Greetings from the Chair

Welcome to the Fall 2003 edition of the UNO Computer Science Department web Newsletter. We wish to keep the department's friends and alumni up-to-date with regard to activities and events within the department. Computer Science is a field that evolves very rapidly and our department changes as it keeps current with technology and with the art of computing. We hope you find interesting the news you read in the newsletter. Also we encourage input from our readers. Feel free to offer suggestions for the newsletter. Let us know if you would like to be included in our mailing list. Alumni can view the general UNO alumni webpage by clicking here. If you would like to be considered for possible inclusion in an upcoming alumni feature section, please email alumni.

Best wishes from the Department, and now please read on.  

Mahdi Abdelguerfi
Professor & Chair

New Faculty

 We welcome our new faculty members:  Dr. Nauman Chaudhry, Dr. Yixin Chen and Dr. Stephen Winters-Hilt.

Dr. Nauman Chaudhry

In his own words:

I have joined UNO after working in the software industry for Oracle Corporation. In industry I worked on numerous projects to make database systems more manageable and easy to tune. It was very satisfying to see Software developed by me being used by a lot of database administrators to solve their problems. However, after some years in industry I came to the conclusion that I would be happier having the freedom of choosing my projects and executing them to the depth I wanted. Academia provides this opportunity, as well as an environment with a lot of energetic minds. Before coming to New Orleans I lived in the beautiful city of San Francisco and worked at the Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores. A stint of living in suburbia, before I moved to San Francisco, had made me realize that I should carefully choose a place of employment so that I can live in a city with character rather than living in the boring suburbs. UNO in this enchanting city seemed an excellent place to me to make my switch to academia. I currently live in the Garden District, easy walking distance from a number of cafes and restaurants.

I was born and grew up in the ancient city of Lahore, Pakistan. Lahore is an old (more than a millennium old) and big (more than 5 million people) city. After getting a B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan to attend the University of Michigan. There I received MSE and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science & Engineering. In Lahore the summer temperature regularly soars above 110F and sometimes past 115F.
In Ann Arbor, I have lived through winter days when the temperature fell below -50F (including wind chill). One "benefit" of having experienced these extremes of temperature is that I now find most climates relatively moderate.

Dr Yixin Chen 

In his own words:

Yixin Chen received the B.S. degree from the Department of Automation,Beijing Polytechnic University, China, in 1995, the M.S. degree in control theory and application from Tsinghua University, China, in 1998, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, in 1999 and 2001, respectively.
In 2003, he received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. Since August 2003, he has been an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of New Orleans, New Orleans.

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His research interests include machine-learning, bio-informatics, computer vision, robotics and control, and soft computing. He is the author or coauthor of more than 20 journals articles and refereed conference papers. He has served as a reviewer for over 10 journals and many conferences.

Recent Publications:

» Yixin Chen and James Z. Wang, "Support Vector Learning for Fuzzy
Rule-Based Classification Systems," IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, vol. 11, no. 6, December 2003.
» Yixin Chen, James Z. Wang, and Robert Krovetz, "Content-Based Image Retrieval by Clustering," 5th ACM SIGMM International Workshop on
Multimedia Information Retrieval, Berkeley, CA, November 2003.

Invited Talks: Dr. Chen is invited to the following talks:

» NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, November 2003
» Department of EECS, Tulane University, December 2003

PHD Student: Dehua Zhao, Dr. Chen's Ph.D student will join the bioinformatics group in January 2004.

Stephen Winters-Hilt

In his own words:

Ph.D., Computer and Information Science, UCSC. Ph.D., Theoretical Physics, Univ. of Wisconsin.      Visiting Student in Mathematics, Oxford.        MS, Applied Physics, Caltech. BS, Electrical Engineering and Physics, Caltech.

Research Interest:

I develop statistics or machine-learning tools for signal analysis and pattern recognition. These tools include support vector machines, hidden Markov models, finite state automata and wavelet quantization. Some of the signal analysis is specialized to stochastic sequential data, including methods developed for nanopore-based DNA classification and genomic analysis. Nanopore-based channel current analysis has led to two patents for sequencing DNA and detecting SNPs, and additional patents are pending.

Biophysics and Biomedical Engineering:

Nanopore-based single molecule biophysical analysis provides a novel method for analysis of biomolecules and their biochemical processes (while in solution). The possible applications of the nanopore detector are being refined and explored further, with particular attention to information deriving from modulations injected by various sources: laser, magnetic (via attached beads), and acoustic, to name a few. The central component of the nanopore device is a nanometer-scale channel that self-assembles in lipid bilayers. The biologically-based protein channel (alpha-hemolysin) is one of many bacterial protein toxins, all of which might be characterized, minimally, with the tools developed thus far. Aside from studies of biological function (in vitro for now, in vivo with single-cell patch clamp methods eventually), the different protein channels provide a variety of different nanopore detector implementations.

Bioinformatics:                           A generalized hidden Markov model has been developed for gene prediction in DNA. I’m also working on a gap-interpolating Markov model with SVM discrimination for identification of transcription factor binding sites and promoters. A long-term work in-progress: an alt-splice gene-predictor model, where hidden Markov models, support vector machines, BLAST, and heuristic models are used.

PAST ISSUES

This is the Fall 2003 installment of the UNO Computer Science Department Newsletter. We welcome feedback from our readers. Especially we would be interested in news about our alumni. You may e-mail us by clicking . Past issues of the Newsletter can be found here.

