department of computer science and engineering at texas a&m university 2011-2012 annual report

2011 - 2012 Annual Report

The Power of

Finding, identifying, and evaluatingonline crowds for change

In this issue:

The Brain Networks Laboratory

Research focus:

Faculty and student awards, and much more!

The Emerging Technologies Building was opened in the fall of 2011, and has allowed the department to increase its footprint on campus with the addition of needed lab space and conference rooms. A view of the lobby can be found on page 31.

Contents:

This annual report is published by The Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University in order to inform readers about department news.

Opinions expressed in this annual report are those of the editor or author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Texas A&M University administration or the Texas A&M University Board of Regents.

2 THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIAFinding, identifying, and evaluating online crowds for change

5 THE BRAIN NETWORKS LABORATORYUnderstanding biology in order to enhance computing

6 FACULTY AWARDS, NEWS, AND RECOGNITIONA festschrift, a new center, and prestigious awards

STUDENT AWARDS, NEWS, AND RECOGNITIONA Best Buy commercial and more prestigious awards12

15 STUDENT ORGANIZATIONSAn organization for every computing occasion

16 DEPARTMENT OUTREACHResearch for undergrads, high school contest, and our Industrial Affi liates Program

19 DISTINGUISHED FORMER STUDENTSDr. Christopher Jones ‘99 and Mr. Eric Marin ‘86

20 FACULTY DIRECTORYAll of our faculty.

Editing/Design:

Tony Okonski

with appreciated help from:

Kathy FloresLesley KriewaldTim SchnettlerKathy WaskomMatt Zeringue

The CSE Facultyand

Engineering Communications

Contact Us:

Communications Coordinator,Department of Computer Science and Engineering3112 TAMUCollege Station, TX 77843-3112

cse.tamu.edu

Annual Report 2011 - 2012

Howdy! Welcome to this issue of our Annual Report, which highlights our continued efforts to develop the human and intellectual resources needed to meet future technological challenges in computing.

In this edition, we take a look at the work of Dr. James Caverlee as he studies the power of social media to bring together online communities and harness their collective intelligence to perform tasks in order to change the world.

We also review the research of Dr. Yoonsuck Choe and the Brain Networks Laboratory as they investigate how understanding the architecture of the human brain could enhance computing for the betterment of mankind.

Be sure to read about our excellent faculty and students who continue to receive honors and awards for their research and teaching. Our department added an IEEE Fellow, three more NSF CAREER Awardees, a Denise Denton Emerging Leadership Award, an Air Force Offi ce of Scientifi c Research Young Investigator Program participant, and other signifi cant awards to the list of our faculty’s accolades. We honored the work of Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor and implementer of the C++ programming language with a well attended and fun-fi lled feschcrift. Several of our students were awarded important fellowships and scholarships that are a testament to the high quality of their research.

In the coming academic year, we will continue to dedicate ourselves to research that enriches the community. In addition, we will remain steadfast in our commitment to providing computer science and computer engineering curricula that develop computer scientists and computer engineers for positions of leadership in industry, government, and academia.

A note from Hank Walker,Department Head

Duncan M. “Hank” WalkerDepartment Head and Ford Motor Company Design Professor IIDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering

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Faculty Spotlight

Social media—user-generated content. Texas A&M computer scientist James Caverlee is studying the use of social media to harness collective intelligence to perform tasks, to persuade and change minds, and maybe even to change the world.

As an expert in large-scale networked information systems—such as the World Wide Web, social media and mobile information systems—Caverlee looks at tremendous numbers of users and tremendous amounts of information, the places people go, the people they talk to and interact with, the content they are interested in, and the connections between them.

These large-scale networked information systems are typically open and intentionally designed to encourage participation, Caverlee says.

“This has lots of good benefi ts,” he says. “You see self-organized systems. You see serendipitous discovery of new information and new uses of these systems beyond what the systems designers had ever imagined. You see communities form. There are all these exciting possibilities that happen when you let people collaborate.”

Now he wants to know whether these systems can be mined to fi nd interesting or useful information to empower decision makers.

Caverlee asks, can collective intelligence be harnessed?

Online gathering placesCrowds are naturally forming, Caverlee says, and the goal of his current research is to fi nd these online crowds and engage them to accomplish tasks.

In 2010, Caverlee received a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (through the agency’s Information Innovation Offi ce) to identify online “hotspots” in real-time social systems, mainly Twitter, where hundreds of millions of messages are posted per day.

These online gatherings can be driven by natural disasters or by sporting events such as the Super Bowl. How do you fi nd these hotspots in real time when huge numbers of people are posting hundreds of millions of messages? The task required developing algorithms and methods.

After the Vancouver riots, people started posting photos and video and messages of the riots,” Caverlee says. “So you had this online refl ection of current events. Assuming you can mine these large-scale systems and fi gure out where people are talking about this particular event, can we close the loop and engage with these crowds that are forming in these systems?

“It’s a form of crowdsourcing,” Caverlee says. “Can crowds of people online work together intelligently, and if so, how?”

Such crowdsourcing would be useful in a disaster, natural or otherwise. When disaster strikes, human impulse is for people on-site to use Facebook and Twitter to post photos and video of the damage, status updates, and their locations. Once these online crowds that have formed in response to this particular emergency are detected out of the hundreds of millions of other online activities, the challenge then becomes connecting the crowds to emergency responders.

“If I am an emergency responder with limited resources, I need to know where to send trucks and rescue teams,” he says. “Emergency responders have to make these decisions

Dr. James Caverlee

The Power of

Finding, identifying, and evaluatingonline crowds for change


with limited information in the immediate moments after this disaster has struck. So let’s engage with these detected crowds and know where they are, but also issue them jobs to complete.”

The National Science Foundation has sponsored some of Caverlee’s work in this area. He says that one job, for instance, would be for people to step outside their homes and take photos of the ground or buildings so that structural engineers can assess the safety of structures in the area. Computers can’t do that job, Caverlee says. Real people need to be directed to take better photos, to give better information that can help decision makers know where to send resources.

“In the moment, as this is happening, the big challenge is to detect this crowd, connect them back to the stakeholder—in this case, the emergency responder—and then give them tasks to do to accelerate decision making and reduce response time.”

Crowd quality—in the momentAlongside this detection and task assignment is assessing the relative quality of a newly formed crowd. A second project, this one funded by the National Science Foundation, aims to assess and monitor the quality of these crowds.

A typical measure of Web quality is Google’s PageRank, or the content of a page or site, the number of clicks on a page, the links around the page, or how people engage with the site. CNN.com, for example, may be a reputable page compared with a blog because CNN has a lot of in-links, a long life on the Web, more site visitors and higher click rates.

But crowds form in real-time systems in response to events, such as a presidential debate, a natural disaster or even just friends talking about a game. The crowd itself may not have a long life span, so a long history to assess the crowd

is not available. Instead, researchers have to develop other methods to evaluate relative quality. “We don’t have history for these people, or accounts,” Caverlee says, “so we have to make assessments in near real time and build models quickly so that we can speed and improve decision making.”

Spam: Not just potted meatCaverlee says the fl ip side of these open systems is getting people to participate in, but not abuse, the system.

“Spam has moved out of our e-mail inboxes and into these social systems,” he says, citing the example of Astroturf, a campaign that looks like a grassroots effort that instead uses fake accounts and bots to promote particular candidates or ideas.

Caverlee started his research with Web spammers who tried to manipulate search engine rankings. But spam has evolved, and with the rise of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, spammers are now infi ltrating and attacking those systems.

In work funded by Google and in collaboration with Steve Webb (then at Georgia Tech and now an independent consultant), Caverlee studied social spammers by deploying social honeypots, a new twist on a classic security reconnaissance trick to attract spammers and then study their tactics and behaviors to reverse engineer a solution to stop them.

The research group ran the social honeypots in MySpace (when MySpace was still popular and active) and in Twitter, engaging in behaviors to attract spammers to them to serve as an early warning system to detect new and emerging behaviors in these social systems.

Caverlee looks at tremendous numbers of users and tremendous amounts of informa on, the places people go, the people they talk to and interact with, the content they are interested in, and the connec ons between them.

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In Twitter, the group set up accounts that didn’t tweet or tweeted only randomly, and that did not connect with other Twitter users.

“These are passive accounts with no listed interests, that no active users would want to friend—these honeypots are irresistible to spammers,” Caverlee says. “So if one of these accounts tried to be friended, we would turn down the request but then crawl back to mine their profi les and connections. We could build machine-learned models of them based on artifacts of what they’ve left in the system.”

Typical spammer behavior is to follow as many other users as possible. Caverlee says an obvious sign of a bot-controlled account is a certain set ratio of friends to followers. Looking at user history showed that as soon as an upper threshold was reached, the bot-controlled account would immediately dump hundreds of followers to maintain the set ratio. Having many links per tweet is another red fl ag that a user is a bot-controlled account.

With 60 Twitter honeypots, the team recorded 36,000 spammers in seven months. By modeling the behavior, the team could detect the spam accounts eight to 10 days before Twitter’s own spam detectors did.

Weapons of mass persuasionThe group noticed not only automated spam but also lots of coordinated spam, more like campaigns. The team found multiple accounts with similar talking points, and more subtle, sophisticated spam campaigns instead of brute-force spam that’s easier to identify.

So the team’s current work, funded through U.S. Air Force Offi ce of Scientifi c Research in spring 2012, is looking at propaganda and strategic manipulation in these large networked social systems.

“The social Web and social media have essentially become a weapon of mass persuasion,” he says. “You have large numbers of people interacting with each other, so you see not only spam but political campaigns involved in this. You see evidence of governments and hate groups engaging in this.”

In this war of persuasion, then, researchers want to know how to change people’s minds and views of the world.

“We know that this is happening already, but we as researchers don’t have a very good handle on what’s going on, only anecdotal evidence,” he says.

So Caverlee is now trying to detect persuasion at the scale of these large systems, fi nding these talking points and tracking their evolution. Coupled with that is building mathematical models that can explain this behavior.

“Anecdotally, there’s this idea of tipping points, where things go viral,” he says. “Once we detect these campaigns, can we rewind the tape and build models? Can we fi nd out if it’s the content of the message, or the topology of the social network, or is it key infl uencers or is it that the message reached a certain kind of inertia, a certain mass of people?”

This all goes back to the idea of these open systems, Caverlee says.

“Anyone can engage, anyone can promote their messages, so it all becomes a war of ideas. Because I’m a computer scientist, I’m trying to build computational methods for detecting and mining these campaigns, for modeling their evolution, for determining how to stop a campaign or determine the factors that make a campaign go global, and understanding the factors that infl uence all of this.” –fi n

In this war of persuasion, thenresearchers want to know howto change people’s minds andviews of the world.

The world of social media is a crowded market:Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. Instagram. Pinterest. YouTube. Flickr. Google+. Foursquare.

Those are just the ones you’ve heard about, and the numbers are staggering:

and on it goes.

Facebook and Twitter combined have more than 1.5 billion users. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest, larger than the United States.

Facebook gets more weekly traffi c than Google, the largest search engine. YouTube is the second-largest search engine.

In April 2012, Facebook paid $1 billion for mobile photo-sharing app Instagram.

Pinterest popularity has exploded from 400,000 unique users in May 2011 to 18.7 million in March 2012.

Ar cle wri en by Lesley Kriewald


Research Focus

Being self aware, humans have often wondered about how our brain works. We wonder about the mechanisms that facilitate thinking, cognition, and problem solving in addition to other functions of the brain. The concept of intelligence intrigues us; some scientists wonder if we can build artifi cial intelligences, but how would that work? How does our understanding of the biology of the brain relate to computing? Dr. Yoonsuck Choe, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, is tackling these questions head on in his Brain Networks Lab.

“One of the major grand challenges in science and engineering in the 21st century is to reverse engineer the brain” says Dr. Choe. “I strongly believe that understanding the principles underlying brain function can revolutionize the way we think about computation and computers. This can lead to major breakthroughs in science and technology, much in the same way computers and the internet revolutionized our society at the end of the 20th century.”

His lab is taking a two-pronged approach in discovering how our brains function.

The lab is aiming to recover and analyze the full circuit diagram of small animal brains by using the revolutionary Knife-Edge Scanning Microscope (KESM). The KESM, developed in the Brain Networks Lab, can cut very thin slices of small animal brain tissue and scan them at very high resolution, all in a fully automated system. The lab has been successful in imaging whole mouse brains and they are working hard to extract the rough connectivity information from the over 1.5 TB data per brain.

The data is being used to construct an online atlas of the mouse brain to be used for research purposes.

“After we had designed and implemented the KESM instrument, we obtained full-brain data from multiple mouse brains. We are putting together a web-based brain atlas, the KESM Brain Atlas, which can be found at http://kesm.org, to allow public access to the full data that we have generated. We are also working on automated methods for geometric reconstruction of the objects such as neurons and blood vessels in our data sets so that a fully quantitative study can be done” says Choe.

The second approach is theoretical. The brain has evolved with its main function being motor control. Higher cognitive functions such as memory and prediction all seem to serve this basic function. In this sense, time also becomes an important component, since memory and prediction can be viewed in terms of the past and the future. Motor actions unfold over time with its success dependent on precise timing.

The Brain Networks Lab is looking into perceptual, temporal, and sensorimotor aspects of brain function at multiple levels to gain deeper insights into the core of brain function. Observing brain function at the synaptic level, single neuron level, map level, and the agent-environment level assists them in developing biologically inspired unsupervised and reinforcement learning algorithms to assist in their modeling and analysis.

Ultimately, this research will allow scientists to build new technologies that will help humanity solve many problems and make the world a better, safer place to live.“Our research will lead to a deeper understanding of the principles underlying brain function and allow us to build tools based on these principles. These tools can have profound impact on science and technology. They can accelerate the rate of discovery of new scientifi c knowledge, help us explore broader and farther regions of space, help us treat mental disorders, and help us build assistive technology for the elderly and the physically impaired.” –fi n

Dr. Yoonsuck Choe

The Brain Networks Laboratory

Research focus:

The Brain Network Laboratory, founded by the late Prof. Bruce H. McCormick, designed and developed the Knife-Edge Scanning Microscope (KSEM), which enables whole-brain imaging of small animal brains at a sub-micrometer resolution. With the fi ne-grained anatomical data from the KESM, combined with innovative theoretical and computational investigations, the lab is working hard to reach its long-term goal of reverse engineering the brain. The image to the right is a 3D visualization of a Golgi-stained cell created using information gathered by the KESM.

