News & Events Archive - 2006

For 2006 events in the Department of Computer Science, click here.

Ph.D. Student Wins Travel Awards
Dumitru Brinza, a Ph.D. candidate advised by Dr. Alex Zelikovsky, recently won significant travel awards from two conferences. He received a registration scholarship of $585 and a travel stipend of $1000, which allowed him to attend the 9th Annual Conference on Computational Genomics in Baltimore on October 28-31. Of the 120 students who applied for travel funding, only six were given awards. He also received a scholarship in the amount of $1100 to attend the Genetic Analysis Workshop 15 in St. Pete's Beach, Florida, on November 11-15. Funding for the scholarship was provided by Illumina, Inc. Although 600 people attended the workshop, only one Illumina scholarship was awarded. (Posted 12/4/06)

Department Seeking to Hire Assistant/Associate Professor for Fall 2007
Department chair Dr. Yi Pan announced that the Department of Computer Science will be accepting applications for an anticipated tenure-track position for an assistant/associate professor beginning in Fall semester, 2007. The full announcement can be found here. (Posted 11/21/06)

Zhu Named Director of Hypermedia and Visualization Laboratory
Dr. Ying Zhu was recently named director of the Hypermedia and Visualization Laboratory (HVL), replacing Dr. Scott Owen, who resigned from the position.
     The HVL was originally established in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science in 1992 with Dr. Owen as the director. Although the core faculty of the HVL has always been small, its projects have involved most of the faculty in the Department of Computer Science. The HVL has had over $1.5 million in funding from the federal government (NSF and NIH), local government, and private industry, and has produced almost fifty publications. In the past two years, HVL faculty have graduated three Ph.D. students and are currently supervising several more.
     Dr. Owen plans to continue playing an active role in the research activities of the HVL. He is currently serving a three-year term as president of ACM SIGGRAPH, the world's leading organization for researchers, artists, developers, filmmakers, scientists, and other professionals who share an interest in computer graphics and interactive techniques. (Posted 11/21/06)

Beyah Featured in Georgia Trend Magazine
Dr. Raheem Beyah was featured in Georgia Trend magazine's October cover story, "40 Under 40: The Best and Brightest." The article listed Dr. Beyah as one of the Georgia Trend 40 Under 40, a group of people under 40 years of age "who will lead our state's commercial, cultural, academic and governmental institutions into the future." The staff of Georgia Trend reviewed 200 candidates nominated by the magazine's readers before choosing 40.
     At age 29, Dr. Beyah was one of the youngest leaders selected by the magazine's editors. He was honored as a result of his professional accomplishments, industry relationships, and community involvement. Georgia Trend noted that Dr. Beyah "has made it his mission to bridge the digital divide, the gap between the community technology haves and have-nots." (Posted 11/6/06)

Georgia State Chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers Founded
Senior computer science major Brooks Lee, along with the charter faculty advisor Dr. Raheem Beyah, have founded the Georgia State chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). The organization welcomes members from all areas of science, including computer science, computer information systems, biology, physics and astronomy, chemistry, mathematics, statistics, and geosciences. The primary goal of the Georgia State chapter is to help young scientists become better professionals and leaders in their fields by providing career advancement, networking, interview preparation, and empowering minorities and females through education in their communities.
     The officers of the new chapter are:

President: Brooks Lee (Senior, Computer Science)
Vice President: Dedrick Gilchrist (Junior, Computer Information Systems)
Treasurer: Oluwatoyin Salami (Sophomore, Exercise Science)
Secretary: Fougere Jacquelin (Senior, Respiratory Therapy)
Membership Chair: Chad Hampton (Junior, Computer Science)
Programs Chair: Jeffery Walker III (Senior, Computer Science)
Academic Excellence Chair: Joel Myers, Jr. (Junior, Computer Science)

(Posted 11/6/06)

