News & Events Archive - 2007

For 2007 events in the Department of Computer Science, click here.

Bioinformatics Conference Returns to Georgia State in 2008
Next May, Georgia State will host the 4th International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (ISBRA 2008). ISBRA 2008 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     Authors are invited to submit papers that demonstrate original unpublished research in all areas of bioinformatics and computational biology, including the development of experimental or commercial systems. Surveys of important recent research results and directions are also welcome. The deadline for submitting papers to ISBRA 2008 is December 21. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by January 25, with final versions due on February 15.
     The proceedings of ISBRA 2008 will be published in the Springer Verlag Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics series. As in previous years, it is anticipated that a special issue of a major bioinformatics journal will be devoted to extended versions of the best symposium papers.
     ISBRA 2008 is the latest in a series of conferences that includes last year's ISBRA 2007 (also held at Georgia State) and the earlier International Workshop on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (IWBRA), held in 2005 and 2006.
     The general chairs of ISBRA 2008 are Dr. Yi Pan and Dr. Dan Gusfield (University of California, Davis). The program chairs are Dr. Raj Sunderraman, Dr. Alex Zelikovsky, and Dr. Ion Mandoiu (University of California, San Diego). Dr. Robert Harrison and Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang are the organizing chairs, and Dr. Anu Bourgeois is the finance chair. Dr. Yingshu Li and Dr. Dumitru Brinza (University of California, San Diego) are the publicity chairs. Ph.D. students Gulsah Altun and Stefan Gremalschi are the poster chairs.
     Symposium attendees will stay at the Atlanta Marriott Downtown. Sessions will be held at the Helen M. Aderhold Learning Center.
     ISBRA 2008 is sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, the Biomedical Computational Center, the Molecular Basis of Disease Program, and the GSU Student Chapter of the ACM. (Posted 12/5/07)

Beyah Named to Atlanta Business Chronicle's Up & Comers List
In its October 26 issue, the Atlanta Business Chronicle named Dr. Raheem Beyah one of the paper's Up & Comers 40 Under 40, a list of the 40 "most successful and powerful leaders in the community" under the age of 40. The editors of Atlanta Business Chronicle reviewed over 270 nominations before making their selections. At age 30, Dr. Beyah is one of the youngest members of the Up & Comers group. He was selected because of his community involvement, which includes mentoring students and working with organizations such as LEAD Atlanta, as well as his academic achievements. A year ago, Dr. Beyah was chosen by Georgia Trend magazine for their 40 Under 40 list. (Posted 11/19/07)

Beyah Joins Board of Directors at KIPP WAYS Academy
Dr. Raheem Beyah has joined the Board of Directors at KIPP WAYS Academy, a free college-preparatory charter school serving students in West Atlanta. KIPP West Atlanta Young Scholars (WAYS) Academy is one of over fifty KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) schools operating in low-income urban and rural communities throughout the country. The school's mission is to prepare students for top-quality high schools, colleges, and the competitive world beyond by instilling in each student a commitment to scholarship, teamwork, integrity, and other "WAYS to success." KIPP WAYS Academy opened in 2003; it has approximately 300 students in grades five through eight. (Posted 11/19/07)

Li Receives ETRI Grant
Dr. Yingshu Li has received a $30,000 grant from South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute. Dr. Li is the principal investigator for the grant; the co-principal investigator is Dr. Yeon-kwon Jeong, a visiting professor. The grant is for a project titled "Research on the WLAN MAC Improvement Methodologies for Seamless Vertical Handover in Next Generation Mobile Communications," which involves investigating how to support seamless vertical handover effectively in the IEEE 802.11 WLAN environment and other wireless access networks. (Posted 10/29/07)

Pan, Zhang, Ding Receive Awards at BIBE
Dr. Yi Pan received the outstanding achievement award at the 7th IEEE International Conference on BioInformatics and BioEngineering (IEEE BIBE 2007), where he was a keynote speaker. Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang, who was program co-chair and chair of the bioinformatics track, received the outstanding academic service award. Ph.D. student Zejin (Jason) Ding, the web co-chair, received the excellent professional service award. The conference was held at the Harvard Medical School Conference Center in Boston on October 14–17. (Posted 10/29/07)