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Our University Distinguished Professor Bjarne Stroustrup, holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science, was honored with a festschrift held April 27-28, 2012. Dr. Stroustrup is the designer and original implementer of C++, one of the world’s most popular and most widely used programming languages.

The Workshop on Quality Software: A Festschrift for Bjarne

Stroustrup took place on the Texas A&M College Station campus in the newly dedicated Emerging Technologies Building. Guests and participants were able to engage in lively discussion via the many technical sessions and lectures, as well as enjoy themselves at the banquet held later in the evening of the event’s fi rst day. In all, the festschrift was a fi tting occasion to mark over thirty years of Dr. Stroustrup’s outstanding work in C++.

The Workshop on Quality Software The Workshop on Quality Software was attended by a world-wide selection of Dr. Stroustrup’s colleagues. Among the many who participated were Dr. Ravi Sethi (president of Avaya Research, formerly AT&T), Dr. Lawrence Crowl (Google, formerly Sun), Dr. Alexander Stepanov (Amazon, formerly Adobe and SGI), Dr. Jan Christiaan van Winkel (Google, Zurich), Dr. Damian Dechev (Univ. of Central Florida), Dr. Hans Boehm (Hewett-Packard), Dr. Matt Austern (Google, formerly Apple), Dr. Vincent Lextrait (Chief Technical Offi cer of Amadeus), Alisdair Meredith (Bloomberg), Jonathan Caves (Microsoft), Dr. Peter Pirkelbauer (LLNL), Dr. Magne Haveraaen (University of Bergen), and Dr. Andrew Lumsdaine (Indiana University). Friends and former colleagues who could not attend sent messages, videos, photos, and congratulatory slides for display at a well-attended reception.

The festschrift organizing committee consisted of faculty members Dr. Nancy Amato, Dr. Jaakko Järvi, Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger, and Dr. Jennifer Welch. The event was sponsored by the Parasol Lab, the Texas A&M Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the department’s Industrial Affi liates Program.

The Festschrift provided the perfect ending to a busy and productive year for Dr. Stroustrup.

The Cambridge Connection: In February, Dr. Stroustrup was honored to give the inaugural Wheeler Lecture at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. There, he spoke about the style of C++11, which became an ISO standard this academic year, emphasizing its type-rich interfaces, compact data structures, integrated resource management and error handling, and highly-structured algorithmic code. Modern C++ is a language for programming based on light-weight abstraction with a direct and effi cient

mapping to hardware, suitable for infrastructure code.Dr. Stroustrup began a life long association with Cambridge while working on his Ph.D. in computer science, which he received in 1979. In the summer of 2009, he gave a memorable lecture “Evolving a Language in and for the Real World” as part of the University’s 800th anniversary celebrations. Dr. Stroustrup is one of eight Overseas Fellows of Churchill College, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge and the national memorial to Sir Winston Churchill.

The Wheeler Lecture is named after Dr. David Wheeler (1927-2004) who in 1951 received the world’s fi rst Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory (then the Mathematical Laboratory). He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1981 and in 2003 awarded Fellow of the Computer History Museum for his invention of the closed subroutine, his architectural contributions to the ILLIAC, the Cambridge Ring, and computer testing. Dr. Wheeler was Dr. Stroustrup’s thesis advisor at Cambridge.

A role in science and technology: Also this past academic year, Dr. Stroustrup gave an invited lecture at CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research. C++ is the main programming language used for high-energy physics and for the design and operation of the world’s most powerful particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider. Dr. Stroustrup’s host “encouraged” him by pointing out that “Einstein stood here” and that most other physics greats had lectured from that spot. Later in the year, CERN was able to announce data that supports the existence of a new particle that is consistent with the elusive Higgs boson. Finding Higgs boson is of the major scientifi c achievements of our new millennium. A message of “Thanks!” from software teams at CERN on that day brought tears to his eyes.

“I am very excited by the scientifi c and technological advances in which C++ has a role” says Stroustrup. “I lost hours of sleep to follow the landing of NASA’s new Mars Rover. I consider that a major technological triumph and am very proud that its critical autonomous driving and scene analysis software is written in C++.”

Dr. Stroustrup is a highly esteemed researcher, inventor, and educator. Among his honors is his election to The National Academy of Engineering “for the creation of the C++ programming language.” As the fi rst computer scientist ever, he was awarded the 2005 William Procter Prize for Scientifi c Achievement from Sigma Xi. He was given the IEEE Computer Society’s 2004 Computer Entrepreneur Award “for pioneering the development and commercialization of industrial-strength, object-oriented programming technologies, and the profound changes they fostered in business and industry.” He received the 1993 ACM Grace Murray Hopper award “for his early work laying the foundations for the C++ programming language.” Based on those foundations and Dr. Stroustrup’s continuing efforts, C++ has become “one of the most infl uential programming languages in the history of computing.”

Stroustrup Honored with Festschrift

Faculty News, Awards, and Recognition


The Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System established the Texas Engineering Experiment Station’s (TEES) Center for Emergency Informatics (CEI) at its Aug. 3, 2012 meeting, recognizing the faculty effort in radically changing disaster response through advances in technology.

Thirty faculty members in the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University have been working together since 2008 to create unmanned systems, new sensors, wireless networks, data mining, simulation and visualization, social networking, and other technologies that can revolutionize response and recovery. The center is unlike any other in the United States as it focuses on how new and evolving information technologies can be

improved, integrated, and put to use for disaster prevention, preparedness, response and recovery.

“The time is now,” said CEI director Dr. Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor in the Department of Computer Science

and Engineering at Texas A&M. “Texas needs the economic resilience to handle disasters, such as Hurricane Ike, which cost more than $22 billion to recover from.

“The technology exists to get better information to the responders, cities and citizens. Information technologies are literally springing up overnight, with more than 1,000 new apps being created every day. And emergency informatics can create jobs; returning veterans, for instance, are already highly skilled and they need jobs.”

CEI will serve to connect members of the Texas A&M family, including the Texas Engineering Extension Service (TEEX); Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue; Hazards Reduction and Recovery Center; Institute for Science, Technology and Public Policy; Internet2 Technology Evaluation Center; and the RFID/Sensor Lab. The CEI will absorb the Emergency Informatics EDGE® Innovation Center, which is the nucleus for the 275-member industry consortium led by General Dynamics.

Activities will commence with a seminar series throughout the academic year and a Summer Institute at TEEX’s Disaster City ® is being scheduled for May 2013.

Dr. Robin Murphy

Center for Emergency Informatics Established at Texas A&M

Dr. Robin Murphy, co-founder of the research fi elds rescue robo cs and human-robot interac on, tests one of her robots on a damaged structure at Disaster City. Dr. Murphy is the director of the newly-established Center for Emergency Informa cs at Texas A&M University.

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Dr. Valerie Taylor and Dr. Xingfu Wu win Best Paper Award

Lawrence Rauchwerger, Professor and co-Founder/-Director of the Parasol Laboratory, was named an IEEE Fellow, effective January 1, 2012. Dr. Rauchwerger received this recognition for his numerous contributions to research in thread-level speculation, parallelizing compilers, and parallel libraries.

The IEEE Grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an

outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fi elds of interest. The total number selected in any one year cannot exceed one-tenth of one- percent of the total voting membership. IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. 321 individuals have been elevated to IEEE Fellow for 2011.

Dr. Rauchwerger holds an Electronic Engineering degree from the Polytechnic Institute in Bucharest, Romania, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and

a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the faculty at Texas A&M in 1996, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Center for Supercomputing R&D, University of Illinois and a Visiting Scientist at AT&T Research Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ.

Among his many accomplishments are an NSF CAREER Award from 1998 to 2002; he was selected as a TEES Fellow in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University for 2002-2003 and for 2005-2006; he won the IBM Faculty Award in 2007 and 2008; and he is the holder of the Halliburton Professorship in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University, conferred in 2009.

Dr. Rauchwerger’s research has targeted the area of high performance compilers, thread level speculation in both software and hardware implementation, libraries for parallel and distributed computing, and adaptive optimizations. His current focus is STAPL, a parallel superset of the ISO C++ STL library which is driven by his goal to improve the productivity of parallel software development. His approach to parallel code development and optimization (STAPL and SmartApps) has infl uenced industrial products at major corporations.

Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger named IEEE Fellow

Dr. Valerie Taylor, Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor in computer science at Texas A&M University, and Dr. Xingfu Wu, TEES Research Scientist won the Best Paper Award among 53 accepted papers in the 14th IEEE International Conference on Computational Science & Engineering, which was held in Dalian, China on August 24-26, 2011. Their paper title is “Performance Modeling of Hybrid MPI/OpenMP Scientifi c Applications on Large-scale Multicore Cluster Systems.”

This work offers a performance modeling framework based on memory bandwidth contention time and a parameterized communication model to predict the performance of OpenMP, MPI and hybrid applications with weak scaling on three large-scale multicore clusters: IBM POWER4, POWER5+ and BlueGene/P. The experimental results for performance modeling method showed less than 7.77% error rate in predicting the performance of hybrid and OpenMP GTC on up to 512 cores on the three multicore clusters.

Dr. Wu works with Dr. Taylor’s research group, Prophesy, which uses a NSF funded project, MuMMI (Multiple Metrics Modeling Infrastructure), to analyze and model parallel application performance and energy on multicore systems. He is a senior ACM member and an IEEE member. His research interests are performance evaluation and modeling,

parallel and cloud computing, and power and energy analysis in HPC systems. His monograph: Performance Evaluation, Prediction and Visualization of Parallel Systems, was published by Kluwer Academic Publishers (ISBN 0-7923-8462-8) in 1999. Dr. Wu has published over 28 papers since he joined Texas A&M’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 2003. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics in March 1997.

Valerie E. Taylor earned her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering and M.S. in Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 1985 and 1986, respectively, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1991. From 1991 through 2002, Dr. Taylor was a member of the faculty in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Northwestern University. Dr. Taylor joined the faculty of Texas A&M University in 2003, where she served as Head of the Dwight Look College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science until 2011. Currently she is the holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship. Her research interests are in the area high performance computing. She has authored or co-authored over 100 papers in these areas. Dr. Taylor is a member of ACM and Senior Member of IEEE-CS.

Dr. Valerie Taylor Dr. Xingfu Wu


Dr. Tracy Hammond, Associate Professor and director of the Sketch Recognition Lab received the 2011-2012 Charles H. Barclay, Jr. '45 Faculty Fellow Award from Texas A&M University. She was presented the award at Texas A&M 's Dwight Look College of Engineering Faculty Awards banquet on April 26, 2012.

Charles H. Barclay, Jr., was a Texas Aggie, Class of 1945, and a civil engineer who retired in 1982 after 40

years with the Texas Highway Department. The Barclay Award is given to professors and associate professors who have been nominated for their overall contributions to the Engineering Program through classroom instruction, scholarly activities, and professional service.

As an educator, Dr. Hammond challenges students to work on and succeed in diffi cult problems through both her role as an advisor and instructor. She encourages students to feel comfortable with uncertainty in order to understand and create new knowledge. Her larger goal is to instill in students both a passion for lifelong learning, but more importantly the skills to be able to continue to learn in new domains even after they leave the university.

Dr. Hammond has served on various internal committees, but also reaches outwardly to exhibit the strengths of Texas A&M University. She has organized several workshops and conferences, and was the local chair for the international conference on Design, Computing, and Cognition that was held recently at Texas A&M University.

Dr. Hammond's research focuses on human perception, sketch recognition, computer human interaction, and learning. She is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate where she earned Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science and in Finance Technology Option. Her bachelor and master degrees in Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and Anthropology were completed at Columbia University. Prior to joining the CSE faculty Dr. Hammond taught for fi ve years at Columbia University and was a telecom analyst for four years at Goldman Sachs, where she designed, developed, implemented, and administered global computer telephony applications.

Of the Charles H. Barclay, Jr. '45 Faculty Fellow Award, Dr. Hammond says, "I am thrilled to receive this award. Service, teaching, and research are all crucial to me. I will continue to pursue these to the best of my abilities to improve Texas A&M University and the broader educational community at large."

2011-2012 Faculty PromotionsProfessor Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna John Keyser

Associate Professor with Tenure Jinxiang Chai Scott Schaefer

Professor Emeritus Donald Friesen William “Mac” Lively

Dr. Tiffani Williams receives Denton AwardCongratulations to Dr. Tiffani Williams who received the 2011 Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in the fall of 2011.

The Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award is presented each year to a junior tenure-track faculty member at an academic or research institution, who is pursuing high-quality research in any fi eld of

engineering or physical sciences, while demonstrating signifi cant leadership capability and contributing signifi cantly to the promotion of diversity. Dr. Williams was non-tenured at the time she was selected for the award.

Tiffani Williams is currently an Associate Professor in the department. She earned her B.S. in computer science from Marquette University and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Central Florida. Afterward, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Mexico.

Tiffani's research interests are in the areas of bioinformatics and high-performance computing — especially as it relates to reconstructing evolutionary trees (or phylogenies) of organisms. Her work makes sophisticated use of algorithms and data structures, employs high-performance tools, and is grounded in the empirical analysis of real-world datasets. Tiffani has served on several conference program committees and is currently the Associate Editor for Systematic Biology. Her research is currently supported by the National Science Foundation.

In addition to her research and teaching, Tiffani is committed to the advancement of women and members of underrepresented groups in computing. Examples include serving as technical program co-chair for the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, serving on the program committee for the Grace Hopper Celebration, and speaking at various career mentoring events. Currently, she is a Co-Chair for CRA-W's Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. Tiffani's honors include a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a McKnight Doctoral Fellowship.

Dr. Tracy Hammond named Faculty Fellow

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Multiple Awards for Dr. James CaverleeThe 2011-2012 academic year was a great one for Assistant Professor James Caverlee, as he received three major awards for teaching and research.

