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"Leaders of the Pack"
 This
year, four top leadership positions are all held by students
from the College of Engineering - presidents of the Student
Senate, Engineers' Council, and senior class and the Technician
editor (a CSC student). Dedication to excellence and the leaders
of the Pack make a winning combination for NC State. To read
more, visit
www.engr.ncsu.edu/news/achieve/educate.html#leaders.
Departmental Research Grants, Gifts, and
Support
Integrated Industrial Information (I-cubed) has renewed
its ePartners membership with an unrestricted cash contribution
of $2,000.
EMC Corporation recently contributed $25,000 in unrestricted
funding, renewing their Super ePartners membership for another
year.
IBM has award Drs. Ed Gehringer and Laurie
Williams $20,000 as an IBM Eclipse Innovation Award
to fund their proposal titled "Distributed Extreme Programming
with Eclipse". The project will run from January to December
of this year. A key component of Extreme Programming is pair
programming - two co-located programmers working together
at one computer. However, the distributed nature of many development
teams makes it hard to practice XP effectively. Consequently,
few outsourced software projects can benefit from XP. They
either bend the rules of XP, resorting to XPB. (XP but), or
they reject XP and its practices outright. To facilitate true
XP with remote customers or distributed developers, collaboration
tools are needed. Ed and Laurie propose to couple Eclipse
with the Syncshare Server (http://www.kizna.com/products_sync.html),
a powerful collaboration server written completely in Java.
Eclipse and Syncshare have inspired our Sangam project (http://sangam.sourceforge.net)
an Eclipse plugin tailored toward distributed pair programming.
The Sangam prototype has proved that pair programming is possible
using Eclipse and the Syncshare Server. However, much work
needs to be done to make it robust. Important features such
as dynamic peer-synchronization need to be implemented to
make for a more realistic pair-programming experience.
IBM also awarded another $25,000 IBM Eclipse Innovation
Award to Dr Laurie Williams (and Co-PI Dr. Michael
Rappa of the College of Management) for their proposal
"Establishing an OpenSeminar for Eclipse-based Software
Engineering Education". The project will run from January
through December of this year. Experience has shown that Eclipse
provides an excellent infrastructure for software engineering
education. Eclipse is readily available for student use and
is a popular and effective development environment. By carefully
choosing from available plug-ins, educators can customize
the Eclipse development environment to map to the learning
objectives of the course. Students learn important lessons
about open source technology and program modularity. However,
educators are busy and changing curricula and development
platform can be time consuming. Laurie and Michael propose
the creation and the initial population of an OpenSeminar
for Eclipse-based software engineering education. The OpenSeminar
will enable professors from different universities to work
collaboratively to create an online seminar and to customize
it to the needs of their own students. These educational resources
will also be freely available to all Eclipse users via the
Internet.
Tekelec in the Research Triangle Park has awarded
Dr Laurie Williams $35,735 to fund her proposal titled
"On Assessing Transitions to Extreme Programming".
The project will run from January to August of this year.
Software organizations are increasingly adopting the software
development practices associated with the Extreme Programming
(XP) methodology. The research team will work with two Tekelec
software development teams to adapt and transition to the
XP practices and methodologies for use in their projects.
Additionally, the research team will assess the teams transitions
relative to the Extreme Programming Evaluation Framework which
has been published as an NCSU CSC technical report.
Faculty/Staff News
Dr. Dennis Bahler has agreed to serve as Director
of Undergraduate Programs from February 1st through June
30th of this year succeeding Dr. Robert Fornaro. Dr. Fornaro
will retain responsibility for the ABET/CAC self-study.
Welcome to Melissa (Missy) Seate, who joined our department
this month as an Accounting Clerk. In this role, she will
assist with processing the biweekly payroll, travel reimbursements,
vendor invoices for payment along with other departmental
office duties. She received her BA from UNC-CH, and has an
extensive accounting background. She has worked at Duke Medical
Center, Spectrum Planning and Development, and The Forest
at Duke. Missy's office is located in 226 Withers Hall and
her telephone number is 919-513-7300.
