Rick Lejk was selected as a finalist for the highest teaching honor bestowed by UNCC, the Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence. This award, first presented in 1968, recognizes outstanding faculty members at UNC Charlotte and provides an example of the university’s commitment to excellence in teaching.

Tiffany Barnes won a prestigious NSF Career Award for her research on “Educational Data Mining for Student Support in Interactive Learning Environments”. The NSF-wide Career award is the Foundation’s most prestigious award in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education, and the integration of their education and research programs within the mission of their organization. This award strengthens the mission of the CS Department and is another indication of the leadership capabilities of our young faculty.

The following awards show the quality of our Ph.D. students on national and university-wide stages. The DHS awards also show our growing leadership in analytics research and methods for homeland security applications.

Lane Harrison and Roman Pyzh of the Computer Science Department have been awarded DHS Fellowships that will give them 2½ years of support with a stipend of $2300 per month and $1500 per year of travel support for 3 years. Fellowship holders will have summer internships at Pacific Northwest National Lab or another laboratory conducting relevant research. The purpose of the fellowships is to build a cadre of future research and development leaders in science areas relevant to homeland security. The fellowship program is administered by James Foley of Georgia Tech and William Tolone of UNC Charlotte.

Evan Suma has won the Giles Dissertation-Year Fellowship, awarded by the UNCC Graduate School to students in the final stages of their doctoral work who demonstrate especially strong potential to make significant contributions to society in their chosen disciplines. The fellowship has a stipend of $20,000 for the academic year with full tuition support and a $1,000 travel allowance. Evan will use the fellowship to complete his dissertation research on methods of navigation in virtual environments. His thesis advisor is Dr. Larry Hodges, who now directs the School of Computing at Clemson University.

Congratulations to Professor Zbigniew Ras on being selected as a finalist for the Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence!

To download the application, click here. Return the completed application to Dora Bradley.

This academic year, the Computer Science Department has launched a new undergraduate curriculum that provides guided paths through the broad field of computer science leading students to a solid grounding in computing skills, broader understanding, and rich professional capabilities. This new curriculum makes the department an academic leader among CS departments and will give our graduates a competitive edge in the workplace. More>>

UNC Charlotte is ranked in the top ten of up-and-coming national universities. More Information

CCI research seminar each Friday at 3 pm in 106 Woodward. More Information

Computer Go is the AI version of the ancient Chinese game. It is considered a much more difficult game programming challenge than computer chess. Ken Chen of Computer Science is a leading expert Computer Go. At the World 9x9 Computer Go Championship held in Taiwan in September, 2008, the program GoIntellect developed by Professor Chen and his student, Dawei Du, won the Silver Medal and a $1,000 cash prize.

The Computer Science Department is looking for talented graduate students! Sign up for GRAD 2009. Invited students will have lodging and all meals provided for the two-day event.

CS Students are encouraged to enter the 8-Hour Start-up Competition. More>>

Computer Science Undergraduate and Graduate enrollment continues to surge!

Rick Lejk is a finalist for the Bank of America Award for Teaching Excellence.

Graduate Seminar, Friday 11/06.
Caroline Ziemkiewicz The Dynamics of Information Visualization

Tiffany Barnes wins prestigious NSF Career Award!

CS Ph.D. Students Win Prestigious DHS and Giles Fellowships

Bill Ribarsky named to the Steering Committee of new DHS Center of Excellence

Professor Zbigniew Ras of CS wins the 2009 Harshimi de Silva Graduate Mentor Award!

Computer Science is the top department in the university in research funding with nearly 60% more external support than the #2 department!

Archived News

The Subtle Side of Search

Elizabeth D. Liddy, Ph.D
Dean & Trustee Professor
School of Information Studies
Syracuse University
Abstract and Bio




More Information

Dr. Jan Rauch, Chair of the EuroMISE Department at the University of Economics in Prague, Czech Republic, is visiting the CS Department from July 25th until August 20. He is a guest of Zbyszek Ras.

Computer jobs in the U.S. hit an all-time high last quarter, and unemployment hovers near the all-time low in computer-related industries. Overall IT employment tops 4 million in the US, an all time record. The IT unemployment rate is about half of the U.S. unemployment rate. For further information, check here.

