Dean's Update - June 2012

VENU DASIGI LEAVING CSE

Dr Venu Dasigi, chair of the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, will be leaving SPSU over the summer to take up a position as chair of the Department of Computer Science at Bowling Green State University. Dr Dasigi of course deserves our heartiest congratulations on this. I am sure that he will make an enormous contribution to his new institution.

I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank Dr Dasigi for his tremendous service to SPSU in general and CSE in particular. Among his many accomplishments are leading the way in the design and implementation of the assessment continuous improvement process that CSE uses to ensure the quality of its degree programs, establishing a highly successful tutoring program for our introductory computing courses, a significant revision in the Master of Science program in Software Engineering, and, of course, the establishment of the new program in Computer Game Design and Development. Under his leadership, the Bachelor of Science program in Computer Science also received its first accreditation from the Computing Accreditation Commission of ABET.

Dr Dasigi will be leaving us in mid-July and I am pleased to announce that Dr Hassan Pournaghshband has agreed to take over from Dr Dasigi as department chair on an interim basis. We will conduct a search for a permanent chair in the fall.

HUNG APPOINTED TO EDITORIAL BOARD OF IJAIS

Dr C.C. Hung was recently appointed to the editorial board of the International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems. The journal is dedicated to topics related to automation, static and mobile agents, decision systems, special computational paradigms, advances in computer-human interaction, human-oriented modeling, and human-centric service and applications. As a member of the editorial board, Dr Hung will help ensure the quality of the papers published in the journal.

Congratulations are of course due to Dr Hung.

COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENT TO COMPLETE HIS PROGRAM AT NINGBO UNIVERSITY

As many of you know, SPSU has had a long-standing arrangements with a number of universities in China for student exchange, and CSE regularly welcomes a group of students from China, who, having completed the first two years of their undergraduate program in China, come to SPSU for their final two years of study. To date, the flow of traffic has been one-way.

Joshua Roberts, a junior in Computer Science, is about to change this. In the fall, Joshua will join Ningbo University in Ningbo, Zhejiang, China to complete at least some of his undergraduate courses. While we still have some details to work out, I have no doubt that Joshua will benefit tremendously from this experience, and I wish him well on his endeavor.

I also want to add that I am pleased that we may be getting closer to making our arrangements with the various universities in China a real student exchange, and I wanted to thank Joshua for his willingness to be a trail blazer.