University of North TexasDepartment of Computer Science and Engineering Student Newsletter

Greetings from the CSE ChairPicture of Dr. Bryant from last newsletter:http://www.cse.unt.edu/people/StudentNewsletters/2011_Sep_StudentEmailNewsletter.html#BarrettBryant

Dear CSE Students,

Our Department of Computer Science and Engineering celebrated its 40th anniversary this semester by inviting our alumni to tour our labs and a dinner at Apogee Stadium. As you, our current students, graduate from our program, we hope you will continue your ties with our CSE Department, just like these alumni have done in coming back to celebrate 40 years. Alumni support is very important for the success of our department.

I want to share the news of many of our research groups in our CSE Department. We have a new NSF grant to support PhD students in our Center for Information and Computer Security. The Language and Information Technologies group is growing with the addition of Dr. Rodney Nielson. Dr. Krishna Kavi’s Net-Centric Software and Systems Industry/University Cooperative Research Center is also growing and just had their semi-annual meeting. Please read below about all the activities in our department.

You are invited get involved in the activities and events in our CSE Department. You can join the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) or the ACM-W. Membership in the UNT chapters of both organizations is open to all UNT students with an interest in computing. Please find out more below about how you can join these groups. Check this newsletter and our website to find out what is happening. Please [[LIKE, https://www.facebook.com/untcse]] us on Facebook to get all the latest news and information.  Barrett BryantProfessor and Chair

Department of Computer Science and Engineering News

CSE Alumni celebrate 40th anniversary

Picture—the one of Nelson in front of the Department

Caption: (L-R) Kelly Gibson, BS 1989; Nelson Cicchitto, BS 1989, his wife Alisa, and Eric Havens, BS 1993

Alumni, faculty and staff celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at a banquet on October 26, 2012 at the new UNT Apogee Stadium. CSE Chair Dr. Barrett Bryant welcomed guests and then introduced Dr. Warren Burggren, UNT Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. Dr. Burggren spoke about the importance of the CSE Department for the University of North Texas. Following Dr. Burggren’s speech, the Dean of the College of Engineering, Dr. Costas Tsatsoulis, added his remarks and congratulated the CSE Department on its 40th anniversary.

[[Nelson Cicchitto, http://www.cse.unt.edu/people/AlumniNewsletters/2012_Sep_AlumniEmailNewsletter.html#Alumni%20News]], BS 1989, spoke about his experience in the Department of Computer Science and how it helped him to found his own company [[Avatier Corp., http://www.avatier.com/]]. Nelson’s gift to the CSE Department helped make this anniversary celebration possible. He talked about how his experience in the department gave him the ability to succeed in his career. Finally he said that it was important to give back to the department after all he had received through his UNT education.

It was a very special evening enjoyed by all who attended. The media gallery page of the 40th anniversary is [[HERE, http://www.cse.unt.edu/site/node/439]]. Before the celebration, alumni were invited to tour the CSE Department and its research labs. The media gallery page of the alumni tour is located [[HERE, http://www.cse.unt.edu/site/node/440]].

UNT receives NSF award to provide Scholarship for Service PhD with Information Assurance concentration to US citizens

Use Logo of CICS website: http://www.cics.unt.edu/

The National Science Foundation has awarded UNT $1 million over 5 years for Scholarship for Service (SFS) PhD with Information Assurance (IA) concentration. This grant will enable US citizens to pursue a PhD degree in Information Assurance (IA) on a

full-time basis and provide six PhD students with scholarships, including stipends, tuition, health insurance, travel and textbooks.

The University of North Texas Interdisciplinary Information Assurance PhD Program responds to the varied and changing needs of an information age. This program’s graduates will be prepared to contribute to the advancement and evolution of the information society in a variety of roles and settings as scientists, educators, administrators, and information security architects.

Dr. Ram Dantu is the Principal Investigator on this NSF award. For more information on this program and application details, please go to this [[Center for Information and Computer Security website, http://www.cics.unt.edu/caedocs/SFS_PhD_Requirements_10_18.pdf]].

