|
Dr. K.C. Tai Memorial Endowment Fund Launched
 Thanks
to the generous contributions of relatives, friends, former
students, and professional colleagues, Dr. K.C. Tai's legacy
will live on within the NCSU Department of Computer Science
in the form of the Dr. K.C. Tai Memorial Endowment Fund.
More than 50 individuals, including 30 NCSU faculty and staff,
have contributed more than $20,000 to date. The new endowment
was created to honor Dr. Tai's significant contributions to
the department and the University in the field of software
engineering. His wife, Mrs. Ling Tai, joined us on
campus on November 19th for a very special ceremony announcing
the launch of the new endowment. Dr. Tai, who passed away
in October 2002, was known as being a kind, compassionate,
and caring person, who enjoyed helping others. This endowment
will provide an ongoing source of funding to help future generations
of NCSU software engineering students and faculty.
If you would like to contribute to the Dr. K.C. Tai Memorial
Endowment Fund, please make your check payable to the
“NC State Engineering Foundation Inc.” and send
it to Ken Tate, NCSU Department of Computer Science, Campus
Box 8206, Raleigh, NC 27695.
Gamers Converge at Unreal University Event
 Hundreds
of game developers invaded the NCSU campus over the weekend
of November 8 & 9 to attend the first annual Unreal
University, sponsored by the Center for Digital Entertainment
at North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer
Science, Epic Games, NVIDIA, Atari and AMD. The event featured
a mixture of demonstrations, developer presentations and hands-on
tutorials covering a wide range of topics in the computer
gaming industry, which now tops $10 billion in sales yearly.
Dr. Michael Young, assistant professor of computer
science at NC State and director of the Center for Digital
Entertainment, said the event exceeded all expectations. Local
and national news coverage was extensive including:
CNN Story http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/11/12/hln.game.unreal.university/index.html
CNN Video http://cde.ncsu.edu/uu/press/CNNUU.mov
Departmental Research Grants, Gifts, and
Support
 Special
thanks to alumnus, Marshall Brain (MS '89) and his wife
Leigh Ann (MS '96), for contributing $4,000 to the CSC
Enhancement Endowment Fund.
Network Appliance recently contributed $25,000 in
unrestricted funding, renewing their Super ePartners membership
for another year. In addition, they provided another $40,000
which will be used to support a number of programs in the
department including sponsorship of the recent groundbreaking
event for our new facility on Centennial Campus, Women in
Computer Science, and internal Senior Design Center projects.
Dr. Laurie Williams has received a prestigious IBM
University Partnership Program Award for $40,000. The
award is for research in the area of "Serviceability
Enhancements: Comprehensive or Needs-Based?". In today's
software development business environment, time-to-market
is a dominant factor of business success. The acceleration
of change and intense competition mean that organizations
need to constantly innovate or risk failure or lack of profitability.
Additionally, applications must continuously evolve to meet
new demands to outpace (or meet) competitive offerings. These
competitive factors motivate the compression of the software
development process. Typical product characteristics that
suffer from such compressed development cycle are usability,
reliability, and serviceability. The primary focus of this
study is serviceability. Serviceability is defined as the
measure of the ease of diagnosing a problem and its time to
resolution once a problem is reported by a customer. Laurie
will make an empirical comparison of two strategies for managing
the cost of and customer satisfaction related to serviceability.
Additionally, the research will explore means for proactively
improving serviceability.
Congratulations to Drs. Laurie Williams and Mladen
Vouk for having their proposal titled "Agile Software
Dependability" funded for $24,515 by Nortel Networks.
The work on the project will occur from 1/01/04 through 5/15/04.
Agile practices relate to the dependability of software systems
in two ways. First, developers rapidly cycle from one software
development practice to another (such as concept, test, design,
code, test, design, code, etc.). The purpose of this cycling
is to get feedback early and often on decisions that have
been made – from requirements decisions to design decisions
and the like. This continual feedback provides "early
and often" checks on factors that ultimately impact the
dependability of the project. Additionally, the concept of
agility leads to the proper mapping of the right mix of dependability
practices to the determination of "good enough dependability"
for a particular project. The determination of what is "good
enough" is dependent upon the project characteristics
and requirements. As a step in an agile dependability effort,
the project team will work with Nortel to study the corporation’s
current practices in software dependability in relation to
industry best practices. The vehicle for this study will be
a web-based self-assessment questionnaire which will be administered
to development organizations with a corresponding "Best
Practices in Reliability" resource guide. The questionnaire
and resource guide will be created and the results analyzed
to advance agile software dependability at Nortel. Additionally,
the research team will work directly with one Nortel development
organization to further their agile dependability efforts
by formulating a ‘good enough’ reliability statement
with data from automated testing and verification ‘soak'.
Faculty/Staff News
Dr. Mladen Vouk has been appointed by Dean Nino
Masnari as Interim Head of the Department beginning July
1, 2004 succeeding Dr. Alan Tharp. In meetings and
correspondence with CSC faculty and staff, the Dean has expressed
his appreciation for Dr. Tharp's leadership and for the significant
progress that has been made during his tenure as department
head. Tentative plans call for a permanent head to be named
by the end of the fall 2005 term. We welcome Dr. Mladen Vouk
to his new role and we celebrate the accomplishments and leadership
of Dr. Alan Tharp.
The Association for Computing Machinery, the oldest and largest
educational and scientific computing society, held their 10th
Annual Conference on Computer and Communications Security
(CCS) October 27-31. Among the 35 accepted papers, the Department
of Computer Science at North Carolina State University had
4 papers in the conference this year, more than any other
institution. Dr. Doug Reeves, professor of computer
science, and his students contributed one of the four NC State
papers, and Dr. Peng Ning, assistant professor of computer
science, and his students contributed the other three. Ning
was the only author who had three papers in the conference.
