We are very excited and proud to share this great news! Professor Brazier, our dear colleague and a founder of the Computer Science Department at UTPA, has defended her Ph.D. dissertation on August 12th, 2010 at University of Texas – El Paso.

Dr. Brazier has been a UTPA faculty member since 1981. Her impact and contribution to the University and the Computer Science Department is truly extraordinary. She designed and implemented the Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, founded the Computer Science Department, which she chaired from 1995-2001, and continues to serve as the Undergraduate Program Coordinator. She was largely responsible for getting the Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (BSCS) degree accredited by CAC/ABET in 2001. During her tenure as a chair, the department established Master of Science degrees in Computer Science (MSCS) and Information Technology (MSIT) in 1996 and 2001, respectively. She was promoted to an associate professor rank in 2001. In 2008, she became the Director of the Computer Engineering Program, which she helped to design and establish in 2007.

Dr. Brazier has proven herself as a great educator and scholar. Over the years, she has developed and taught a wide variety of undergraduate courses, ranging from the Introductory Programming and Data Structure courses to Analysis of Algorithms, Organization of Programming Languages, Operating Systems, Systems Programming, and Software Engineering. She had also been teaching courses of her interest at the graduate level and has published a number of educational works in international conferences, including papers that appeared in proceedings of IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference and International Conference on Engineering Education.

Dr. Brazier enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Computer Science at the University of Texas – El Paso in 2002, where she worked with Dr. Ann Q. Gates, her Ph.D. advisor, on her dissertation research. The focus of Dr. Brazier’s research is on investigation of an ontology-driven discovery approach that can support the elicitation, sharing, documentation, and registration of scientific computational entities and other resources distributed on the Web. Her innovative work employs new Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies, such as structured wiki and Resource Description Framework, and features applications in geosciences. This multi-disciplinary research resulted in several significant contributions in Computer Science, including the design of Computational Entity Discovery Ontology, unique architecture for the GeoSciences Web Service Discovery (GEO-SEED) system, and novel approach to database schema generation in relational RDF repositories. Dr. Brazier’s dissertation research has been recently presented and published in IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, International Conference on Semantic Web and Web Services, and IEEE International Workshop on Scientific Workflows. Dr. Brazier has successfully defended her dissertation titled “Ontology-Driven Discovery of Scientific Computational Entities” on August 12th, 2010.

Congratulations, Dr. Pearl Brazier, on this great achievement!

Dr. Grabowski's research featured in New Scientist magazine

Research by Dr. Laura Grabowski, assistant professor of computer science, was featured in the August 7, 2010 issue of New Scientist. The article highlights Dr. Grabowski's work artificial life research. The research examines evolving memory use in "digital organisms," computer programs that reproduce, compete, and evolve within a digital environment. Early results of this research will be presented at the 12th Annual Conference on Artificial Life (ALife XII) in Odense, Denmark, on August 19-23, 2010. The New Scientist story was picked up by news media around the world, appearing in publications such as the Daily Telegraph, the largest newspaper in the United Kingdom.

Dr. Schweller and Dr. Patitz Have Paper Accepted in FOCS 2010

FOCS (the Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science) and STOC (th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing) are the top two conferences in theoretical computer science. Both conferences usually accept the best papers in each field of theoretical computer science in the current year. This year, Dr. Robert Schweller and Dr. Matthew Patitz had their paper "Strong Fault-Tolerance for Self-Assembly with Fuzzy Temperature" accepted to the 51st Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS 2010), to be held in Las Vegas , Nevada on October 23-26. Their paper presents results in the field of theoretical self-assembly, based on an artificial self-assembling system composed of molecular "tiles" (created from DNA molecules) which autonomously combine to form pre-defined structures. In this artificial, laboratory-based model, a major hurdle to researchers attempting to create large, complex structures is the prevalence of errors. In particular, errors in which a system "temperature" parameter is not held constant and tiles are able to bind to a forming assembly even though their edges don't match with sufficient strength. They proposed a new model of fault tolerance, fuzzy temperature fault tolerance, which absolutely prevents this major type of error. Additionally, they presented a construction which exhibits such fault tolerance and which self-assembles into n x n squares using O(log n) tiles, which is very close to the optimal lower bound of O(log n / log log n) for non-fuzzy temperature fault-tolerant assemblies. The full paper can be found here: http://www.cs.panam.edu/~mpatitz/papers/sftsaft.pdf.

Christine Reilly and Matthew Patitz Will Join the Computer Science Faculty in Fall 2010

We are absolutely delighted to welcome Christine Reilly and Matthew Patitz to join our Computer Science faculty as assistant professors in Fall 2010. No department can thrive without continuing to add new faculty, and the addition of these two outstanding scholars will both deepen and broaden the department’s strengths and expertise in teaching, research and services.