In September 2011, he was one of nine faculty at Texas A&M University who was named a Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE) 2011-2012 Montague-CTE Scholar.

The Montague-CTE Scholar program, named after its founding

donor, Kenneth Montague '37, honors early-career excellence in undergraduate teaching at Texas A&M. Each year, the program recognizes one tenure-track assistant professor from each college who has demonstrated a commitment to excellence in undergraduate teaching. Montague-CTE Scholar awardees receive a $6,500 grant to encourage further development in his/her undergraduate teaching excellence.

Caverlee's award is a result of an undergraduate teaching philosophy that is broad, but has recently focused on introducing students to massive data management and entrepreneurship.

"Computer science naturally links theory to practice. Algorithmic advances in our discipline have directly spawned high-impact companies like Google and accelerated the growth of companies like Amazon and Facebook," says Dr. Caverlee. "The ability to make sense out of massive amounts of data, as well as the drive to create something new has helped these companies tremendously."

In order to prepare his students to be technical and innovative leaders in large scale data management, he proposes to bring personalized cloud computing to his undergraduate classroom.

"Cloud computing provides access to a scale of computing not possible in a traditional lab setting. Instead of data mining over smallish data that can fi t on a single machine, my goal is for students to learn how to harness these massive computational resources for large-scale knowledge discovery. Students will learn how to setup and deploy cloud-based data analytics through Amazon Web Services, write MapReduce code for distributed data analysis, and build new mobile and social applications that utilize the cloud."

Dr. Caverlee also continues to build on his efforts to encourage entrepreneurship among computer science and engineering undergraduates.

"I'm excited about the opportunity of sparking a "startup culture" among our undergrads. I hope to encourage students to approach classroom projects and traditional learning modules as an opportunity for continued growth and turn them into practical, real-world applications that can have big impact."

To encourage this aim, Dr. Caverlee plans to use a portion of his Montague Scholar Award to invite local entrepreneurs and world-renowned experts to College Station to lead invited lectures, to coordinate "hackathons" (a hackathon is a loosely-organized programming environment that encourages creativity and collaboration), and meet with undergraduates in small group settings.

"This is a tremendous honor … I am truly humbled. I'm especially thankful to the Montague family for this opportunity to enhance our undergraduate curriculum."

In January 2012 Dr. Caverlee was one of 48 scientists and engineers who received grants from the Air Force Offi ce of Scientifi c Research through its Young Investigator Research Program (YIP). He was selected for his research in detecting, analyzing, modeling, and predicting strategic manipulation and adversarial propaganda in social media.

Dr. Caverlee and his research group will lead an integrated computational/socio-behavioral science effort to fundamentally advance both theories and systems for modeling mass persuasion in social media. The project will develop new algorithms for effi ciently detecting evidence of existing persuasion campaigns in large-scale social media, build new models of social media-driven persuasion by drawing on recent advances in complexity science, and will analyze the spatial-temporal constraints of mass persuasion to identify new insights into the scope of persuasion and the factors impacting widespread adoption.

The objective of the AFOSR-YIP program is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering. Major research areas include aerospace, chemical and material sciences; physics and electronics; and mathematics, information and life sciences. The recipients selected will receive the grants over a 3 to 5 year period.

Finally, in February, he was selected to receive the National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER award for his research into “Real-Time Crowd-Oriented Search and Computation Systems,” effective February 9, 2012.

The award will fund a fi ve year program with the goal of developing “the framework, algorithms, and systems for crowd-oriented search and computing, so that crowds discovered in emerging social systems may become part of in situ human-computational systems,” says Dr. Caverlee.

Dr. Caverlee joined our department in 2007 after receiving his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. During that time has also been awarded two Google research awards and a 2010 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-Young Faculty Award.


Dos Reis and Schaefer win NSF CAREER AwardsThis past academic year we added three more faculty to our growing list of NSF CAREER awardees. Along with Dr. James Caverlee, whose CAREER grant is mentioned in the article on the previous page, Dr. Gabriel Dos Reis and Dr. Scott Schaefer were also recipients of this prestigious award. This brings the department total to nineteen CAREER awards.

The NSF awards the CAREER grants to outstanding junior faculty members to help them advance their research and teaching activities.

Dr. Gabriel Dos Reis received a grant for his continuing investigation of formal-methods-based principles and tools to make the practice of programming a more mathematical activity for ordinary programmers.

His project, “Compilers for Dependable Computational Mathematics,” will be funded through May 2017.

“The overriding aim is to make dependability a common, basic property of critical software. The results are expected to infl uence the evolution of existing major mainstream programming languages (such as C++) in their support for structured generic programming and improvement of software reliability,” says Dr. Dos Reis.

Our modern civilization has become extraordinarily dependent on software artifacts at virtually all levels of its structure. An immediate implication is that failures in software systems can cost human lives and are responsible for billions of dollars lost annually. Furthermore, silent failures of simulation software can seriously undermine the credibility of a scientifi c model, entailing profound intellectual liabilities. On the other hand, the algorithms we use in computational mathematics are becoming more and more complex. Yet, the programming languages we use to express them as computer programs do not seem to progress at a matching pace. As a result, there is an ever growing gap between the level of abstraction of published algorithms, and the software artifacts that realize them. In other words, the mapping between algorithms and code is no longer direct nor obvious, to the point where we have trouble convincing ourselves that our programs really do what they are supposed to do.

Dr. Dos Reis’s research will investigate and develop tools to support research in axiomatic programming for computational mathematics. He will design new programming models rooted in a structured approach to generic programming. This project has the potential of an enabling technology in computational sciences, and the potential to change the way to think of programming and our approach to

software construction. Dr. Dos Reis will involve students both at the graduate and undergraduate levels, in hands-on, fully integrated research-based classes.

Dr. Dos Reis received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Paris VII and École Normale Supérieure de Cachan—France in 2001. He worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate for INRIA Sophia Antipolis in France and for our department before joining as faculty. His research interests include computer algebra, mathematical software, formal verifi cation, programming languages, compiler construction, and generic programming. Dr. Dos Reis is presently a trustee of the Calculemus project; project lead of the OpenAxiom computer algebra system; project lead of the Liz programming system; member of the ISO C++ Standards Committee; and member of the AFNOR (French national body for standardizations) C++ committee.

Dr. Scott Schaefer, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, received his CAREER award for research in graphics and visualization. Dr. Schaefer was non-tenured at the time he was selected for the award.

Dr. Schaefer’s project, “Parameterization and Tessellation for Computer Graphics” will be funded through May 2017.

“Project outcomes will signifi cantly advance the state of the art not only in computer graphics and geometric modeling, but also in other areas of applied mathematics and computer science where the representation and precise control of smooth freeform shapes play a key role,” says Dr. Schaefer.

Parameterization underlies nearly all curve and surface representations in Computer Graphics. Typically the effect of parameterization is ignored, yet this is a degree of freedom that can have a large effect on the shape of the curve. Parameterization is also used to tessellate surfaces on graphics cards, which is a process of taking high quality shapes such as those found in movies and turning the shapes into triangles for the graphics card to draw.

The investigation of “the fundamental connection between parameterization and surface shape or quality for parametric curves, surfaces and volumes” leads Dr. Schaefer’s research. “He will expand upon the concept of non-uniform parameterization of surfaces and volumes. And he will design new representations that allow the user to control or automatically adapt the parameterization of these shapes during the design process, and incorporate methods of non-uniform parameterization that are currently not possible.” This work has potential applications in surface design in the automotive, aeronautics, and entertainment industries and even in fi nite element computations for physical simulations.

Dr. Schaefer received his PhD in Computer Science from Rice University in 2006 and joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University in the same year. His teaching and research interests include computer graphics, geometric modeling, and scientifi c visualization. Congratulations to all of our CAREER awardees!

Dr. Sco Schaefer

Dr. Gabriel Dos Reis

12

Student News, Awards, and Recognition

Graduate student Jon Moeller and his advisor Dr. Andruid Kerne were awarded a Best Paper Honorable Mention by the prestigious ACM Computer Human Interaction (CHI 2012) conference for their paper "ZeroTouch: An Optical Multi-Touch and Free-Air Interaction Architecture."

The ZeroTouch multi-touch and free-air interaction sensing technology has the potential to transform how people interact with televisions, automobiles, building energy systems, and other walks of life. Kerne’s research group, The Interface Ecology Lab, strives to build relationships, developing new methods connecting computing, engineering, social sciences, the arts, and other fi elds to human experience.

Over the past year ZeroTouch has garnered much attention for its innovative nature and relatively cheap cost. Touch-sensitive frames have enabled interactive surfaces for years, but the size and responsiveness tend to be limited. ZeroTouch, developed with support from the National Science Foundation, enables precise sensing within a specifi c plane of interaction.

While watching the latest season of Mad Men, many of us in computer science and engineering were excited to see one of our own in a nationally aired commercial for Best Buy. However, it was no surprise that it was Jon Moeller and the ZeroTouch device that appeared in the commercial titled, "Future Innovators."

"I had no idea that ZeroTouch would become such a big deal" says Moeller. "I was skeptical at fi rst about doing the commercial, but now that I've seen what they put together,

I'm really happy how it turned out. The shoot day was pretty tiring. I have a new respect for actors after performing in the commercial."

At ACM CHI 2012, the Interface Ecology Lab exhibit featured one ZeroTouch integrated with a 55" LCD, heralding a new era of responsive televisions. Also featured were three ZeroTouch sensors for eSports competition, two of them integrated with pen-based computing. Another pen + multi-touch sensor ran Embodied InfoComposer, a single display groupware for helping people curate connected and rich collections of visual bookmarks. Another application, Zooming Bookmarker used ZeroTouch to bring multi-touch into Google's Chrome browser. And fi nally, the free-air interaction of intangibleCanvas, reminiscent of technologies imagined in the movies Minority Report and Iron Man, invites attendees to collaborate in a painting space.

ZeroTouch's popularity has opened the door for new collaborations between the Interface Ecology Lab and the entertainment industry. The future of the device is bright.

"We are working to develop relationships with entertainment companies, such as ESPN, Disney, and Pixar, and computing device experience companies, such as Apple and Google, in order to bring ZeroTouch to the world," says Dr. Kerne. "In The Interface Ecology Lab, students and faculty collaborate to form and realize visions of transforming computing technology so that human experiences grow more expressive, creative, participatory, and fun. Our continuing work with ZeroTouch is a prime example. Research feeds education feeds research, in an eternal golden braid."

Grad Student Jon Moeller awarded Best Paper Honorable Mention; featured in Best Buy Commercial

CSE graduate student Jon Moeller and the ZeroTouch device as seen in the Best Buy “Future Innovators” commercial. ZeroTouch has garnered interest from both the entertainment and compu ng industries.


The Texas A&M University team won the 2012 Southwest Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (SWCCDC) for the fourth time in a row. Second and third place went to teams from Oklahoma State University and the University of Texas at Austin, respectively.

The 2012 SWCCDC was held March 10-12 at Texas Engineering Extension Service’s Disaster City in the Emergency Operations Training Center located in College Station. Texas A&M advanced to the national fi nals in San Antonio where they fi nished third place.

The SWCCDC asked student teams to assume administrative and protective duties for a small business’s computer network comprised of multiple servers and Internet services such as a web server, mail server, and e-commerce site.

“The student teams are hired to replace an incompetent group of system administrators,” says Gerry Creager, event organizer.

Each team begins the competition with an identical set of hardware and software and is scored on its ability to

maintain the business’s network, to respond to security and administrative tasks, and to defend against attacks.

“A volunteer red team tries to compromise the network,” says Creager. “It looks around on the fi rst morning of the competition to get a feel for the business’s network structure before beginning to hack the system.”

The color-coded teams are comprised of the blue team, the “hired” troubleshooting administrators; the white team, the executives and administrators of the small business; the gold team, the judges and senior staff; and the aforementioned red team, the hackers. Business hours are maintained during the competition starting at 8:30 a.m. on Saturday and ending at noon on Sunday.

Congratulations to the Texas A&M team members: Nik Johnson, Ross Dixon, Ryan Schmidt, Taahir Ahmed, Robert Schumacher, Mark Browning, and Katelyn Seloff. Most of the team members are undergraduates from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

CCDC Events are designed to build a meaningful mechanism by which institutions of higher education may evaluate their programs, provide an educational venue in which students are able to apply the theory and practical skills they have learned in their course work, foster a spirit of teamwork, ethical behavior, and effective communication both within and across teams, and create interest and awareness among participating institutions and students.

Texas A&M Wins First at Regional, Third at National Cyber Defense Competition

In the Fall of 2011, CSE graduate student Jesus Suarez received the Bridge to Doctorate (BTD) fellowship from the National Science Foundation, which is administered by the TAMUS LSAMP (Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation) program. The BTD fellowship paid for his travel to attend the 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) held November 1-5 in Kyoto,

Japan, where he presented his research "A Survey of Animal Foraging for Directed, Persistent Search by Rescue Robotics." Additionally, the fellowship funds his graduate school study and research for two years.

Currently, Jesus is in the PhD program in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. When he began as an undergrad in Dr. Robin Murphy's lab last year, his research interest was centered on

autonomous search and navigation. Since then his focus has changed to computer vision for human robot interaction. "I'd like to improve the quality of interaction between people and robots by using gesture recognition to make the communication more natural for the person. My ultimate career goal is to become a professor," says Suarez.

The Texas A&M University System LSAMP program goal is to increase the quality and quantity of underrepresented students successfully completing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) baccalaureate degree programs, and to boost the number of underrepresented students interested in programs of graduate study. The intent of this program is to link underrepresented undergraduate students with active and supportive faculty-researchers who will mentor them and provide them with opportunities to engage in research-related activities, as early as possible in the students' academic careers.

Jesus' academic advisor is Dr. Robin Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue.

