Dr. Emmett Tomai has recieved an Army Research Office Grant for his project: "Data Analyses of Narrative Accuracy and Interestingness". The grant is in cooperation with Dr. Andrew Gordon at the Institute for Creative Studies at the University of Southern California. The funding will be $100,000 for one year from December 2009 to November 2010.

Walmart's Leadership in Technology and Innovation Scholarship Award

APPLICATION DEADLINE: November 20, 2009

Walmart's Campus Relations Team has announced a scholarship fund through the University of Texas Pan American Computer Science Department to support students majoring in Computer Science.  Up to five students will be selected to receive a $1,000 scholarship.

Qualification Requirements:

• Student must be classified as either a Sophomore, Junior, or Senior at the University of Texas Pan American.
• Student must be majoring in Computer Science  and be in good standing.
• Student must have a 3.0 or above GPA on a 4.0 scale.

Appications are available online or can be picked up at the Department of Computer Science.   

Computer Science Department Assistant Professor Faculty Positions

The Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) seeks applications for two tenure-track Assistant Professor positions in Computer Engineering (F09/10 new). All candidates must have a potential/proven record in teaching and active research. The Assistant Professor positions in Computer Engineering require a Ph.D. in computer science, computer engineering or a closely related area. Highest priority will be given to candidates who can support the software track of the Computer Engineering program with expertise in software engineering and databases.  

The program in Computer Engineering leading to BS degree in Computer Engineering is administered jointly by the Computer Science Department and the Electrical Engineering department. The Computer Science Department also offers the BSCS (ABET/CAC Accredited) and BS undergraduate degrees, MS in Computer Science and MS in Information Technology.

UTPA is situated in the lower Rio Grande valley of south Texas, a strategic location at the center of social and economic change. With a population of over one million, the Rio Grande Valley is one of the fastest growing regions in the country. The region has a very affordable cost-of-living. UTPA is a leading educator of Hispanic/Latino students, with enrollment of 18,400.  

The positions start Fall 2010. Salaries are competitive. Please send:  (1) a cover letter, specifically stating an interest in the Assistant Professor in Computer Engineering position, noting your specialization, (2) vita, (3) statements of teaching and research interests, and (4) names and contact information of at least three references to: Dean’s Office, Computer Engineering Search, College of Science and Engineering, The University of Texas-Pan American, 1201 W. University Drive, Edinburg, Texas 78541-2999. Email: COSEDeansoffice@utpa.edu . Review of materials will begin on November 1, 2009 and continue until the position is filled. 

NOTE:  UTPA is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. Women, racial/ethnic minorities and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply.  This position is security-sensitive as defined by the Texas Education Code §51.215(c) and Texas Government Code §411.094(a)(2). Texas law requires faculty members whose primary language is not English to demonstrate proficiency in English as determined by a satisfactory grade on the International Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL).

Congratulations to Computer Science HESTEC Poster Competition Winners!

As part of HESTEC and the Dr. Hashim Mahdi Memorial Science Symposium, students and their faculty advisors from across the College of Science and Engineering participated in a poster competition.  The posters showcased the exciting research throughout the college.

The poster judges for the Department of Computer Science, Dr. Laura Grabowski, Dr. Emmet Tomai, and Dr. Yang Liu, elected
the following winners for the Computer Science department HESTEC poster competition:

Undergraduates:

1st Place: "DNA Self-Assembly Design Software" by Sergio Gonzalez and Michael Baldwin, Faculty Advisor: Dr. Robert Schweller

2nd Place: "Genetic Sequence Editor - Sequence Alignment Feature" by Jacqueline Barreiro, Faculty Advisor: Dr. Andres Figueroa, Dr. Joanne Rampersad-Ammons

3rd Place: "Medical Records Evaluation" by Brad Estep, Faculty Advisor: Dr. John Abraham

Graduate student departmental champion:

"Protein 3D Structure Alignment and Protein Search" by Zaixin Lu and Bin Fu

The department congratulates these students for their outstanding work, and all the students who participated in this exciting event.