Computer-related jobs have a built-in hedge against economic downturn because they are so pervasive and important. To quote from the article, “Why would IT employment remain robust as unemployment rises in most other job categories? IT performs a critical role in business productivity, and the efficiencies it brings are crucial for employers looking to trim costs—including payrolls—as fuel and related expenditures soar and the economy and dollar weakens. In addition, companies today cannot operate without functioning IT systems, so certain business technology skills cannot be eliminated if a company wants to remain competitive.”

A new Honors program for majors in the College of Computing and Informatics will begin in Fall 2008. The goal of the Honors Program is to identify creative, imaginative, and exceptional undergraduate CCI students and develop their potential through encouragement, opportunity, and recognition. For further details, go to the Honors Program Website.

Computer Science Ph.D. student Eve Powell has been awarded a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Integrated Resource Management and Routing for Heterogeneous Access Networks

Lijuan Cao

Advisor: Dr. Teresa Dahlberg

Tuesday, April 29, 2008
9:00 - 10:30am
441 Woodward Hall

More Information

Visualization in the World expresses the expanding ability of our field to address visualization embedded in the life, work, and culture of our times, either through science, art, the humanities, business, social life, or other means. The symposium will address not only visualization and its uses but also the environment within which it is embedded; and how the current or potential interactions across domains in this milieu are of interest. More Information

GAANN Fellowships provide up to $20,000 per year plus an educational supplement for Ph.D. students with financial need. To qualify you must be accepted into the College of Computing and Informatics Ph.D. Program, and be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident of the U.S. Other requirements and applications instructions are listed here.

Dr. Myung Kyun Kim from the University of Ulsan, Korea will be a Visiting Professor in the Network Research Lab beginning January 2008 through January 2009. Dr. Kim is a professor of computer engineering and his research areas are real-time communications and industrial communication networks. During his visit of the Networking Research LAb, Dr. Kim will conduct research in realiable and real-time communications in wireless networks. More Information

Dr. Jong Wan Lee of Hallym University, Korea will be a Visiting Professor in the Games+Learning Lab from January 2008 until January, 2009. Dr. Lee is a professor of physics, and will be teaching a game physics course in the Fall of 2008. During the Summer of 2008 four students from Hallym University will be joining Dr. Lee to conduct research in the Games + Learning Lab. More Information

Load Balancing Routing in Multi-hop Wireless Networks
Fan Li
Advisor: Dr. Yu Wang

Friday, Jan. 25, 2008
12:30--3pm
441 Woodward Hall

A team of two Computer Science PhD students, Fan Li and Lin Li, from the Networking Research Lab won the Performance Award in the Mobile Ad-hoc Networking Interoperability And Cooperation (MANIAC) Challenge, which was sponsored by the National Science Foundation Networking Technology and System program and held with the 50th IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference in Washington DC, November 25-26. The objective of the MANIAC Challenge is to stimulate experimentation in wireless networking through deployment of a large-scale mobile ad hoc network (MANET) and evaluation of MANET node participation strategies. During the contest, the team also won the First Place of Presentation Award in an oral presentation competition sponsored by the IEEE Professional Communication Society. The Team Coach is Dr. Yu Wang. More Information

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte has entered a partnership with Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) to create a new RENCI engagement center on the Charlotte campus focused on forecasting urban growth and its impacts.

The new center will be administered by UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute and will be developed as a partnership among the Urban Institute, the Center for Applied GIS and the Charlotte Visualization Center. The three campus entities will collaborate on interdisciplinary research that addresses trends in land use and development in the Charlotte area, and the effects of urbanization on natural resources, traffic patterns, urban infrastructure, quality of life and disaster response.
More Information

Dr. Larry Hodges received a GVU Impact Award at the 15th Anniversary Celebration of the founding of  the GVU Center at Georgia Tech. 
GVU Center Information
Award Information
More Information

The Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte invites applications for two tenure track faculty positions, one at Assistant Professor and one at Associate Professor rank. More Information

The Department now offers both undergraduate and graduate Certificates in Game Design and Development. For information on both programs go to the Games + Learning Lab website.

Click here to participate in a study of a neat new computer programming game.