Suarez Awarded BTD Fellowship

14

Folami Alamudun - Runner-up, Best Paper Award at the Pervasive Health Conference 2012

Danielle Cummings - National Science Foundation East Asia and Pacifi c Summer Institute Fellowship; Google Women of Color Scholarship

Jory Denny - Association of Former Student Merit Fellowship

Brittany Duncan - National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship

Chinwe Ekenna - Schlumberger Faculty for the Future Fellowship; Google Women of Color Scholarship

Adam Fidel - Texas A&M University Diversity Fellowship

Mike George - National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship

Jessica Gonzalez - Google Women of Color Scholarship

Ivan Hernandez - Microsoft Scholarship

Sam Ade Jacobs - 2nd Place, ACM Student Research Competition; SC11, the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

Jesus Lira - Explore Microsoft internship

Charles Lively III - Alvin M. Weinberg Fellowship

Timothy Mann - Texas A&M University Dissertation Fellowship

Josiah Manson - National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship

Olga Pearce - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Scholar Program

Roger Pearce - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Scholar Program

Janice Rosado - Explore Microsoft internship

Cynthia Skach - Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society

Paul Taele - National Science Foundation East Asia and Pacifi c Summer Institute Fellowship

Daniel Tomkins - Association of Former Student Merit Fellowship

Myounggyu Won - Best Student Paper Award, 9th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing

On October 29, 2011 at Baylor University, Texas A&M University’s Maroon Team took 2nd place in the 2011 ACM South Central USA Regional Programming Contest, or what’s referred to as the Battle of the Brains.

The competition consisted of 60 teams from universities covering Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, all vying for a spot to attend International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals that was held in Warsaw, Poland on May 14-18, 2012.

“While the Battle of the Brains exposes students to IBM’s Smarter Planet Initiative, the contest itself embraces a global theme. Thirty years ago, the contest pulled from just a few countries. Today, contest participation has grown more than 800 percent, with teams from 90 countries on six continents participating in their individual Regional phases,” said Doug Heintzman, director of strategy at IBM Software Group and sponsorship executive of the ICPC.

The Regional teams are given 8 problems and are ranked according to how many problems they can solve correctly, and then by the total amount of time taken to solve

the problems. Texas A&M’s Maroon team was one of three teams to answer 4 of the 8 problems, doing so in a total time faster than the other two teams. A team from the University of Tulsa fi nished fi rst, solving 5 of the 8 problems, and a team from Rice University fi nished third.

Texas A&M’s teams’ coach Dr. John Keyser said, “It was exciting to fi nish well, but a bit disappointing to be passed near the very end by the winning team. The Maroon team solved all four of its problems in the fi rst 2 hours 45 minutes, during which time Tulsa solved only one. But, in that last 2 hours 15 minutes, Tulsa solved four more, moving into fi rst place.”

Team Aggies and Team White fi nished in 15th and 23rd places, respectively.

Team Members for the Maroon Team were Kyle Willmon, senior in computer science, Ryan Schmidt, junior in computer science, and Robert Schumacher, senior in computer engineering.

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest evolved from a competition held here at Texas A&M in 1970 hosted by the Alpha Chapter of the UPE Computer Science Honor Society.

A&M Team Takes 2nd in ACM Regional Programming Contest

Other Current Student Awards


Student Organizations

CSEGSA provides graduate students in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering with the means to express their opinions and address issues that affect them and infl uence broader policies that deal with the department as a whole. CSEGSA also acts as a conduit to communicate important information to graduate students. As part of its goal to enhance interaction among students,

faculty and staff, CSEGSA, in collaboration with the other student organizations in the department, organizes the department’s annual fall picnic and spring banquet. Currently CSEGSA is embarking on a mentoring program in which students from the various research labs can act as mentors for current and incoming graduate students. The CSEGSA has proven itself to be an important part of the department.

Computer Science and Engineering Graduate Students Association (CSEGSA)

Texas Aggie Game Developers (TAGD)

Texas A&M Computing Society (TACS)TACS is the local student chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Society. TACS provides a means of communication among students having an interest in computing. Each semester, TACS holds meetings and sponsors computer programming contests. Speakers are invited to TACS meetings from companies such as Microsoft, HP, Nortel, and Raytheon. Members of TACS participate annually in the ACM Regional Programming Contest. In fall 2011 TACS students placed 1st in the regional competition, and 3rd at nationals.

The mission of Texas Aggie Game Developers is to expose Texas A&M University students to careers in the game industry. This is done by facilitating game development activities through group projects, tutorials, programming competitions, and bringing in guest speakers from the industry. TAGD members have been busy with individual and group projects that provide valuable game making experience. TAGD brings in guest speakers from the industry as well as faculty members to promote strong ties with our members. TAGD welcomes all students to join - from expert game developers to never-made-a-game-before programmers to artists!

Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE)Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) is an international honor society in the computing sciences founded at Texas A&M University in 1967 for outstanding undergraduate and graduate students in computing and information disciplines. It is endorsed by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS). Its purpose is to help students attain personal and professional growth by “bringing together outstanding students, faculty, and industry representatives in order to effectively and positively infl uence the Computer Sciences.” UPE works hand-in-hand with the department hosting and publicizing events. UPE has been rapidly growing in members over the last three years and will continue to grow.

AWICS is an organization devoted to supporting women students and faculty in computer science and computer engineering at Texas A&M University. For twelve years, AWICS has served as an Association of Computing Machinery - Committee on Women in Computing chapter. Its activities include professional development, mentoring, and socializing. AWICS holds regular study breaks and recreational events, administers a peer-mentoring program for its members, organizes a distinguished lecturer series, and regularly attends the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conferences. In the fall of 2011, AWICS hosted an event called Trick-or-Research, designed as a way to introduce undergraduates and fi rst year graduate students to the awesome research

that is going on in our department. This was a great opportunity for students to network with CSE faculty and students. The event was comprised of two sessions; the fi rst involved presentations of research and the second gave students an opportunity to visit research groups that piqued their interests. AWICS was also instrumental in helping with the Spring Banquet and Industrial Affi liate Program meetings.

Aggie Women in Computer Science and Engineering (AWICS)

16

CSE Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)

Summer 2012 marked the ninth year that the CSE department offered Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU@ CSE). In addition to the REU program, the department offers the Dwight Look College of Engineering Undergraduate Summer Research Grants (USRG) program, the Computer Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) Distributed Mentor Project (DMP), and the CRA-W and Coalition to Diversify Computing Distributed REU (DREU). These summer research programs span the 10-week summer term and involve undergraduate students from Texas A&M and other colleges and universities from around the world.

During the summer research experience, participants work closely with faculty members, graduate students and undergraduate mentors on current research projects, make short progress presentations to their peers during program meetings, attend presentation skills workshops, make a formal poster presentation of their research experience at the end of the program, create a personal website and submit a written, fi nal report describing the results of their research. The goal is that the students participating in the CSE REU program will make signifi cant contributions to ongoing faculty research and, more importantly, will gain an appreciation for and an interest in graduate school and a future research career.

2012 CSE REU Participants: Kalil Armstrong from Texas A&M University; faculty sponsor: Dr. James Caverlee, Tyler Biehle from Texas A&M University; faculty sponsors: Dr. Nancy Amato and Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger, Jason Bolden from Texas A&M University; faculty sponsor: Dr. James Caverlee, Rachel Flores-Meath from Texas A&M University; faculty sponsor: Dr. Robin Murphy, Bhavesh Gupta from the Jaypee Institution of Information Technology; faculty sponsor: Dr. Jianer Chen, Dielli Joxha from Texas Lutheran University; faculty sponsors: Dr. Nancy Amato and Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger, Joshua Howell from Texas A&M University; faculty sponsor: Dr. Jianer Chen, Seungho Park from Texas A&M University; faculty sponsor: Dr. Guofei Gu, Cameron Smith from Tarrant Co. College; faculty sponsors: Dr. Nancy Amato and Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger, Kiley Sobel from Harvey Mudd College; faculty sponsor: Dr. Tracy Hammond, Nicholas Straford from the University of North Texas; faculty sponsors: Dr. Nancy Amato and Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger, Ashley Tharp from Collin College; faculty sponsors: Dr. Nancy Amato and Dr. Lawrence Rauchwerger, David Turner from Texas A&M University; faculty sponsor: Dr. Tracy Hammond, Philip Van Ruitenbeek from Texas A&M University; Faculty sponsor: Dr. Jaakko Jarvi, and Michael Waterstreet from the Lamar University; faculty sponsor: Dr. Robin Murphy.

2012 CSE REU par cipants, mentors, and sponsors take a break from presen ng posters to take a group photo. The poster sessions are an excellent opportunity for the REU students to present their work to the public as well as be rewarded for a summer’s worth of hard work.

Outreach


The sixth Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) high school computer science contest, Internet Privacy 2011, was held on October 8th at the H.R. Bright Building on the Texas A&M campus. Fifteen student teams from Texas high schools were presented with an Internet privacy challenge designed by CSE Professor Jyh-Charn (Steve) Liu. Competing teams were given the task of developing the most effective educational tools for primarily middle school and high school students on how to handle, respond, and protect their personal information on the Internet.

The teams spent the morning and early afternoon in individual labs designing and preparing slide presentations that focused on the protection and security of social networking using parents and teachers as moderators. During this planning stage, the teams were visited by the judges and were asked to explain their work. This helped the judges get a better grasp of the projects, learn about the design process, and observe the team dynamics. Excitement escalated as the day progressed to the oral presentations, which were held in Bright’s Frank J. Malina ‘34 Auditorium. The fi nal demonstrations were lively, informative, imaginative, and fun. Team Dulles Vikings from John Foster Dulles High School in Sugar Land included a dramatic physical demonstration of portions of their slide presentation and followed that with a song-and-dance routine, ending their energetic presentation mid-song at the seven minute mark.

The judges thought highly of the team presentations and, in addition to the three winners, added three honorable mentions: Bryan High School (Team Asgard Engineering), Travis High School (Team Travis Tigers), and Martin’s Mill High School (Team Martin’s Mill). Winning third place was Klein Collins High School (Team Anonymous). For their school they won a fl ip camera, and $25 Best Buy gift certifi cates were given to each member of the team. Second place went to North Crowley High School (Team Panther’s Algorithm. Their school received both a digital and a fl ip camera along with a memory card and each team member received a $50 Best Buy gift certifi cate.

The winning team, Engineering & Technologies Academy at Roosevelt High School in San Antonio (Team Indomitable 2 ETA), received a digital and a fl ip camera along with a memory card for their school, and each team member was

awarded a $100 Best Buy gift certifi cate. Random drawings for i-Tune gift cards and laptop computer bags were held before the winning teams received their prizes.

Graciously volunteering their time to judge the contest were Allen Hurst from Improving Enterprises in Addison, Texas; Angela Okonski, a teacher at St. Joseph’s School in Bryan; Jordan Cazamias and Janice Rosado, undergraduate students in computer engineering at Texas A&M; and Mike and Cindy Mullen, parents from College Station.

Internet Privacy was generously sponsored by CSE Industrial Affi liates Program members Chevron and USAA. The contest was organized by CSE Program Coordinator Ms. Theresa Roberts. Other CSE staff, undergraduate students, and their families volunteered for the event.

CSE High School Contest:

Internet Privacy 2010Internet Privacy 2010

Two digital cameras and Best Buy Gi Cer fi cates were given to the fi rst place winners Team Indomitable 2 ETA from the Engineering & Technologies Academy at Roosevelt

High School in San Antonio.

18

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The Industrial Affi liates Program was developed in 2004 to establish a stronger relationship with industry in order to improve our knowledge of industry needs and practices, to better help us prepare and place our students, and to foster research collaborations. The IAP generated 67 scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students during the 2011-2012 academic year. Each scholarship was for the amount of $1500.00, and were made available to undergraduate and graduate students, based on need and merit. IAP funds were also used to support student activities that included the fall picnics, the annual banquets, travel expenses for students to attend conferences, and for the biannual IAP meetings. Our thanks goes out to the below IAP members of the 2011-2012 academic year.

Industrial Affiliates Program (IAP) Membership


Distinguished Former Students

Department honors Former Students at Annual Spring Banquet and Awards CeremonyThe Department of Computer Science and Engineering held its Annual Spring Banquet and Awards Ceremony on April 10, 2012 at Briarcrest Country Club in Bryan. Dr. Christopher Jones and Mr. Eric Marin received the department’s Distinguished Former Student Awards, which consisted of commemorative plaques and $1000 scholarships in their honor. The 2012 Christopher Jones Scholarship recipient is Cesar Rodriguez, a junior in computer engineering, and the Eric Marin Scholarship recipient is Arthur Philpott, a senior in computer science.

Dr. Christopher Jones received a B.S. with Honors in Computer Engineering from our Department in August 1999. Upon graduating, he joined the robotics group at Sandia National Laboratories. It is a great testament to his abilities that he was chosen for this group even though he did not yet have a graduate degree. He then went to USC where he received master’s and Ph.D. degrees in robotics with Dr. Maja Mataric. After receiving his Ph.D., Chris joined a company that at the time was known mainly to researchers in robotics, iRobot. Today, iRobot, or at least their roomba robot, is known to almost everyone. After only a year at iRobot, Chris became a Research Program Manager and Senior Principal Investigator; in April 2010 he became Director of Research Advancement. iRobot is one of the most successful robot companies and for Chris to have achieved this position of research leadership so rapidly is very impressive.

Eric Marin received a B.S. in computer science from our department in 1986. Upon completion of his degree, he worked as a software engineer in the aerospace and defense industries. He excelled in working on high-profi le projects such as Unisys’ multimillion dollar Space Transportation System Operations Contract. While continuing to work with contractors such as General Dynamics, Boeing, and NASA, Eric completed his MBA with a minor in fi nance from the University of Houston. In 1994, Eric became a project manager at Insource Management Group and then a partner for Accenture. In 2003, Eric used his successful experience in the business sector to start his own company, Marin Medical Services, where he provided support in accounting, human resources, IT, systems technologies, and marketing services to the healthcare industry. In 2006 Eric sold his company and accepted a position as Vice President of Quorum Business Solutions. Currently, he is a Founder and Managing Director of R&M Global Advisors, a management consulting company with offi ces in Houston, Lima, Sao Paulo and Bogota.

