CSEE NEWS! FACULTY and STUDENTS
FACULTY
January 2008: Baek-Young Choi, Assistant Professor, CSEE Department, is the PI of the $175,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant titled "On Optimization Issues In Supporting High Bandwidth Multimedia Applications". In this project, Professor Choi aims to design, implement, and evaluate network architecture for one-to-many high bandwidth applications through multiple layer perspectives toward achieving optimal resource usage, performance and reliability.
September 2007: Yugi Lee, Associate Professor, CSEE Department, is the lead PI of the $200,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant titled "ARTISAN - Art Inspired Service Oriented Architecture Design", which was recently awarded. In this multi-disciplinary effort, Professor Lee teams up with colleagues, Dinakar Dinakarpandian, Assistant Professor/CSEE, Shannon Jackson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Daven Gee, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, and Margaret Brommelsiek, Directory, Center for Creative Studies, to explore the applicability of paradigms from the art world to the science of software design.
June 2007: The CSEE Department is pleased to announce that two new faculty will be joining the department as assistant professors starting Fall 2007.
Walter Daniel Leon-Salas is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interests are: Low-power Mixed-Signal Circuits; On-Sensor Processing; Ultra-Wideband RF Circuits; Sensor Networks; Data Compression; CMOS Focal Plane Arrays.
Praveen Rao is completing his Ph.D. at the University of Arizona. His research interests are: Large-scale Data Management & Information Systems: Indexing, Query processing, Filtering; XML Data Processing; Data Management in Scientific Disciplines.
April 2007: Deep Medhi, Professor, CSEE Department, is the author of a new book, Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols, and Architectures, published by Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (an imprint of Elsevier). His co-author is Karthikeyan Ramasamy (MS-CS’93). This book presents a comprehensive view of network routing that encompasses Internet routing, PSTN routing, VoIP routing, and how routers are built for efficient routing.
March 2007: Yugi Lee, Associate Professor, is partnering with Geoscientists at UMKC to build HIS-KC WATER (Hydrologic Information System for Kansas City metro WATERsheds), an automated realtime analysis and forecasting system for water quality in the watersheds covering the Kansas City metro area; this prototype system is based on Context-Aware Geospatial Data and Service Integration. Their research is presented at the 2007 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Seoul, South Korea.
January 2007: The Kansas City Area Life Sciences Institute (KCALSI) announces the award of a $25,000 Research Development Grant to Yu-Ping Wang, Assistant Professor, CSEE Department, for his proposal 'Computation Imaging, Integrated Molecular Karyotyping, Gene Expression Analysis'. Only six scientists receive General Research Development Grants in this year's competition.
December 2006: Congratulations to CSEE faculty member, Reza Derakhshani, who received a University of Missouri Research Board (UMRB) grant in the Fall'2006 cycle.
September 2006: Yijie Han, Associate Professor, CSEE Department, now holds the best time complexity record for solving the all pairs shortest paths problem. He presented his new result, a O(n3 (log log n/log n)5/4) time algorithm for all pairs shortest paths, at the 14th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2006) in Zurich, Switzerland this month. This improves on previously known best result of O(n3 / log n) time. As part of this conference proceedings, his paper is published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Sciences, volume 4168. His research has been supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.
July 2006: Vijay Kumar, Professor, CSEE Department, is the author of a new book! Mobile Database Systems, published by John Wiley & Sons, is a graduate-level textbook for computer science students that covers concepts, issues and implementation in mobile database technology.
March 2006: Peter Rogan, Professor, School of Medicine/Childrens Mercy Hospital, with a joint appointment in the CSEE Department, is the co-inventor of the patent "Chromosome structural abnormality localization with single copy probes", Patent # 7,014,997, issued by the US Patent & Trademark Office on March 21, 2006 for single copy FISH (scFISH) technology. He received another patent earlier in December 2004.
February 2006: EK Park, Professor of CSEE, is going on leave to join National Science Foundation as a Program Director. He will serve in NSF's Division of Computing and Communications Foundations (CCF) in the Directorate of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE). Park is the first CSEE faculty to serve a rotation at NSF. His initial appointment is for a year.
January 2006: Yugi Lee, Associate Professor of CSEE, and Judy Mullins, Instructor of Computer Science, conducted a workshop at the Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) Conference at Science City in Kansas City, Missouri. At this one-day conference, 6th through 8th grade girls had the opportunity to interact with female role models in science and math related fields. Girls attended hands-on workshops that are designed and led by female engineers, physicians and scientists. The workshop led by Lee and Mullins was attended by 44 girls where they learned how to program using ALICE.