DESRIST 2008 Coming to Atlanta
The Third International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST 2008) will be held in Atlanta next year. Several Georgia State faculty members and staff are among the conference organizers, including Dr. Vijay Vaishnavi (program chair) and Dr. Richard Baskerville (program co-chair) of the Department of Computer Information Systems and Art Vandenberg (local arrangements chair) of Information Systems & Technology. Dr. Ying Zhu of the Department of Computer Science is serving as doctoral consortium co-chair.
     DESRIST 2008 will explore aspects of design science research methodology as well as research exemplars of the genre. The objective of the conference is to bring together researchers from diverse backgrounds ranging from computer science, HCI, information systems, and software engineering to social ethnography, artistic, and architecture disciplines to create a forum for discussing novel solutions to emerging problems.
     DESRIST 2008 will be held on May 7–9 at the Westin Buckhead Atlanta. (Posted 10/15/07)

Ph.D. Student Awarded Travel Grant
Ph.D. student Yiwei Wu has been awarded a travel grant to attend the 2007 Military Communications Conference (MILCOM 2007). At the conference, he will present the paper "Constructing k-Connected m-Dominating Sets in Wireless Sensor Networks," which is co-authored with Dr. Yingshu Li (his Ph.D. advisor), Dr. Feng Wang of the University of Minnesota, and Dr. My Thai of the University of Florida.
     Now in its 26th year, MILCOM is the premier international conference for military communications, attracting 5,000 military and government communications experts from around the globe to engage in in-depth discussions about the latest technological advancements.
     MILCOM 2007 will be held on October 29–31 at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center near Orlando. (Posted 10/15/07)

Li Hosts Visiting Professor
The Department of Computer Science welcomes a new visiting professor, Dr. Xiaoming Wang. Dr. Wang is associate dean of the College of Computer Science at Shaanxi Normal University in China. His research areas are dynamic systems and access control in networks and database systems. During his visit, which will last for a year, Dr. Wang will collaborate with Dr. Yingshu Li on research in wireless sensor networks. Dr. Wang is supported by the China Scholarship Council. (Posted 10/10/07)

Cisco Research Grant Awarded
A team that includes Dr. Xiaojun (Matt) Cao has received a Cisco Research Grant. The grant was awarded to the Rochester Institute of Technology, where Dr. Cao worked before coming to Georgia State. The project, titled "Advanced Networking Infrastructure Projects for Computing and Collaboration," involves using 10 GigE network devices to create an advanced network infrastructure for computing and collaboration, with an emphasis on uncompressed HD over IP, high-throughput data transfers, and low-latency backplane/interconnects for HPC clusters. The grant includes $78,000 in cash and as much as $386,000 in equipment. The other members of the team are Gurcharan Khanna (the principal investigator) and Andy Elble. (Posted 10/10/07)

Beyah Chosen for Outstanding Atlanta
Dr. Raheem Beyah has been chosen as one of this year's Outstanding Atlanta honorees. Being selected by Outstanding Atlanta, formerly known as The Outstanding Young People of Atlanta, is the city’s premier honor for community involvement by young Atlantans ages 21 to 36. Founded in 1968, the organization chooses ten young leaders annually based on their roles in business, civic, and cultural fields. Previous honorees include news anchors Jovita Moore and Monica Kaufman, state representative Stacey Y. Abrams, state senator M. Kasim Reed, Atlanta city councilmember Ceasar C. Mitchell, and Dr. Beyah's wife, Kali Wilson Beyah. (Posted 10/3/07)

Zhang Receives NSF Grant
Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang received a $5,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled "Student Fellowships for Participating in IEEE 7th International Symposium on BioInformatics and BioEngineering." Dr. Youping Deng of the University of Southern Mississippi and Dr. Jack Yang of Harvard University are co-principal investigators. The grant will be used to provide financial support for students to attend BIBE 2007, which will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14–17. Two Georgia State Ph.D. students, Bernard Chen and Qiong Cheng, will be supported by the grant. (Posted 10/1/07)

Students for Open Source Holds First Meeting
Students for Open Source, a new student organization, will hold its first meeting on Thursday, September 20, at 4:00 p.m. in room 330 of the Aderhold Learning Center. The topic is "Students for Open Source, Open Source, and You." There will be free software demos, giveaways, and free snacks.
     Students for Open Source is dedicated to the promotion of free and open source software (FOSS), including the Linux kernel, Mozilla Firefox, Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice, and The GIMP. It provides an opportunity for like-minded students to meet and get to know each other, thus fostering a stronger sense of community among Linux and open source users throughout the Georgia State community. The organization plans to hold meetings once or twice per month during the academic year. Anyone is invited to attend; there are no dues or fees. The 2007–2008 officers of Students for Open Source are:

