http://www.cs.fsu.edu/ Computer Science News http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=7An interdisciplinary FSU team, coordinated by SCS professor Fredrik Ronquist, has received a $2.25 million NSF grant to develop MorphBank. The team of PIs include faculty at the Departments of Biological Science (A. Mast, G. Erickson), Computer Science (D. Gaitros, R. van Engelen), Mathematics (G. Erlebacher), and at the School of Information (G. Riccardi, C. Jorgensen, P. Jorgenson). MorphBank is a web image database of biological images, used for comparative studies of animals
and plants. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=8The department congratulates Alec Yasinsac for his promotion to associate professor and being tenured. The department also congratulates Michael Burmester and Gary Tyson for being tenured. The new position and status for all three faculty are effective Fall 2005.
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=11The CS department received a Graduate Assistance for Areas of National Need (GAANN) award from the Department of Education. This $633,360 award will provide PhD fellowships for five students for three years starting in the Fall 2006 semester. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=10The Department of Defense has re-certified FSU's Information Security program for
compliance with with NIETP (National IA Education & Training Program) training standards,
and re-affirmed FSU's designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information
Assurance Education for academic years 2006-2009.

For more information about this award and FSU's Information Security programs, please visit:
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/academia/acade00001.cfm
http://www.sait.fsu.edu/home.shtml http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=13Michael Burmester is honored as the first professor to recieve the Harris Endowed Professorship from Harris Corporation. This professorship honors faculty for outstanding achievement in research, teaching, and service. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=14Carl and Ermine Owenby have established the Owenby Scholarship in Computer Science. This scholarship is designated to help undergraduates complete the Computer Science degree. Carl Owenby is an FSU CS Alumnus, graduating in the Fall 2005 semester. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=15This award program is designed to recognize FSU faculty who are several years advanced into their careers. This competition is intended to help identify FSU's future academic leaders.

For more information, please visit the Developing Scholar Award Web Page. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=18Dr. Steve Leach has been in the department since it was established in 1984. Throughout the years, he has taught almost all of the undergraduate courses in CS curriculum and also served as the associate chair for many years. He received several teaching and advising awards, including the University Distinguished Teaching Professor Award in 1995.

Steve Leach will be serving as the Assistant Dean at the FSU Panama City campus and his service to our department will be greatly missed. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=25Piyush Kumar has received the prestigious NSF CAREER award.
The National Science Foundation offers these awards in
support of the early career-development activities of those
teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research
and education within the context of the mission of their
organization. The title of his grant is "Core-Sets for
Geometric Optimization and Their Applications." The award
is for $400,000 over a five year period. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=22The 2006 Computer Science Homecoming "Grads Made Good" speech will
be given by Tom Leonard, an bachelor's and master's alumnus who
went on to found a series of successful businesses. Tom will will
talk about lessons he has learned, both as a student at FSU and as
an entrepreneur in information technology. Tom's first product
was the TML Pascal compiler
(http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.04/04.06/Jun88Letters/index.html).
His current business is RedRocket solutions.
(http://www.redrocketsolutions.com/).

2:00-3:30 P.M., Friday, November 17th
Room 499 Dirac Science Library http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=28The department congratulates Ashok Srinivasan for his promotion to associate professor and being tenured. Both his promotion and tenure will become effective starting in the Fall 2007 semester.
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=27Title: Flow-Sensitive Program Analysis for Speculative Parallelization

Abstract:

The rise of chip multiprocessors (CMP) featuring tens to hundreds of processing units on a single chip promises to significantly boost the performance of desktop systems, rivaling the performance of yesterday's supercomputers. Supercomputing applications typically exploit a high degree of parallelism present in the application's computational tasks, which allows multiple processing units to work on solving the problem simultaneously to obtain a solution fast.
However, common software applications are not written for specialized supercomputer architectures and lack sufficient explicit exposure of parallelism to gain speedups from CMPs automatically. Therefore, a successful exploitation of CMPs requires a rethinking of design, coding, and debugging by application developers. Programming languages and program annotations that natively support parallel
concepts will be increasingly more successful, as well as programming languages in which sequential code can be more easily converted into parallel code.

This research investigates the combination and enhancements of several successful approaches to expose more parallelism in program code automatically. Firstly, the investigators will merge flow-sensitive loop-variant variable detection and optimization with the chains of recurrences (CR) algebra together with the NLVI (nonlinear variable interval) test that is based on interval theory. This aims to reduce the number of false positives prohibiting parallelization
of loops with array dependences. Secondly, techniques for speculative parallelization of loops will be enhanced with a new run-time
dependence analysis algorithm based on the CR algebra, NLVI test, and the theory of axiomatic semantics. Thirdly, a set of program annotations will be introduced to support speculative
parallelization. This benefits source-to-source compilers and programmers who can leverage these annotations to extract more parallelism from loops by exercising application-specific knowledge. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=32A new interdisciplinary undergraduate degree program in Computer Criminology will be offered by FSU starting in Fall 2007. This new degree program was developed jointly by the Department of Computer Science and the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

Computer crime can be broadly defined as any criminal activity that involves the use of information technology. These crimes include illegally accessing information, intercepting data, damaging or deleting data, interfering with the functioning of a computer system, identity theft, etc. Information-related crime and computer/network security issues are already major concerns.