December 2005: Deep Medhi, Professor of CSEE, visited Kurukshetra University, India as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Information Technology in December 2005. The Fulbright Senior Specialists Program is designed to provide short-term academic opportunities (two to six weeks) for leading U.S. faculty and professionals. Applicants recommended by specialist peer review committees and approved by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board are added to the roster of Fulbright Senior Specialists. Besides Deep Medhi, another CSEE Professor, Vijay Kumar, is also on the roster of Fulbright Senior Specialists; Professor Kumar visited Czech Republic as a Fulbright Senior Specialist in 2003.
December 2005: Congratulations to CSEE faculty member, Chris Zhang, who received a University of Missouri Research Board (UMRB) grant in the Fall'2005 cycle. Faculty of all four University of Missouri campuses are eligible to compete for UMRB grants.
November 2005: Cory Beard, Associate Professor of CSEE, is co-author of the recently published Internet RFC, Framework for Supporting Emergency Telecommunications Service (ETS) in IP Telephony" (RFC # 4190). Although RFC stands for Request for Comments, they are archival documents that have gone through Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) rigorous approval process to be released as an RFC. In publishing this RFC, he has accomplished something that only a handful of university faculty members around the world have accomplished so far.
October 2005: Yugyung Lee, Associate Professor of CSEE, and her graduate students received the Distinguished Paper Award at the Annual Symposium of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), held during October 22-26, 2005 in Washington, DC. Distinguished papers were selected from among more than 500 papers submitted to the AMIA 2005 Annual Symposium. The paper "Ontodiagram: Automatic Diagram Generation for Congenital Heart Defects in Pediatric Cardiology," describes a framework developed as part of a collaborative project with William Drake, M.D., a pediatric cardiologist at the Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics, Kansas City, Missouri. AMIA is the premier organization in the United States dedicated to the development and application of medical informatics in the support of patient care, teaching, research, and health care administration.
September 2005: A team led by Khosrow Sohraby, Dean of School of Computing & Engineering and Curators' Professor of CSEE, has recently received a $785,000 four-year grant from the US National Science Foundation to develop a program for pre-college students as well as high school teachers in an effort to attract students to pursue undergraduate degrees in engineering and computer science. This program will hold workshops where pre-college students and high schools teachers will have an opportunity to learn about many varied careers computer scientists and engineers pursue and to connect the high school curriculum with engineering application.
August 2005: At the invitation of UM President Elson Floyd, CSEE professor Deep Medhi will serve on the University of Missouri's Research Board (UMRB) which encompasses the four campuses (Columbia, Kansas City, Rolla, and St. Louis) of the University of Missouri System. According to UMRB's website, "The purpose of the UM Research Board is to enhance the long-term quality and quantity of scholarship throughout the University by supporting meritorious research projects. An important goal is to leverage external funds by UM faculty by supporting promising new faculty and funding high quality new initiatives of senior faculty." UMRB is composed of 20 members from four campuses. President Floyd, in his letter, stated that "our very best faculty researchers" are invited to serve on this board. Dr. Medhi will serve a minimum of two year term starting in the academic year 2005-2006.
STUDENTS/ALUMNI
July 2005: The CSEE Department is pleased to announce that two new faculty members are joining the department starting Fall 2005. Baek-Young Choi completed PhD from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2003; she was most recently 3M McKnight Distinguished Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Chuanjun "Chris" Zhang completed PhD from the University of California-Riverside in 2004; he was most recently Assistant Professor at the San Diego State University.
July 2005: Deep Medhi, Professor of CSEE, has been invited to be a keynote speaker at the 19th International Teletraffic Congress, to be held in Beijing, China, August 28-September 2, 2005. ITC is the oldest networking/telecommunication conference, first one held in 1955 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
June 2005: Reza Derakhshani, Assistant Professor of CSEE, is a co-PI of the $430,000 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant titled "Dynamic Simulation of Joints Using Multi-Scale Modeling" awarded to UMKC recently. Trent Guess, Assistant Professor in the Civil and Mechanical Engineering Department at UMKC, is the lead PI on this interdisciplinary project. Two other faculty members from CME, Anil Misra and Ganesh Thiagarajan, are also co-PIs on this grant.
June 2005: Wen Gao, Honorary Professor of CSEE (primary affiliation: Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China), was honored as one of the top ten Chinese technologists to watch in June 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum. To quote, Wen Gao "aims to save consumers hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty fees for video players, stereos, and televisions that use the MPEG-2 audio and video standard. Gao heads a China-led international group developing a royalty-free standard called AVS."