President: David Tomaschik
Vice-President: Charles Keller
Treasurer: Mark Sahara
Secretary: Kyle Proctor

Dr. Michael Weeks is the group's faculty advisor. (Posted 9/17/07)

Department Awards Seven Ph.D. Degrees in August
The Department of Computer Science awarded seven Ph.D. degrees in August, the largest number at one time in its history. The recipients of the degrees were:

(Posted 9/17/07)

Li Wins Best Paper Award
Dr. Yingshu Li has won the best paper award at the International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (WASA 2007). The award was for the paper "Constructing Connected Dominating Sets with Bounded Diameters in Wireless Networks," co-authored with Donghyun Kim, Feng Zou, and Ding-Zhu Du of the University of Texas at Dallas. WASA 2007 was an NSF-sponsored forum for theoreticians, system and application designers, protocol developers, and practitioners to discuss current wireless-network trends, challenges, and state-of-the-art solutions. Thirty-six papers were presented at the conference, which was held on August 1–3 in Chicago. (Posted 9/10/07)

Graduate Fellowship Winners Announced
The winners of Molecular Basis of Disease (MBD) and Brains & Behavior (B&B) fellowships were announced this summer. New MBD fellowships were awarded to the following computer science graduate students:

The following students hold MBD fellowships that were awarded in prior years:

A new B&B fellowship was awarded to the following student:

The following students hold B&B fellowships from prior years:

Each fellowship provides a stipend of $22,000 per year. Fellowships last for one year but can be renewed for up to three years. Molecular Basis of Disease is a program in computational biomedicine that includes faculty in six departments engaged in interdisciplinary research: Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Physics and Astronomy, Mathematics and Statistics, and Computer Information Systems. The program provides both graduate and undergraduate fellowships as well as support for state-of-the-art facilities in these departments. Brains & Behavior is a Georgia State initiative that unites a wide variety of researchers who bring unique perspectives about how nervous systems produce behavior. B&B research groups foster collaboration among faculty from Biology, Chemistry, Computer Information Systems, Computer Science, Mathematics and Statistics, Philosophy, Physics and Astronomy, and Psychology. (Posted 8/22/07)

Hu Receives NSF Grant
Dr. Xiaolin Hu received a $120,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled "System Integration of Dynamical Data-Driven Wildfire Spread and Firefighting Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization." Dr. James Nutaro from Oak Ridge National Laboratory is co-principal investigator of the grant, which runs from August 1, 2007 to July 31, 2009.
     Research to be performed under the grant involves developing an integrated data-acquisition, modeling, simulation, and optimization software environment for effective wildfire management. This environment integrates real-time acquisition of weather and fire-front position data, fast simulation of fire spread to predict fire behavior, just-in-time optimization to compute firefighting resource deployment, and modeling and simulation of firefighting to assess strategies of fire suppression. Integrating these components that are usually treated in isolation enables a novel comprehensive software system to effectively support real-time optimal decision-making for fire management and minimize firefighting risk and cost. The software environment will also serve as a valuable training and planning tool for fire management, and will provide a multidisciplinary educational tool for students and researchers in general. (Posted 8/10/07)

Beyah Appointed to Journal Editorial Board
Dr. Raheem Beyah has been named an associate editor of Security and Communication Networks, a journal published by John Wiley & Sons. Security and Communication Networks is an international journal publishing original research and review papers on security and cryptographic mechanisms applied to all types of information and communication networks, including wired, wireless, and optical transmission platforms. The journal provides a prestigious forum for the R&D community in academia and industry working at the inter-disciplinary nexus of next-generation communications technologies with physical and upper-layer network security implementations. It is aimed at academic researchers, professional engineers, and developers working in wireless and wired communication networks, cryptography, biometrics, and information technology. (Posted 8/10/07)

