From the Chair

Welcome to the summer 2008 edition of the Bitstream, a newsletter for alumni and friends of Department of Computer and Information Science at IUPUI. Another exciting year has concluded, and the Department is poised for even more positive growth after two years of enrollment increases in both the undergraduate and graduate programs.

This edition of the Bitstream includes updates on a number of important topics. Below you’ll find information on recent research grants that have been made to the Department’s faculty, including a National Science Foundation grant, an Indiana 21st Century Grant, and an extension for the international Fetal Alcohol Syndrome grant. Our PhD program continues to expand, as we accepted the largest class for Fall 2008 entry so far. Read more about this expansion, as well as news about the Master of Science program, from Dr. Raje, the Graduate Committee chair below.

The Department has also been active in teaching-related grants. Lecturer Michele Roberts, along with some colleagues, have been very successful in obtaining funding for new student learning assessment activities. Along with teaching activity, the Computer Science Club has been active, holding its 2nd Annual High School Programming Contest on March 22. This year, over 50 students participated from nine area high schools. A complete program wrap-up is below. You’ll also find information about our newest faculty hire, Dr. Murat Dundar in an article that follows.

We hope that you enjoy this issue, and share it with friends. As the Department concludes its 26th year, we have a lot to look back on, and a bright future ahead. Please take a moment to visit us on the web at www.cs.iupui.edu, or drop by any time. We look forward to sharing in your joys, accomplishments, and successes.

With very best regards,

Shiaofen Fang
Associate Professor & Chair

Indiana University Designated as Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Research

The National Security Agency and Department of Homeland Security have announced the first group of elite universities in information assurance research. Indiana University, including IUPUI, was named among 22 institutions recognized as fostering training and education programs to support cybersecurity needs in the U.S. IU joins other top-ranked research universities, such as Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins, Penn. State, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and University of Washington. Designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence is in effect until 2013.
Designation as a National Centers makes colleges and universities eligible to apply for scholarships and grants through both the federal and Department of Defense Information Assurance Scholarship Programs.

 Indiana University celebrated the designation by releasing the following:

"The National Centers of Academic Excellence in IA Research (CAE-R) program was launched in September 2007 to address the need for robust information assurance technology, policy and practices to enable the nation to prevent and respond to catastrophic events. Its vision is to establish a process that will allow IA research centers to find solutions for securing the global information grid and provide federal agencies with insight into programs that can support advanced research and development for information assurance."

Scott Orr, Network Engineer for the Department of Computer & Information Science, represented IU in accepting the designation award. More information about the designation is available online at the following links:

Indiana University News Source: National Center for Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Designation: http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/8237.html.

NSA Press Release: http://www.nsa.gov/releases/cae_r.cfm.

 

Department Now Awards Teachers Certification Renewal Units

Based on a recent request to the Indiana State Department of Education, the Department is now allowed to offer Certification Renewal Units (CRUs) to Indiana high school teachers. Plans are being made to offer at least one teacher in-service training yearly for those teaching computer applications, programming, and internet programming to teachers in Central Indiana.

All of the state's teachers must obtain a certan number of CRUs to remain current with their teaching licenses. The Department's ability to now allow the outreach events and teacher training activities that the Department is involved in to carry CRU credit, thus making the activities even more valuable for local teachers.

CS Faculty to Attend Year-Long Academy for Instructional Excellence

Michele Roberts, a lecturer in the Department, has been asked to represent IUPUI at a year-long series of events focusing on instructional development. The Ivy Tech Academy for Instructional Excellence, which has been held yearly since the 1994-1995 academic year, has been regarded as one of the most positive professional development experiences available for college teachers. Michele will be participating in a five-day opening session in late July, with two follow-up sessions lasting two days each in the 2008-2009 academic year. She said, "This is a wonderful opportunity to share my experiences and learn from other experienced teachers. We'll learn a lot from each other, share some memories, and return for the year energized. I'm really looking forward to it!" The Academy's primary sponsor is Ivy Tech Community College.