On November 8th and 9th, The Department of Computer Science and the Department of Software and Information Systems will host students from across the region to attend GRAD 2007.  GRAD 2007 (Graduate Research and Academic Discovery 2007) is a unique,  two-day program to introduce promising undergraduates to the possibilities of graduate school, as well as the faculty, students, and research opportunities available at UNC Charlotte.  Hotel lodging for Thursday and Friday nights and all meals will be provided. 
More Information

Dr. Agnieszka Dardzinska, Bialystok Tech. Univ., Poland, will be in the Department as a Visiting Professor from Nov 15th unitl Nov 30th.

Dr. Milan Simunek, Univ. Prague, Czech Republic, will be in the Department as a Visiting Professor from October 26th unitl October 31th.

Dr. Jan Rauch, Univ. Prague, Czech Republic, will be in the Department as a Visiting Professor from October 26th unitl October 31th.

Dr. Jianhua Chen, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University, will be in the Department as a Visiting Professor from October 9th unitl October 20th.  More Information

Efficient Gene Interactions Exploration in DNA Microarray Data
Yong Ye
Advisor: Dr. Xintao Wu

Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007
10am--12pm
Room 157, CHHS building

Analysis of and Techniques for Privacy Preserving Data Mining
Songtao Guo
Advisor:Dr. Yuliang Zheng and Dr. Xintao Wu

Friday, Oct. 5, 2007
9--11am
Woodward Hall 441

Representation and Automatic Generation of Contact State Graphs between General Solid Objects
Peng Tang
Advisor: Dr. Jing Xiao

Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007
10am--1pm
9:30am--12:30pm

Woodward Hall 441

The College of Computing and Informatics (CCI) will sponsor the director of the National Geographic and IBM Genographic Project, Dr. Spencer Wells to give a special presentation on campus October 16th from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. at Halton Arena. The Genographic Project aims to better understand our deep ancestry by mapping the migratory history of humankind using DNA as a study tool. The event is free and open to students, staff, and faculty.

To register for the exciting opportunity please go to www.cci.uncc.edu and click on the events tab where you will be directed to the CCI events calendar.

Date: Oct 10, 2007
Time: 8:00AM - 6:30PM
Location: McKnight Auditorium
Cone University Center
More Information

Dr. Spencer Wells will give a special presentation to faculty, staff, and students

Efficient Gene Interactions Exploration in DNA Microarray Data
Yong Ye
Advisor: Dr. Xintao Wu

Thursday, Oct. 4, 2007
10am--12pm
Room 157, CHHS building



Analysis of and Techniques for Privacy Preserving Data Mining
Songtao Guo
Advisor:Dr. Yuliang Zheng and Dr. Xintao Wu

Friday, Oct. 5, 2007
9--11am
Woodward Hall 441



Representation and Automatic Generation of Contact State Graphs between General Solid Objects
Peng Tang
Advisor: Dr. Jing Xiao

Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007
10am--1pm
9:30am--12:30pm

Professor Jamie Payton, with co-authors Christine Julien, and Gruia-Catalin Roman,  received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for the paper  Automatic Consistency Assessment for Query Results in Dynamic Environments which  was presented at the Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 15th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering in  Dubrovnik, Croatia, September 2007.
More Information

Real-Time Adaptive Robot Motion Planning
John M. Vannoy
Advisor: Dr. Jing Xiao

Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2007
10am--1pm
441 Woodward Hall

Cooperative Music Retrieval Based on Automatic Indexing of Music by Instruments and Their Types
Cynthia Xin Zhang
Advisor: Dr. Zbigniew Ras

Thursday, Sept. 13, 2007
1--3pm
441 Woodward Hall

More Information

Dr. Larry Hodges, an alumni of North Carolina State University, has been honored by the NCSU Department of Computer Science as an Alumni Acheiver and will be one of four keynote speakers at their 40th Anniversity Celebration and Technical Symposium on October 25th, 2007.
More Information

Ontology-Based Large-Scale Image Classification, Indexing and Exploration

Yuli Gao
Advisor: Dr. Jianping Fan

Woodward Conference Room 441
Friday May 11, 2007
10:00 am to 2:00 pm

The Charlotte STARS Leadership Corps of the STARS Alliance

The Charlotte chapter of the SLC consists of 25 students from UNC Charlotte, Johnson C. Smith University, Winthrop University, and other regional colleges. These students were selected from incoming freshman, transfer students, newly-declared computing majors, and new graduate students, as well as returning undergraduate and graduate students. Our mission is to provide outreach to our schools and communities to encourage interest in technology learning. More Information

Congratulations to the students whose presentations won cash awards in the Computer Science Division at the 7th Annual Niner Research Across the Disciplines Graduate Research Fair on Saturday, March 31st.