Department Welcomes Visiting Faculty
The department is honored to host two visiting faculty members. Dr. Shi-Jinn Horng is visiting from July 1 to September 30. Dr. Horng is dean of the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the National United University of Taiwan. During his stay at Georgia State, he will collaborate with Dr. Yi Pan on research into information security and networks. Dr. Horng is supported by Taiwan's National Science Council.
     Dr. Yeon-kwon Jeong is a member of the Mobile Multimedia Laboratory research staff at the Information and Communications University of Korea. Dr. Jeong is collaborating with Dr. Yingshu Li on a project titled "WLAN MAC Improvement Methodologies for Seamless Vertical Handover in Next-Generation Mobile Communications." Currently there are multiple wireless access technologies, including wireless WANs (e.g., 2G, 2.5G, 3G, B3G, etc.) and wireless LANs (e.g., IEEE 802.11a/b/g and HiperLAN/2). Each technology has its own characteristics in terms of coverage area, performance, and end-user cost. By using each interface in different ways, users with multi-interface terminals can seamlessly roam among these access networks according to their preferences, the applications, and the capability of the interfaces. Such an internetwork roaming procedure is referred to as vertical handover. Dr. Jeong and Dr. Li are investigating how to support seamless vertical handover effectively in the IEEE 802.11 WLAN environment among these various wireless access networks. Dr. Jeong's visit will last from March 2007 to February 2009. (Posted 8/10/07)

Department to Offer History of Computing Course
In the Fall Semester, the Department of Computer Science will offer CSc 3010 (History of Computing) for the first time. This three-hour course will survey the history of the computing field from antiquity to the present, focusing on the era of the electronic digital computer. Topics will include historical developments in hardware, software, and the theoretical foundations of computer science. Georgia State students have an unusual opportunity: because computer science is a relatively new field, courses on the history of computing are rare. CSc 3010, which will be taught by Dr. K. N. King, is aimed at both computer science majors and non-majors; it will meet on Mondays and Wednesdays from 3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. (Posted 7/30/07)

Spring 2007 Newsletter Now Available
The Spring 2007 edition of the department newsletter has been published. A PDF version is available for download. (Posted 7/30/07)

Starting Salaries Increase for Computer Science Majors
According to a recent study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the average starting salary for new computer science graduates increased by 4.1% from last year to $53,396. Computer science remains one of the highest-paying majors, exceeded only by chemical engineering ($59,361), computer engineering ($56,201), electrical engineering ($55,292), and mechanical engineering ($54,128). Increased demand is the primary reason for the salary increase, with nearly 9 out of 10 employers seeing more competition for new college graduates. (Posted 7/30/07)

Zelikovsky Wins SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize
Dr. Alex Zelikovsky has won a prestigious SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize. The prize is for the paper "Tighter Bounds for Graph Steiner Tree Approximation," co-authored with Dr. Gabriel Robins of the University of Virginia, which appeared in the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics in 2005. The prizes, first awarded in 1999, are given for outstanding papers published in SIAM journals during the three years prior to the year of the award. Only three awards are given each year. The award carries a stipend of $500 for each author.
     SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) is a professional organization founded in the 1950s. Its membership, which now numbers over 11,000, includes applied and computational mathematicians, computer scientists, numerical analysts, engineers, statisticians, mathematics educators, and students. SIAM publishes 14 peer-reviewed research journals. (Posted 7/18/07)

Prasad Elected Chair of Technical Committee on Parallel Processing
Dr. Sushil Prasad has been elected chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Parallel Processing. His term of office begins in July and ends in June 2009.
     With nearly 100,000 members, the IEEE Computer Society is the world's leading organization of computer professionals. Founded in 1946, it is the largest of the 39 societies of the IEEE. The Computer Society sponsors over three dozen Technical Committees, which serve as the focal point for the society's activities within a technical discipline and directly influence standards development, conferences, publications, and educational activities.
     The Technical Committee on Parallel Processing (TCPP) acts as an international forum to promote parallel processing research and education, and participates in setting up technical standards in this area. Topics of interest are related to the design, analysis and implementation of parallel systems and solutions, including design and analysis of parallel architectures and algorithms as well as application development on parallel machines.
     Among other activities, TCPP sponsors professional conferences and workshops. The flagship conference is the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), which is held annually in the spring. TCPP also sponsors the International Conference on High Performance Computing (HiPC). (Posted 7/18/07)

Sunderraman Updates Oracle Primer
Dr. Raj Sunderraman's latest book, Oracle 10g Programming: A Primer, was published in May. This book is the most recent edition of Oracle Programming: A Primer, which first appeared in 1998. The first edition covered Oracle 7.0; later editions covered versions 8.0 and 9i.
     Dr. Sunderraman's book is a concise, streamlined guide to Oracle programming that introduces the Oracle technology students need to know for a first database course. It is designed to accompany a popular database textbook, Fundamentals of Database Systems, Fifth Edition, by Ramez Elmasri and Shamkant B. Navathe.
     The first part of Oracle 10g Programming: A Primer offers a basic review of the relational model and an introduction to Oracle SQL and PL/SQL. The second part introduces related technologies that facilitate Oracle Web functionality, including chapters on SQLJ, Oracle Web programming with Java servlets, and Oracle XML. The final chapter contains a number of sample projects and programming applications.
     Published by Addison-Wesley, Oracle 10g Programming: A Primer (ISBN 0-321-46304-8) is a paperback book with 544 pages. It is available at Amazon.com for $39.60. (Posted 7/2/07)