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering Annual Spring Banquet and Awards Ceremony is funded by the department’s Industrial Affi liates Program and hosted by the Computer Science and Engineering Graduate Student Association, the Aggie Women in Computer Science, and Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE).

L-R: Department Head Hank Walker, Eric Marin Scholarship recipient Arthur Philpo , and Dis nguished Former Student Eric Marin

L-R: Department Head Hank Walker, Christopher Jones Scholarship recipient Cesar Rodriguez, and Dis nguished Former Student Dr. Christopher Jones

20

Faculty Directory

Nancy M. AmatoUnocal Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-862-2275Offi ce: HRBB 425HPh.D. Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1995

Nancy Amato joined Texas A&M in 1995.

Research InterestsMo on planning, computa onal biology, robo cs, computa onal geometry, anima on, parallel and distributed compu ng, parallel algo-rithms, performance modeling and op miza on

AwardsAssocia on of Former Students Dis nguished Achievement Award in Teaching, Texas A&M University, 2011; IEEE Fellow, 2010; TEES Senior Faculty Fellow, E.D. Brocke Profes-sorship Award, 2009-2010; ACM Dis nguished Speaker, 2008 - pres-ent; Woman’s Progress Award, Texas A&M University, 2008; Dis nguished Lecturer, IEEE Robo cs and Automa- on Society, 2006-2007; NSF CAREER

Award, 1995

Selected Publica onsTroy McMahon, Sam Ade Jacobs, Bryan Boyd, Lydia Tapia, Nancy M. Amato, “Local Randomiza on in Neighbor Selec on Improves PRM Roadmap Quality,” in Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Intel. Rob. Syst. (IROS), Vilamoura, Algarve [Portugal], Oct 2012.

Shuvra Nath, Shawna Thomas, Chinwe Ekenna, Nancy M. Amato, “A Mul -Direc onal Rapidly Exploring Random Graph (mRRG) for Protein Folding,” in ACM Conference on Bio-informa cs, Computa onal Biology and Biomedicine, Orlando, FL, USA, Oct 2012.

Riccardo Be a Professor

Email: be a @cse.tamu.eduPhone: 979-845-5469 Offi ce: HRBB 509C Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1995

Riccardo Be a joined Texas A&M in 1995.

Research InterestsDistributed real- me systems, scheduling algorithms, communica- on protocols, traffi c analysis, and

anonymity and privacy

AwardsChevron Faculty Fellow 2008-2009 Tenneco Meritorious Teaching Award, 2005; BP Amoco Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence, 2002

Selected Publica onsCifuentes, L., Mercer, R., Alvarez, O., and Be a , R., “An Architecture for Case-based Learning,” TechTrends, Springer Verlag, Vol. 55, No. 6, pp. 44-50, Nov.-Dec. 2010.

W. Yu, Nan Zhang, Xinwen Fu, R. Be a , and W. Zhao, “Localiza on A acks to Internet Threat Monitors: Modeling and Countermeasures,” IEEE Transac ons on Computers, Vol. 59, No. 12, pp. 1655 - 1668, Decem-ber 2010.

S. Wang, Y. Ahn, and R. Be a , “Schedulability Analysis in Hard Real-Time Systems Under Thermal Constraints,” Real-Time Systems, Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 160 -- 188, 2010.

S. Wang, D. Xuan, R. Be a , and W. Zhao, “Toward Sta s cal QoS Guarantees in a Diff eren ated Ser-vices Network,” Telecommunica on Systems, Springer, Vol. 43, No. 3-4, pp. 253 - 263, April 2010.

James CaverleeAssistant Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-0537 Offi ce: HRBB 403Ph.D. Computer Science, Georgia Ins tute of Technology, 2007

James Caverlee joined Texas A&M in 2007.

Research InterestsWeb-scale informa on management, distributed data-intensive systems, informa on retrieval, databases, and social compu ng

AwardsNa onal Science Founda on CAREER Award, 2012; Air Force Offi ce of Scien fi c Research (AFOSR) Young Inves gator Award, 2012 Montague-CTE (Center for Teaching Excellence) Scholar for excellence in undergradu-ate teaching, 2011-2012; Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Young Faculty Award, 2010; Google Research Award, 2009;Department of Computer Science and Engineering Graduate Faculty Teaching Award, 2009 & 2010

Selected Publica ons Z. Cheng, J. Caverlee, and K. Lee, “A Content-Driven Framework for Geo-loca ng Microblog Users,” ACM Transac ons on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST),” To appear.

K. Kamath and J. Caverlee, “Content-Based Crowd Discovery on the Real-Time Web,” 21st ACM Interna- onal Conference on Informa on and

Knowledge Management (CIKM), Maui, October 2012.

Z. Cheng, J. Caverlee, K. Lee, and D. Sui, “Exploring Millions of Footprints in Loca on Sharing Services,” 5th Interna onal AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM), Barcelona, July 2011.

Jinxiang ChaiAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-3510Offi ce: HRBB 527DPh.D. Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2006

Jinxiang Chai joined Texas A&M in 2006.

Research InterestsComputer anima on, computer graphics, interac on techniques for 3D graphics, computer vision, image-based modeling and rendering, image and video processing

AwardsNSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, 2011

Selected Publica onsH. Huang, J. Chai, X. Tong and H.-T. Wu, “Leveraging Mo on Capture and 3D Scanning for High-Fidelity Facial Performance Acquisi on,” ACM Transac ons on Graphics (presented at SIGGRAPH 2011), 30(4): Ar cle No. 74, 2011.

X. Wei, J. Min and J. Chai, “Physically-valid Sta s cal Mo on Models for Human Mo on Synthesis,” ACM Transac ons on Graphics (presented at SIGGRAPH 2011), 30(3): Ar cle No. 19, 2011.

X. Wei and J. Chai, “Modeling Physically Realis c Human Mo on from Monocular Video Sequences,” ACM Transac ons on Computer Graphics (proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2010), 29(4): Ar cle No. 42, 2010.

J. Min, Y.-L. Chen and J. Chai, “Interac ve Anima on Genera on with Deformable Mo on Models,” ACM Transac ons on Computer Graphics (presented in SIGGRAPH 2010), 29(1): Ar cle. No.9, 2010.


Jianer ChenProfessor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-4259 Offi ce: HRBB 315CPh.D. Mathema cs, Columbia University, 1990Ph.D. Computer Science, New York University, 1987

Jianer Chen joined Texas A&M in 1990.

Research InterestsJianer Chen’s main research is centered on computer algorithms and their applica ons. His current research projects include exact and parameterized algorithms, computer graphics, computer networks, and computa onal biology

AwardsAFS Dis nguished Faculty Achieve-ment Award (university level), Texas A&M University, 2007; AFS Dis n-guished Faculty Achievement Award (college level), Texas A&M University, 2006

Selected Publica ons J. Chen, Y. Liu, S. Lu, S.-H. Sze, and F. Zhang, “Itera ve expansion and color coding: an improved algorithm for 3D-matching,” ACM Transac ons on Algorithms 8-6, 2012.

J. Chen and J. Meng, “A 2k Kernel for the Cluster Edi ng Problem,” Journal of Computer and System Sciences 78, pp. 211-220, 2012.

E. Akleman, J. Chen, Q. Xing, and J. Gross, “Cyclic Plain-Weaving on Polygonal Mesh Surfaces with Graph Rota on System,” ACM Transac ons on Graphics 28-3 (SIGGRAPH 2009).

J. Chen, J. Kneis, S. Lu, D. Molle, S. Richter, P. Rossmanith, S.-H. Sze, and F. Zhang, “Randomized Divide-and-Conquer: Improved Path, Matching, and Packing Algorithms,” SIAM Journal on Compu ng, pp. 2526-2547, 2009.

Walter DaugheritySenior Lecturer

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-1308Offi ce: RICH 901FEd.D. Harvard University, 1977

Walter Daugherity joined Texas A&M in 1987.

Research InterestsQuantum compu ng, computer ethics, computer security, object-oriented programming, fuzzy logic, ar fi cial intelligence

AwardsWinner, $500 cash prize, TAMU Academic Integrity Week Essay Com-pe on (Faculty Category), 2004; named by the TAMU System to The Academy for Educator Development, a major component of the TAMU System’s Regents’ Ini a ve for Excel-lence in Educa on (one of only two faculty members selected from the en re College of Engineering), 2003; Graduate Student Council, Outstand-ing Graduate Faculty Award, 1997; Associa on for Compu ng Machin-ery, Outstanding Regional Intercolle-giate Programming Contest Director Award, 1993

Selected Publica onsDaugherity, W. C., and Coulson, R. N., “Knowledge Engineering for Sustainable Agriculture Manage-ment,” Proceedings of ICAST 2001 Conference, Beijing, China, 2:266, November 2001.

Daugherity, W. C., Harris, C. E. , Jr., and Rabins, M. J., “Introducing Ethics and Professionalism in REU Programs,” Proceedings of the 1995 World Conference on Engineering Educa on, Minneapolis, Minnesota, October 1995.

Gabriel Dos ReisAssistant Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-458-1547Offi ce: HRBB 410CPh.D. Mathema cs, Univer-sity of Paris VII and École Normale Supérieure de Cachan—France, 2001

Gabriel Dos Reis joined Texas A&M in 2006.

Research InterestsComputer algebra, mathema -cal so ware, formal verifi ca on, programming languages, compiler construc on, generic programming

AwardsNa onal Science Founda on Faculty Early Career Development (NSF CAREER), 2012; William Procter Grant-in-Aid Research, 2005

Selected Publica onsGabriel Dos Reis, “A System for Axioma c Programming,” 2012 Inter-na onal Conferences on Intelligent Mathemathics, Bremen, Germany, July 2012.

Tahina Ramananandro, Gabriel Dos Reis, Xavier Leroy, “A Mechanized Se-man cs for C++ Object Construc on and Destruc on with Applica ons to Resource Management,” 39th Sym-posium on Principles of Programming Languages (POPL 2012), Philadel-phia, USA, January 2012.

Yue Li, Gabriel Dos Reis, “An Auto-ma c Paralleliza on Framework for Algebraic Computa on Systems,” 36th Interna onal Symposium On Symbolic and Algebraic Computa- on, ACM press, San Jose, California,

June 2011.

Yoonsuck ChoeAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-5466Offi ce: HRBB 322BPh.D. Computer Science, University of Texas at Aus n, 2001

Yoonsuck Choe joined Texas A&M in 2001.

Research InterestsBrain Networks Lab, Neural Intel-ligence Lab, Mul -scale model-ing of mouse brain networks project, Topographica cor cal map simulator project

AwardsBest Paper Award ICPR 2008 & IEEE CIMSVP 2009; Big 12 Faculty Fellow-ship, 2006

Selected Publica onsYoonsuck Choe, Jaerock Kwon, and Ji Ryang Chung, “Time, Consciousness, and Mind Uploading,” Interna onal Journal on Machine Consciousness, 4:257-274, 2012.

Ji Ryang Chung and Yoonsuck Choe, “Emergence of Memory in Reac ve Agents Equipped with environmen-tal Markers,” IEEE Transac ons on Autonomous Mental Development, 3:257-271, 2011.

D. Mayerich, J. Kwon, C. Sung, L. C. Abbo , J. Keyser, and Y. Choe, “Fast Macro-scale Transmission Imaging of Microvascular Networks Using KESM,” Biomedical Op cs Express, 2:2888-2896, 2011.

J. R. Chung, C. Sung, D. Mayerich, J. Kwon, D. E. Miller, T. Huff man, L. C. Ab-bo , J. Keyser, and Y. Choe, “Mul scale Explora on of Mouse Brain Micro-structures Using the Knife-edge Scan-ning Microscope Brain Atlas,” Fron ers in Neuroinforma cs, 5:29, 2011.

22

Richard FurutaProfessor and Undergraduate Advisor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-3839 Offi ce: HRBB 402CPh.D. Computer Science, University of Washington, 1986

Rick Furuta joined Texas A&M in 1993.

Research InterestsDigital libraries, hypertext systems and models, computer-human inter-ac on, electronic publishing

AwardsCharles W. Crawford Service Award, 2008-2009; ACM Dis nguished Engi-neer, 2007; TEES Fellow, 2001

Selected Publica onsNeal Audenaert, Richard Furuta, Eduardo Urbina, Jie Deng, Carlos Monroy, Rosy Saenz, Doris Careaga, “Integra ng Diverse Research in a Digital Library Focused on a Single Author,” Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: 9th European Conference, ECDL 2005, Austria, September 2005.

Pra k Dave, Paul Logasa Bogen, II, Unmil Karadkar, Luis Francisco-Revil-la, Richard Furuta, Frank Shipman, “Dynamically Growing Hypertext Collec ons,” Hypertext 2004: 15th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Santa Cruz, CA, August 9-13, pp. 171-180, 2004.

Furuta, R., Kalaspur, S., Kochumman, R., Urbina, E., and Vivancos-Perez, R., “The Cervantes Project: Steps to a Customizable and Interlinked On-line Electronic Varorium Edi on Suppor ng Scholarship,” Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: 5th European Conference, ECDL 2001, LNCS 2163, Springer, pp. 71-82, Sept. 2001.

Guofei GuAssistant Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-2475Offi ce: HRBB 502CPh.D. Computer Science, Georgia Ins tute of Technology, 2008

Guofei Gu joined Texas A&M in 2008.

Research InterestsNetwork security, system security, intrusion and anomaly detec on, malware detec on, analysis, and defense, web and social network security

AwardsNSF Early CAREER Award, 2010; Best Student Paper Award, 2010 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy

Selected Publica onsZhaoyan Xu, Lingfeng Chen, Guofei Gu and Christopher Kruegel. “PeerPress: U lizing Enemies’ P2P Strength against Them.” Proc. of the 19th ACM Conference on Com-puter and Communica ons Security (CCS’12), Raleigh, NC, USA, October 2012

Jialong Zhang, Chao Yang, Zhaoyan Xu, Guofei Gu, “PoisonAmplifi er: A Guided Approach of Discovering Compromised Websites through Reversing Search Poisoning A acks,” Proc. of the 15th Interna onal Symposium on Research in A acks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID’12), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Sep-tember 2012.