		Christine Reilly is a rare example of a young scholar who has a passion for excellent teaching. Her multi-disciplinary training and education include a B.S. in Environmental Engineering Science from MIT in 1999, M.S. in Environmental and Resource Engineering from the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in 2002, and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2005. She is expecting her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2010. Her research areas are database and scientific data management.
		Matthew Patitz has not only a well-established academic record of research but also five solid years of experience in software development in industry. This combination of experiences makes him a unique faculty to teach Computer Science and Computer Engineering, focusing on software engineering. Matthew Patitz has already completed his Ph.D. study and expects to receive his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Iowa State University in May 2010. His research expertise is in software engineering and theoretical and experimental self-assembly systems. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from Iowa State University in 1998, and completed his M.S. in Computer Science from Iowa State University in 2002. His M.S. research focused on reconfigurable processor architectures. From 2000 to 2005, he worked as a software developer and engineering team lead for the software company SupportSoft, in Redwood City, CA.

 

Fifth Annual Computer Science Student Research Day

The ACM student chapter at the University of Texas Pan-American (UTPA) would like to welcome you to our Fifth Annual Computer Science Student Research Day Conference. This event will bring together Computer Science students from various universities doing research, faculty members from diverse fields, and company representatives, all in order to collaborate and promote Computer Science research and projects that are relevant to business and industry entities in our community

Vist their website for registratration and event information

 

Celebrating Engineers Week: Awards for Outstanding Faculty and Student in Computer Science

In conjunction with Engineers Week, the Department of Computer Science recognized one outstanding faculty and one outstanding student. The 2010 recipients of these annual awards are Dr. Robert Schweller, Outstanding Computer Science Faculty and Zackary Gill, Outstanding Computer Science Student.

The UTPA Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Chapter organized students to vote for the recipient for this year’s Outstanding Faculty Award and selected Dr. Schweller as the winner. The Computer Science faculty chose Zachary as the winner of the Outstanding Student Award. The awards were presented to both Dr. Schweller and Gill at the Engineers Week Award Banquet Wednesday, February 17, 2010, along with other winners in the School of Engineering and Computer Science.

 

Dr Zhixiang Chen and Zachary Gill		Pearl Brazier and David Rodriguez	Dr. Zhixiang Chen and Dr. Robert Schweller

 

Zachary Gill is a senior and will graduate with dual majors in Computer Science and Mathematics in the summer of 2010. Graduating from high school at age 15, Zackary started college the next year taking online classes from Liberty University. After about a year he transferred to UTPA and has since maintained a 4.0 GPA in both of his majors. At UTPA he has participated in research supported by the NSF Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program. He has also volunteered in several areas to serve the community. He helped build housing for orphans in Guatemala. At a camp in Texas he was a counselor for the Mowangaza African Children’s Choir during that organization’s U.S. tour to raise money for orphans in Africa. Zachary served as a weekly volunteer in Edinburg, working with underprivileged children and adolescents whose families lived in government housing. Zachary has received a long list of honors and awards, including UTPA Deans List Second Honors (Spring 2007, Fall 2007), UTPA Deans List First Honors (Spring 2008 to present), Robert L. Townsend Scholarship (2008-09, 2009-10), Jim Odell Memorial Scholarship (2008-09, 2009-10), and Joseph W. Memorial Math Scholarship (2009-10).

David Rodriguez Was also honored as a Recipient of Deans List Second honors Fall 07 and Spring 08, Deans List First honors - Spring 09, Fall 09 Member of ACM ( currently Event Planner ) He was also inducted into Engineering Honor Society last semester. His work experience includes Software Developer with EMU Plastics in McAllen and as an internship as a Calculus I Student Assistant. He will be gradiating with a Computer Engineering Degree May 2010 with optional Applied Math Minor.

Dr. Schweller received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northwestern University and joined in the UTPA CS faculty in fall 2008. He learned how to adjust the teaching environment at UTPA very quickly and effectively and received 100% student evaluation in the Excellent to Good Category for every class he taught in the first year, and received almost the same evaluation in the second year. His teaching is dynamic, challenging, and innovative. He has received very good comments about his teaching from both students and faculty members. Dr. Schweller has kept publishing research papers in top-tiered journals and top-rated conference proceedings. His most recent publications include papers in the Proceedings of the 21st Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA'2010); the ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG), 2009, and the Journal of Computational Biology, 2008. Dr. Schweller's research has been followed by other researchers. For example, a paper in the Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS'09) has settled one open problem proposed by Dr. Schweller’s in one of his 2008 papers.