June 2005: Khosrow Sohraby, Curators' Professor of CSEE, was named the Dean of the School of Computing & Engineering. He served as the interim dean for the past year.
April 2005: Several faculty members in the CSEE Department have been recently promoted to the associate professor rank with tenure. They are: Cory Beard, Deb Chatterjee, Yugyung Lee, Ken Mitchell, and Jeff Rydberg-Cox (of Department of English, with a joint appointment in the CSEE Department).
April 2005: Deendayal "Dinakar" Dinakarpandian, Assistant Professor of CSEE, was honored in the category "US Patents and Inventors on Invention Disclosure" at the 5th Annual Technology Transfer Showcase organized by the University of Missouri System in Kansas City on April 12, 2005.
January 2005: Jeff Rydberg-Cox, Assistant Professor of English (with a joint appointment in the CSEE Department) received a $348,000 grant titled "Approaching the Problems of Digitizing Latin Incunables", funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Rydberg-Cox works on creating computational tools for the study of Ancient Greek, Early Modern Latin, and Old Norse texts in a network of digital libraries. His other current funding sources include National Library of Medicine (History of Medicine Division), National Science Foundation (Digital Libraries Initiative) and the European Commission ITS Program.
December 2004: Peter Rogan, Professor, School of Medicine/Childrens Mercy Hospital, with a joint appointment in the CSEE Department, is the co-inventor of the patent "Single copy genomic hybridization probes and method of generating same", Patent # 6,828,097, issued by the US Patent & Trademark Office on December 7, 2004.
December 2004: Congratulations to CSEE faculty members, Yugyung Lee and Yu-Ping Wang, who received University of Missouri Research Board (UMRB) grants in the Fall'2004 cycle. Faculty of all four University of Missouri campuses are eligible to compete for UMRB grants. CSEE Faculty received 2 out of total 9 awarded to UMKC in this round!
April 2007: M. Fahim Siddiqi (MS-CS'93) is the recipient of 2006-2007 SCE Alumni Achievement Award at UMKC. He's CEO of Sereniti, Inc. He accepted his award at the Alumni Association's dinner and program on Thursday, April 19, 2007. (more ...). On Friday, April 20th, he was the seminar speaker in the Department in which he talked about "Engineering Operational Support Systems – A Practitioner’s view".
April 2007: Arthur Pemberton, a CS major, took the top prize in the web programming contest at the Consortium for Computing in Small Colleges: Central Plains Conference on April 14. Arthur gave a formal presentation to three professional judges in which he described the technical aspects of the site and then gave a demo of the site. He was awarded a $300 prize for the best overall web site (best use of technology, best visual design/layout and best content). Check out UMKC ACM web-site!
April 2007: Ivan Markov, a CS major, has been selected as the 2007 Student Employee of the Year by the National Student Employment Association for his work with UMKC Adult Continuing Education for Persons with Development Disabilities (ACED) program. He was first selected as UMKC Student Employee of the Year, then winning the state and regional awards, and finally, the national award. Congratulations! (more ...)
April 2007: Four doctoral students in the CSEE department are the recipients of prestigious and highly competitive UMKC doctoral fellowships: they are Amin Fazel (Chancellor's Doctoral Fellowship), Tuanjie Tong (Chancellor's Doctoral Fellowship), Jiazhen Zhou (Dissertation Research Fellowship), and Kevin Burger (Preparing Future Faculty Fellowship). Congratulations!
March 2007: The CSEE department announces the establishment of the Balaji Krithikaivasan Memorial Graduate Fellowship Fund, dedicated to the memory of Balaji Krithikaivasan. Balaji was a graduate student in the program from 1999 to 2006 and completed both MS and PhD degrees. We are currently seeking donation; go to Balaji Krithikavasan Fund page for details.
April 2006: IEEE Student Robotics competition was held at the IEEE Region 5 Technical, Professional, and Student Conference in San Antonio, Texas . Thirty-six Robotics Teams signed up for the competition this year and UMKC placed sixth after the first round and thirteenth over all. UMKC Robotic's Competition team members are: Jared Bayne, Dhaval Ghody, Jignesh Patel, Mohammad Qureshi, Jonathan Rodgers, Andrew Thurston (Erica Daume and Bill Thomas were unable to attend).