First Place: Evan Suma, Comparison of Travel Techniques in a Complex, Multi-Level 3D Environment
Second Place: Priyesh Dixit,  Optimal Information Placement in an Interactive 3D Environment
Third Place: Amy Ulinski, Two Hands Up: Exploring Bimanual Task Division for 3D Volumetric Selection Techniques
More Information

The Fiechtner Scholarship is awarded each year to a rising junior or senior majoring in Math, Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, or Mechanical Engineering. Further information and application material is available here.

The brightest minds, the most innovative research, the leading companies, and the most stimulating discussions in the fields of virtual environments, augmented reality, and 3D user interfaces. You will find them all at IEEE Virtual Reality 2007, March 10-14 in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. More Information

Apply now to work on undergraduate research projects in digital gaming, wireless networking and embedded computing, data visualization, and virtual reality.
Details at www.cs.uncc.edu/reu/
Application deadline is March 15, 2008!

Where? College of Health and Human Services Building (CHHS)
Room 294
When? Thursday, February 8, 2007 12:00pm to 1:00pm

Microarrays are high-throughput platforms used to perform, in parallel, measurements of a large number of biological polymers of the same type. The most well known are gene expression microarrays, which measure the transcript level of tens of thousands of transcripts using hundreds of thousands of probes. In a mixture so complex, from samples that are by their nature heterogeneous, a large number of types of interactions occur in addition to the intended complementary sequence hybridizations.

For the most part such interactions have been handled statistically, as noise. My group has been systematically identifying probes with anomalous behavior and determining the sources of what are essentially systematic errors of different kinds. We then re-analyze the entire dataset to show the effect the errors have had on the interpretation of an experiment. In order to do this we have had to develop a novel database and associated analysis toolkit, since current microarray analysis systems do not allow this level of data resolution and manipulation. I will present key components of our analysis system and then discuss several sources of systematic error, including SNPs and alternate transcripts, as well as their impact on the outcome of analyses performed on large public cancer datasets; we obtained a surprisingly close correspondence in gene lists of two independently performed experiments.

Previously unique to NC State University, Sun is coming to UNC-Charlotte! This free unique Sun event is a super-rare opportunity designed specifically for the academic community-- including undergraduate students, graduate students, faculty, and staff. Hear real Sun developers from Sun’s offices in California talk about the latest technologies that are driving mobile computing, open source projects, securities, web services, and more. You can’t afford to miss this!

Feb 6 2007 5:00-8:00pm
Register at the link below or register before or during the event outside of the Woodward Hall 106 auditorium More Information

INTER-PERSONAL SOCIAL CONVERSATION IN MULTIMODAL HUMAN-VIRTUAL HUMAN INTERACTION

Sabarish Babu
Advisor: Dr. Larry Hodges

Woodward Conference Room 441
Friday, February 2, 2007
12:30 to 3:00 pm

CONCEPT-BASED LARGE-SCALE DATABASE BROWSING AND RETRIEVAL VIA VISUALIZATION

Hangzai Luo
Advisor:  Dr. Jianping Fan

338 Woodward Hall
Thursday  Jan. 18, 2007
10:00 am to 1:00 pm

More Information

EXAMINING DIRECT AND INDIRECT SOCIAL INFLUENCE WITH VIRTUAL CHARACTERS:  THE ROLE OF GENDER AND REALISM

Catherine Zanbaka
Advisor: Dr. Larry Hodges

Woodward Conference Room 441
Friday January 19, 2007
12:30 to 3:00 pm

More Information

The following Computer Science courses are available to UNC Charlotte students over the internet:

• LBST 2213: Science, Technology and Society
• ITCS 1101: Introduction to Computer Concepts
• ITCS 1102: Advanced Internet Concepts
• ITCS 1214: Introduction to Computer Science I
• ITCS 1215: Introduction to Computer Science II
• ITCS 2175: Logic and Algorithms
• ITCS 2215: Design and Analysis of Algorithms
• ITCS 2214: Data Structures
• ITCS 2231: Introduction to Business Programming