News from the Language and Information Technologies Group

Picture (taking this on Tuesday, November 13)

The [[Language and Information Technologies, http://lit.csci.unt.edu/index.php/Main_Page]] group welcomed [[Dr. Rodney Nielson, http://www.cse.unt.edu/~nielsen/]] when he joined the CSE faculty this summer. The LIT group has had a busy summer and fall semesters.

The highlights of these past two semesters are two new PhDs in the group: in summer, Michael Mohler successfully defended his dissertation on "Sentence Similarity Analysis with Applications in Automatic Short Answer Grading," followed this fall by Ben Leong, who presented his dissertation on "Modeling Synergistic Relationships between words and images". Michael is now working as a research scientist at the Language Computer Corporation in Richardson, and Ben has just started his new position as a research engineer at the Educational Testing Services in Princeton.

We also had several other achievements: Rajitha Schellenberg has presented her thesis titled "Automated Classification of

Emotions in Song Lyrics"

Bharath Dandala, Rada Mihalcea, and Razvan Bunescu published a book chapter on "Word Sense Disambiguation using Wikipedia", to appear in ``The People's Web Meets NLP: Collaboratively Constructed Language Resources'', Springer book series ``Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing''.

Diana McCarthy, Ravi Sinha, and Rada Mihalcea's paper on "The Cross-Lingual Lexical Substitution Task" was accepted for publication in the Language Resources and Evaluations journal.

Ravi Sinha and Rada Mihalcea's paper on "Explorations in Lexical sample and All-words Lexical Substitution" was accepted for publication in the Journal of Natural Language Engineering.

Veronica Perez-Rosas, Rada Mihalcea, and Louis-Philippe Morency's article on "Multimodal Sentiment Analysis of Spanish Online Videos" was accepted for publication in IEEE Intelligent Systems.

Rada Mihalcea has delivered two keynote talks, at the ACL 2012 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis, held on July 12, 2012 in Jeju Island, Korea, and at the ACL 2012 TextGraphs-7 Workshop on Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing, held on July 13, 2012, also in Jeju Island.

Daniel Albright, Arrick Lanfranchi, Anwen Fredriksen, William F. Styler, Colin Warner, Jena D. Hwang, Dmitriy Dligach, Rodney D. Nielsen, James Martin, Wayne Ward, Martha Palmer, and Guergana K. Savova's article on "Annotating a clinical narrative corpus with syntactic and semantic annotations" has been accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). BMJ.

The LIT Group members also had 13 conference papers published and presented during the summer and fall of 2012. The list of papers can be accessed [[here, then link to a list of the 12 papers below]].

Mihai Burzo, Daniel McDuff, Rada Mihalcea, Louis-Philippe Morency, Alexis Narvaez and Veronica Perez-Rosas, "Towards Sensing the Influence of Visual Narratives on Human Affect". in Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Santa Monica, October 2012.

Rada Mihalcea and Mihai Burzo, "Towards Multimodal Deception Detection -- Step 1: Building a Collection of Deceptive Videos", in Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, Santa Monica, October 2012.

Cem Akkaya, Janyce Wiebe, and Rada Mihalcea, "Utilizing Semantic Composition in Distributional Semantic Models for Word Sense Discrimination and Word Sense Disambiguation", in Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Semantic Computing, Palermo, Italy, September 2012.

Rada Mihalcea and Carlo Strapparava, "Lyrics, Music, and Emotions", in Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2012), Jeju Island, July 2012.

Samer Hassan, Carmen Banea, and Rada Mihalcea, "Measuring Semantic Relatedness using Multilingual Representations", in Proceedings of the First Joint

Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2012), Montreal, Canada, June 2012.

Bharath Dandala, Rada Mihalcea and Razvan Bunescu, "Towards Building a Multilingual Semantic Network: Identifying Interlingual Links in Wikipedia", in Proceedings of the First Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2012), Montreal, Canada, June 2012.

Rada Mihalcea and Vivi Nastase, "Word Epoch Disambiguation: Finding How Words Change Over Time", in Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2012), Jeju Island, July 2012.

Carlo Strapparava, Rada Mihalcea and Alberto Battocchi, "A Parallel Corpus of Music and Lyrics Annotated with Emotions", in Proceedings of the Conference on Language Resources and Evaluations (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 2012.