In addition to the awards for outstanding student, the Computer Science faculty chose Jason Stromberg as the recipient of the 2010 Academic Deans' Awards to Outstanding Students. Jason started college at the University of Texas San Antonio to pursue a degree in Architecture. After a year, he decided that architecture was not the best fit for him and returned to his hometown in the Valley. During the summer of 2007, Jason began his undergraduate study in Computer Science at UTPA. Soon he found out that this was the right choice for him. As the semesters went by, he has become increasingly interested in the field of Computer Science, and achieved outstanding academic performance for course work. His GPA is among the top in the current graduating seniors. He had an internship as a software analyst at Exxon Mobil last summer and gained a lot of experience in applying his Computer Science skills to help develop and recreate a database application for the company. Now, as a senior, he will soon complete his undergraduate degree.

 

High School Programming Contest 2010 

The Department of Computer Science held its annual High School Programming Contest on Saturday, February 20, 2010. This year the format of the competition was modified to add a written examination to the hands-on contest.  

Click here for more information. 

 

Congratulations to Computer Science HESTEC Poster Competition Winners!

As part of HESTEC and the Dr. Hashim Mahdi Memorial Science Symposium, students and their faculty advisors from across the College of Science and Engineering participated in a poster competition.  The posters showcased the exciting research throughout the college.

The poster judges for the Department of Computer Science, Dr. Laura Grabowski, Dr. Emmet Tomai, and Dr. Yang Liu, elected
the following winners for the Computer Science department HESTEC poster competition:

Undergraduates:

1st Place: "DNA Self-Assembly Design Software" by Sergio Gonzalez and Michael Baldwin, Faculty Advisor: Dr. Robert Schweller

2nd Place: "Genetic Sequence Editor - Sequence Alignment Feature" by Jacqueline Barreiro, Faculty Advisor: Dr. Andres Figueroa, Dr. Joanne Rampersad-Ammons

3rd Place: "Medical Records Evaluation" by Brad Estep, Faculty Advisor: Dr. John Abraham

Graduate student departmental champion:

"Protein 3D Structure Alignment and Protein Search" by Zaixin Lu and Bin Fu

The department congratulates these students for their outstanding work, and all the students who participated in this exciting event.

 

Congratulations to Pearl Brazier and Artem Chebotko

The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT)  Academic Alliance Seed Fund, sponsored by MICROSOFT Research, has recently awarded Pearl Brazier and Artem Chebotko in the Computer Science Department $15,000 to fund a proposal “Dancing Robots Introduction to Computer Science” which we will use to enhance CSCI 1360 to attract Women to the Computer Science/ Computer Engineering Degree. We plan to offer this version of the course during Spring 2010 and Summer 2010.  UTPA was one of three to receive this award.  Read more about their award on the NCWIT website!

PRESS RELEASE
For Release: Friday, Sept. 25, 2009

Introductory computer science concepts course to feature dancing robots in spring 2010

EDINBURG, Texas – Starting in spring 2010, students at The University of Texas-Pan American will get a chance to build their own mobile robots during a special section of an introduction to computer science course, which will be offered primarily to females and non-computer science majors.
 
The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) recently awarded Professor Pearl Brazier, director of the Computer Engineering Program and undergraduate coordinator for computer science, and Dr. Artem Chebotko, assistant professor in computer science, $15,000 to fund a proposal titled “Dancing Robots Introduction to Computer Science.” The award, which will provide funds for a year, will redesign the current “CSCI 1360 Intro to Computer Science Concepts” course offered at UTPA.
 
“We want to attract more women to computer science and programming projects, which tend to be more male oriented,” Brazier said.
 
UTPA was one of three Round 5 winners of the NCWIT Academic Alliance Seed Fund, which is funded by Microsoft Research, to provide U.S. academic institutions with start-up funds to develop and implement initiatives for recruiting and retaining women in computer science and information technology fields of study. Other winners included The University of Pennsylvania and Waukesha County Technical College.
 
The CSCI 1360 course is currently targeted to students without prior programming experience who may be interested in computer science. With the course redesign Brazier and Chebotko are hoping to attract more women and underrepresented groups into considering a degree in computer science and/or computer engineering.
 
The “Dancing Robots Introduction to Computer Science” concept will offer UTPA students the chance to work with LEGO® Mindstorms robots while learning programming concepts, teamwork, and computing in the context of real-world problems.
 
“They say a picture is worth a thousand words and hence the visual aspect of the programming experience,” Brazier said. “I believe the robots will give an immediate visual feedback on the program and will enhance the learning environment for the students.”
 
The course will also fulfill the computer literacy general education requirement Brazier said. Brazier and Chebotko will recruit 20 students to participate in the course with preference given to women and underrepresented groups. Another course will be offered in the summer of 2010.
 
In addition, computer science undergraduate students will be hired and volunteer student mentors will be recruited from the UTPA Association for Computing Machinery student chapter to assist in the course and provide a peer development environment.
 
For more information and to register for the course, contact Brazier at 956/381-3455 or by e-mail at brazier@utpa.edu.
 