Dr. Yu Wang Receives 2006 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award

Dr. Aidong Lu Receives Department of Energy Early Career Award

Dr. Xintao Wu Awarded NSF CAREER Award

Dr. Teresa Dahlberg Honored for Contributions to Business Diversity

Dr. Chen takes two medals at the International Computer Games Association Computer Olympiad

Recent Faculty Awards and Honors Dr. Yu Wang Receives 2006 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award The Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards provide seed money for research by unior faculty at Oak Ridge Associated Universities (OrAU) member institutions and are intended to enrich the research and professional growth of young faculty and result in new funding opportunities. More Information

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Recent Faculty Awards and Honors Dr. Aidong Lu Receives Department of Energy Early Career Award Professor Aidong Lu has been named an Early Career Principal Investigator in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and High-Performance Networks by the U.S. Department of Energy.The principal goal of this program is to identify exceptionally talented applied mathematicians, computer scientists, and high-performance networks researchers early in their careers and assist and facilitate the development of their research programs. Dr. Lu will receive $300,000 of funding over a three year period.

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Recent Faculty Awards and Honors Dr. Yu Wang Receives 2006 Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award Congratulations to Assistant Professor Xintao Wu who has been awarded a prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Grant from the National Science Foundation for $439,700. The CAREER Program is a NSF-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious 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.

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Recent Faculty Awards and Honors Dr. Teresa Dahlberg Honored for Contributions to Business Diversity Associate Professor Teresa Dahlberg is one of this year's winners of the Charlotte Business Journal's Diversity in Business Award. She was nominated by the university and will be honored at an annual award luncheon on Sept. 13. First awarded in 2004, the Diversity in Business Award is given to those companies and individuals deemed by the Charlotte Business Journal as embodying inclusiveness and respect for the uniqueness and differences of all employees. The winners are identified as catalysts for diversity initiatives throughout the Charlotte region. More Information

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Recent Faculty Awards and Honors Dr. Chen takes two medals at the International Computer Games Association Computer Olympiad Professor Ken Chen's computer Go program, Go Intellect won the Silver Medal in the 19x19 Go Tournament and the Bronze Medal in the 9x9 Go Tournament at the International Computer Games Association's ?11th Computer Olympiad held in Turin, Italy May 24-June 1, 2006.

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Congratulations to 3 Volatile Pointers (Nathan Conrad, Priyesh Dixit,  and Zack Wadler) who placed 9th out of 135 teams competing in the 2006 ACM Mid-Atlantic USA Programming Contest held October 28, 2006. The team advisor is Richard Ilson. More Information

Believable Agents and Intelligent Story Adaptation for Interactive Storytelling



Mark Riedl
Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT)
University of Southern California

Wednesday, November 1, 2006
2:00-3:30 in  Woodward 441
More Information

Top Ten Reasons to Join Us at UNC Charlotte

Ten₁₂ More Reasons for Women Students to Study Computer Science at UNC Charlotte!

The College of Computing and Informatics' Learning Community (CCI-LC) is a program for freshmen majoring in either Computer Science or Software and Information Systems. Learning Communities are designed to give entering college students a supportive environment and a sense of community within a larger university. The CCI-LC provides opportunities for students with similar interests to develop team skills by working together on group assignments, in study groups, and on community-based service projects. All CCI-LC students are members of the CCI Freshman Seminar which is devoted to easing the transition to college, enhancing study skills and exploring career options. More Information

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Xintao Wu who has been awarded a prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Grant from the National Science Foundation for $439,700. The CAREER Program is a NSF-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious 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.

Professor Aidong Lu has been named an Early Career Principal Investigator in Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, and High-Performance Networks by the U.S. Department of Energy.  The principal goal of this program is to identify exceptionally talented applied mathematicians, computer scientists, and high-performance networks researchers early in their careers and assist and facilitate the development of their research programs.  Dr. Lu will receive $300,000 of funding over a three year period.

Complete Content of the Grand Opening Symposium on the Future of Visualization Now Online!

College of Computing and Informatics Podcasts!

The Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards provide seed money for research by unior faculty at Oak Ridge Associated Universities (OrAU) member institutions and are intended to enrich the research and professional growth of young faculty and result in new funding opportunities. Congratulations, Professor Wang! More Information

Associate Professor Teresa Dahlberg is one of this year’s winners of the Charlotte Business Journal’s Diversity in Business Award. She was nominated by the university and will be honored at an annual award luncheon on Sept. 13. First awarded in 2004, the Diversity in Business Award is given to those companies and individuals deemed by the Charlotte Business Journal as embodying inclusiveness and respect for the uniqueness and differences of all employees. The winners are identified as catalysts for diversity initiatives throughout the Charlotte region. More Information

LendingTree, Inc. is seeking a graduate level intern for Fall and Spring to work on Data Visualization. Salary is $19.40 per hour @ 20 hours per week, with an additional $1500.00 provided to the student for travel and relative conference costs. Interested students will need to apply by sending a resume via the University Career Center’s online Campus Professional database, at http://uncc.erecruiting.com/er/security/login.jsp and to also be eligible to participate in the university Experiential Learning Program. Contact Ben Cudia in the University Career Center for assistance with Campus Professional or eligibility questions, www.career.uncc.edu or 704-687-2231.

Professor Ken Chen’s computer Go program, Go Intellect won the Silver Medal in the 19x19 Go Tournament and the Bronze Medal in the 9x9 Go Tournament at the International Computer Games Association’s  11^th Computer Olympiad held in Turin, Italy May 24-June 1, 2006.

Welcome to our new faculty members who will be joining the Department this fall.

Jamie Payton comes to us from Washington University in St. Louis where she has just completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Her research is focused on software engineering for context-aware applications designed for use in mobile ad hoc networks.

Richard Souvenir is joining us from Washington University in St. Louis where he has just completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His research is in computer vision, specifically manifold learning for video data sets.

Dale-Marie Wilson joins us from Auburn University where she has completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. Her research interests include conversational user interfaces in conjunction with pervasive computing.

G. Michael Youngblood completed his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Arlington in August 2005 and then spent one year as a Research Faculty Associate in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UTA. His areas of interest include AI for Computer Games, Intelligent Systems, Pervasive Computing, and Autonomous Systems.

Zhengchang Su completed his Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in August 2000, and then spent three years as a postdoc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Before joining us he was a research faculty at the University of Georgia in Athens. His areas of interest include developing novel algorithms for deciphering gene regulatory networks using sequence and other high throughput data, and simulation of 3D structures of macromolecules using high performance computing.

Dennis Livesay comes to us from California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, where he was faculty within the Chemistry Department for the past six years. Before that, he received his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is focused on elucidating sequence/structure/function relationships within protein families using bioinformatic and computational biology techniques.

The campus community is invited to a retirement reception honoring Dr. C. Michael Allen, sponsored by the Computer Science Department.

When: May 12, 1:00-2:30
Where: Woodward Hall

Please RSVP to Ellen Keidel (eskeidel@uncc.edu), if you are able to attend. More Information

On May 1 and 2, 2006, the Charlotte Visualization Center will host the Symposium on the Future of Visualization with prime sponsorship from the Charlotte Research Institute. This will be an event of national importance with leading visionaries in the field of visualization presenting their views on the next big things in research and development in this burgeoning field. This is a unique opportunity to hear all these leaders speak at the same event and to have them address this topic. In addition, attendees will see demonstrations of the latest visualization tools, tour the Charlotte Visualization Center, and meet colleagues from business, government, and academia.

Invited speakers include:

	Stu Card, Senior Research Fellow at PARC, ACM Fellow, first recipient of the SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award, and did the first human factors studies leading to the mouse’s introduction, "Using Vision to Think"
	Jim Foley, ACM and IEEE Fellow, Founding director of Georgia Tech's GVU Center, Steven Fleming Professor at Georgia Tech, former Director of Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab, "Just Another Pretty Visualization? or The What, Where, When, Why, and How of Evaluating Visualization"
	Pat Hanrahan, Canon USA Professor at Stanford University and Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering, "Towards Automating Graphic Design"
	Chuck Hansen, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Utah and winner of the IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award, "The Future of Large-Scale Scientific Visualization"
	Arie Kaufman, IEEE Fellow, recipient of the IEEE Visualization Career Award, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at SUNY Stony Brook, and developer of the virtual colonoscopy procedure, "Virtual Colonoscopy"
	Daniel Keim, Chair of Information Processing, University of Konstanz, leader in information visualization, "Scalability in Visual Data Exploration: Learning from Human Information Processing"
	Kent Larson, Director, Changing Places, MIT Media Lab and College of Architecture, leading researcher in responsive design and acclaimed author on unbuilt masterworks, "Visualization and the Creation of More Responsive Places for Living"
	William Ribarsky, Bank of America Endowed Chair and Director of the Charlotte Visualization Center, "Knowledge Visualization"
	Jim Thomas, Laboratory Fellow, Pacific Northwest National Lab, and Director of the National Visualization and Analytics Center, "Visual Analytics: a Grand Challenge in Science - Turning Information Overload into the Opportunity of the Decade"
There will also be a panel, "Other Thoughts on the Future of Visualization" with Fred Brooks, Kenan Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, Larry Hodges, CS Department Chair at UNC Charlotte, and corporate executives. The new Visualization faculty (Robert Kosara, Aidong Lu, Zachary Wartell, and Jing Yang) will also make presentations on their work. See the schedule for details.

More Information

A team comprised of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the Georgia Institute of Technology has been named a Regional Visualization and Analytics Center by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. PNNL leads the Department of Homeland Security's National Visualization and Analytics Center or NVAC™, which is bringing academic expertise to the nation's efforts to discover information that may warn officials of a terrorist attack. More Information

The UNC Charlotte Undergraduate Programming Team finished 8th out of 125 college teams at the ACM 2005 International Collegiate Programming Contest for the Mid-Atlantic region held at Virginia Tech on November 12th. Congratulations to team members: Nathan Conrad, Jonathan Champ, and Priyesh Dixit. The Team Coach is Richard Ilson. More Information

Due to newly funded research projects and the establishment of the Charlotte Visualization Center, the Department of Computer Science expects to have several Research Assistant Positions for new Ph.D. students in Visualization, Visual Analytics, and Grid Computing. Most of these positions required excellent programming skills and at least undergraduate experience or coursework in computer graphics. Interested students should contact Professor William Ribarsky (ribarsky at uncc dot edu). Admissions information for the Ph.D Program is available here,

Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award: Teresa Dahlberg

Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award: Xintau Wu

Essam El-Kwae Student-Faculty Research Award: Timothy Tickle & Taghi Mostafavi

Outstanding Staff Award: Patricia Artis

The Charlotte Visualization Center Web portal is up and running! Thirty faculty from across the UNCC campus and many students are involved in this interdisciplinary enterprise. This virtual opening of the VisCenter will be followed by a grand opening this Fall in the new Science and Technology Building. More Information

Dr. Mirsad Hadzikadic, Dean of the College of Information Technology, was awarded the Dr. Richard Neel Award for Career Achievement at the 2005 Blue Diamond Awards sponsored by Information Technology Charlotte. The Award for Career Achievement recognizes a special individual for accomplishments, both professional and voluntary, over the course of their career. This award details an individual's unique or extensive contributions to the local technology industry. Factors considered include the period of time over which contributions were made, and professional and community endorsements.

September 2004
Dr. Zbigniew Michalewicz  is PI on a new grant funded by the Naval Graduate School  for Coevolutionary TEMPO Game.

Dr. Jing Xiao was Program Co-Chair of the 2004 IEEE/RSJ International
Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Sendai, Japan, Sept. 28--Oct. 2, 2004.

October 2004
Dr. Larry Hodges is Co-PI on a new grant funded by the University of North Carolina for Scientific Innovations in Numerical Modeling, Digital Visualization, and High-Speed Connectivity in Western North Carolina.

November 2004
Dr. Teresa Dahlberg has been appointed as Area Editor for Computer Networks Journal.

December 2004
Dr. Larry Hodges is PI on a new grant funded by the University of Pittsburgh for CORE Center for Balance Research.

Dr. Larry Hodges presented an invited talk on Digital Humans at Hallym University in Chuncheon, Korea.

January 2005
Dr. Teresa Dahlberg is serving a one-year appointment as Faculty Associate to the Provost.  She will address recruiting and retention of students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math disciplines.
 
Dr. Larry Hodges has been appointed to the Editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.