Congratulations to Jennifer Craddock for being selected
as Research Facilitator (responsible for processing research
proposals) replacing Ginger McGlamery effective January 5.
Jennifer has been cross-training over the past six months
to provide support for this critical position, which should
make for a smooth transition. Jennifer will be located at
the EGRC on Centennial Campus.
Dana Lasher, director of student services, and Ken
Tate, director of the ePartners Program, have recently
been selected as a “Pride of the Wolfpack Award”
winners in the College of Engineering.
Congratulations to Dr. Vince Freeh and his wife Jennifer,
on the birth of their 4th child, Anna Maria Freeh, on January
18th.
Congratulations to Drs Injong Rhee, Lisong Xu,
and Khaled Harfoush for their work on improving TCP
performance for high-speed networks (a network with large
delay and huge bandwidth. E.g., Internet2 or ESNet). This
work is published in INFOCOM 2004. In the paper, they proposed
a new protocol called BIC that improves the performance of
TCP and they also implemented the protocol in Linux. The exciting
news is that this protocol was tested by a third party at
SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) along with 6 other
protocols being proposed by other researchers around the world
including Caltech, Rice, UC-Berkeley, University College of
London. BIC turns out to be the *best* protocol among these
protocols. The work is reported in http://dsd.lbl.gov/DIDC/PFLDnet2004/papers/Bullot.pdf.
Recently Caltech has created a lot of publicity around FAST
(see http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/).
ACM/AITP Meeting Sponsorships Available
A reminder to all our ePartners, a complementary named sponsorship
event is available for the ACM/AITP Meeting on April 21st
at 7 pm. You simply need to provide a guest speaker and a
technical topic of 30-40 minutes in length. Other nights are
also available for sponsorship. For more information, please
contact Ken Tate at 919-513-4292 or tate@csc.ncsu.edu.
Scientists Develop Technology to Enable
High-Performance Computing
An optical network provisioning protocol to enable more efficient
computing applications has been successfully demonstrated
by scientists at MCNC Research & Development Institute
and North Carolina State University, including computer science
professors, Drs. Harry Perros and George Rouskas.
To read more, visit http://www.ncsu.edu/news/press_releases/04_01/005.htm.
Averitt Recognized as an IT Leader
Samuel F. Averitt, vice provost for information technology,
chair of the North Carolina Networking Initiative (NCNI) and
alumnus of the College of Engineering, has been selected as
one of Computerworld magazine’s Premier 100 IT Leaders
for 2004. The award was announced in a special Jan. 5 edition
of Computerworld. The annual award honors 100 top IT and business
executives for their exceptional technology leadership. This
year’s winners will be honored at the Premier 100 IT
Leaders Conference in Palm Desert, Calif., in March. Suzanne
Gordon, who is vice president of IT at SAS Institute Inc.,
a member of the NC State Board of Trustees, and a CSC alumna,
received the award in 2003. To read the entire article, visit
http://www.ncsu.edu/BulletinOnline/01_04/averitt.htm.
'Naming Rights' Available for New Facility
 The
official groundbreaking ceremony for our new 100,000 sq. ft,
$41M state-of-the-art teaching and research facility on Centennial
Campus was held on October 24th, 2003. At that same time,
we launched the official Naming Rights Campaign with opportunities
ranging from $25,000 to over $1M. Premiere naming spaces include
an expansive atrium and a series of terraces designed to host
events of all sizes, as well as labs, classrooms, conference
rooms, and faculty offices. More information is available
at http://epartners.ncsu.edu/naming_rights.html,
and more details will officially be released on this campaign
in the coming months. If you have questions or would like
more information, please contact Ken Tate at 919-513-4292
or tate@csc.ncsu.edu.
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