News
Excellent teaching, advising
Seven members of the University of Delaware faculty have been recognized for outstanding work in teaching and advising, and three graduate teaching assistants have received awards for excellence in teaching.
Paths to science careers
Hands-on research puts student scholars on paths to STEM careers.
Research instructional grants
Five academic programs on the University of Delaware campus have won instructional grants to promote a broad expansion of undergraduate research and scholarship via a course-based approach. James Atlas, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, is one of the recipients with the project “Big Ideas in Computer Science”.
Helping Haiti
Eric McGinnis doesn’t like to play games; rather, he likes to create them. During the fall of his junior year at the University of Delaware, McGinnis took a course called CISC 374, Educational Games Development. Earlier this month while on a service trip to Haiti, McGinnis developed an English to Creole tutor application to help Haitian women send emails and communicate in English, in collaboration with UD Prof. Lori Pollock and Richard Burns, a graduate research assistant.
May 3: CIS lecture series
Can diseases in human populations be detected and prevented? How many currents can one electrical power grid handle? Who detects the community structure of large social networks? These are just a few of the emerging real-world graph problems that engineers currently examine. David A. Bader, from Georgia Institute of Technology, is a leading expert on massive-scale social networks, combinatorial optimization and parallel algorithms.
He will discuss the real-world applications and scalability challenges in high performance computing on Thursday, May 3, at 3:30 p.m., in Room 004 of Kirkbride Lecture Hall. His talk is titled “Opportunities and Challenges in Massive Data-Intensive Computing.”
Making learning fun, accessible
University of Delaware senior Bryan Mey understands that in order for kids to play a game, it has to be fun. He also knows that children are social by nature and enjoy playing games together. Mey’s group was one five student teams to showcase their gaming creations Dec. 13, during the fall 2011 Educational Games Demonstration and Reception on campus. They are the fifth cohort of UD undergraduate students to complete the course since 2009. Developed by Lori Pollock, professor of computer and information sciences (CIS), and Terry Harvey, CIS assistant professor, the course enables UD computer science students to develop valuable technical and communication skills, while serving their community through interaction with CCCS. The course is supported through a National Science Foundation (NSF) Broadening Participation in Computing grant.
Bioinformatics
Major advances in the fields of molecular biology and genomic technology have generated a wealth of new biological information from the scientific community. Ease of access to this information and a process for extracting only the information required to answer specific biological questions are critical to future scientific advances.
University of Delaware Prof. Cathy Wu is principal investigator of two new research grants aimed at improving computerized databases to store, organize and index bioinformatics data and to create specialized tools to view and analyze the data.
UDRF grants
How much power does your computer consume as you use that word processing software? Assistant professors Kristina Winbladh and James Clause are co-principal investigators on a project with Fouad Kiamilev, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Lori Pollock, professor of computer and information sciences, to develop a technique for measuring power consumption across the entire hardware platform and to map the consumption profile of a running software application. This information will help guide software designers in the development of more energy-efficient solutions.
The University of Delaware Research Foundation (UDRF), a nonprofit organization supporting fundamental research in all fields of science at UD, has awarded six strategic initiative grants for collaborative research in the life and health sciences, energy and the environment — areas emphasized in the University’s Path to Prominence.
Each project is led by at least one early-career faculty member working with one tenured faculty member, who serves as a mentor. Each grant totals $45,000-$55,000, which includes $5,000 in matching funds from both the provost’s office and the lead faculty member’s dean.
Computing connections
Students from the Departments of Computer and Information Sciences (CIS) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) gained valuable networking and presentation experience by representing the University of Delaware at two national conferences. Students attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and the Supercomputing Conference 2011.
Influencing national security
Flying in a military jet, rubbing elbows with retired generals and getting an insider’s view of the Department of Defense (DOD) were never part of John Cavazos’ job description as a university professor, until recently. John Cavazos, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware, was one of 12 junior faculty selected nationwide to participate in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Computer Science Study Group. The program was created by the DOD to support university research that could lead to advances in defense and communications technology.
Early quake alerts
Michela Taufer, assistant professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, is collaborating with researchers from Stanford University and the U.S. Geological Survey to implement a new network of seismic sensors aimed at arming communities with early earthquake detection and warning capabilities.
Computer science students excel in programming competition
Two teams from the University of Delaware’s Department of Computer and Information Sciences competed in the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) MidAtlantic USA regional programming contest Nov. 6.