Newsletter: Fall 2004
Greetings from the Chair
Welcome to the Fall 2004 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 .
Best wishes from the Department, and now please read on.
Mahdi Abdelguerfi
Professor & Chair
New Faculty: Dr. Jeng Ding
A new faculty member has joined the department this fall. He is Dr. Jing Deng. Dr. Deng was born in Gaozhou, in Guangdong Province of the People's Republic of China. He went to undergraduate and graduate school at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China. Then he came stateside to earn his doctorate, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. His dissertation was titled "Multiple Access Control Protocol Design and Optimization for Ad Hoc Networks".
In His Own Words:
It is my great pleasure to join the department of computer science at the University of New Orleans. I worked as a Research Assistant Professor at Syracuse University, where I performed research on wireless ad hoc networks, sensor network security, and data fusion. Before joining Syracuse University, I worked toward my Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University in the beautiful town of Ithaca, NY.
My current research areas include Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs), wireless sensor networks, multiple access control, backoff control for wireless networks, energy efficient scheme design, wireless network security, and information assurance.
We are in an exciting era witnessing numerous potential applications for computer and communication networks, especially wireless networks. Their applications, however, require careful design of many vastly different techniques. I hope to make my contribution to this field with the help from faculty members and students in our department.
I grew up in southern China, with a similar weather as New Orleans, before I went to college in northern China and moved on to pursue a Ph.D. degree in central New York. After 15 years of living in cold weather, I am happy to come back to an area with familiar warm and pleasant-in-the-winter weather.
Infrastructure Changes
With funding form a grant awarded to Dr. Stephen Winters-Hilt, a Biomedical Informatics Laboratory is being assembled in room MATH 342. Approximately $50,000 is being invested in this new laboratory. It will be equipped with 12 64-bit Sun workstations, gigabit networking, and a Sun Fire v20z server. This new lab should be operational by the start of the new year. The primary role of the lab will be to support research and coursework in BioInformatics.
A second new Sun v20z server has also been purchased. It will support research in Sensor Networks. Both these new Sun servers are dual processor Opteron 248 systems with 4 GB of RAM and 146 GB of storage.
The Experimental Computing Lab is being converted and renamed as the Distributed Computing and Software Integration Lab (DISTIL); the location is room MATH 340. The new laboratory will have 7 dual-processor Xeon systems and 2 Macintosh G4 systems. Drs. Vassil Roussev and Shengru Tu will be the directors of the new lab.
Our Data Engineering Lab, in room MATH 212, has been upgraded with 28 new 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 machines, each with 1 GB of RAM and a flat panel LCD monitor. This lab primarily supports the service courses which the department offers, including our computer literacy course CSCI 1000, and the introductory programming courses we offer in languages FORTRAN and C++.
The Internet connectivity in the department has been improved due to the university's investment in additional bandwidth for the campus. The bandwidth has been increased from 12 Mbit to 24 Mbit, providing a substantial boost in Internet access speed.
Students of Note
Elias Loup
Elias Loup grew up in New Orleans. He first attended UNO while enrolled at Benjamin Franklin High School, taking extra Computer Science, Math, and Physics classes. After graduating from high school, Elias was accepted into the University of Chicago. He graduated in 2003, receiving a BS with Honors in Mathematics, a BS in Computer Science, and a BA in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. He then returned to New Orleans to teach high school Physics and Algebra at McDonogh 35. He is now attending the University of New Orleans, seeking a PhD in Engineering and Applied Science.
Lev Shulman
My name is Lev Shulman, and I am a recent graduate of the University of New Orleans Computer Science Undergraduate program. I have recently worked as a software developer for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. There I gained experience in creating visualization, data mining, and data extraction tools for a variety of spatio-temporal oceanographic data sets, as well as systems programming. I am currently a Computer Science Masters student at University of New Orleans, and an instructor for an Introduction to Programming Course at St. Augustine High School in New Orleans. My research interests include spatio-temporal databases, data profile languages, query optimization, and chess and AI programming.