Congratulations to Pearl Brazier and Artem Chebotko

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT)  Academic Alliance Seed Fund, sponsored by MICROSOFT Research, has recently awarded Pearl Brazier and Artem Chebotko in the Computer Science Department $15,000 to fund a proposal “Dancing Robots Introduction to Computer Science” which we will use to enhance CSCI 1360 to attract Women to the Computer Science/ Computer Engineering Degree. We plan to offer this version of the course during Spring 2010 and Summer 2010.  UTPA was one of three to receive this award.  Read more about their award on the NCWIT website!

PRESS RELEASE
For Release: Friday, Sept. 25, 2009

Introductory computer science concepts course to feature dancing robots in spring 2010

EDINBURG, Texas – Starting in spring 2010, students at The University of Texas-Pan American will get a chance to build their own mobile robots during a special section of an introduction to computer science course, which will be offered primarily to females and non-computer science majors.
 
The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) recently awarded Professor Pearl Brazier, director of the Computer Engineering Program and undergraduate coordinator for computer science, and Dr. Artem Chebotko, assistant professor in computer science, $15,000 to fund a proposal titled “Dancing Robots Introduction to Computer Science.” The award, which will provide funds for a year, will redesign the current “CSCI 1360 Intro to Computer Science Concepts” course offered at UTPA.
 
“We want to attract more women to computer science and programming projects, which tend to be more male oriented,” Brazier said.
 
UTPA was one of three Round 5 winners of the NCWIT Academic Alliance Seed Fund, which is funded by Microsoft Research, to provide U.S. academic institutions with start-up funds to develop and implement initiatives for recruiting and retaining women in computer science and information technology fields of study. Other winners included The University of Pennsylvania and Waukesha County Technical College.
 
The CSCI 1360 course is currently targeted to students without prior programming experience who may be interested in computer science. With the course redesign Brazier and Chebotko are hoping to attract more women and underrepresented groups into considering a degree in computer science and/or computer engineering.
 
The “Dancing Robots Introduction to Computer Science” concept will offer UTPA students the chance to work with LEGO® Mindstorms robots while learning programming concepts, teamwork, and computing in the context of real-world problems.
 
“They say a picture is worth a thousand words and hence the visual aspect of the programming experience,” Brazier said. “I believe the robots will give an immediate visual feedback on the program and will enhance the learning environment for the students.”
 
The course will also fulfill the computer literacy general education requirement Brazier said. Brazier and Chebotko will recruit 20 students to participate in the course with preference given to women and underrepresented groups. Another course will be offered in the summer of 2010.
 
In addition, computer science undergraduate students will be hired and volunteer student mentors will be recruited from the UTPA Association for Computing Machinery student chapter to assist in the course and provide a peer development environment.
 
For more information and to register for the course, contact Brazier at 956/381-3455 or by e-mail at brazier@utpa.edu.
 

Dr. Bin Fu Won the Prestigious NSF CARRER Award. Congratulations!

Dr. Bin Fu’s winning proposal is “CAREER: Theories and Applications of Efficient Separator and Randomization”, 2009 April 1 to 2014 March 31, with $409157.  

Dr. Chen and Dr. Fu at the luncheon	Dr. Wendy Lawrence-Fowler and Dr. Bin Fu

NSF states that “The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.”

The goal of Dr. Fu's project is to study efficient separator and randomization theories and technologies with applications to algorithm design. Separator and randomization are basic tools of designing algorithms for many applications problems. A separator is often used to decompose a difficult computational problem into smaller and easier ones, and then to solve the problem with a divide and conquer strategy. Randomization is widely used to speed up computation by sampling a small number of cases from a large number of possibilities. In order to attack challenging computational problems, such as protein 3D structure prediction, more efficient decomposition methods are expected to be developed. His project unifies the two approaches of separators and randomization because of their close connection. This unified approach helps the development of sublinear time algorithms, which are usually based on random sampling.  