Veronica Perez-Rosas, Carmen Banea and Rada Mihalcea, "Learning Sentiment Lexicons in Spanish", in Proceedings of the Conference on Language Resources and Evaluations (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 2012.

Erwin Fernandez-Ordonez, Rada Mihalcea, and Samer Hassan, "Unsupervised Word

Sense Disambiguation with Multilingual Representations", in Proceedings of the Conference on Language Resources and Evaluations (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey, May 2012.

Carmen Banea, Samer Hassan, Michael Mohler, Rada Mihalcea, "UNT: A Supervsied Synergistic Approach to Semantic Text Similarity", in Proceedings of the SemEval-2012 Workshop on Semantic Evaluation Exercises, Montreal, Canada, June 2012.

Lucia Specia, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Rada Mihalcea, "SemEval 2012 Task 1: English Lexical Simplification", in Proceedings of the SemEval-2012 Workshop on Semantic Evaluation Exercises, Montreal, Canada, June 2012.

Myroslava Dzikovska, Rodney D. Nielsen, and Chris Brew, "Towards effective

tutorial feedback for explanation questions: A dataset and baselines", in Proceedings of the 2012 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, (NAACL HLT 2012), Montreal, Quebec, Canada, June 3-8, 2012.

Net-Centric Software & Systems Center News

Group picture: http://www.cse.unt.edu/gallery/events/2012_NetCentricMeeting_GreatWolfLodge/2012_NetCentricMeeting_GreatWolfLodge39.jpg

Caption: (L-R) Dongyu Ang, Ruwan Nawarathna, Mohan Velagaleti, Mohamed Abouelenien, Dr. Bryant, Sarath Chandra, Charles Shelor, Danielle Gaither, Jared Sherman, Tommy Janjusic, Dr. Akl, Brandon Potter, Jim Buchanan, Dr. Kavi, Paul Lin, Robert Tidwell, Patrick KamongiMore pictures are in our [[media gallery, http://www.cse.unt.edu/site/node/438]].

The National Science Foundation Net-Centric Software and Systems Industry/University Cooperative Research Center [[(Net-Centric IUCRC, http://netcentric.cse.unt.edu/]] met on October 16-17, 2012 in Grapevine, Texas. The meeting was a great success. The Net-Centric IUCRC organizes two meetings per year. At these semi-annual meetings, faculty and students make presentations on their current research projects that are funded by the industrial members of the center. New project proposals are reviewed for funding by the Industrial Advisory Board of the center.

At present the IUCRC includes 19 industrial members and 4 universities (with UNT as the lead university). Missouri University of Science and Technology (formerly known as the University of Missouri at Rolla) has also recently joined this Spring.

In addition to normal presentations, the October meeting organized an open house with nearly 40 poster presentations by faculty and students from Arizona State University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Southern Methodist University, UNT and UTD. Following the presentations was a reception for all in attendance; where students, faculty, and industrial members could mingle, collaborate, and discuss work in progress. As the host, UNT had the most persons in attendance with 22.

The next semi-annual meeting of the Net-Centric IUCRC will be held April, 2013 in Rome, New York at the Rome Air Force base. If you are interested in the center's research and how you can join the center, contact [[Dr. Krishna Kavi, http://www.csrl.unt.edu/~kavi/]], the director of the center.

Network Security Lab to develop CloudCar with MITUse Logo of NSL at http://nsl.cse.unt.edu/index.php?section=1

CSE’s [[Network Security Lab, http://nsl.cse.unt.edu/index.php]] is the lead Principal Investigator on a new NSF $500,000 grant which will develop a CloudCar, a cloud-based infrastructure to monitor and collect date about drivers, vehicles and road conditions. The type of data to be collected included driver’s biometrics (eyeball tracking, heart rate, blood pressure, and EEG brain wave analysis), sensory data from the vehicle, traffic data, and sensed data about road condition.

The collected data is analyzed in the cloud and used to enable a wide spectrum of applications, including assessing drivers' behavior and ability to drive, the "health" of the

vehicle, dissemination of information about road conditions to prevent accidents and road congestion, and vehicular crash detection and notification.

This is a collaborative project between the University of North Texas and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT will be a subcontract and will help design the Cloud Car hardware components for measuring parameters from the vehicle. As head of the NSL, Dr. Ram Dantu will lead this new NSF project grant.