Dr. Zbigniew Ras is PI on a new grant funded by the National Science Foundation for Automatic Indexing of Audio with Timbre Information for Musical Instruments of Definite Pitch.

Dr. Zbigniew Ras is the guest Editor of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence special January double issue on Knowledge Discovery.
Dr. Larry Hodges is credited as the visionary behind the development of Virtual Reality Therapy in Virtual Cures for Real-World Phobias published in the January issue of Readers Digest.

February 2005
Dr. William Ribarsky gives an invited talk on The Science of Analytic Reasoning at the American Association for the Advancement of Science(AAAS) Annual Meeting, February 20, 2005 in Washington, DC.
March 2005
Dr. Teresa Dahlberg named UNC Charlotte Faculty/Staff Woman of the Year.
Dr. Zbigniew Ras is PI on a new grant funded by the Department of Defense to support the International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems.
April 2005
Dr. Teresa Dahlberg will serve as Technical Program Chair for the 24th IEEE International Performance Computing and Communications Conference (IPCCC), which will be held April in Phoenix, Arizona.

Dr. William Ribarsky was the Keynote Speaker at Applied Visualization 2005 which was held April 28 and 29 in Asheville, NC.

Dr. Jing Xiao organizes a special session "Contacts and Compliant Motion" at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Barcelona, Spain, April 18--22, 2005. She is also on the Program Committee of the conference and serves as a session chair.
May 2005
Dr. Zbigniew Ras will serve as Program Chair for the Fifteenth International Symposium on Methodologies for Intelligent Systems (ISMIS'05) which will be held May 26-28 in Saratoga Srping, New York.
Dr. Zbigniew Rasis the editor of the proceedings Foundations of Intelligent Systems to be published by Springer in LNAI. June 2005
Dr. Jing Xiao is Guest Editor of the Special Issue on "Compliant Motion: Modeling, Planning, and Control" of Advanced Robotics.

July 2005
Dr. Jing Xiao is General Chair of 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Assembly and Task Planning, Montreal, Canada, July 19-21, 2005.
Dr. Zbigniew Ras is the guest Editor of the International Journal of Intelligent Systems. special July issue on Knowledge Discovery, November 2005
Dr. William Ribarsky is co-editor of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics special November issue on Virtual Reality, Haptics, and Augmented Reality.

The Department of Computer Science, along with the entire College of Information Technology, has moved into the new Science and Technology Building. All computer science faculty offices and over 6,000 square feet of new computer science lab space are now located on the fourth floor of the South Wing of the building. Click here to see live video of our new home.

The MS Early Entry Program  accepts exceptional undergraduate students at UNC Charlotte into the Master of Science in Computer Science and allows them to begin work toward a graduate degree before completion of the baccalaureate degree.  How to Apply

After winning two Bronze Medals at last year's games, Dr. Ken Chen's Go Intellect program has achieved the rare feat of winning the Gold Medal in both the 19x19 Go Tournament and the 9x9 Go Tournament at the 9th International Computer Olympiad in Ramat-Gan, Israel this summer. Congratulations to Dr. Chen on this outstanding achievement! More Information

Tiffany Barnes joins us as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Barnes received her Ph.D. from North Carolina State University in 2003. Her research interests include Intelligent Systems and Data Mining.
Lorrie Lehmann joins us as a Lecturer. Ms. Lehmann is completing her M.S. in Computer Science from UNC Charlotte. She brings a great deal of experience in the design and management of on-line courses to the Department. William Ribarsky joins us as the Bank of America Endowed Chair in Information Technology. Prior to joining our faculty he was Principal Research Scientist in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. Dr. Ribarsky is internationally known for his research and leadership in Visualization. Yu Wang joins us as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Wang received his Ph.D. from Illinois Institute of Technology in 2004. His research interests include algorithm analysis and design for wireless ad hoc networks and sensor networks. Zachary Wartell joins us as a Visiting Assistant Professor. Dr. Wartell received his Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 2001. His research interests include Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality, and Visualization.

William Ribarsky has joined the Computer Science faculty as the Bank of America Endowed Chair in Information Technology. Dr. Ribarsky is the first recipient of the endowed professorship, which was created with funding from Bank of America to help attract a nationally prominent scholar and teacher to the College of Information Technology at UNC Charlotte. More Information