Department Featured in Georgia State Magazine
An article in the Summer 2007 issue of Georgia State Magazine features research being done in the Department of Computer Science. The article, titled "Introducing Bioinformatics," discusses the department's key role in the emerging field of bioinformatics. The article quotes the department chair, Dr. Yi Pan, extensively. It also mentions Dr. Robert Harrison, the first bioinformatics faculty member to be hired by the department, and NeuronBank, a joint project with the Department of Biology. Georgia State Magazine is a quarterly publication distributed to more than 120,000 alumni, donors, and other friends of the university. (Posted 7/2/07)

New Course to Replace Math 2420
Starting in Fall 2007, the Department of Computer Science will offer a new course, CSc 2510 (Theoretical Foundations of Computer Science), which replaces Math 2420 (Discrete Mathematics) in the B.S. curriculum. All students entering Georgia State in Fall 2007 will be required to take CSc 2510 instead of Math 2420. Students who entered prior to Fall 2007 and have not yet taken Math 2420 are encouraged to take CSc 2510 instead; the department will accept it as a substitute for Math 2420. CSc 2510 is designed from a computer science perspective and covers all theoretical/mathematical concepts needed to study advanced computer science subjects. (Posted 6/20/07)

Joint Appointment Announced
The department is pleased to announce that Dr. Mark Keil of the Department of Computer Information Systems has been granted a joint appointment. He joins four other faculty members who hold joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science: Dr. Veda Storey and Dr. Vijay Vaishnavi (both of Computer Information Systems), Dr. Guantao Chen (Mathematics and Statistics), and Dr. Xiaochun He (Physics and Astronomy). (Posted 6/20/07)

Department Phone Numbers to Change
As of July 1, all telephone numbers at Georgia State University will change, including all numbers used by the Department of Computer Science. The change is a result of the IP Telephony project, during which the university will move to a university-owned VoIP system from Avaya Communications. The new system will save money as well as offering additional features and capabilities. The new numbers will all be in the 404 area code and will have a 413 prefix. Both the old and new numbers will work until July 1, when the old numbers will be discontinued. Please refer to the Contact Info page and the People page for the new department numbers. New phone numbers for all Georgia State personnel can be found in the Campus Directory. (Posted 6/14/07)

ACM Chapter Welcomes New Officers
The Georgia State University student chapter of the ACM recently elected officers for the 2007–2008 academic year. The new officers are:

Chair: Akshaye Dhawan
Vice Chair: Sandeep Kondubhatla
Secretary: Chetan Galgali
Treasurer: Philip Rogers
Program Co-Chairs: Naveen Hiremath and Zejin Ding
Publicity Chair: Chirayu Poundarik
Membership Chair: Rizwan Babwani
Webmaster: Chad Frederick

(Posted 6/14/07)

Department Awards Four Ph.D. Degrees in May
The Department of Computer Science awarded four Ph.D. degrees in May. The recipients of the degrees were:

(Posted 6/14/07)

Cao To Join Department
Dr. Xiaojun (Matt) Cao will join the Department of Computer Science in August as an assistant professor. Dr. Cao is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Networking, Security, and Systems Administration at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He received a B.S. degree in engineering physics from Tsinghua University in 1996 and an M.S. in electronic engineering from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999. In 2004, he received his Ph.D. degree in computer science and engineering from the University at Buffalo. His research focuses on network modeling, analysis, and protocol/algorithm design.
     Dr. Cao is the recipient of a prestigious award from the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The grant provides Dr. Cao with $400,000 in support over a five-year period for his research on developing a multi-granular switching framework to reduce the complexity, cost, and size of both electronic and optical switches. The CAREER award, which emphasizes high-quality research and novel education initiatives, is the most competitive and prestigious award from NSF to young faculty members in science and engineering fields. Dr. Yingshu Li also won a CAREER award in 2006, giving the department the rare honor of having two CAREER awardees on the faculty. (Posted 6/13/07)