News from Trusted Secure Systems Lab

Picture of Gomathisankaran lab

Caption: (L-R) Satyajeet Nimgaonkar, Patrick Kamongi, Dr. Gomathisankaran, Srujan Kotikela, and Yernat Yestekov

Dr. Mahadevan Gomathisankaran's [[Trusted Secure Systems Lab, http://tssl.cse.unt.edu/]] is having a very productive and rewarding year. We have published 7 conference papers, two posters, and submitted 6 journal articles in the last year.

Patrick Kamongi, the First Rwandan Presidential Scholar to graduate from University of Arkansas, has joined our Lab as a PhD student. Patrick is working on a joint project, with Prof. Krishna Kavi of Computer Systems Research Lab (CSRL), in designing a vulnerability analysis framework for Cloud Computing systems.

Srujan Kotikela has decided to pursue his Doctoral studies at UNT continuing from his Masters. Satyajeet Nimgaonkar has successfully finished his Ph.D Qualifiers in March 2012. Yernat Yestekov, a Fullbright Scholar, is working on `Design and Analysis of A Novel Secure E-Voting Scheme` for his Masters’ thesis.

In July 2012 Dr. Gomathisankaran received NSF funding to do research in secure sensor fusion research. Dr. Gomathisankaran is expanding UNT’s security curriculum by offering new courses such as `Applications of Cryptography`. He is mentoring two groups of under-graduate students for their senior design projects. He is also mentoring a team of undergraduate and graduate students to participate in the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition 2013.  

Dr. Ram Dantu’s research featured on NSF website

Picture at http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_images.jsp?cntn_id=125913&org=NSF

The National Science Foundation has featured CSE Professor Dr. Ram Dantu’s “Mobile Life Guard” on the front page of its website. Dr. Dantu and his team created this app that keeps drivers focused and safe on the roads. A year ago, Dr. Dantu was among the first group of scientists to receive a $50,000 [[National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps), http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/]] award which help scientists and engineers extend their focus beyond the laboratory into the commercial award. The safe driving app is a result of this work.

The app is not commercially available yet but it is currently undergoing a field trial with the insurance industry. If it is successful, safe drivers could receive safe driver discounts. Dr. Dantu says, “Insurance companies see it as an investment in lowering their costs long term.”

For more information, see this [[NSF article, http://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=125913&WT.mc_id=USNSF_51&WT.mc_ev=click]].

Prof. Mohanty Publishes a Book on Memory Design

Picture of book cover

Prof. Mohanty recently published a book titled “Robust SRAM Designs and Analysis”. This book provides a guide to Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) bitcell design and analysis to meet the nano-regime challenges for CMOS devices. In addition, emerging devices, such as Tunnel FETs are discussed in detail for their applicability for memory design.

Discussions are included to cover nano-regime challenges such as process variation, leakage and NBTI for SRAM design and analysis. Emphasis is placed throughout the book on the various trade-offs for achieving a best SRAM design. The book discusses in detail the most important SRAM bitcell topologies to mitigate nanoscale process variations, as process variations is an ongoing challenge in memory design.

The following are key features of the book: It provides a complete introduction to SRAM bitcell design and analysis. It presents techniques to face nano-regime challenges such as process variation,

leakage, and NBTI for SRAM design and analysis. It discusses simulation set-ups for extracting different design metrics for CMOS

technology and emerging technology devices. It emphasizes different trade-offs for achieving the best possible SRAM design.

CSE attends Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing

Picture at http://sites.donretzlaff.com/images/2012_GraceHopperCelebration/Grace_Hopper_Group3.jpgCaption: (L-R) Garima Bajwa, Dr. Barrett Bryant, Yiwen Wan, Dr. Renee Bryce, and Chaitra Urs. More pictures [[HERE, https://www.cse.unt.edu/site/node/442]].

The 2012 [[Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, http://gracehopper.org/2012/]] was held October 2-5 in Baltimore, MD. UNT CSE had a good presence at the conference—seven members of the UNT CSE department attended – Garima Bajwa, Dr. Barrett Bryant, Dr. Renee Bryce, Iris Gomez-Lopez, Olivia Loza, Chaitra Urs, and Yiwen Wan. The event provided the opportunity for the students and faculty to attend great talks on everything from research to career development.

