUST sign up for a session IN ADVANCE with Beatriz.



	Step 2:  Students must bring a CURRENT transcript to the session (printout from Goldmine is fine).







Students should be aware that space is limited for each session.



The early dates will be restricted to students who have completed Data Structures with a "C" or better.







If students cannot attend any of the above sessions, they must schedule an appointment with their respective advisor.



Please note that availability is extremly limited.







Advisors will not be available during the summer; please get advice regarding fall now.







The fall schedule of CS classes should be available on the CS web page before advising starts.







For more specifics, see posted flyers or contact Bea, Nelly, or Frank.







Thanks!



Frank and Nelly