Associate Professor Yao Liang Lectures in Italy

From May 5-13, Dr. Yao Liang visited Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (Sant'Anna School for Advanced Studies), a university in Pisa, Italy, to deliver a series of lectures on advanced communication protocols for wireless sensor networks. These lectures were delivered in conjuction with the Real-Time Systems Laboratory at the university, and were part of a series that occurred this year. Often called the MIT of Italy, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna is a respected research university in Italy, educating approximately 250 undergraduates and 1450 graduate students this year. Dr. Liang's talks were well received, and contact was made with administrators at the institution for possible future research collaborations, as well as graduate student exchange.

Computer Science Seniors Score Big on Major Field Test

On March 7, eleven seniors completed the Major Field Test in Computer Science as part of CSCI 495, the senior capstone course. The Major Field Test is a standardized exam that covers topics in programming concepts, discrete structures and algorithms, and computer systems, norm-referenced to a large set of college seniors. These students did very well, scoring an average of 158 on a scale of 120-200. This placed the department's average in the 75th percentile of all institutions. When examining the parts of the exam, our institutional percentiles were: Programming Concepts: 90th percentile Data Structures & Algorithms: 70th percentile Systems: 85th percentile Dr. Snehasis Mukhopadhyay, chair of the undergraduate committee and instructor for CSCI 495, said, "We are quite proud of the performance of our seniors. The exam was a difficult one, and measures well the kinds of competencies we look for in graduates. As part of our ongoing efforts at program assessment and improvement, these results show that the undergraduate curriculum is strong and prepares students well for both employment and graduate school." The next step for the department is to conduct a focus group with the CSCI 495 participants, and collect comparative data from other like institutions, to see how our seniors compare. Results of the study should be available in the Fall 2008 semester.

New Faculty Hired for Fall 2008, Position Joint with School of Informatics

Following the successful recruitment of Drs. Arjan Durresi and Yao Liang, the Department received approval to search for one tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level. This position is a joint appointment with the Indiana University School of Informatics at IUPUI, with 75% effort with Computer Science and 25% effort with Informatics. The position advertisement was posted in February, and the Department has received almost 200 applications. Dr. Mihran Tuceryan headed the search committee. He commented, "The committee was impressed with the quality of the applicant pool right from the beginning. Top-notch candidates from around the US and the world were interested in working with us, and we selected the best candidates for interviews." As a result of this process, the Department is proud to announce the hiring of Dr. Murat Dundar of Siemens Research as a new Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Dr. Dundar's research is in the areas of biomedical visualization and data mining.

Department Lands Competitive Research Grants

Recently, faculty from the Department were awarded major research grants and grant extensions from state and national funding agencies. This funding speaks to the high quality of research proposals and the work that is happening on campus.

The most recent research project brings a familiar face back to IUPUI - alumnus Eric Tinsley (BS, MS). Funded by the Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund, a $1.9 million grant has awarded My Health Care Manager, LLC, and faculty from the Department of Computer & Information Science, and the IU School of Informatics at IUPUI. Dr. Christopher Callahan, a faculty member from the IU School of Medicine will also assist in the project.

The group is led by Eric Tinsley of My Health Care Manager as the primary investigator, and includes Dr. Yuni Xia as Co-Principal Investigator, Dr. Mathew Palakal as Principal Investigator for IUPUI, and Dr. Josette Jones of the School of Informatics. The project aims to develop an innovative Knowledge Management System for Geriatric Care Management. The system will be built on the distributed expertise and knowledge of the participants and merges standards of care, current clinical knowledge, and existing practices in order to change the traditional care support service to a technology-enhanced, evidence-based practice. The focus of the project is the dynamic interaction between the care recipient, the nurse case-manager, and information technology in the decision-making process regarding the care provided.

Dr. Shiaofen Fang, the Chair of the Department, said, "This is a wonderful opportunity to make a real difference in the lives of our senior citizens, and enhance their quality of care. The funding that Dr. Xia has received as part of the grant is substantial, and should allow for active graduate student participation in these activities. We're especially pleased that our alumnus, Eric Tinsley, will be leading the project and has returned to work with the faculty again."