Phillip Porras, Seungwon Shin, Vinod Yegneswaran, Mar n Fong, Mabry Tyson, and Guofei Gu, “A Security Enforcement Kernel for OpenFlow Networks,” Proc. of ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in So ware Defi ned Networking (HotSDN’12), Helsinki, Finland, August 2012.

Ricardo Gutierrez-OsunaProfessor and Graduate Advisor

Email: rgu [email protected]: 979-845-2942Offi ce: HRBB 520APh.D. Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University, 1998

Ricardo Gu errez-Osuna joined Texas A&M in 2002.

Research InterestsIntelligent sensors, speech process-ing, face recogni on, machine olfac- on, neuromorphic computa on,

mobile robo cs, pa ern recogni on, machine learning

AwardsAssocia on of Former Students College-level Dis nguished Teaching Award, 2010; Barbara and Ralph Cox ‘53 Faculty Fellow 2009; Ten-neco Meritorious Teaching Award 2009; Ramón y Cajal Award, Spain’s Ministry of Educa on and Science 2005-2010

Selected Publica onsJ. Choi and R. Gu errez-Osuna, “Removal of Respiratory Infl uences from Heart Rate Variability in Stress Monitoring,” IEEE Sensors Journal, in press.

J. Rodriguez and R. Gu errez-Osuna, “Reverse Caricatures Eff ects on Three-Dimensional Racial Recon-struc ons,” Image and Vision Com-pu ng, 29, pp. 329-334, 2011.

N.-Y. Yu, T. Yamauchi, H.-F. Yang; Y.-L. Chen and R. Gu errez-Osuna “Feature Selec on for Induc ve Generaliza on,” Cogni ve Science, 34, pp. 1574-1593, 2010.

R. Gu errez-Osuna and A. Hier-lemann, “Adap ve Microsensor Sys-tems,” Annual Review of Analy cal Chemistry, 3, PP. 255-276, 2010.

Tracy A. HammondAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-842-4284Offi ce: HRBB 414CPh.D. Computer Science, Massachuse s Ins tute of Technology, 2006

Tracy Hammond joined Texas A&M in 2006.

Research InterestsSketch recogni on, gesture recogni- on, hap cs, hand-tracking, ar fi cial

intelligence, human computer interfaces

AwardsCharles Barclay, Jr. ‘45 Faculty Fellow 2012, TAMU; Best Paper Award, MIT Student Oxygen Workshop 2004; Doctoral Consor um, Interna onal Joint Conference on Ar fi cial Intel-ligence, 2003; New Faculty Fellow, Fron ers in Educa on, 2002; Clare Booth Luce Fellowship 2000, M.I.T.

Selected Publica onsHammond, T., and Davis, R. “Creat-ing a Percep on-based Language for Sketch Recogni on by Looking at How People Naturally Defi ne Shapes.” Designing Interac ve Systems (DIS 2010), Arhus, Denmark, August 18-20, 2010.

Hammond, T., Logsdon, D., Paulson, B., Johnston, J., Peschel, J., Wolin, A., and Taele, P. “A Sketch Recogni on System for Recognizing Free-Hand Course of Ac on Diagrams.” The Twenty-Second Conference on In-nova ve Applica ons of Ar fi cial Intelligence, Atlanta, Georgia, July 11-15, 2010.

Dixon, D., Prasad, M., and Ham-mond, T. “iCanDraw? – Using Sketch Recogni on and Correc ve Feedback to Assist a User in Drawing Human Faces.” ACM Conference on Human Factors in Compu ng Systems 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, April 10-15, 2010.


Joseph HurleySenior Lecturer

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-0263Offi ce: RICH 916HPh.D. Texas A&M University, 2002

Joe Hurley joined Texas A&M in 1993.

AwardsNominated for Mervin & Anne Peters Faculty Advising Award by the Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M, 2001; Faculty Teaching Awards, Sam Houston State Univer-sity, 1992-1993; Graduate Student Instructor of the Year (Computer Sci-ence), University of Missouri, 1985, 1986; Research Paper presenta on: Midwest Associa on of Behavior Analysts, Chicago, Il, 1976; Academic Scholarship, Notre Dame University, South Bend, IN, 1974; PSI CHI Na- onal Honor Society, 1974; Academic

Scholarship, Pace University, NY, NY, 1971; New York State Regents Schol-arship, 1965; Academic Scholarship, Fordham University, Bronx, NY, 1965

Thomas R. IoergerAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-0161Offi ce: HRBB 322CPh.D., Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996

Tom Ioerger joined Texas A&M in 1996.

Research InterestsAr fi cial intelligence, machine learn-ing, intelligent agents, bioinforma cs

AwardsTEES Faculty Fellow, 2004-2005; Graduate Teaching Excellence Award, Dept. of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, 2001; NSF Graduate Fellowship, 1990 - 1993

Selected Publica onsIoerger, T.R., Feng, Y., Ganseula, K., Chen, X., Dobos, K.M., Fortune, S., Jacobs, W.R., Mizrahi, V., Parish, T., Rubin, E., Sasse , C. and Sacchet- ni, J.C. (2010), “Varia on Among

Genome Sequences of H37Rv Strains of M. tuberculosis from Mul ple Laboratories,” Journal of Bacteriol-ogy, 192:3645-3653.

Ioerger, T.R., Koo, S., No, E.-G., Chen, X., Larsen, M.H., Jacobs, W.R., Pillay, M., Sturm, A.W., and Sacche ni, J.C., “Genome Analysis of Mul - and Ex-tensively-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis from KwaZulu-Natal,” South Africa, PLoS ONE, 4(11):e7778, 2009.

Cho, Y., Ioerger, T.R. and Sacche ni, J.C., “Discovery of Novel Nitrobenzo-thiazole Inhibitors for M. tuberculo-sis ATP Phosphoribosyl Transferase (HisG) through Virtual Screening,” Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, 51(19):5984-5992, 2008.

Jaakko JärviAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-4359Offi ce: HRBB 416Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Turku, Finland, 2000

Jaakko Järvi joined Texas A&M in 2004.

Research InterestsGeneric and genera ve program-ming, so ware libraries, program-ming languages, type systems, user interfaces

AwardsTEES Select Young Faculty Award, 2010; NSF Early CAREER Award, 2009; Best Paper Award SAC 2008

Selected Publica onsJohn Freeman, Jaakko Järvi, Won-seok Kim, Mat Marcus, and Sean Parent, “Helping Programmers Help Users,” In GPCE ‘11: Proceedings of the 10th Interna onal Conference on Genera ve Programming and Com-ponent Engineering, ACM, 2011.

Jaakko Järvi and John Freeman, “C++ Lambda Expressions and Closures,” Science of Computer Programming, vol 75, no 9, pp 762-772, 2010.

Jaakko Jävi, Mat Marcus, and Jacob N. Smith, “Programming with C++ Concepts,” Science of Computer Programming, 2009. In Press.

Jaakko Järvi, Mat Marcus, Sean Parent, John Freeman, and Jacob N. Smith, “Algorithms for User Inter-faces,” In GPCE ‘09: Proceedings of the 8th Interna onal Conference on Genera ve Programming and Com-ponent Engineering, pages 89-98, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.

Anxiao (Andrew) JiangAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-7983Offi ce: HRBB 427BPh.D. Electrical Engineering, California Ins tute of Technology, 2004

Andrew Jiang joined Texas A&M in 2005.

Research InterestsInforma on theory, coding for fl ash memories, wireless and sensor networks, algorithms

AwardsIEEE Communica ons Society Best Paper Award in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage, 2009; NSF Early CAREER Award, 2008

Selected Publica onsA. Jiang, M. Schwartz and J. Bruck, “Correc ng Charge-constrained Errors in the Rank Modula on Scheme,” in IEEE Transac ons on Informa on Theory, vol. 56, no. 5, pp. 2112-2120, May 2010.

A. Jiang, R. Mateescu, M. Schwartz and J. Bruck, “Rank Modula on for Flash Memories,” in IEEE Transac- ons on Informa on Theory, vol. 55,

no. 6, pp. 2659-2673, June 2009.

A. Jiang, M. Cook and J. Bruck, “Op mal Interleaving on Tori,” SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathema cs, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 841-879, 2006.

A. Jiang and J. Bruck, “Network File Storage with Graceful Performance Degrada on,” ACM Transac ons on Storage, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 171-189, May 2005.

24

Andruid KerneAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-862-3217Offi ce: HRBB 402APh.D. New York University, 2001

Andruid Kerne joined Texas A&M in 2002.

Research InterestsHuman-centered compu ng, HCI, mul touch interac on, sensory interfaces, intelligent user interfaces, gesture recogni on, crea vity sup-port tools, informa on visualiza on;Serious games, wearable compu ng, body sensor networks, intelligent sensory devices, ubiquitous comput-ing, social compu ng, mul media; Support for informa on mapping in programming languages, embedded systems, so ware

AwardsNSF Early CAREER Award, 2008; NSF Human-Centered Compu ng Medium, 2008

Selected Publica onsMoeller, J. and Kerne, A., ZeroTouch: An Op cal Mul -Touch and Free-Air Interac on Architecture, Proc. CHI 2012, 2165-2174. Best Paper Honor-able Men on.

Kerne, A., Koh, E., Smith, S. M., Webb, A., Dworaczyk, B., “combin-Forma on: Mixed-Ini a ve Composi- on of Image and Text Surrogates

Promotes Informa on Discovery,” ACM Transac ons on Informa on Systems (TOIS), 27(1), 5:1-45, Dec. 2008.

Kerne, A., Smith, S.M., Koh, E., Choi, H., Graeber, R., “An Experimental Method for Measuring the Emer-gence of New Ideas in Informa on Discovery,” Interna onal Journal of Human-Computer Interac on (IJHCI), 24 (5), 460-477, July 2008.

Eun Jung KimAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-3660Offi ce: HRBB 427CPh.D. Computer Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, 2003

E.J. Kim joined Texas A&M in 2003.

Research InterestsComputer architecture, power ef-fi cient systems, parallel/distributed systems, cluster compu ng, perfor-mance evalua on, and fault-tolerant compu ng

AwardsNSF Early CAREER Award, 2009

Selected Publica onsL. Wang, P. Kumar, K. H. Yum and E. J. Kim, “APCR: An Adap ve Physical Channel Regulator for On-Chip Interconnects,” Interna onal Confer-ence on Parallel Architectures and Compila on Techniques (PACT), Min-neapolis, MN, September 2012.

H. Jang, B. S. An, N. Kulkarni, K. H. Yum and E. J. Kim, “A Hybrid Buff er Design with STT-MRAM for On-Chip Interconnects,” ACM/IEEE Interna- onal Symposium on Networks-on-

Chip (NOCS), Copenhagen, Denmark, May 2012.

B. S. An, M. Lee, K. H. Yum and E. J. Kim, “Effi cient Data Packet Compres-sion for Cache Coherent Mul pro-cessor Systems,” iData Compression Conference (DCC), Snowbird, Utah, April 2012.

Y. Jin, E. J. Kim and T. M. Pinkston, “Communica on-Aware Globally-Coordinated On-Chip Networks,” in IEEE Transac ons on Parallel and Dis-tributed Systems (TPDS), May 2011.

John KeyserProfessor and Associate Head for Academics

Email: [email protected]: 979-458-0167Offi ce: HRBB 527CPh.D. Computer Science, University of North Carolina, 2000

John Keyser joined Texas A&M in 2000.

Research InterestsGeometric compu ng, graphics and visualiza on, simula on and model-ing, and computer algebra

AwardsWilliam Keeler Faculty Fellow, 2010; Tenneco Meritorious Teaching Award, 2007; Montague Scholar, Center for Teaching Excellence, 2003-2004; Coali on to Diversify Comput-ing Mentor Travel Award, 2003; ONR Graduate Fellowship, 1994-1998

Selected Publica onsShu-Wei Hsu, John Keyser, “Piles of Objects,” ACM Transac ons on Graphics (Proceedings of ACM SIG-GRAPH Asia), vol. 29, no. 6, ar cle 155, 2010.

Cem Yuksel, John Keyser, Donald House, “Mesh Colors,” ACM Transac- ons on Graphics, vol. 29, no. 2,

ar cle 15, 2010.

Cem Yuksel, Sco Schaefer, John Keyser, “Hair Meshes,” ACM Transac- ons on Graphics (Proceedings of

ACM SIGGRAPH Asia), vol. 28, no. 5, ar cle 166, 2009.

Shu-Wei Hsu, John Keyser, “Sta s cal Simula on of Rigid Bodies,” Proceed-ings of ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Anima on, pp. 139-148, 2009.

Andreas KlappeneckerProfessor

Email: [email protected]: 979-458-0608Offi ce: HRBB 509BPh.D. Computer Science, University of Karlsruhe, 1998

Andreas Klappenecker joined Texas A&M in 1999.

Research InterestsQuantum compu ng, image process-ing, cryptography

AwardsBest Paper Award ICQNM 2009; Hal-liburton Faculty Fellow, 2007; TEES Select Young Faculty Award, 2004; Fellow-at-Large, Santa Fe Ins tute, 2000

Selected Publica onsA. Klappenecker, M. Rö eler, I. Shparlinski, A. Winterhof, “On Ap-proximately Symmetric Informa on-ally Complete Posi ve Operator-Val-ued Measures and Related Systems of Quantum States”, J. Math. Physics, 46, (17 pages), 2005.

A. Klappenecker and M. Rö eler, “Mutually Unbiased Bases are Com-plex Projec ve 2-Designs,” Proc. 2005 IEEE Interna onal Symposium on Informa on Theory, Adelaide, Australia, pp. 1740-1744, 2005.

A. Klappenecker and M. Rö eler, “On the Monomiality of Nice Error Bases,” IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, 51(3), pp. 1-6, 2005.

G. Song and A. Klappenecker, “Op mal Realiza ons of Simplifi ed Toff oli Gates,” Quantum Informa on and Computa on 4(5), pp. 361-372, 2004.


Teresa LeykSenior Lecturer

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-4456Offi ce: RICH 901EPh.D. Australian Na onal University, 1998

Teresa Leyk joined Texas A&M in 1997.