At the awards banquet, Jonathan Rodgers was recognized for his work in building the UMKC IEEE Student Branch to the strong, vibrant student organization it is today with the prestigious 2005 IEEE Region 5 Outstanding Student Member Award. IEEE Region 5 encompasses eighty universities covering following states: Kansas, Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri.
April 2006: Shekhar Srivastava’s doctoral dissertation, "Models and Algorithms for Effective Traffic Engineering of Label-based Backbone Networks", was judged as Honorable Mention at the INFORMS Telecommunications Doctoral Dissertation Award, 2006. It is worth noting that only six finalists were invited to present their work at the INFORMS Telecommunications Conference in Dallas, Texas, which consisted of Shekhar Srivastava from UMKC, two from MIT, one from Stanford, one from UC-Berkeley, and one from Bilkent University, Turkey. One of the two from MIT won the award while the rest five were declared as honorable mention. Congratulations, Shekhar!
January 2006: The University of Missouri-Kansas City has released the names of students who made the Dean’s List for the Fall 2005 semester. The Dean’s List indicates those full-time undergraduate students taking a minimum of 12 graded credit hours of coursework who ranked in the top 10 percent of enrolled students. 29 students with major in the Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering made the Dean's List..
August 2005: UMKC student chapter of IEEE won the fourth place (runners up) in the student chapter IEEE Website Design competition at the International level! Previously, our chapter won at the Region-5 level. Congratulations to ECE undergrad, Vishal Moody, in particular, for all his hard work on the web-site design!
May 2005: UMKC teams consisting of CSEE students took first and second place in Cerner Software Design Lifecycle competition. The first place team members are: Susan Roos, Asma Khan, Noran Badawi, Raghav Sharma, Ankur Aggarwal; second place team members are: Dan Hagrman, Trevor Huston, Z.J. Hull, and Tongan Zhao.
April 2005: UMKC student chapter of IEEE won the first prize in the IEEE's Region 5 Student Chapter Website Design Competition, beating out teams such as UT-Austin!
April 2005: On April 7-10, 2005 the UMKC Student chapter of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) competed in the ten state, IEEE Region 5 robotics competition in Denver, Colorado. Since September, a group of approximately 15 students had worked to prepare a robot that would accept commands through a wireless link and proceed to drive around a course to pick up and deposit pop cans. On competition day, unfortunately, the UMKC team shared in the fate of 21 of the 25 teams who attended; they were unable to complete the intended task successfully. But with only 4 teams successful, we optimistically consider UMKC team to have finished tied for fifth with 21 other teams!
November 2004: UMKC's Student ACM chapter was a sponsor chapter for the International Collegiate Programming Contest for 2004-2005, held in November 2004. There were 10 teams competing at UMKC's site, and there were 10 sites in this Region (Illinois, NW Indiana, MO, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee). UMKC had two teams competing, one composed of Dan Hagrman, Joel Sparks, and Clifford Juan; and the other team was Cem Oztas, Saurabh Bhandari, and Tim Haines. The first team mentioned came in First Place at our site, and scored 47th in the region.
Other UMKC student news
April 2007: It is time to update the success of the UMKC Debate team. Ranked 15th entering the 2007 competition, UMKC merely hoped to make it to the quarter finals of the 61st Annual National Debate Tournament, hosted March 28 through April 2 in Dallas. But after knocking off the likes of high-ranked Northwestern University and the University of California-Berkeley, the UMKC team consisting of Amy Foster and Malcolm Gordon made it to the final, losing to the Emory University's debate team; it's worth noting that this is the best finish in school history.
March 2006: Again CSEE did't have any student in the UMKC's Debate team; we certainly take pride in the success of the UMKC's Debate Team. At the National Debate Tournament held at Northwestern University in March 2006, UMKC's debate team consisting of Andy Culp and Malcolm Gordon was a double-octa finalist. They were seeded 8th nationally, but lost to a UC-Berkeley team (seeded 25th) in the double-octa round. The UC-Berkeley team lost to eventual winner Michigan State University in the "elite eight" round.
March 2005: While CSEE doesn't have any student in the UMKC's Debate team, we take pride in the success of the UMKC's Debate Team. At the National Debate Tournament held at Gonzaga University in March 2005, UMKC's debate team (seeded-22nd) reached "sweet sixteen" by defeating a Harvard University debate team (seeded-11th)! UMKC lost to UC-Berkeley and failed to reach "elite eight" (the next round). UC-Berkeley went on to the final, and lost to Northwestern's team. Great job UMKC's Debate team!
