• Greetings from the Chair
• Infrastructure Changes
• Faculty Grants
• Books from our Faculty
• New Assistant Systems Manager
• Undergraduate Award Winners

Welcome to the Spring 2005 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.

The departmental research productivity has received a considerable boost during the previous academic year. Two manuscripts, 1 book chapter, 9 journal papers, and 22 conferences papers have been published. This includes Drs. Nino and Hosch totally revamped second edition of their textbook entitled "An Introduction to Programming and Object Oriented Design Using Java" (John Wiley & Sons). Dr. Yixin Chen has distinguished himself by being the lead author of a monograph entitled "Machine Learning and Statistical Modeling Approaches to Image Retrieval" (Kluwer Academic Publishers), and three papers published in the prestigious IEEE Transactions journals. Finally, Dr. Stephen Winters-Hilt published 3 journal papers as well as 2 conference papers.

The number of new grants/contracts being submitted and funded is on the rise. Indeed, 15 new grants/contracts totaling $1,213,801 have been funded during the previous academic year. Funding agencies includes the National Science Foundation (NSF), Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR), U.S Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Louisiana's Board of Regents Support fund, and Louisiana's LaSpace program. Notable achievements include those of Drs. Bin Fu and Stephen Winters-Hilt. Indeed, Dr. Fu's proposal "Protein 3D structure model and algorithm" submitted to the Louisiana Board of Regents Support Fund (Research Competitiveness Subprogram) was ranked number one in the State. Dr. Winters was able to secure three grants within his first year with the Computer Science department. It is also worth noting that during 2003/04, the Computer Science Department has received (thanks to Drs. Chaudhry, Winters and Fu) a total of three grants from the Board of Regents Research Competitiveness Subprogram. This number represents the largest number of awards (from the Board of Regents Research Competitiveness Subprogram) secured by a UNO department within a single year.

More proposals submitted to Federal agencies are currently pending, and may add to the above grand total. Given the fact that the department currently includes 10 research oriented junior faculty members, it is expected that the research productivity exhibits a further increase in the very near future.

Faculty members have been active with their professional organizations, thus giving more visibility to our department. Dr. Sheila Tejada was the Chair of the RoboCup US Open 2004 help on campus on April 2004. She also Chaired the AAAI Spring Symposium on Accessible Hands-on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Education (Stanford, CA, March 2004), and the ACM Knowledge, Discovery and Datamining Workshop on Data Cleaning, Record Linkage, and Object Consolidation (August 2003, Washington DC). Dr. Golden Richard was the Program Chair for International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference (April 2004, Phoenix, Arizona). Dr. Stephen Winters-Hilt was elected (during 2003 Annual Meeting) to Board of the MCBIOS Bioinformatics Society. He is expected to chair the 2005 MCBIOS Annual Meeting (to be held at UNO).

The undergraduate enrollment, which saw its peak in 2001/02, has faced a decrease of over 20%. This decrease is in line with the nationwide trend following the economical downturn accompanying the 9/11 tragedy. We are intent on reversing this trend by pursuing an aggressive recruitment and retention strategy.

The number of Master's student has stabilized around 70 (from a peak of 80 in Fall 2001), while the number of Computer Science students enrolled in the DENAS doctoral program has jumped to 8. Doctoral student "Abdul Altalhi" working under the supervision of Dr. Golden Richard has graduated (May 2004) from the DENAS program. He is the second doctoral student the department graduates.

The Department is determined to substantially increase the size of its graduate students population. This will permit balancing the nationwide decrease in undergraduate enrollment and provide our faculty members with a larger pool to select research assistants from.

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

Computational facilities in the Department have seen significant improvement during the past year, and more upgrades are planned for the near future. Two new instructional and research laboratories have come line, a Biomedical Informatics Laboratory and a new Computer Literacy Laboratory.

The Biomedical Informatics Laboratory consists of 12 64-bit Sun w1100z workstations, a Sun Fire v20z server, gigabit networking, and an HP 2300 laser printer. This facility was equipped through a Board of Regents grant obtained by Dr. Stephen Winters-Hilt.

Current research employing this facility includes:

• Implementation of channel current cheminformatics software
• Establishing a prototype web interface to in-house cheminformatics and bioinformatics tools (including HMM software for analysis of channel current data and for gene finding in genomic DNA)
• Establishing a prototype web interface to Machine Learning Tools (including an SVM to for multiclass pattern recognition).

The new Computer Literacy Laboratory consists of 29 Dell Pentium 4 PC's and an HP 2300 laser printer. The lab was funded through a student technology fee grant obtained by Dr. Adlai DePano.

Additionally, a new database server and new Beowulf cluster were acquired by the Department. The database server has dual 64-bit Intel Xeon CPU's, 4GB RAM, and dual 73GB SCSI drives. It will be used to provide both instructional and research database services.

The Beowulf cluster consists of 32 64-bit Sun v20z servers integrated in a Sun Compute Grid Rack system using Cisco Catalyst 3750 switches. The equipment was procured through a State of Louisiana IT grant obtained by Dr. Mahdi Abdelguerfi and a Sun Microsystems grant obtained by Dr. Vassil Roussev. It will be used in distributed system classes and to support research in distributed computer forensics, parallel GIS, and hurricane modeling.

There are a number of improvements planned the near future to the physical infrastructure and layout of the instructional laboratories, the departmental network, and system management automation.

Network enhancements include:

• Upgrading the switched backbone to Cisco Catalyst 3750 gigabit switches
• Consolidation of all switches in the control room
• Upgrading the wiring to labs and offices to category 6 gigabit
• Deployment of packet filtering to secure the LAN from outside threats

These measures will substantially improve the security and robustness of the network.

In the area of system management, the department hope to accomplish the following:

• Utilize client management software to deploy and manage client workstations
• Unify all clients, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris platforms, under a single authentication and file service mechanism
• Automate backup of client workstations
• Automate services such as wireless setup and registration, student and faculty self-service portal, web page updates.

The department has recently hired Mr. Fareed A. Qaddoura as Assistant Systems Manager. Mr. Qaddoura will work with the department's System Manager, Mr. Venkata S. Mahadevan, in maintaining the department's computing and network facilities.

Mr. Qaddoura was born in the city of Ramalla in Palestine, and earned his Bachelors of Science degree in Computer Science in 2001 from Birzeit University.

He joined the Master of Sciences program in the department in 2003, and worked as a Research Assistant under Dr. Mahdi Abdelguerfi, concentrating on intelligent web applications for distributed systems, web application design, GIS, and spatial databases. He completed his thesis Dynamic Website and Data Engine Generators for Distributed Enterprise/Business Architectures under the direction of Dr. Abdelguerfi, and graduated in Fall, 2004.

The department's annual undergraduate academic awards were presented recently at the College of Sciences Honors Convocation to Mr. Matthew Landry and Mr. Andrew Cristina.

Matthew Landry

Mr. Landry was presented the Outstanding Senior Award of the Computer Science Faculty. The award is given for scholastic excellence. He will graduate with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science this spring, and is maintaining a perfect 4.0 gpa. Mr. Landry is currently exploring the binary classification of DNA molecules under a grant from NASA/Ames Research Center. He plans to enroll in the Master's program in the fall and continue working in bioinformatics.

Andrew Cristina

Mr. Cristina was awarded the Howard Evans Memorial Scholarship, given for scholarship and service tot he department. Mr. Cristina, a graduate of Archbishop Rummel High School, has served as both treasurer and president of the student ACM chapter. He is a member and treasurer of the UNO Robotics Team has competed with the team at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Acapulco, Mexico and in the US Robocup competition held at UNO in the spring of 2004.