Beyah Receives Grant for Network Research
Dr. Raheem Beyah was awarded a grant through a subcontract with the Georgia Institute of Technology. Funding for the grant comes from Scientific Atlanta, Inc. (S-A) with matching funds from the Georgia Research Alliance. The grant will support the development of a network-monitoring tool that allows S-A to monitor links between their distributed nodes. As a result of this work, S-A will ultimately be able to provide better service to rural areas. (Posted 11/6/06)

Georgia State to Host International Bioinformatics Symposium
Next May, Georgia State will host the first International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (ISBRA 2007). ISBRA 2007 will provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and results among researchers, developers, and practitioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications.
     Authors are invited to submit papers that demonstrate original unpublished research in all areas of bioinformatics, including the development of experimental or commercial systems. Surveys of important recent results and directions are also welcome. The deadline for submitting papers to ISBRA 2007 is December 20. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by January 31, with final versions due on February 21.
     The proceedings of ISBRA 2007 will be published in the Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics series, and it is anticipated that a special issue of a major bioinformatics journal will be devoted to expanded versions of the best symposium papers.
     ISBRA 2007 is the successor to the successful International Workshop on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (IWBRA), held on May 22-25, 2005 at Emory University and on May 28-31, 2006 at the University of Reading (U.K.) in conjunction with the International Conference on Computational Science.
     The general chairs of ISBRA 2007 are Dr. Yi Pan and Dr. Dan Gusfield (University of California, Davis). The program chairs are Dr. Alex Zelikovsky and Dr. Ion Mandoiu (University of Connecticut). Dr. Robert Harrison and Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang will be the organizing chairs, Dr. Raj Sunderraman will be the publication chair, Dr. Anu Bourgeois will be the finance chair, and Dr. K. N. King and Dr. Yingshu Li will be publicity chairs.
     Symposium attendees will stay at the Atlanta Marriott Downtown. Sessions will be held at the Helen M. Aderhold Learning Center.
     ISBRA 2007 is sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, the Biomedical Computational Center, and the Molecular Basis of Disease Program. (Posted 11/1/06)

Ground Broken for Science Teaching Laboratory
On October 10, Governor Sonny Perdue visited Georgia State to participate in groundbreaking ceremonies for two new buildings, the Science Teaching Laboratory and the Science Research Laboratory. The Science Teaching Laboratory will be the new home of the Department of Computer Science.
     Preliminary plans call for the department to occupy 15,000 square feet. Approximately 9,000 square feet of space will be for offices, including 29 offices for faculty and staff. There will be 16 offices for Ph.D. students, each shared by three students, and a large room with cubicles housing 45 M.S. students. The remaining 6,000 square feet will be devoted to labs, including three computer-equipped classrooms seating 40-50 students.
     Other science departments will also be housed in the new buildings, including biology, chemistry, geosciences, nursing, nutrition, physical and respiratory therapies, physics and astronomy, and psychology.

Parker H. Petit Science Teaching Laboratory

     The buildings will be located on a three-acre tract at the corner of Decatur Street and Piedmont Avenue, just south of the Student Recreation Center. Georgia State acquired the property in 1998. It was previously the site of a jail operated by the City of Atlanta.
     The cost of the buildings will be $142 million, with $40 million coming from state funding and the rest raised privately. Parker H. "Pete" Petit donated $5 million; the Science Teaching Laboratory will be named after him. Petit founded Healthdyne, Inc. and is currently CEO of Matria Healthcare. He received an M.B.A. degree in finance from Georgia State in 1973.
     Construction of the buildings will begin next spring and is expected to take two years to complete. The Science Teaching Laboratory and the Science Research Laboratory are the first buildings in a planned $200 million University Science Park complex. Two other buildings are still in the fund-raising stage. (Posted 10/12/06)

Bourgeois Becomes Director of Undergraduate Studies
Dr. Anu Bourgeois was named Director of Undergraduate Studies, effective September 26, replacing Jaman Bhola. Mr. Bhola had held this position since January 2000. Department chair Dr. Yi Pan thanked Mr. Bhola for his long service to the department. Dr. Bourgeois has been in charge of learning outcomes for the last two years. Dr. Pan noted that she had done an "excellent job" in that position and expressed confidence that she will excel in her new post. (Posted 10/5/06)