ROBOCUP US OPEN 2004

The University of New Orleans will host the RoboCup robot competitions here in New Orleans on April 24-27, 2004.
Dr. Sheila Tejada, Assistant Professor in the Department, is the RoboCup US Open 2004 Chair. For more details, click here.

Faculty Grants

Dr. Stephen Winters-Hilt,
Title: Nanopore-based Cheminformatics Analysis of Biomolecules, Membranes,
and Protein Channels
Funding Agency: LaSPACE Research Enhancement Award
Funding Amount: $26,216
Start Date: March 15, 2004
Duration: 1 year

For previous Faculty Grants click here.

Superior Graduate Fellowship/Scholarship Program Recipients

We are pleased to announce the addition of 2 PhD Scholarship recipients and 1 MS Fellowship recipient to the CS Department. The four-year PhD Scholarships are funded ($20K/year plus tuition waiver per scholarship) by the LSU Board of Regents' "Performance and Accountability Funds for Doctoral Students." The two-year MS fellowship is funded ($12K/year stipend plus tuition waiver) by the LSU Board of Regents'  "Superior Graduate Fellow Program.”

Richard Dinoso

An MS Fellowship recipient, Mr. Dinoso received his BS in Electrical Engineering from LSU. He is currently involved in researching parallel visualization techniques using VTK (Visualization Tool Kit).

Eric Normand

A PhD Scholarship recipient, Mr. Normand received his BS in Computer Science from the University of New Orleans. He is currently involved in researching COTS integration solutions using Peoplesoft and databases.

Maik Flanagin

A PhD Scholarship recipient, Mr. Flanagin received both his BS and MS degrees in Computer Science from MIT. He is currently involved in a wide variety of GIS-oriented research and parallel visualization techniques using VTK.

An NSF REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) being established at UNO’s Computer Science Department.

A three year NSF REU site in Spatio-Temporal Database Systems (STDS) is being established at UNO’s Computer Science Department. The goal of the proposed REU site is to attract talented upper-level undergraduate students representing a wide spectrum of this country’s ethnic and cultural diversity; and to immerse them in challenging research experiences. This project will enable the selected participants (10students/year) to experience first-hand the exciting process of scholarly research and discovery that lie at the core of academic life, thereby increasing their awareness and appreciation of academic life, and encouraging their pursuit of graduate study.

The site will be hosted administratively by the UNO’s Computer Science Department. It will involve a team of scientists composed of Drs. Mahdi Abdelguerfi (PI) and Shengru Tu (Co-PI) from UNO, Dr. Roy Ladner (Participant) from the Naval Research Laboratory’s (NRL) at Stennis Space Center and Jay Ratcliff (Participant) from the US Army Corps of Engineers of New Orleans. The REU site is being funded by the NSF at around $270K. Additional matching funds are provided by UNO’s Office Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) and NRL at Stennis Space center.

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A dedicated web site for this exciting new program will be available shortly.  

Graduation Tips from Graduates

Attention freshman Computer Science majors!

Books from our faculty

Service and Device Discovery                          
Dr. Golden G. Richard III

New Java TextBook             
Dr. Jaime Nino and Dr. Frederick Hosch

Book on 3D Synthetic Environment                       
Dr. Mahdi AbdelGuerfi

UNO ACM

The UNO ACM is terrific opportunity for students at UNO who are interested any
aspect of computing to interact and meet with other UNO students with similar
interests. The ACM also provides events such as conferences and speakers to
improve each member's understanding of computing machinery, while also
providing relaxing social events for the ACM to act as a community.
Recently the ACM has had a membership drive with a BBQ outside the Math
building and a Matrix night retreat to see third Matrix movie in the trilogy.
On the side we have provided tutoring and had meetings to help student life.
On November 7th and 8th, the UNO computer science department sent three
teams to compete at the 2003 South Central USA Regional ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. The ACM ICPC is a programming contest sponsored by the ACM and by IBM, for undergraduates in computer science. The South Central Regionals are held every year at LSU in the fall. The three teams from UNO were the Burninators, consisting of Daniel Tingstrom, Jason Meltz, and Dina Phan. The Burninators came in forty-sixth place. Coming in at forty-seventh place was the UNO Rebels without a Compiler, consisting of Andrew Cristina, Ryan Lane, and Tommy Tickle. The last team was the Boneheads, consisting of Justin Bantuelle, Jared Giles, and Alex Smith. The Boneheads placed fifty-first. All three teams solved 3 of the 7 problems. Winning the competition this year was the University of Texas at Austin, which came as no surprise to anyone who follows the ICPC. More information about this the 2003 South Central Regional ACM ICPC can be found at http://acm2003.csc.lsu.edu.
 

Make a gift

Financial support from alumni and friends of UNO's Computer Science Department is essential to maintaining the strength and quality of the education offered by the department. Donations will provide scholarships for students, funding for current operations and support for new initiatives. All donations will be acknowledged. Acknowledgements range from a listing on our alumni/friends pages to a full feature story in our Contributors. All donations are tax deductible. Payment can be made with a check to UNO's Computer Science Department. Donations can be mailed to the following address:

Attn: Head of Alumni Affairs Committee
Dept. of Computer Science, Math 312
University of New Orleans
New Orleans, LA 70148.