Research InterestsApplying object-oriented languages to solving engineering or scien fi c problems, and producing high-quali-ty so ware

AwardsUndergraduate Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, 2007 & 2012

Selected Publica onsT. Leyk, S. Roberts, “Numerical Solving of a Free Boundary Phase Field Model Using Krylov Subspace Method,” CTAC95, Melbourne, 1995, R. May and A. Easton, eds., World Scien fi c, pp. 479-487, Singapore, 1996.

T. Leyk, D. Stewart, J. Comput, “Error Es mates for Krylov Approxima ons of Matrix Exponen als,” Appl. Math. 72, pp. 359-369, 1995.

T. Leyk, D. Steward, “Solving Linear and Weakly Nonlinear Parabolic Diff eren al Equa ons by Krylov Ap-proxima on Method,” Proceedings of CTAC93, ANU, Canberra, 1993, H. Gardner, D. Singleton, and D. Stew-art, eds., Singapore, World Scien fi c, pp. 329-337, 1994.

Jyh-Charn (Steve) LiuProfessor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-8739Offi ce: HRBB 502BPh.D., Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Michigan, 1989

Steve Liu joined Texas A&M in 1989.

Research InterestsReal- me distributed compu ng systems, network performance and security, medical informa cs

AwardsInterna onal Excellence Award, Texas A&M University, 2003

Selected Publica onsJ-J. Hu, T.W. Fossum, M.W. Miller, H. Xu*, S. Liu, J.D. Humphrey, “Biome-chanics of the Porcine Basilar Artery in Hypertension,” Annals of Biomedi-cal Engineering, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 19-29(11), January 2007. Jian Jia Wu*, Jyh-Charn Liu, Wei Zhao, “U liza on-Bound Based Schedulability Analysis of Weighted Round Robin Schedulers,” IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium, (Best Student Paper Award), December 2007.

Sheng-Ya Lin, Jonas Tan, Jyh-Charn Liu, Michael Oehler, “High-Speed De-tec on of Unsolicited Bulk Emails,” Symposium on Architectures for Networking and Communica ons Systems, Dececember 2007. Jian Jia Wu, Jyh-Charn Liu, Wei Zhao, “On Schedulability Bounds of Sta c Priority Schedulers,” IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Ap-plica ons Symposium, 2005.

Dmitri LoguinovProfessor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-0512Offi ce: HRBB 515CPh.D. Computer Science, City University of New York, 2002

Dmitri Loguinov joined Texas A&M in 2002.

Research InterestsPeer-to-peer networks, conges on control, Internet measurements, high-performance web crawling, massive-scale informa on retrieval, topology modeling, and stochas c analysis of networks

AwardsBest Paper Award IEEE P2P, 2009; TEES Fellow, 2009; Best Paper Award WWW, 2008; TEES Select Young Faculty Award, 2005

Selected Publica onsH.-T. Lee, D. Leonard, X. Wang, and D. Loguinov, “IRLbot: Scaling to 6 Bil-lion Pages and Beyond,’’ WWW, April 2008 (best paper award).

X. Wang, X. Liu, and D. Loguinov, “Modeling the Evolu on of Degree Correla on in Scale-Free Topology Generators,” IEEE INFOCOM, April 2008.

Z. Yao and D. Loguinov, “Understand-ing Disconnec on and Stabiliza on of Chord,” IEEE INFOCOM, April 2008.

D. Leonard and D. Loguinov, “Turbo King: Framework for Large-Scale Internet Delay Measurements,” IEEE INFOCOM, April 2008.

Rabi N. MahapatraProfessor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-5787Offi ce: HRBB 520BPh.D. Computer Engineering, Indian Ins tute of Technology, 1992

Rabi Mahapatra joined Texas A&M in 1995.

Research InterestsEmbedded systems, system-on-chip, reconfi gurable architectures, real- me systems, cyber infrastructure,

seman c networks

AwardsIEEE Computer Society’s Dis n-guished Visitor, North America, 2005-2007; Ford Fellow, BOYS-CAST Fellow (Indo-US Young Scien st Award)

Selected Publica onsAmar Rasheed and Rabi Mahapatra, “Key Pre-distribu on Schemes for Establishing Pairwise Keys with a Mobile Sink in Sensor Networks,” IEEE Transac ons on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), Vol. 22, Issue 2, pp. 176-184, Jan 2011. Yoonjin Kim, and Rabi N. Mahapatra, “A New Array Fabric for Coarse-Grained Reconfi gurable Architec-ture,” in Proc. IEEE EuroMicro Confer-ence, pp. 584-591, September 2008.

Ranjani Sridharan, Nikhil Gupta, and Rabi Mahapatra, “Feedback-controlled reliability-aware power management for real- me embed-ded systems,” Design Automa on Conference, 2008.

26

Robin MurphyEndowed Raytheon Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-2015Offi ce: HRBB 333Ph.D. Computer Science, Georgia Ins tute of Technology, 1992

Robin Murphy joined Texas A&M in 2008.

Research InterestsRescue robo cs, human-robot in-terac on, psychology, cogni ve and neural sciences

AwardsMotohiro Kisoi Award, Interna onal Rescue System Ins tute,2010; IEEE Fellow, 2010, AUVSI Founda on Al Aube Outstanding Contributor Award, CMU Field Robo cs Ins tute “Pioneer in Field Robo cs,” IEEE Spectrum “Dream Jobs,” TIME Magazine, Innovators in Ar fi cial Intelligence, Wired Magazine Alpha Geek, 2009; US Air Force Exemplary Civilian Service Award, 2005; Eagle Award, Na onal Ins tute for Urban Search and Rescue, 2001

Selected Publica onsMurphy, R.R., Tadokoro, S., Nardi, D., Jacoff , A., Fiorini, P., and Erkmen, A., “Rescue Robo cs,” Handbook of Robo cs, B. Sciliano and O. Kha b, editors, Springer-Verlag, pp. 1151-1174, 2008.

Murphy, R. R. and Woods, D.D, “Beyond Asimov: The Three Laws of Responsible Robo cs,” IEEE Intel-ligent Systems, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 14-20, July/Aug. 2009.

Murphy, R. R. and Argrow, B., “UAS in the Na onal Airspace System: Research Direc ons,” Unmanned Systems Magazine, vol. 27 no. 6, pp. 23-28, June 2009.

Murphy, R.R., Introduc on to AI Robo cs, MIT Press, 2000.

Lawrence RauchwergerHalliburton Professorship II

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-8872Offi ce: HRBB 425EPh.D. Computer Science, Uni-versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1995

Lawrence Rauchwerger joined Texas A&M in 1996.

Research InterestsCompilers for parallel and distributed compu ng, parallel and distributed C++ libraries, adap ve run me op -miza ons, architectures for parallel compu ng

AwardsIEEE Fellow, 2011; Halliburton Profes-sorship Award, 2009; IBM Faculty Award, 2008; TEES Fellow, College of Engineering, Texas A&M University 2005-2006, 2002-2003; NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, 1998-2002; TEES Select Young Faculty Award, College of Engineering, Texas A&M University, 2000-2001

Selected Publica onsA. Jula and L. Rauchwerger, “Custom Memory Alloca on for Free: Improv-ing Data Locality with Container-Centric Memory Alloca on,” 19th Workshop on Languages and Compil-ers for Parallel Compu ng (LCPC), New Orleans, Louisiana, Nov 2006.

Lawrence Rauchwerger and Nancy Amato, “SmartApps: Middle-ware for Adap ve Applica ons on Reconfi gu-rable Pla orms,” ACM SIGOPS Oper-a ng Systems Reviews, Special Issue on Opera ng and Run me Systems for High-End Compu ng Systems, 40(2):73-82, 2006.

Hao Yu, Lawrence Rauchwerger, “An Adap ve Algorithm Selec on Framework for Reduc on Paralleliza- on,” IEEE Transac ons on Parallel

and Distributed Systems, 17 (19), pp. 1084-1096, 2006.

Vivek SarinAssociate Professor andUndergraduate Advisor

Email: [email protected]: 979-458-2214Offi ce: HRBB 309CPh.D. Computer Science, Uni-versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1997

Vivek Sarin joined Texas A&M in 1999.

Research InterestsNumerical methods, parallel algo-rithms, computa onal science

AwardsNSF Faculty Early Career Develop-ment (CAREER) Award, 2000-2004; IBM Faculty Partnership Award, 2002; TEES Select Young Faculty, 2002; TEES Special Research Fellow, 2001

Selected Publica onsMahawar, H. and Sarin, V., “Precon-di oned Itera ve Solvers for Induc-tance Extrac on of VLSI Circuits,” SIAM Journal on Scien fi c Comput-ing, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 182-96.

Saldana, J. G. B., Anand, N. K., and Sarin V., “Numerical Simula on of Mixed Convec ve Flow Over a Three-Dimensional Horizontal Backward-Facing Step,” Journal of Heat Trans-fer, vol. 127, pp. 1027-1036, 2005.

Yan, S., Sarin, V., and Shi, W., “Sparse Transforma ons and Precondi on-ers for Hierarchical 3D Capacitance Extrac on,” IEEE Transac ons on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems, vol. 24, no. 9, pp. 1420-1426, 2005.

Sarin, V. and Sameh, A. H., “Hier-archical Divergence-free Bases and Their Applica on to Par culate Flows,” Journal of Applied Mechan-ics, vol. 70, pp. 44-49, 2003.

Evdokia NikolovaAssistant Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-5498Offi ce: HRBB 515APh.D. Electrical Engineer-ing and Computer Science, Massachuse s Ins tute of Technology, 2009

Evdodokia Nikolova joined Texas A&M in 2011.

Research InterestsAlgorithms and combinatorial op -miza on; stochas c and risk-averse op miza on; algorithmic game theory

AwardsDoctoral Fellowship in the Math-ema cal Sciences, American Founda on for Bulgaria, 2006-2007; Presiden al Fellowship, MIT, 2003-2004; Herchel Smith Harvard Fellow-ship, Cambridge University, England, 2002-2003

Selected Publica onsEvdokia Nikolova, Nicolas E. S er Moses, “Stochas c Selfi sh Rou ng,” In Proceedings of the Fourth Sympo-sium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT ‘11), Salerno, Amalfi Coast, Italy, Lecture Notes in Computer Sci-ence, Springer, Berlin, 2011.

Evdokia Nikolova, “Approxima on Algorithms for Offl ine Risk-averse Combinatorial Op miza on,” (origi-nal tle: “Approxima on Algorithms for Reliable Stochas c Combinatorial Op miza on”), In Proceedings of AP-PROX ‘10, Barcelona, Spain, 2010.

Jon Feldman, S. Muthukrishnan, Evdokia Nikolova, Mar n Pal, “A Truthful Mechanism for Offl ine Ad Slot Scheduling,” In Proceedings of the First Interna onal Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT ‘08), Padeborn, Germany, May 2008.


Sco SchaeferAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-862-4251Offi ce: HRBB 527BPh.D. Computer Science, Rice University, 2006

Sco Schaefer joined Texas A&M in 2006.

Research InterestsComputer graphics, geometric mod-eling, scien fi c visualiza on

AwardsNSF CAREER Award, 2012; Best Paper Award (The Günter Enderle Award), Eurographics for “Wavelet Rasteriza- on,” 2011; Computer Science &

Engineering Undergraduate Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, 2010 & 2011; Par cipant of the DARPA Com-puter Science Study Panel, 2008

Selected Publica onsManson J., Schaefer S., “Wavelet Rasteriza on,” Proceedings of Euro-graphics, pp. 395-404, 2011.

Singh M., Schaefer S., “Triangle Surfaces with Discrete Equivalence Classes,” Proceedings of ACM SIG-GRAPH, pp. 46:1-46:7, 2010.

Lei H., Hormann K., Schaefer S., “Pa-rameterizing Subdivision Surfaces,” Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH, pp.120:1-120:6, 2010.

Loop, C., Schaefer S., Ni T., Castano I., “Approxima ng Subdivision Surfaces with Gregory Patches for Hardware Tessella on,” Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA, pp. 151:1-151:9, 2009.

Yuksel C., Schaefer S., Keyser J., “Hair Meshes,” Proceedings of ACM SIG-GRAPH ASIA, pp. 166:1-166:7, 2009.

Dylan ShellAssistant Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-2369Offi ce: HRBB 333BPh.D. Computer Science, University of SouthernCalifornia, 2008

Dylan Shell joined Texas A&M in 2009.

Research InterestsDistributed AI, biologically-inspired mul -robot systems, coordinated system, analysis of mul -agent systems, crowd modeling

AwardsCSE Faculty Service Excellence Award, Spring 2010

Selected Publica onsL. Liu and D. A. Shell, “A Distributable and Computa on-fl exible Assign-ment Algorithm: From Local Task Swapping to Global Op mality” 2012 Robo cs: Science and Systems Conference (RSS), Sydney, Australia, July 2012.

L. Liu and D. A. Shell, “Large-Scale Mul -Robot Task Alloca on via Dy-namic Par oning and Distribu on” Autonomous Robots, vol. 33, no. 3, pp 291-307, June 2012.

L. Liu and D. A. Shell, “Assessing Op- mal Assignment under Uncertainty:

An Interval-based Algorithm,” Inter-na onal Journal of Robo cs Research (IJRR), vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 936-953, June 2011.

L. Liu, B. Fine, D. Shell, A. Klappe-necker. “Approximate Characteriza- on of Mul -Robot Swarm ‘Shapes’

in Sublinear-Time,” Proceedings of 2011 IEEE Interna onal Conference on Robo cs and Automa on (ICRA), Shanghai, China, May 2011.

Dezhen SongAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-5464Offi ce: HRBB 311CPh.D. Industrial Engineering and Opera on Research, University of California, Berkeley, 2004

Dezhen Song joined Texas A&M in 2004.