Weeks Publishes First Book
Dr. Michael Weeks has published his first book, Digital Signal Processing Using MATLAB and Wavelets. The book, which is scheduled to hit stores this month, was motivated by growing interest in digital signal processing in the computer science community. DSP applications in the consumer market, such as the MP3 audio format and MPEG-based cable/satellite television, have fueled a desire to understand this technology outside of hardware circles.
     Designed for upper-division engineering and computer science students as well as practicing engineers, Digital Signal Processing Using MATLAB and Wavelets emphasizes the practical applications of signal processing. Over 100 MATLAB projects and wavelet techniques provide the latest applications of DSP, including image processing, games, filters, transforms, networking, parallel processing, and sound.
     The book includes coverage of the mathematical processes and techniques needed to understand DSP theory. Designed to be incremental in difficulty, it will benefit readers who are unfamiliar with complex mathematical topics or those limited in programming experience. Beginning with an introduction to MATLAB programming, the book moves through filters, sinusoids, sampling, the Fourier transform, the z-transform, and other key topics. An entire chapter is dedicated to a discussion of wavelets and their applications. The book is accompanied by a CD-ROM that contains the programs used throughout the book, along with example projects. Instructors may obtain a CD-ROM with over 350 slides in both OpenOffice and PowerPoint formats.
     Published by Infinity Science Press, Digital Signal Processing Using MATLAB and Wavelets (ISBN 0-9778582-0-0) is a hardcover book with 452 pages. It has a list price of $69.95 but is available for less from Internet bookstores, including Amazon.com, which sells it for $44.07. (Posted 9/26/06)

Weeks Launches New MATLAB Course
Dr. Michael Weeks is currently teaching a new course entitled "Introduction to MATLAB Programming." The three-hour course, which is dual-listed as CSC 3610 and CSC 7610, is designed to give science majors experience with the MATLAB programming language. MATLAB is used for scientific applications involving images, sound, and other signals. The course requires no previous programming experience.
     Although the course is aimed at science majors—including students majoring in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics—75% of the students enrolled in the course this semester are computer science majors. Dr. Weeks hopes that the course will draw more students from outside the department when it is next taught. He currently plans to offer the course again in the fall of 2007. (Posted 9/26/06)

Department Awards Four Ph.D. Degrees
The Department of Computer Science awarded four Ph.D. degrees in August 2006, bringing the number of Ph.D. graduates to twelve. The recipients of the degrees were:

(Posted 9/13/06)

Gagliano Named Associate Editor of Ubiquity
Dr. Ross Gagliano, who retired from the Department of Computer Science in 1999, has been named an associate editor of Ubiquity, a web-based publication of the Association for Computing Machinery. Ubiquity combines the features of a well-edited magazine of opinion and a town hall forum, offering essays by IT leaders and interactive feedback from site visitors. It is dedicated to fostering critical analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to the nature, constitution, structure, science, engineering, cognition, technology, practices, and paradigms of the IT profession. Book reviews by Dr. Gagliano and others can be found at Ubiquity's Book Review page. His most recent review is of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. (Posted 9/6/06)

Zhang Article Ranked in Top 25
An article co-written by Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang was recently ranked among the TOP25 Hottest Articles published in the journal Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. The rankings were determined by ScienceDirect based on the number of downloads by online users during July, August, and September, 2005. The article, titled "Granular support vector machines with association rules mining for protein homology prediction," was co-authored by recent Ph.D. recipient Dr. Yuchun Tang and current Ph.D. candidate Bo Jin. It was originally published in the September 2005 issue of the journal. (Posted 8/28/06; updated 9/6/06)