Dr. Yao Liang, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (PA), have received over $370,000 from the National Science Foundation in support of their grant, titled "Collaborative Research: Investigating Temporal Correlation for Energy Efficient and Lossless Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks." This project is funded for three years. The project abstract follows:

This project is devoted to the fundamental investigation of exploiting temporal correlation in WSNs, for sustaining monitoring in harsh and possibly hostile environments, through an integrated theoretical and empirical approach. From this project, a novel, analytical, adaptive multimodal predictive transmission framework based on predictive coding is developed, for environmental monitoring WSN engineering, to achieve substantial energy savings and, hence, to significantly extend the lifetime of WSNs. Based on the developed framework, a new data gathering protocol suite is designed and implemented. Furthermore, a real-world environmental monitoring WSN testbed in a hilly watershed is deployed for evaluation and validation. Our interdisciplinary education plan uses the built WSN testbed and integrates our research results and new insights into education practice to provide hands-on training and experience for undergraduate and graduate students in both environmental and IT fields.

Our physical world presents an incredibly rich set of observation modalities, such as heat, light, moisture, pressure, motion, etc. Recent advances in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) enable the continuous monitoring of various physical phenomena at unprecedented high spatial densities and long time durations and, hence, open new exciting opportunities for numerous scientific endeavors. Because sensor nodes are battery-powered, the most critical challenge in WSNs is minimizing the use of power, of which the most energy-consuming operation is data transmission. Given the commonly high correlations of sensed data in time and space, an analytical framework for correlation studies and new data gathering protocols is fundamentally important to reduce communication costs through lossless data compression in WSNs.

Department Chair Dr. Shiaofen Fang is co-Principal Investigator on two National Institutes of Health grants. The grant, "3D Facial Imaging on FASD" was received in collaboration with Dr. Tatiana Foroud from the Indiana University School of Medicine at Indianapolis. The total award is in excess of $1.5 million for five years. Dr. Fang is also co-PI on a grant entitled "Mouse Model Neuro-Facial Dysmorphology: Translational and Treatment Studies." This grant is awarded for over $1.2 million, and is conducted in collaboration with Drs. Feng Zhou and Yun Liang from the Indiana University School of Medicine, and is funded for five years.

The National Institute of Justice has awarded a grant in the amount of $270,000 for Drs. Mihran Tuceryan, Jiang yu Zheng, and Shiaofen Fang (co-PIs) for a project titled, "Advanced In-Car Video System." This project is in collaboration with Herb Blitzer at the Institute for Forensic Imaging - Indianapolis, and is funded for two years.

Graduate Programs Update

Our PhD and Master of Science programs continue to expand, this year receiving record numbers of applications to both programs. The PhD program nearly doubled in size to 12 active students, and the Master of Science program is poised to bring in over 40 students for the Fall 2008 term.

Recently, the faculty voted on and approved a "course only" option in the MS program, whereby students can earn the Master of Science degree by completing course work and omitting a final research project or thesis. This option is expected to be attractive to those attempting the program on a part-time basis, and will allow for a broad exposure to many areas in computer science, as well as in-depth exploration of a certain area.

2nd Annual High School Programming Contest Wrap-Up

On March 22, fifty-one students from area high schools made their way to IUPUI for a 4-hour test of skill and endurance. Now in its second year, the IUPUI High School Programming Contest brings students from around Central Indiana together for food, fun, and a serious competition to determine which team will come out on top. Student teams of two were confronted with a suite of 10 programming and computer science problems to complete in a 4-hour competition time frame. Students could rely on each other and reference materials, but could not use the internet or other aids. This year's contest was attended by students from Park Tudor, Brownsburg, Carmel, Noblesville, Cardinal Ritter, Ben Davis, Warren Central, and Pike Township, and Zionsville High School. Ably assisted by Scott Orr, Systems Network Engineer, the Computer Science Club and its leadership planned and facilitated the event, even creating a web-based scoring system to aid in the problem submission grading.

The winning team was from Park Tudor, with second going to Carmel, and third to Zionsville. The Computer Science Club looks forward to hosting next year's competition!