The decomposition methods are studied from low dimensional geometric spaces to high dimensional spaces and to general graphs and to algebraic computation. Proving the existence of a separator will get new insights into combinatorial nature of a given problem. Finding a separator efficiently is also an interesting algorithmic problem itself and often uses randomized methods. On the other hand, the research on complexity theory related to randomness is a part of his project, which includes the research about some lower bounds for randomization methods and the limitation of derandomization. A potential application of separator theory is protein folding prediction. A more efficient decomposition method will bring faster algorithm for this significant problem in science. As his project combines decomposition with randomization, the results of the research make new contributions to the core area of computation theory and discover applications in the field of bioinformatics. Education is an integral part of his project. Minority graduate students and female graduate students are involved in the protein 3D structure related algorithm design and web-server implementation. A randomized computation course for both undergraduate and graduate students is developed.  

Dr. Bin Fu received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1998. He also studied at Princeton University. He joined the UTPA faculty in Fall 2006.  Prior to that, he completed three and a half years of teaching as an Assistant Professor at the University of New Orleans and five years of teaching as a Lecturer at the Beijing Computer Institute. 

Dr. Bin Fu is a scholar in several areas of computer science including bioinformatics (protein folding), algorithms (width-bounded separator theory, Rocchio's relevance feedback algorithm analysis, and Abelian group factorization), complexity theory, and molecular computing. He has made significant contributions to the above areas of computer science. 

Dr. Fu has pioneered and established the width-bound geometric separator theory and its applications in a variety of areas including approximation algorithms, bioinformatics, etc. This theory is profoundly different from the existing well-known separator theories and is more precise and robust in dealing a large array of algorithm design problems.  

For the first time since early 1970s, he has, along with Dr. Zhixiang Chen, given the first rigorous analysis about Rocchio’s similarity-based relevance feed back algorithm, the most popular, fundamental query reformation algorithms in information retrieval. Thus, the long standing challenging problem of complexity analysis of this fundamental algorithm is settled.  

His research group’s protein search software outperforms the best software in the area. The service provided by their software is open for public access via his UTPA web site.  

His research with his collaborators on randomized and approximation algorithm design and analysis has led to a number of significant discoveries, including the sublinear time randomized algorithm to find separators in high dimensional space and inapproximability results for several bioinformatics problems such exemplar break point problem.  

His major scientific contributions before joining UTPA include: (1) The separation of EXP from P_{n^{1-\epsilon}(SPARE). This is a breakthrough in the area of computational complexity. He used Kolmogorov complexity to masterfully carry out the need complex analysis. (2) The settlement of a challenging open problem in structural complexity theory: NC^{PL}_{1} = PL and NC^{PP}_{1} = PP. This result leads to improvement on a series of results about probabilistic complexity classes. (3) The separation of NE from P_{n^{o(1)}-T}(NP). (4) He has also made contributions to DNA computing in his Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University. 

Congratulations to Jorge S. Hernandez and Mr. David Egle

The following have been selected to be honored for the Engineering Week representing the Department of Computer Science.

Mr. Jorge S. Hernandez has been selected as the most outstanding student by the department faculty.

Mr. David Egle has been selected by the ACM Student selection as Most Outstanding Faculty.

Again, congratulations from all of us in the Department of Computer Science.

WALMART Leadership in Technology and Innovation Scholarship

Who we are

The Department of Computer Science is a part of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas - Pan American. We are located in Edinburg, Texas, close to South Padre Island and Mexico. The University of Texas - Pan American is a component of the University of Texas System with an enrollment of around 18,000 students.

The Department of Computer Science offers an CAC/ABET accredited Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (BSCS) degree with a major in computer science. The Department of Computer Science offers a joint Computer Engineering Degree with the Electrical Engineering Department. A Bachelor of Science (BS) degree with a major in Computer Science with a required minor field is also offered. The BS degree is not accredited by CAC/ABET.  The Department also offers an 18-hour minor in computer science. 

The department offers Master's degrees in Computer Science and Information Technology.

Please come by the department offices on the third floor of the Engineering building and discuss the opportunity of studying Computer Science with our department.