Research InterestsNetworked robo cs, computer vision, mul media, autonomous vehicle, op miza on, automa on

AwardsFinalist, Best Paper Award, IEEE Interna onal Conference on Automa- on Science and Engineering, 2008;

TEES Select Young Faculty, 2007; NSF Early Career Award, 2007; Semi-fi -nalist (with blue team), DARPA Grand Challenge, Oct. 2005; Kayamori Best Paper Award, IEEE Interna onal Conference on Robo cs and Automa- on, 2005

Selected Publica onsDezhen Song, Chang Young Kim, and Jingang Yi, “Simultaneous Localiza on of Mul ple Unknown and Transient Radio Sources Using a Mobile Robot,” IEEE Trans. on Robot-ics (T-RO), vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 668-680, June 2012,

Dezhen Song, Chang Young Kim, and Jingang Yi, “On the Time to Search for an Intermi ent Signal Source Under a Limited Sensing Range,” IEEE Transac ons on Robo cs (T-RO), vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 313-323, 2011.

Dezhen Song and Yiliang Yu, “A Low False Nega ve Filter for Detec ng Rare Bird Species from Short Video Segments using a Probable Observa- on Data Set-based EKF Method,”

IEEE Transac ons on Image Process-ing, vol. 19, no. 9, pp. 2321-2333, Sept. 2010.

Frank M. ShipmanProfessor

Email: [email protected]: 979-862-3216Offi ce: HRBB 404Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Colorado, 1993

Frank Shipman joined Texas A&M in 1993.

Research InterestsIntelligent user interfaces, hypertext, computers and educa on, mul me-dia, computers and design, comput-er-human interac on, computer-supported coopera ve work

AwardsACM Dis nguished Scien st, 2009; Google Research Award, 2009; Best Student Paper Award at ACM UIST 2002 (with Haowei Hsieh); Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award at ACM Hypertext 1999; NSF CAREER Ini a- on Award, 1998-2002

Selected Publica onsC. Marshall and F. Shipman, “On the Ins tu onal Archiving of Social Media”, Proceedings of ACM & IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 1-10, 2012.

C. Duarte, R. Gu errez-Osuna, and F. Shipman, “Design and Evalua- on of Classifi er for Iden fying Sign

Language Videos in Video Sharing Sites”, Proceedings of ACM SIGAC-CESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility, 2012.

C. Marshall and F. Shipman, “Social Media Ownership: Using Twi er as a Window onto Current A tudes and Beliefs,” Human Factors in Comput-ing Systems: Proceedings of ACM CHI, pp. 1081-1090, 2011.

K. Meintanis and F. Shipman, “Visual Expression for Organizing and Accessing Music Collec ons in MusicWiz,” Proceedings of European Conference on Digital Libraries, 2010.

28

Bjarne StroustrupUniversity Dis nguished Professor and College of Engineering Endowed Chair in Computer Science

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-4094Offi ce: HRBB 417APh.D. Computer Science, Cambridge University, England, 1979

Bjarne Stroustrup joined Texas A&M in 2003.

Research InterestsDistributed systems, so ware devel-opment tools, design, programming and programming languages, found-ing member of the ISO C++ standards commi ee

AwardsRecipient of the The Rigmor and Carl Holst-Knudsen Science Prize, 2010; AFS Dis nguished Achieve-ment Award in Research, College and University level, 2009; Dr. Dobbs Excellence in Programming Award, 2008; TEES Fellow, 2007; William Procter Prize for Scien fi c Achieve-ment, 2005; Na onal Academy of Engineering, 2004; IEEE Computer Society 2004 Computer Entrepreneur Award; AT&T Bell Labs Fellow, AT&T Fellow; ACM Fellow; IEEE Fellow

Selected Publica onsBjarne Stroustrup, “Founda ons of C++,” 22nd European Symposium on Programming (ESOP), Springer LNCS 7211, April 2012.

Bjarne Stroustrup, “So ware Development for Infrastructure,” Computer, vol. 45, no. 1, pp. 47-58, January 2012.

Andrew Su on and Bjarne Stroust-rup, “Design of Concept Libraries for C++,” AProc. SLE 2011 (Interna onal Conference on So ware Language Engineering), July 2011.

Radu StoleruAssistant Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-862-8349Offi ce: HRBB 509DPh.D. Computer Science, University of Virginia, 2007

Radu Stoleru joined Texas A&M in 2007.

Research InterestsDeeply embedded wireless sen-sor systems, distributed systems, embedded and real- me compu ng, computer networking

AwardsBest Student Paper Award (Myoung-gyu Won) at 9th IEEE/IFIP Interna- onal Conference on Embedded

and Ubiquitous Compu ng (EUC), 2011; Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award, Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia, 2007

Selected Publica ons H. Chenji, R. Stoleru, “Towards Accurate Mobile Sensor Network Localiza on in Noisy Environments,” accepted, to appear in IEEE Transac- ons on Mobile Compu ng (TMC),

2012.

M.A. Suresh, R. Stoleru, E. Zechman, B. Shihada, “On Event Detec on and Localiza on in Acyclic Flow Net-works,” accepted, to appear in IEEE Transac ons on Systems, Man and Cyberne cs: Part A: Systems, 2012.

P. Barooah, H. Chenji, R. Stoleru, T. Kalmar-Nagy, “Cut Detec on in Wireless Sensor Networks,” in IEEE Transac ons on Parallel and Distrib-uted Systems (TPDS), vol. 23, issue 3, 2012.

R. Stoleru, H. Wu, H. Chenji, “Secure Neighbor Discovery and Worhm-hole Localiza on for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks,” accepted, to appear in AdHoc Networks (Elsevier), 2012.

Sing-Hoi SzeAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-5009Offi ce: HRBB 328BPh.D. Computer Science, University of Southern California, 2000

Sing-Hoi Sze joined Texas A&M in 2002.

Research InterestsBioinforma cs/Computa onal Biol-ogy: mul ple sequence alignment, mo f fi nding with applica ons to predic ng transcrip on factor bind-ing sites, biological network analysis, iden fi ca on of gene clusters within genomes

AwardsUndergraduate Faculty Teaching Award: computer science depart-ment, 2006

Selected Publica onsLu S., Zhang F., Chen J. and Sze S.-H., “Finding Pathway Structures in Protein Interac on Networks,” Algo-rithmica, 48, 363-374, 2007.Yang Q. and Sze S.-H., “Path Match-ing and Graph Matching in Biological Networks,” Journal of Computa onal Biology, 14, 56-67, 2007.

Yi G., Sze S.-H. and Thon M.R., “Iden fying Clusters of Func onally Related Genes in Genomes,” Bioin-forma cs, 23, 1053-1060, 2007.

Chen J., Lu S., Sze S.-H. and Zhang F., “Improved Algorithms for Path, Matching, and Packing Problems,” 18th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA’2007), 298-307, 2007.

Valerie E. TaylorRoyce E. WisenbakerProfessor and Former Head (2003-2011)

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-2497Offi ce: HRBB 517Ph.D. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley, 1991

Valerie Taylor joined Texas A&M in 2003.

Research InterestsHigh performance compu ng, with par cular emphasis on the perfor-mance analysis and modeling of parallel and distributed applica ons and par oning methods

AwardsSigma Xi Dis nguished Lecture; Rich-ard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scien fi c Scholarship, Civic Science, and Diversifying Compu ng, 2005; MOBE Infl uencers and Innovators of the Internet and Technology Award, 2003; CRA A. Nico Habermann Award, 2002; Hewle Packard Har-riet B. Rigas Educa on Award, 2001

Selected Publica onsXingfu Wu and Valerie Taylor, Perfor-mance Characteris cs of Hybrid MPI/OpenMP Implementa ons of NAS Parallel Benchmarks SP and BT on Large-Scale Mul core Clusters, The Computer Journal, to be published, 2011. Xingfu Wu, Benchun Duan, and Valerie Taylor, Parallel Earthquake Simula ons on Large-scale Mul core Supercomputers (Book Chapter), Handbook of Data Intensive Comput-ing (Eds: B. Furht and A. Escalante), to be published in Springer-Verlag, 2011.


Jennifer L. WelchChevron Professor, Regents Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-5076Offi ce: HRBB 415Ph.D., Computer Science, Massachuse s Ins tute of Technology, 1988

Jennifer Welch joined Texas A&M in 1992.

Research InterestsAlgorithms and lower bounds for distributed compu ng systems, in par cular mobile ad hoc networks, distributed shared objects

AwardsAFS Dis nguished Achievement Award in Teaching, College and Uni-versity level, 2009; Regents Professor Award, 2008; Charles Crawford Service Award, 2008; Chevron II Professorship, 2004; IEEE Educa on Society Hewle -Packard Harriet B. Rigas Award, 2004;

Selected Publica onsCheng Shao, Jennifer L. Welch, Evelyn Pierce and Hyunyoung Lee, “Mul -Writer Consistency Condi ons for Shared Memory Registers,” SIAM Journal on Compu ng, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 28--62, 2011.

Hagit A ya, Alex Kogan, and Jennifer L. Welch, “Effi cient and Fault-Tolerant Local Mutual Exclusion in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks,” IEEE Transac ons on Mobile Compu ng, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 361-375, 2010.

Hagit A ya and Jennifer Welch, Dis-tributed Compu ng: Fundamentals, Simula ons and Advanced Topics, Second Edi on, John Wiley & Sons, 414 pp., March 2004.

Duncan M. WalkerDepartment Head andFord Motor Company Design Professor II

Email: [email protected]: 979-865-5820Offi ce: HRBB 305BPh.D., Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 1986

Hank Walker joined Texas A&M in 1993.

Research InterestsIntegrated circuit test, defect-based test, delay test, IDDQ test, fault diagnosis, realis c fault modeling, parametric and func onal yield predic on

AwardsCharles W. Crawford Service Award, 2010; E. D. Brocke Professorship, 2008; Lockheed Mar n Aeronau cs Company Excellence in Engineering Teaching Award, 2006; Dwight Look College of Engineering Fellow, 2007; AMD Fellow, 2003; TEES Fellow, 1999

Selected Publica onsZ. Wang and D. M. H. Walker, “Com-pact Delay Test Genera on with a Realis c Low Cost Fault Coverage Metric,” IEEE VLSI Test Symposium, Santa Cruz, CA, May 2009.

Z. Wang and D. M. H. Walker, “Dy-namic Compac on for High Quality Delay Test,” IEEE VLSI Test Sympo-sium, Rancho Bernardo, CA, May 2008, paper 8.1.

S. Sabade and D. M. H. Walker, “Es ma on of Fault-Free Leakage Us-ing Wafer-Level Spa al Informa on,” IEEE Transac ons on VLSI Systems, vol. 14, no. 1, January 2006, pp. 91-94.

Tiff ani L. WilliamsAssociate Professor

Email: [email protected]: 979-845-7977Offi ce: HRBB 328CPh.D. Computer Science, University of Central Florida, 2000

Tiff ani Williams joined Texas A&M in 2005.

Research InterestsBionforma cs/Computa onal biol-ogy, phylogeny, high-performance compu ng, op miza on, perfor-mance analysis

AwardsDARPA CS2P par cipant, 2006; Radcliff e Ins tute Fellow, 2004-2005; Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow-ship in Computa onal Biology, 2002-2004; McKnight Doctoral Fellowship, 1994-1999

Selected Publica onsSeung-Jin Sul and Tiff ani L. Williams, “Big Cats, Consensus Trees, and Computa onal Thinking,” book chapter, Bioinforma cs for Biologists, to appear.

Suzanne J. Ma hews and Tiff ani L. Williams,”An Effi cient and Extensible Approach for Compressing Phyloge-ne c Trees’, BMC Bioinforma cs, to appear. Grant Brammer, Ralph Crosby, Suzanne Ma hews, and Tiff ani L. Williams, “Paper Mache: Crea ng Dynamic Reproducible Science’’, Interna onal Conference on Compu-ta onal Science (ICCS’11), 2011.

Suzanne J. Ma hews, Seung-Jin Sul and Tiff ani L. Williams,”A Novel Ap-proach for Compressing Phylogene c Trees’’, Interna onal Symposium on Bioinforma cs Research and Applica- ons (ISBRA’10), 2010.

30

Faculty EmeritusS. Bart Childs, Ph.D., Oklahoma State University, Computational engineering and science, literate programming, programming environments, documentation

Donald Friesen, Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Algorithm analysis, complexity

William M. Lively, Ph.D., Southern Methodist University. Software engineering, human-computer interaction

Paul Nelson, Ph.D., University of New Mexico. Mathematical software, numerical analysis, parallel numerical analysis

Udo Pooch, Ph.D., University of Notre Dame. Operating Systems, Fault Tolerant Systems, Performance, Measurement and Evaluation, Computer Networks and Data Communications, Real-time Systems

Sallie Sheppard, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh. Simulation, software engineering, high-level languages

Dick B. Simmons, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania. Software engineering, software models and metrics, expert systems, productivity improvement techniques

Richard A. Volz, Ph.D., Northwestern University. Former Department Head and Royce E. Wisenbaker Professor. Application of information technology to advanced training systems, real-time embedded computing in robotics and manufacturing, telerobotics, distributed programming and languages, software engineering

Glen Williams, Ph.D., Texas A&M University. Former Interim Department Head; Former Interim Associate Dean for Academic Programs; Former Assistant Dean, Dwight Look College of Engineering; and Former Associate Director, Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES). Computer graphics, scientifi c and engineering applications, computational mathematics

Retired FacultyDaniel Colunga, Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin. Software engineering, database systems design, management information systems

Joint AppointmentsShankar P. Bhattacharyya, Ph.D., Professor; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Pierce Cantrell, Ph.D., Vice President, and Associate Provost for Information Technology; Chief Information Offi cer, Texas A&M University and the Texas A&M University System

Mi Lu, Ph.D., Professor; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Michael Pilant, Ph.D., Professor of Mathematics, Aerospace Engineering, and Computer Science; Department of Mathematics

William Rundell, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science; Department of Mathematics

Peter Stiller, Ph.D., Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science; Assistant Director of the Institute for Scientifi c Computation; Department of Mathematics

Karan Watson, Ph.D., Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs; Professor of Electrical Engineering

Adjunct FacultyBronis de Supinksi, Ph.D., University of Virginia. Adjunct Associate Professor; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Jian Li, Ph.D., Cornell University. Adjunct Assistant Professor; IBM Austin Research Laboratory

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