Prasad Is Tutorials Chair for IPDPS 2008
Dr. Sushil Prasad is serving as tutorials chair for the 22nd IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2008). IPDPS is a forum for engineers and scientists from around the world to present their latest research findings in the fields of parallel processing and distributed computing. The five-day program will include contributed papers, invited speakers, panels, tutorials, and commercial participation, with workshops held on the first and last days. IPDPS 2008 will be held on April 14–18 at the Hyatt Regency Resort in Miami. (Posted 6/13/07)

Department Hosts International Bioinformatics Symposium
In May, the Department of Computer Science hosted the first International Symposium on Bioinformatics Research and Applications (ISBRA 2007), drawing a crowd of 200 researchers, developers, and practitioners working on all aspects of bioinformatics and computational biology and their applications. Attendees came from 14 countries and 20 U.S. states. A group photograph (high-resolution version) is available showing some of the participants.
     The symposium featured 55 papers, 23 posters, and two tutorials, as well as keynote addresses by three distinguished scientists: Dr. Ming Li (University of Waterloo), Dr. Laura L. Elnitski (National Human Genome Research Institute), and Dr. Mark Borodovsky (Georgia Tech).
     The proceedings of ISBRA 2007 were published as volume 4463 of 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.
     At the conference banquet, the following awards were given:

     The general chairs of ISBRA 2007 were Dr. Yi Pan and Dr. Dan Gusfield (University of California, Davis). The program chairs were Dr. Alex Zelikovsky and Dr. Ion Mandoiu (University of Connecticut). Dr. Robert Harrison and Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang were the organizing chairs, Dr. Raj Sunderraman was the publication chair, Dr. Anu Bourgeois was the finance chair, and Dr. K. N. King and Dr. Yingshu Li were publicity chairs. Ph.D. students Gulsah Altun and Dumitru Brinza served as poster chairs.
     ISBRA 2007 was sponsored by the Department of Computer Science, the Biomedical Computational Center, and the Molecular Basis of Disease Program. (Posted 5/31/07)

Pan Is Keynote Speaker at AINA Conference
Dr. Yi Pan delivered one of three keynote addresses at the IEEE 21st International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications (AINA 2007), which was held in Niagara Falls, Canada, on May 21–23. The title of his talk was "Public Computing – Challenges and Solutions". The conference was devoted to the theory, design, and application of computer networks and distributed computing systems. It was organized by the EHPCLab at St. Francis Xavier University and sponsored by the IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing and Nokia. (Posted 5/30/07)

Internal Grants Awarded to Computer Science Faculty
Five Computer Science faculty members were among 61 Georgia State professors who recently won internal grants from the university. The awards were competitive, with applications reviewed by an Internal Grant Peer Review Committee consisting of 24 senior faculty members. Two CS faculty members received Research Initiation Grants, which promote the scholarly and artistic activity of the faculty and foster academic excellence within the university:

Another three faculty members were co-recipients of Research Program Enhancement Awards, which are available only to currently funded research groups:

(Posted 5/30/07)

Owen Gives Talks in Asia
On May 24, Dr. Scott Owen presented the opening keynote address, titled "The Future of the Digital Age," at ASIAGRAPH in Shanghai, China. ASIAGRAPH is an annual conference that brings together educational institutions, industry, and government to discuss how to combine next-generation digital technologies with entertainment and other aspects of culture. The conference rotates between South Korea, China, and Japan. On May 26, Dr. Owen gave an invited talk on "ACM SIGGRAPH and Plans for an Asian SIGGRAPH Conference" at the 11th Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival in Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Owen is the president of ACM SIGGRAPH. (Posted 5/30/07)

Beyah Named Demo Co-Chair for TridentCom 2007
Dr. Raheem Beyah has been named Demo Co-Chair for the 3rd International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for the Development of Networks and Communities (TridentCom 2007). TridentCom brings together all aspects of experimental telecommunication infrastructures, creating a forum where telecommunication networks researchers, vendors, providers, and users can exchange ideas on past experience, requirements, needs, and visions for the establishment of such infrastructures. TridentCom will be held in Orlando on May 21–23. The conference is co-sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society and CREATE-NET. (Posted 4/11/07)

