Chair's Message

The 2009-2010 academic year has arrived. As always, the summer was too short. But the start of the new school year is always an exciting time.

It was a great summer on the research front. CSE PhD candidate Aaron Dingler, undergraduate Michael Garrison, and faculty members X. Sharon Hu and Michael Niemier co-authored the paper "System-Level Energy and Performance Projections for Nanomagnet-based Logic" that received the Best Paper Award at the IEEE Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures held July 30-31, 2009 in San Francisco. Juniors Sean McRoskey and Jim Notwell receive the Best Student Paper Award for their paper "Mining in a Mobile Environment" published in the Third International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data held in conjunction with KDD 2009. The paper is co-authored with Professors Nitesh Chawla and Christian Poellabauer. Also, Professors Thain, Hu, Niemier, Chalwa, Blake, Bowyer, Flynn, Chen and Madey all received new research grants in the last few months.

This fall we welcome one of our largest-ever entering classes of new PhD students. Our PhD program continues to grow in size, quality and scope. The department was recently awarded one of the Department of Education's Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) grants, which will allow us to support a larger number of PhD students who intend to go on to a teaching and research career.

This fall we also welcome our largest number of undergraduates entering the department in several years. Our undergrads have an especially rich variety of electives available this year. One new course, Ubiquitous Computing, is being taught by Dr. Christian Poellabauer. Another new course, Computer Vision and Biometrics, is being taught by Dr. Patrick Flynn. A third new course, System Interface Design, is being. taught by Dr. Aaron Striegel. Students in the System Interface Design course will be programming one two new Microsoft Surface devices, in a lab that was newly renovated over the summer. And a fourth new course, Programming Challenges and Problem Solving, is being taught by PhD candidate (and ND CSE grad) Peter Bui.

If you are a high school student and potentially interested in a major in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, please take a look at some of our course web pages. Our undergraduate degree programs are second to none in terms of quality of classroom teaching, availability of undergraduate research opportunities, and the latest in modern computer labs. And if you are interested in earning a PhD in CSE, we hope that you will apply to our PhD program. There are too many exciting research projects in the department to attempt to list them all here, so I encourage you to browse individual faculty web pages.

Kevin W. Bowyer
Schubmehl-Prein Professor and Department Chair
September 29, 2009