STUDENT AWARDS
On April 20, SPSU held its annual student awards banquet. We use this event to recognize our
best and brightest students. Some 100 students received awards including 8 from CSE.
Tanvir Rahman and Michael Stittleburg were recognized as the outstanding CSE graduates
students, while Benjamin Bernhardt (Software Engineering), Tyler Clark (Information
Technology) Josh Skelton (Computer Game Design and Development), and Teng Zhao (Computer
Science) were recognized as the outstanding undergraduate students. The Julian Joseph
Award for Service to CSE was shared by Megan Cox and Chris Miller. Megan and Chris
were instrumental in helping us strengthen the tutorial services that we offer to
our students.
All the recipients deserve our congratulations.
FACULTY PROMOTIONS
Two of the faculty members of the Department of Information Technology were recently
promoted. Dr Svetlana Peltsverger was promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure,
while Professor Bob Brown was promoted to Senior Lecturer. The promotions recognize
the extraordinary contributions Dr Peltsverger and Professor Brown has made to CSE
and will no doubt continue to make in the future. I wanted to publicly express my
appreciation for their work and congratulate them on their achievements.
SKELTON ACCEPTED FOR SUMMER RESEARCH FELLOWSHIP
Josh Skelton was recognized in more than one way in April. In addition to being recognized
as the outstanding undergraduate student, Josh was also accepted for a summer research
position at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. The program, which is funded
by the NSF, is very competitive (less than 7% of applicants are accepted), and gives
outstanding undergraduate students the opportunity to work with a faculty member at
the host institution on a summer research project. Josh will be working as part of
a Biomedical Informatics research team. More specifically, he will work on the X-Box
Kinect SDK and research algorithms that can be used for physical therapy/rehabilitation
patients.
Clearly, the fact that Josh was accepted is a testimony both to his talents but also
to the quality of the Computer Game Design and Development program that he is enrolled
in. Congratulations to Josh.
STUDENTS PRESENT AT CONFERENCE
A group of undergraduate students recently presented a paper based on their capstone
project at the ACM Southeast conference in Tuscaloosa, AL. The students, who worked
under the supervision of Dr Kai Qian, were Zhengzhe Li, Teng Zhao (the recipient of
our of the CSE outstanding undergraduate awards), Dong Ren, Yang Zhang, and Lei Wang
and the title of their paper was “Learning Applications of Multi-tasking Signal Analysis
of Fourier Transform Based on Smart Mobile Devices”. Congratulations to all.
GRADUATION RECEPTION
On May 11 CSE will again be hosting the reception for its graduating students. Between the
spring and summer commencement, we are expecting to graduate around 100 students from
the various programs in CSE. CSE hosts the reception to help them and their friends
and family celebrate this achievement. This year, we will also ask graduating students
to take the Pledge to the Computing Profession. UPS is sponsoring the reception,
while BlueWave Computing is providing financial support for the Pledge to the Computing
Profession. I am of course most grateful to both sponsors.
On a more personal note, It turns out that the entire office staff in the Dean’s Office
is graduating in the spring. So, in addition to extending my congratulations to all
students who will graduate, I want to extend a special congratulation to Ashley McClure,
Paula Stadnicki, and Shruti Tammireddi.
FORMER STUDENTS START COMPANY
Marshall Miller, a 2011 CSE graduate in Computer Science, and Tommy Tornroos, a graduate
from SPSU’s business program, recently announced the formation of a new software company,
GearSprout LLC, and the release of its first product, SproutConverter. SproutConverter
automatically removes blank spaces, video noise, distortion and other glitches from
digital video files, home video cassettes and film, and downloaded movies. I of course
wish Marshall and Tommy every success in their new venture.
MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE OLYMPIAD
Last month I reported on the Science Olympiad that SPSU hosted for high school students.
The organizers of that event, Lance Crimm, Stephanie McCartney and Susan Vande Ven
from our department of Information Technology, are obviously gluttons for punishment
as they organized a similar event for middle school students. With the help of around
100 volunteers, some 360 students competed in such events as TowerBuilding, Mission
Possible and MouseTrap Vehicle. The top team will compete in a national competition
in Orlando in May.
I wanted to express my appreciation for the effort that all have put in to make this
event possible. Keeping middle school students interested in science, technology,
engineering and computing is extremely important if we as a country as to address
the growing shortage of professionals in these fields.
INCREASING DIVERSITY – YOUR INPUT NEEDED
One of the CSE strategic goals is to increase the diversity of its student population,
and I have to admit that we have not done enough to address this goal, at least not
in a systematic way. Thanks to some prodding and suggestions from Lisa McVey, CIO
of McKesson Provider Solutions, and a member of the CSE Dean’s Development Council,
we have started a project to formulate a plan to increase the diversity of our student
population. Our student demographics are interesting in that we are ethnically relatively
diverse (some 47% of our undergraduate population are non-white). Our main lack of
diversity is gender. Female students make up less than 15% of our undergraduate populations
and less than 30% of our graduate population. Moreover, the issue appears to be one
of recruitment, rather than retention, in that we appear to retain female students
at the same rate as male students, although it has to be said that retention rates
are extremely poor for both groups.
We have had a few brainstorming sessions within CSE and the reason for writing is
to ask you for any suggestions you might have. What can we do to attract more young
women into our programs? Do you have anecdotes of things we did and should have prevented
that turned women away from our programs? Do you have anecdotes of things we did
or should have done to make our programs more attractive to women? Any suggestions
about how we can increase the diversity in our student populations are most welcome.
Let stress that we are not only seeking suggestions from women or ethnic minorities.
The issue of diversity is a broad issue that I believe concerns us all.