Olivia Loza presented her work in the PhD forum. Garima Bajwa, Chaitra Urs, and Iris Gomez-Lopez presented posters on their work. Our UNT CSE members that attended were able to share their enthusiasm for UNT CSE with others that they met at the conference and recruited several new potential graduate students that may join the department in Fall 2013!

CSE Distinguished Speaker Seminar

Picture of Prof. C. Lee Giles

Dr. C. Lee Giles was the first Distinguished Speaker in our Department of Computer Science and Engineering’s Seminar Series on October 5, 2012. His presentation was on “Data Mining and Information Extract for CiteSeerX and Friends.” Dr. Giles is the David Reese Professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. He is also graduate college Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, courtesy Professor of Supply Chain and Information Systems, and Director of the Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory. He directs the Next Generation CiteSeer, CiteSeerx project and codirects the ChemxSeer project at Penn State.

Picture of Patrick Xuechun Zhao at http://www.noble.org/staff/zhao-patrick/

Our second Distinguished Speaker was Patrick Xuechun Zhao on November 9, 2012. His presentation was on “Advancing Systems Bioinformatics to Modeling and Deciphering Plant Gene Regulatory Networks.” Dr. Patrick X. Zhao is an Associate Professor, Head of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Lab at the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation. He also holds an Adjunct Professor appointment in the Department of

Computer Science, Oklahoma State University. Dr. Zhao received his PhD degree in Communications and Information Systems from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2000. Dr. Zhao’s current research centers on Machine Learning, Bioinformatics, and Plant and Soil Microbe Functional Genomics.

Seminar with Dr. Thomas D. Parsons

Picture of Dr. Thomas D. Parsons—pick the best one!

Dr. Thomas D. Parsons presented a seminar on “Clinical Neuropsychology and Simulation Lab: Virtual Environments and Serious Games for Psychology and Neuropsychology” on October 19, 2012 in the CSE conference room.

Dr. Parsons exposed researchers to work being done in the Clinical Neuropsychology and Simulation (CNS) lab. His goal is to foster interdisciplinary research at UNT in Psychology, Computer Science, Engineering and related sciences. He discussed the ways in which recent research within the serious gaming and immersive virtual environments draws heavily on psychology and neuroscience.

Thomas D. Parsons, PhD, is a Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychologist, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, and Director of the Clinical Neuropsychology and Simulation (CNS) Laboratory at the UNT. Prior to joining the faculty at UNT, Dr. Parsons was on faculty at the University of Southern California and a Research Scientist at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies.

Android Programming class to give presentationsUse logo: http://realpokerapps.com/images/111734_android_logo-736475.jpg

Dr. Garlick's Android Programming class (CSCE 3410) is getting ready to give their second milestone presentations. Each student is creating his or her own app, and this semester it ranges from games using the Corona engine to apps using crowd sourcing to estimate how busy your favorite restaurant is, to a cross-platform prescription medication reminder using PhoneGap.

Apps in progress also include a pool tournament companion, an audio re-sampling app to speed up your songs for an intense workout, and a sleep study tracking app in conjunction with Dr. Taylor in the Psychology department. Keep an eye on the Android app market soon!

ACM and ACM-W hosts Halloween eventPicture of the poster from our website

ACM and ACM-W decorated the CSE department for Halloween and hosted a trick-or-treat event on October 31. Participants visited selected labs and faculty offices and received candy after asking questions about their work. The event was a great opportunity for students to learn about the work of faculty and labs that they might not otherwise encounter. To see pictures, go to this [[media gallery page, http://www.cse.unt.edu/site/node/441]].

Prizes were awarded as follows:Best Costume: Quentin Mayo, PhD student Best Computer Related Costume: Joseph Helsing, PhD student Best Faculty Costume: Dr. Ram Dantu Best Lab Decoration: Network Security Lab

ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society and is dedicated to advancing computing as a science and a profession. ACM-W is dedicated to increased participation of women both within ACM and in the larger computing community. Membership in the UNT chapters of both organizations is open to all UNT students with an interest in computing.