Dr. Bin Fu Won the Prestigious NSF CAREER Award. Congratulations!

Dr. Bin Fu’s winning proposal is “CAREER: Theories and Applications of Efficient Separator and Randomization”, 2009 April 1 to 2014 March 31, with $409157.  

Dr. Chen and Dr. Fu at the luncheon	Dr. Wendy Lawrence-Fowler and Dr. Bin Fu

NSF states that “The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such activities should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.”

The goal of Dr. Fu's project is to study efficient separator and randomization theories and technologies with applications to algorithm design. Separator and randomization are basic tools of designing algorithms for many applications problems. A separator is often used to decompose a difficult computational problem into smaller and easier ones, and then to solve the problem with a divide and conquer strategy. Randomization is widely used to speed up computation by sampling a small number of cases from a large number of possibilities. In order to attack challenging computational problems, such as protein 3D structure prediction, more efficient decomposition methods are expected to be developed. His project unifies the two approaches of separators and randomization because of their close connection. This unified approach helps the development of sublinear time algorithms, which are usually based on random sampling.  

The decomposition methods are studied from low dimensional geometric spaces to high dimensional spaces and to general graphs and to algebraic computation. Proving the existence of a separator will get new insights into combinatorial nature of a given problem. Finding a separator efficiently is also an interesting algorithmic problem itself and often uses randomized methods. On the other hand, the research on complexity theory related to randomness is a part of his project, which includes the research about some lower bounds for randomization methods and the limitation of derandomization. A potential application of separator theory is protein folding prediction. A more efficient decomposition method will bring faster algorithm for this significant problem in science. As his project combines decomposition with randomization, the results of the research make new contributions to the core area of computation theory and discover applications in the field of bioinformatics. Education is an integral part of his project. Minority graduate students and female graduate students are involved in the protein 3D structure related algorithm design and web-server implementation. A randomized computation course for both undergraduate and graduate students is developed.  

Dr. Bin Fu received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1998. He also studied at Princeton University. He joined the UTPA faculty in Fall 2006.  Prior to that, he completed three and a half years of teaching as an Assistant Professor at the University of New Orleans and five years of teaching as a Lecturer at the Beijing Computer Institute. 

Dr. Bin Fu is a scholar in several areas of computer science including bioinformatics (protein folding), algorithms (width-bounded separator theory, Rocchio's relevance feedback algorithm analysis, and Abelian group factorization), complexity theory, and molecular computing. He has made significant contributions to the above areas of computer science. 

Dr. Fu has pioneered and established the width-bound geometric separator theory and its applications in a variety of areas including approximation algorithms, bioinformatics, etc. This theory is profoundly different from the existing well-known separator theories and is more precise and robust in dealing a large array of algorithm design problems.  

For the first time since early 1970s, he has, along with Dr. Zhixiang Chen, given the first rigorous analysis about Rocchio’s similarity-based relevance feed back algorithm, the most popular, fundamental query reformation algorithms in information retrieval. Thus, the long standing challenging problem of complexity analysis of this fundamental algorithm is settled.  

His research group’s protein search software outperforms the best software in the area. The service provided by their software is open for public access via his UTPA web site.  

His research with his collaborators on randomized and approximation algorithm design and analysis has led to a number of significant discoveries, including the sublinear time randomized algorithm to find separators in high dimensional space and inapproximability results for several bioinformatics problems such exemplar break point problem.  

His major scientific contributions before joining UTPA include: (1) The separation of EXP from P_{n^{1-\epsilon}(SPARE). This is a breakthrough in the area of computational complexity. He used Kolmogorov complexity to masterfully carry out the need complex analysis. (2) The settlement of a challenging open problem in structural complexity theory: NC^{PL}_{1} = PL and NC^{PP}_{1} = PP. This result leads to improvement on a series of results about probabilistic complexity classes. (3) The separation of NE from P_{n^{o(1)}-T}(NP). (4) He has also made contributions to DNA computing in his Ph.D. dissertation at Yale University.  

     

Who we are

The Department of Computer Science is a part of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas - Pan American. We are located in Edinburg, Texas, close to South Padre Island and Mexico. The University of Texas - Pan American is a component of the University of Texas System with an enrollment of around 18,000 students.

The Department of Computer Science offers an CAC/ABET accredited Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (BSCS) degree with a major in computer science. The Department of Computer Science offers a joint Computer Engineering Degree with the Electrical Engineering Department. A Bachelor of Science (BS) degree with a major in Computer Science with a required minor field is also offered. The BS degree is not accredited by CAC/ABET.  The Department also offers an 18-hour minor in computer science. 

The department offers Master's degrees in Computer Science and Information Technology.

Please come by the department offices on the third floor of the Engineering building and discuss the opportunity of studying Computer Science with our department.