The Computing Research Association (CRA) and the Association
for Computing Machinery (ACM) held a special panel discussion
on Grand Research Challenges in Cyber Security, Thursday,
November 20, at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington,
DC. House Science Committee Chairman, Sherwood Boehlert, served
as honorary co-host of the event. The panel, moderated by
noted cyber security expert, Dr. Eugene Spafford, discussed
the most challenging areas in long-term computer and network
security research, as identified by the most preeminent security
researchers in academia, industry, and government labs worldwide.
Among those on the panel, our Dr. Annie Antón,
associate professor of computer science and Founder &
Director of thePrivacyPlace.org.
Congratulations to Dana Lasher, director of student
services and EPA faculty, for being chosen as a Pride of
the Wolfpack Award winner in November.
Software Could Revolutionize Event-Planning
Industry
Led by Dr. Thomas Honeycutt, a group of 50 computer
science graduate students at NC State University is developing
software intended to help revolutionize the event-planning
portion of the marketing automation industry. At the same
time, RedPelican, a Triangle-area provider of marketing
communications process management applications, is helping
to ease the pain that marketing teams face in working with
a broader range of project management issues. For more information
on how the two efforts are tackling voids in this highly competitive
industry, see http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/news/news_articles/EventPlan.html.
Tiny Sensor-Based Computers Could Help
Track Wildlife
 Computer
scientists at NC State University aren’t afraid of the
big bad wolf – instead they’re revolutionizing the
technology that tracks him. The NC State researchers are studying
how tiny, sensor-based computers can improve wildlife tracking
methods for red wolves in eastern North Carolina. Current
tracking methods based solely on radio telemetry are expensive,
cumbersome and provide limited data, said Dr. Robert Fornaro,
professor of computer science at NC State. Wildlife researchers
can currently track red wolves using radio collars, but this
approach doesn’t show the big picture, said Mark MacAllister
of the North Carolina Zoological Society. “Radio telemetry
helps us understand locations,” he said, “but this
new technology could help us understand behaviors.” To
read more about this special project, sponsored this fall
by Foundry Networks, go to http://www.ncsu.edu/news/press_releases/03_11/321.htm.
Computer Scientist Works to Improve Games’
Stories, Intelligence
As computer game companies release their new selections for
the holidays, you’ll probably see role-playing games
in which characters must kill a monster in order to get treasure
and some clues to the next monster-guarded treasure, or to
advance to the game’s next skill level. But what happens
if a player doesn’t like to fight, or somehow manages
to avoid – but not vanquish – the monster? Researchers
in the Liquid Narrative Group, a collection of graduate and
undergraduate computer science students at North Carolina
State University headed by Dr. R. Michael Young, assistant
professor of computer science, are investigating ways of solving
this quandary. They are creating software tools that will
improve the artificial intelligence (AI) of games and educational
software; specifically, they are investigating ways that the
software allows users to both interact with the narrative,
or storyline, and feel like an active participant in the way
the story unfolds. For the entire news release, visit http://www.ncsu.edu/news/press_releases/03_11/317.htm.
 Undergraduate
Research Awards Go to CSC Student & Faculty Sponsor
CSC undergraduate, Neha Jain, has been awarded an NCSU
Undergraduate Research Award of $500. Her faculty research
sponsor, Dr. Annie Antón, also received a $500
award. In addition to this award, Neha was recently awarded
the CISCO Information Assurance Undergraduate Scholarship.
Congratulations Neha!
Senior Project Team Makes Site Visit
 Students
on the Progress Energy senior project team, one of
20 sponsored projects in the fall ‘03 Senior Design Project
course, visited the Shearon Harris nuclear power plant training
facility in New Hill, NC. Joining in the onsite visit were,
from the left: Andrew Humphries, Andrew Williams, Mark
Merrill, Matthew Ingle and sponsor, Lisa Council.
The Senior Design Center teams reported on their projects
to sponsors and guests at Posters & Pies held Dec. 3 at
the Talley Student Center. More about the Senior Design Center
and student team projects is available online at http://sd.csc.ncsu.edu/.
Companies interested in sponsoring projects for spring or
fall 2004 are invited to contact Dr. Robert Fornaro, professor
and Senior Design Center director, at fornaro@csc.ncsu.edu.
NCEITA Recognizes EMC as its 2003 "Public
Company of the Year"
 At
its annual awards banquet held in Cary on November 20th, the
North Carolina Electronics & Information Technologies
Association (NCEITA) recognized EMC as its 2003 "Public
Company of the Year". NCEITA, the primary voice of
the Information Technologies industry in North Carolina, annually
recognizes both companies and individuals who have significantly
helped advance North Carolina's leadership in technology via
public awareness, involvement in public policy, & championing
technology recruitment into the State. Awards are presented
in three major area covering company performance, community
involvement, and excellence in technology. The Public Company
of the Year award is one of the excellence in technology awards.
Congratulations to EMC, one of our founding Super ePartners,
for this tremendous honor.
Priority 'Naming Rights' for ePartners
 The
official groundbreaking ceremony for our new 100,000 sq. ft,
$41M state-of-the-art teaching and research facility on Centennial
Campus is tentatively planned for October 24th. At the same
time, we plan to launch the official Naming Rights Campaign.
While the details of this campaign are still being finalized,
we expect naming opportunities to range 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. Our ePartners will have priority naming rights opportunities.
More information will be released officially on this campaign
in the coming months, but if you have questions or would like
more information, please contact Ken Tate at 919-513-4292
or tate@csc.ncsu.edu.
Below are links to all previous issues on our Connected newsletter
as well as other informative sites at NCSU.
Back to Main ePartners News Page.
|