Students Participate in Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference
A team of undergraduate computer science majors participated in Georgia State's first Undergraduate Research Conference, which was held on April 11 in the Student Center. The team members were David Tomaschik, Michael Igbinigie, Kyle Proctor (a Computer Information Systems major), and Fred Hudson. Their presentation, titled "The Oui System – An Embedded Systems Language Learning Lab," was related to their Imagine Cup project. The team's faculty sponsor was Dr. Michael Weeks.
     The Undergraduate Research Conference was designed to showcase research, art, and music produced by Georgia State undergraduates. It also served as a recruiting tool: high-school seniors who were already accepted by Georgia State were invited to attend the conference to see the high-quality work being done by undergraduates. The conference was the first ever held at Georgia State, but the university plans for it to be an annual event. (Posted 4/11/07)

Georgia State Students Compete in Imagine Cup
Five Georgia State students are currently competing in the Imagine Cup, an international computing contest sponsored by Microsoft Corporation. The Imagine Cup consists of nine competitions organized into three categories. Georgia State students are competing in Embedded Development and Software Design, which are two of the competitions in the Technology Solutions category. The other categories are Skills Challenges and Digital Arts.
     A team of four students (David Tomaschik, Michael Igbinigie, Kyle Proctor, and Fred Hudson) is participating in the Embedded Development competition. Kyle Proctor is majoring in Computer Information Systems; the other team members are computer science majors. Dr. Michael Weeks is the team's advisor.
     Each team in the Embedded Development competition is required to build a working prototype of an embedded device that will have an impact on solving some of the world’s toughest problems. Teams are required to use Windows Embedded CE 6.0 as their operating system and target their project to the eBox-2300 system.
     The Georgia State team's project, which is titled "The Oui Language Learning Lab," involves creating a prototype system for an interactive environment that helps the user rapidly learn new words in a foreign language. The system permits users to interact with their environment and receive real-time feedback in a foreign language to help them build language skills. It uses an embedded computer system that allows users to hear the words for everyday objects in the foreign language of their choice. Users press a button located on or next to the object to trigger the response. The system also supports a quiz mode that allows users to evaluate their progress and a game-show mode that provides a more entertaining environment for younger users. The system requires little or no computer background to use. The embedded nature of the system allows it to be used in remote parts of developing countries, helping bring foreign language education to the less fortunate.
     During the first round, which ended on February 22, teams submitted an interim report describing their project. Georgia State's team was one of 200 to advance to the second round, which ends on May 18. In the second round, teams are provided with an ebox-2300 computer as well as a set of software tools to use in developing their prototype system. Based on reports submitted at the end of the second round, 15 teams will be chosen to advance to the worldwide finals in South Korea. The finalists will be announced on June 15, with the finals held on August 5-10 in Seoul. Finalists will be judged on their oral presentation and project demo. Cash prizes totaling $15,000 will be awarded to the top three teams.
     Another Georgia State computer science major, Minh Nguyen, is competing in the Software Design competition, which has three stages. The first stage was an online competition consisting of twelve programming and testing challenges. In the second stage, the top 500 students were invited to attend one of four regional semi-finals. Semi-finalists will compete over the course of one day on a challenge of particular complexity and difficulty. The top 24 students will be invited to the third stage: the North American Final in Redmond, Washington. In this stage, six teams of four students will have one week to design, develop, test, and debug an application. One team will be selected to travel to Seoul to compete in the Imagine Cup 2007 worldwide finals, representing the U.S. and Canada. Mr. Nguyen qualified for the regional semi-finals with a score of 145 out of 330. His faculty advisor is Dr. Xiaolin Hu.
     The Imagine Cup began four years ago. So far, more than 100,000 students from over 100 countries and regions have competed. In 2004, the first year of competition, a team of four Georgia State students was awarded second place in the Southern Regional Imagine Cup competition. (Posted 4/11/07)

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 Undergraduate Research Award

Outstanding Graduate Research Award

Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student Award

The ceremony was held on April 4 at Georgia State's Rialto Center for the Arts. (Posted 4/4/07)

Pan Appointed Co-Editor for Wiley Book Series
Dr. Yi Pan has been appointed by John Wiley & Sons to serve as co-editor for the new Wiley book series on Wireless Communication and Mobile Computing along with Dr. Xuemin (Sherman) Shen of the University of Waterloo in Canada. The objective of the series is to provide timely treatments of both the theoretical and practical aspects of wireless communication and network systems. (Posted 3/12/07)

Prasad Is Co-Chair of SOBDAT Workshop
Dr. Sushil Prasad is serving as program co-chair for the first IEEE International Workshop on Service Oriented Technologies for Biological Databases and Tools (SOBDAT 2007). The SOBDAT workshop will provide a forum for researchers and practitioners working to solve problems related to the integration of the diverse databases and tools used in the analysis of biological data. SOBDAT will be held on July 13 in Salt Lake City in conjunction with the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS) and the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC). A recent Georgia State Ph.D. recipient, Dr. Janaka Balasooriya, now at the University of Missouri-Rolla, is serving as a local arrangements co-chair for SOBDAT. (Posted 3/12/07)