Ph.D. Student Ranks 9th in UCSD Data Mining Contest
Bo Jin, a Ph.D. candidate advised by Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang, recently participated in the 2006 UCSD Student Data Mining Contest. The competition, which was open to undergraduate students, graduate students, and post-doc researchers, drew 58 teams from 22 U.S. universities.
     The contest was designed to give participants a chance to test their data mining skills on a real-world data set. Teams competed to build a system that correctly predicts useful information from a corpus of text documents. There were two tasks: Document Classification (predicting the topic of a document) and Word Prediction (given some words in a document, predicting what other words would be found in the document). Mr. Jin finished in 9th place on the Document Classification task with a score of 83.7 (the winning team's score was 87.6). His score placed him ahead of teams from the University of Central Florida, UCLA, UC San Diego, the University of Michigan, and the University of Texas at Austin.
     The contest, which ran from May 15 to July 15, was organized by UC San Diego and sponsored by Fair Isaac. (Posted 8/17/06)

CS Faculty Members Promoted
Congratulations to the following CS faculty members, who were recently promoted:

The promotions are effective Fall 2006. (Posted 8/17/06)

Spring 2006 Newsletter Now Available
The Spring 2006 edition of the department newsletter has been published. A PDF version is available for download. (Posted 7/21/06)

Owen Elected to Executive Committee of ACM SIG Governing Board
Dr. Scott Owen was recently elected to the Executive Committee of the ACM Special Interest Groups Governing Board. The SIG Governing Board (SGB), which is comprised of the chairs or presidents of the ACM SIGs, establishes financial and other policies that relate to all SIGs. In addition to his general duties of helping with SGB issues, Dr. Owen is the Large SIG Advisor. In this capacity, he is responsible for providing assistance to large SIGs (defined as those with a budget over $1,000,000).
     ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the world's oldest and largest educational and scientific computing society. Founded in 1947, ACM serves computing professionals and students in more than 100 countries. ACM currently has 34 Special Interest Groups, each covering a separate computing discipline. (Posted 7/21/06)

Zelikovsky Is Awarded Additional NSF Funding
The National Science Foundation has approved an additional $33,000 in funding for a grant held by Dr. Alex Zelikovsky. The grant, which started in August 2004, will be extended until July 31, 2007. The title of the project is "New Directions for Advanced VLSI Manufacturability"; it deals with issues that affect the layout and manufacturing of VLSI chips, including automatic layout flows for phase-shifting masks, area fill synthesis for yield improvement, gate-length biasing for leakage variability control, and principled methodologies for exploring restricted design rules. (Posted 7/21/06)

Department Team Among 30 Finalists in Windows Embedded Student ChallengE 2006
A team of Georgia State computer science majors was among 30 finalists for the Windows Embedded Student ChallengE 2006. The Georgia State team was one of only five teams from the United States to place in the top 30. The third annual Windows ChallengE competition challenges undergraduate teams of four—with a faculty mentor—to design a computer-based system that solves a real-world problem.
     Approximately 300 teams entered the competition. Judges selected 200 teams to advance to the next round. These teams were sent a ChallengE Kit containing hardware and software valued at several hundred dollars. After using the kit to complete their projects, teams submitted final reports. Based on these reports, 30 teams were awarded expense-paid trips to visit the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington, for the ChallengE finals on June 22-24. Winning teams were eligible for cash prizes, including the first prize of $8,000. The Georgia State team has also submitted its report to the IEEE Computer Society's International Design Competition.
     The members of the Georgia State team were Drew Phebus, David Tomaschik, Mike McGreevey, and Kyle Cooper. The team's advisor was Dr. Michael Weeks. Their project, titled "RAIN: ReActive Irrigation Nexus," involved designing an innovative system that detects if an area of soil needs watering and, if so, turns on a sprinkler. The RAIN system includes a gypsum sensor to determine moisture levels, a circuit to convert the signals of the sensor into usable data, and a graphical user interface that allows the user to easily maintain a lawn.
     Photos from the team's trip to Redmond are now available. (Posted 4/20/06; updated 5/25/06 and 7/6/06)

