Computer Science Faculty Meeting (11/09/2005)

Minutes

Faculty in attendance: Baker, Baldauf, Burmester, Duan, Ford, Gaitros, Gopalan, Hawkes, Kumar, Leach, Myers, Schwartz, Srinivasan, Stoecklin, Tyson, van Engelen, Whalley, Wang, Yasinsac, and Yuan.

The Chair, Dr. David Whalley, called the meeting to order at 11:15 AM and made several announcements and comments:

1) At the last Science Area Chairs meeting, Ross Ellington made a presentation on the Pathways to Excellence. We can expect to hear more on that topic.

2) There will be a “faculty report card” spreadsheet available on the FSU website.

3) Drs. Whalley and Hawkes have been hard at work on the GAANN proposal and still need the 2-page vitae on several of the tenure-track faculty.

4) There have been problems with attendance at the Faculty Colloquia series.

Next there was a presentation by one of our current graduate students, Eduardo Freitas, who was speaking on behalf of the local student chapter of the ACM. The student chapter is interested in being “in the loop” when possible changes to the department and curriculum are being considered. They would like to have a non-voting representative that would attend faculty meetings (including certain committee meetings). The faculty appeared to be in favor of such representation. Eduardo indicated that the ACM was having its first meeting the following day (11/10/05). There are plans for having practice sessions that would allow students to prepare for the programming contest and the ACM is encouraging a revival of the summer “Speed Programming” course that was offered a few years ago.

Dr. Whalley then presented a plan for implementing the Harris Endowed Professorship. The details of the Professorship are contained in a separate document, but will be for a 3 year term ($5,000 supplement per year). The FEC submits an ordered list of applicants to the chair, who will make the final decision. The Harris Professorship implementation procedures were approved unanimously with the change that the final selection by the chair is confirmed by the dean.

Dr. Whalley also reported on recent meetings concerning a possible Computational Biology degree at the undergraduate level. The Dean of Arts & Sciences is quite interested in such a degree program.

Dr. Stoecklin reported that the Computer Science program at the University of Central Florida had recently been allowed to remove the foreign language from its graduation requirements.

There was some discussion led by Ken Baldauf concerning the addition of Computer Literacy II to our list of courses that may be applied towards a Computer Science minor (for non-science majors only). The addition was approved unanimously.

There was some discussion about the removal of COP 3331 as a prerequisite for the course COT 4420. The proposal was approved unanimously.

Sara Stoecklin presented a proposal of offering three Certificate programs (PC campus only) that would involve existing courses. The proposal passed unanimously.

Dr. van Engelen reported that the Portfolio defenses were scheduled for the next day (11/10/05).

Dr. Baker reported on the activities of the Equipment committee.

The meeting finished with a discussion of the concerns involved with having heavy programming requirements in some our graduate courses.

The meeting was adjourned at 12:14 PM.

Submitted by Stephen P. Leach, Associate Chair.