ACM and ACM-W are planning other activities throughout the school year. Plans are in progress for a scavenger hunt with computing problems later in the year. Other possible events include sponsoring guest speakers and community service projects.

For more information about ACM, contact Micheal Pruitt at mmmmike.p@gmail.com. For more information about ACM-W, contact Danielle Gaither at daniellegaither@my.unt.edu. Both organizations also have pages at orgsync.com.

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Student NewsCSE Students defend PhD DissertationsCongratulations to these PhD students for defending their dissertation in October 2012!

Pictures (set it up just like here: http://www.cse.unt.edu/people/StudentNewsletters/2011_Nov_StudentEmailNewsletter.html#Defend)

Chee Wee (Ben) LeongDissertation: Modeling Synergistic Relationships between Words and ImagesMajor Professor: Dr. Rada MihalceaDefense Date: October 4, 2012

Prakash DuraisamyDissertation: 2D-3D Image Registration using LiDAR and Visual ImagesMajor Professor: Dr. Bill Buckles on the rightCo-Major Professor: Dr. Kamesh Namuduri on the leftDefense Date: October 8, 2012

Li LiDissertation: Source and Channel Coding Strategies for Wireless Sensor NetworksMajor Professor: Dr. Bill BucklesDefense Date: October 17, 2012

Students defend MS Theses Congratulations to these graduate students who defended in October 2012! Picture (set it up just like the PhD article above this)

Rajitha SchellenbergThesis: Automated Classification of Emotions in Song LyricsMajor Professor: Dr. Rada MihalceaDefense Date: October 17, 2012

Sarath Chandra AkumallaThesis: Evaluating appropriateness of EMG & Flex Sensors for classifying hand gesturesMajor Professor: Dr. Robert AklDefense Date: October 26, 2012

IBM awards scholarship to CSE StudentPicture of Bharath Dandala

Our PhD student Bharath Dandala has been recently awarded a scholarship from IBM, in the amount of $10,000 to assist with his studies for 2012-2013. The [[IBM PhD Fellowship Awards Program, https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/university/phdfellowship/]] is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional PhD students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study.

Congratulations to Bharath on receiving this prestigious scholarship!

Danielle Gaither travels to Portugal for conferenceBy Danielle Gaither, CSE PhD student

Picture of Danielle Gaither

Caption: Danielle in the courtyard at Belém Tower.

On the morning of September 9th, I arrived in Lisbon, Portugal for the purpose of attending the 3rd International Summer School on Domain Specific Modeling from September 10th-14th. Domain-specific modeling (DSM) is one approach to model-driven development (MDD). One goal of MDD is to have software models more tightly integrated into the code writing process than is currently the case in most instances. Many researchers believe that DSM is a better way to achieve this goal than using general purpose modeling languages such as UML (Unified Modeling Language).

Lisbon's excellent subway system took me from the airport almost all the way to my hostel door. In fact, nearly all my travel in Lisbon was by subway. I also visited Lisbon's Oceanarium, which contains marine life from all the world's oceans.

The summer school brought speakers from both academia and industry to talk about their work with various aspects of DSM. Topics included domain analysis, metamodeling, model transformations, model checking, model compositions, and methods for evaluating modeling solutions. We also had ample opportunities to work with some of the tools that the speakers discussed.

After the summer school ended, I traveled to Belém, which contains significant historical attractions. Belém Tower was built in the 16th century as part of a defense system for Lisbon and provides great views of the Tagus River, which runs through Lisbon. The nearby Hieronymite Monastery was also built in this time period and is a magnificent piece of architecture. One surprising attraction was the Berardo Museum, which contains art by many well-known modern and contemporary artists.

The summer school provided me with a lot of good information on DSM, as well as the opportunity to experience a wonderful city. I look forward to incorporating what I learned into my research.