Beyah Chosen for L.E.A.D. Atlanta
Dr. Raheem Beyah has been chosen to participate in the L.E.A.D. Atlanta class of 2007, a Leadership Atlanta initiative for young professionals. L.E.A.D. Atlanta provides participants the opportunity to enhance their leadership skills, tackle challenges facing the community, and develop contacts early in their careers. L.E.A.D. ("Leadership, Education, Action, and Direction") Atlanta incorporates issues and challenges facing Atlanta but also includes skill-building that will aid participants in their career and community involvement. (Posted 6/28/06)

Beyah Receives FACES Career Initiation Grant
Dr. Raheem Beyah was recently awarded a Georgia Tech FACES Career Initiation Grant. The Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science (FACES) program is a collaborative effort between the College of Engineering and College of Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Emory University, Morehouse College, and Spelman College designed to significantly increase the number of African-Americans receiving doctoral degrees in engineering and science and ultimately increase the number of these individuals entering the professoriate. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the FACES program awards two Career Initiation Grants valued at $30,000 each to promising doctoral students who accept a tenure-track faculty position in an engineering or science field at a U.S. college or university. The grant can be used to purchase research equipment as well as support graduate and/or undergraduate research assistants. (Posted 6/28/06)

Sunderraman and Zhu Receive NIH Grant
Dr. Raj Sunderraman and Dr. Ying Zhu, in collaboration with primary investigator Dr. Paul Katz from the Department of Biology, have been awarded a National Institutes of Health R21 Grant for $291,000. The project is titled "NeuronBank: A Database for Identified Neurons and Synaptic Connections" and runs from March 2006 to March 2008.
     The goal of the project is to create a web-based resource, called NeuronBank, to catalog and organize identified neuronal types and their synaptic connections. The project will facilitate research on model invertebrate nervous systems, which are comprised of individually identifiable neurons. It will also serve as a testbed for understanding the issues involved in creating a complete wiring diagram of more complex mammalian brains, which contain identifiable neuronal types. When completed, NeuronBank will allow information about neuronal types and their connections to be published and accessed online.
     More information on this project can be found at www.neuronbank.org. (Posted 6/12/06)

Tang Earns Ph.D. Degree
On May 13, Yuchun Tang became the eighth person to earn a Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science. Dr. Tang's dissertation was titled "Granular Support Vector Machines Based on Granular Computing, Soft Computing and Statistical Learning." His advisor was Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang. Dr. Tang is currently a research scientist at CipherTrust, Inc., working on spam filtering using data mining techniques. (Posted 5/25/06)

IEEE International Conference Held at Georgia State
The 2006 IEEE International Conference on Granular Computing (IEEE-GrC 2006) was held at Georgia State on May 10-12. Granular computing is a general computation theory for effectively using granules such as classes, clusters, subsets, groups, and intervals to build an efficient computational model for complex applications with huge amounts of data, information, and knowledge. It has begun to play important roles in bioinformatics, e-business, security, machine learning, data mining, high-performance computing, and wireless mobile computing in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, robustness, and uncertainty. The conference brought together researchers from universities, laboratories, and industry to present new results in the theory and applications of granular computing.
     A key ingredient of IEEE-GrC 2006 was a distinguished lecture series, jointly organized with Georgia State, that featured two “Nobel” laureates—Stephen Smale (winner of the Fields Medal, often called the “Nobel Prize” for mathematics) and Lotfi Zadeh (winner of the IEEE Medal of Honor, the “Nobel Prize” for electrical engineering)—and two pioneer experts, T. Y. Lin (granular computing) and Vladimir Vapnik (support vector machines), who was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.
     IEEE-GrC 2006 received 321 paper submissions from 22 countries; 49 six-page papers and 102 four-page papers were accepted for publication in the proceedings. In addition, there were 5 six-page papers and 12 four-page papers in four special sessions. The best paper award was given to Tony Bellotti, Zhiyuan Luo, and Alex Gammerman for their paper “Reliable Classification of Childhood Acute Leukaemia from Gene Expression Data using Confidence Machines.”
     The conference was sponsored by the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. Dr. Yi Pan was one of the conference's general co-chairs, Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang was a co-chair of the program committee, Dr. K. N. King was a publicity co-chair, and Dr. Anu Bourgeois and Dr. Raj Sunderraman were local arrangements co-chairs. (Posted 5/23/06)