Faculty Help Organize BIBE Symposium
Several members of the Department of Computer Science are helping to organize the upcoming 7th IEEE International Symposium on BioInformatics and BioEngineering (BIBE 2007), which will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 15–17. Dr. Yi Pan and Dr. Yan-Qing Zhang are members of the BIBE steering committee. Dr. Zhang is a program co-chair for BIBE 2007 in addition to serving as chair of the bioinformatics track. Dr. Yingshu Li is a publicity co-chair, and Dr. Alex Zelikovsky is a publication co-chair. Ph.D. student Zejin Ding is the web chair for the conference. Dr. Pan will also be one of five invited keynote speakers. (Posted 2/28/07)

Fall 2006 Newsletter Now Available
The Fall 2006 edition of the department newsletter has been published. A PDF version is available for download. (Posted 2/19/07)

Pan Receives NSF Grant
Dr. Yi Pan received a $30,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for a project titled "Transmembrane Protein Segment Prediction and Understanding Based on Machine Learning Methods." Dr. Robert Harrison of Computer Science and Dr. P. C. Tai of Biology are co-principal investigators on the grant, which runs from September 1, 2006 to August 31, 2007.
     The research to be performed under the grant involves an innovative approach to rule generation for understanding prediction of transmembrane segments by integrating rough set theory, support vector machines, and association rule-based classifiers. Although several methods exist for solving this problem, the researchers hope to achieve better performance with respect to accuracy and the number of generated patterns. They expect that the patterns generated will be easily understandable and biologically meaningful and can be used by biologists to guide their experiments. The new approach and the software tools to be developed are completely generalizable and can be applied to other domains, such as protein secondary structure prediction. The project will increase interaction between computer scientists and biologists, which should lead to tackling difficult problems in cell biology and complex systems. (Posted 2/19/07)

Owen Visits Asia to Plan New SIGGRAPH Conference
Dr. Scott Owen, the president of ACM SIGGRAPH, recently returned from a three-week tour of Asia, where he visited Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo. The purpose of the trip was to investigate sites for a possible new conference in Asia. Interest and activity in Asia in computer science, especially computer graphics and digital media, has increased dramatically. As a result, Dr. Owen last fall formed a steering committee to investigate the possibility of starting a new annual SIGGRAPH Conference in Asia (SiA). The steering committee consists of Dr. Owen, ACM SIGGRAPH vice president Alyn Rockwood, and eleven members from six Asian countries.
     In Singapore, Dr. Owen was a guest of the Singapore Tourism Board and met with representatives of several academic and government institutions. There was a meeting of the entire steering committee in Kuala Lumpur to plan the new conference. Dr. Owen also discussed SiA with government and academic representatives in Kuala Lumpur and Tokyo and had a very favorable reaction.
     The existing SIGGRAPH conference, held annually during the summer, is the largest ACM conference, with between 20,000 and 30,000 attendees. SiA will likely be held in December, starting in 2008 or 2009, and is expected to attract a similar number of people.
     Dr. Owen's SiA proposal was covered in Asian news media as well as in Variety. (Posted 1/29/07)

Hu Named Program Co-Chair for International Simulation Conference
Dr. Xiaolin Hu will serve as a program co-chair for MSV'07, the 2007 International Conference on Modeling, Simulation, and Visualization Methods. Topics to be discussed at the conference include simulation languages, modeling and simulation for computer engineering, modeling and simulation for education and training, real-time modeling and simulation, and information and scientific visualization, among many others.
     MSV'07 is part of WORLDCOMP'07 (2007 World Congress in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Applied Computing), the largest annual gathering of researchers in computer science, computer engineering, and applied computing. WORLDCOMP'06 attracted over 1,500 computer science and engineering researchers from 78 countries. WORLDCOMP'07 will consist of 25 conferences, with attendees having full access to all sessions, tracks, and tutorials of these conferences. It will be held on June 25–28 at the Monte Carlo Resort in Las Vegas. (Posted 1/29/07)

Department Awards Five Ph.D. Degrees in December
The department awarded five Ph.D. degrees in December 2006, the largest number at one time in its history. The recipients of the degrees were:

(Posted 1/17/07; updated 1/29/07)