These issues affect all levels of business, government, and academia and have grown in importance as most organizations link their networked computer environments to the Internet. A Computer Criminology student will learn both how to use computers to facilitate the study of crime and will study how crimes are accomplished through the use of computers.

We anticipate there will be a significant demand for graduates of the Computer Criminology program. It is well known that there is a shortage of information technology experts. Similarly, there is a pressing need for information technology specialists to handle issues related to information crime, cyberforensics, and computer/network security. However, there is also a need for computer skills for the prevention, detection, and study of all types of crime, whether or not they involve the use of information technology. Graduates of the program will be prepared to work either for law enforcement agencies as information crime specialists, within companies or organizations as network security specialists, or within academia and government to study the causes of crime and the best methods for its prevention. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=34Computer Science 2007 Newsletter can be found at this link.
2007 CS Newsletter http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=42Betty Stanton is a recipient of the FSU Undergraduate Advising Award for 2007-2008. This award is established to honor faculty or staff for excellence in undergraduate advising. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=37The CS department has hired two new assistant professors that started in the Fall 2007 semester. Feifei Li received his PhD in Computer Science from Boston University in the Summer of 2007. His research interests include security and privacy in both streaming and relational database systems, management and indexing of large databases, spatio-temporal database applications, and stream and sensor databases. Zhenghao Zhang received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His research interests include network security systems, scheduling algorithm design, performance analysis, wireless access networks, cross-layer design, optical networks, and wireless sensor networks. http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=40Dr. Xiuwen Liu is a recipient of the FSU Developing Scholar Award for 2007-2008. The Developing Scholar Award is based on evidence of a clearly established program of teaching, research and creativity lasting over a number of years.
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=41Mainline Information Systems has established the Mainline Information Systems Professorship to honor a Computer Science faculty member who exemplifies excellence in the performance of teaching, research, and service. This is the first award for this professorship and Dr. Baker will be the Mainline Information Systems Professor for the next three academic years.
http://www.cs.fsu.edu/site/calendar.php?id=36Dr. Liu recieves 4-year NSF grant with total of $655981 and first increment of 157,697.

ABSTRACT

Project: Novel Computational Methods for the Analysis, Synthesis and
Simulation of Shapes of Surfaces

Proposal Number: DMS-0713012

PI: Washington Mio
Co-PI: Xiuwen Liu

The main goal of this project is to develop novel computational models and strategies to analyze the shapes of spherical surfaces in Euclidean 3-space.
In recent years, there has been a substantial progress in the computational study of shapes of curves with methodology based on the geometry of infinite-dimensional spaces of curves. However, attempts to extend these approaches to surfaces have encountered tall obstacles. In this project, an effective computational solution is proposed that encompasses all fundamental aspects of the problem. Shape spaces will be constructed equipped with geodesic metrics, which will provide a natural environment for the quantitative study of shapes of surfaces. A full set of computational tools will be designed and implemented to quantify shape similarity and divergence, to develop statistical models from samples, to synthesize shapes from learned models, and to analyze and simulate shape dynamics. Techniques will be developed to convert a noisy point-cloud representation of a surface of genus zero to a minimum-distortion parametrization over the standard sphere. Alignment algorithms will be designed to best match the geometric features of surfaces and to extract optimal parametrizations for modeling a family of shapes. Riemannian metrics inherited from weighted Sobolev spaces will capture geometric similarities and discrepancies between shapes to any desired order. The project will focus on first-order metrics, as they offer a good balance between geometric accuracy and robustness for computations.
Due to the typical complexity of the geometry of surfaces, many algorithms will employ a coarse-to-fine approach both for the processing of point clouds and triangular meshes. Localization of spherical shapes in the frequency or spatio-temporal domains will also be employed for
statistical modeling and to achieve computational efficiency.
The proposed research on shapes and forms of 3D objects is motivated by a series of problems arising in areas such as computer vision, medical imaging, and computational biology. Shape is a key attribute associated with patterns arising in geometric data and its effective computational representation and analysis will have an impact on application domains such as the recognition of objects or targets from various modalities of images, modeling brain anatomy and functions, the simulation of biological growth and motion, and anatomical changes associated with diseases and aging.
As such, the proponents will make the tools of shape modeling and analysis developed under this project available to the broader research community and will also actively pursue collaborations with researchers in these areas.