ACM Chapter Welcomes New Officers
The GSU student chapter of the ACM recently elected officers for the 2006-2007 academic year. The new officers are:

Chair: Akshaye Dhawan
Vice Chair: Navin Vishmiwanath
Secretary: Evelyn Brannock
Treasurer: Ed Bullwinkel
Program Chair: Chao Xie
Publicity Chair: Dharam Damani
Membership Chair: Larry Fitzgerald
Webmaster: Diana Mohan

The chapter thanks Gulsah Altun, who is stepping down after having been an ACM officer for five years and the chair for the last three years. (Posted 5/3/06)

Computer Science Students Receive Awards at Honors Day
The following computer science students were presented with departmental awards at the annual Arts and Sciences Honors Day ceremony:

Outstanding Senior Award

Outstanding Graduate Research Award

Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student Award

The ceremony was held on April 12 at Georgia State's Rialto Center for the Performing Arts. (Posted 4/20/06)

Pan Paper Among Most Downloaded
A paper co-authored by Dr. Yi Pan (along with Y. Xiao and J. Li) is among the most downloaded papers at the IEEE Xplore web site. Statistics for the last three months of 2004 show that the paper, titled "Design and Analysis of Location Management for 3G Cellular Networks," was the fourth most downloaded paper published in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems during that year or any prior year. The paper appeared in the April 2004 issue of the journal. (Posted 4/12/06)

Department to Host Summer Institute for AP Computer Science Teachers
The Department of Computer Science will host a Summer Institute for AP Computer Science Teachers on June 19-30. The purpose of the institute is to prepare high school teachers to teach AP Computer Science, which has used the Java programming language for the last three years. The institute will offer two courses (Learning Java for AP Computer Science A and Learning Java for AP Computer Science AB) as well as a workshop (Teaching AP Computer Science A & AB). The deadline for registering is May 15. Summer Institute programs will be taught by Dr. Anu Bourgeois, Dr. K. N. King, and Dr. Raj Sunderraman. Dr. Sunderraman is also the director of the institute. The Summer Institute is sponsored by the University System of Georgia's Double the Double Initiative. (Posted 3/7/06)

Fall 2005 Newsletter Now Available
The Fall 2005 edition of the department newsletter has been published. A PDF version is available for download. (Posted 2/6/06)

Department Welcomes Visiting Professor
The department is honored to host Professor Bernard P. Zeigler as a visiting professor during his sabbatical. Dr. Zeigler is a professor at the University of Arizona and a co-director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Modeling and Simulation. He is internationally known for his research in discrete event modeling and simulation and the Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) formalism. During his stay at Georgia State, Dr. Zeigler will collaborate with Dr. Xiaolin Hu as well as researchers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Georgia Tech. (Posted 1/26/06)

Li Receives NSF CAREER Award
Dr. Yingshu Li, a new assistant professor of computer science, received a prestigious award from the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The CAREER award will provide Dr. Li with about $400,000 in support over the next five years.
     The award, formerly known as the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, is the most competitive and prestigious award from NSF to young faculty members in science and engineering fields. The award places emphasis on high-quality research and novel education initiatives.
     "CAREER awards support exceptionally promising college and university junior faculty who are committed to the integration of research and education," says NSF Director Rita Colwell. "We recognize these faculty members, new in their careers, as most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century."
     Dr. Li's award was especially significant in several respects. It the first such award in the history of Georgia State's Department of Computer Science and only the fourth to a Georgia State faculty member since 2000. Moreover, Dr. Li received the award the first time she applied for it. (Posted 1/12/06)

Department Awards Four Ph.D. Degrees
The department awarded four Ph.D. degrees in December 2005, the largest number at one time in its history. The recipients of the degrees were:

 (Posted 1/12/06)