Advising Corner

Use same logo at http://www.cse.unt.edu/people/StudentNewsletters/2012_Sep_StudentEmailNewsletter.html#link19

The Fall Semester is well past the midpoint and we are now looking ahead to Spring 2013. Early Registration has already begun and classes are filling up fast! Some are already full! So be sure to register early. Remember we are not doing override day as in the past, so a full class is "full".  Also we are experiencing problems with EIS in regards to pre-requisites for some classes. The correct pre-requisites can be found in the 2012-2013 catalog and on the CSE website. These are the ones that are being enforced by the department, although they may be incorrect in EIS. If you are unable to register for a class due to pre-req issues, but you meet the pre-reqs in the 2012-2013 catalog, then you can either come by the office or send an email to cseadvising@unt.edu with your name, EMPLID number, the course and section, and when you took the pre-req course(s) and we will administratively add you to the course if seats are available.

Also be sure to check the [[CSE website, www.cse.unt.edu]] under the advising section for degree plan packets for your catalog year, and a new comprehensive [[FAQ, www.cse.unt.ed/site/node/418]] that will answer many of your common advising questions. The degree plan packets include a flow chart that will help you select your next classes based on the pre-req structure. So, for example, the CSCE 1040 class can be taken right after CSCE 1030, etc. These packets will also show you all the required courses for your major etc. Remember that the Ethics requirement now has a separate course for Computer Engineers (CSCE 4011) and the Computer Science and IT majors (CSCE 4010)

Finally, many of you need to request degree audits. In general you should do this once you have completed the College of Engineering Core courses, or if you have significant transfer credits in courses other than University Core areas. The degree audit is completed in the CSE department by an advisor. You can come in during any of the open advising hours, but be sure to bring unofficial copies of all UNT transcripts as well as those from any transfer institutions. We must have these copies in order to process your audit.

We hope you are having a great Fall semester and wish you Happy Holidays from your CSE Advisors!

Complete Exit Surveys to improve UG courses

Use ticket at http://www.cse.unt.edu/people/StudentNewsletters/2012_Apr_StudentEmailNewsletter.html#link24

At the end of every Fall and Spring semester, all undergraduate students are asked to complete two surveys. The SETE (Student Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness) is a

UNT survey about your course instructor. The online exit survey is about your course and measures how well the [[ABET, http://abet.org/]] course outcomes were met.

ABET requires us to have a program of continuing assessment and improvement. Our undergraduate courses have outcomes, which are measurable skills or knowledge that students should achieve by the end of the course. The outcomes of all the courses in the curriculum are designed to ensure that you will have mastered the objectives of the degree by the time you graduate.

The course exit survey lets us know how you think you are achieving these outcomes and lets you tell us how you think the course could be improved. Your surveys are reviewed by the CSE Undergraduate Committee and needed changes are made in our courses. Thank you for completing these exit surveys and helping to improve our CSE undergraduate programs. 

College of Engineering News

UNT Homecoming celebrated by College

Picture of Wes Fox

Caption: Wes Fox, BS 1992, chats with CSE Chair Dr. Barrett Bryant and CENG Dean Costas Tsatsoulis in the College of Engineering Homecoming tent.

More than fifty guests visited the College of Engineering tent at Victory Plaza, the new tailgating arena adjacent to Apogee Stadium, prior to the UNT Homecoming football game on Saturday, November 3, 2012.

At the tailgating tent, CSE Chair, Barrett Bryant, met Computer Science and Engineering alums from the classes of 1980 through 2012. Students Amelia Chase and Vernon Watson presented their current efforts of Association of Computing Machinery and ACM-Women with guidance from new CSE faculty member, Dr. Renee Bryce. Football fare buffet was available for alumni, friends and family members.

Following the tailgating event, alumni and friends attended the second Homecoming football game in the new stadium. Our Mean Green football team lost to Arkansas State by a score of 37-19.

Engineering Technology Department is 20 years old

Picture of Enrique Barbiere from http://inhouse.unt.edu/engineering-technology-celebrates-20-years-founding-department

The [[Department of Engineering Technology, http://etec.unt.edu/]] celebrated its 20th anniversary with a reception and alumni recognition at Discovery Park on September 20, 2012. ETEC Chair Enrique Barbiere, pictured on the right, welcomed alumni and guests and shared the vision for the future of ETEC. Alumni and guests were given the opportunity to see the latest technology being taught to today’s students by visiting the ETEC labs and talking to faculty and students.

Read more about the ETEC celebration in this UNT [[INhouse article, http://inhouse.unt.edu/engineering-technology-celebrates-20-years-founding-department]].