Dean's Update, July 2010
MASTERS THESES
July saw the successful defense of two Master's theses, both from MSIT students. Chad Teat presented his thesis entitled "An Analysis of the effects of Grid Computing and Modern Cryptanalysis on Common Cryptosystems: MD5, SHA1, NT Hash". The thesis was supervised by Dr Svetlana Peltsverger. Minzhe (Michael) Guo defended his thesis "Vulnerability Categorization Based on Bayesian Network". His work was supervised by Dr Andy Wang. Congratulations both to Chad and Michael and to their respective supervisors.
EXTERNAL GRANTS
A number of members of CSE received news in July on successful grant applications.
Dr Jon Preston was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for $147K. The grant is entitled "Using a Virtual Gaming Environment in Strength of Materials: Increasing Access and Improving Learning Effectiveness". It is a joint grant with Dr Wasim Barham from the Division of Engineering and Dr Jim Werner from the Department of English, Technical Communication and Media Arts. The grant will be administered out of the Center for Advanced Gaming and Media Arts.
The National Science Foundation also awarded a grant of $50,000 to Dr Andy Wang. The grant is entitled "Collaborative Project: Teaching Cryptography through Hand-on Learning and Case Studies" and will be administered through the Center of Information Security Education.
The final grant to report on is for our newest faculty member Dr Sarah North. As I reported last month, Dr North joined the Department of Information Technology. Dr North applied for a grant while she was at her previous employer but the granting agency has allowed her to take her grant with her to SPSU. The grant is from the National Security Agency and is worth $73,000. It is entitled "Advancing Information Assurance and Cyber Security: A Collaborative Capacity Building Approach". The grant will be held jointly with Dr Max North, Dr Andy Wang and Dr Dan Lo, and it will be administered through the Center for Information Security Education.
Congratulations to all.
GEEK SQUAD SUMMER CAMP
As has become customary, CSE again hosted about 180 Girl Scouts in the Geek Squad Summer Camp. The camp teaches middle school girls a range of computing related skills, including digital photography and video, PC and MAC basics, and Internet communication. The camp, which is run in collaboration with Best Buy's Geek Squad, attracted good publicity on Fox 5 Good Day Atlanta (http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/dpp/good_day_xtra/road_warrior/Road-Warrior:-Empowering-Girls-20100727-gda-sd) and in the Atlanta Journal Constitution (http://www.ajc.com/news/cobb/geek-camp-for-girls-579746.html).
I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Bob Brown for coordinating this event from the SPSU end and our new faculty member Dr Jeff Chastine and our existing faculty members Professor Briana Morrison and Professor Barbara Bernal for putting on evening activities for the camp participants.
NEW WebBSIT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
As some of you may know, one of the programs offered out of CSE is the WebBSIT. The WebBSIT is a fully on-line undergraduate degree in Information Technology that is offered jointly by Armstrong Atlantic, Clayton State, Columbus State, Georgia Southern and SPSU. Further information about the program is available at www.gawebbsit.org.
The program, which is entirely self-funding, is managed by an executive director and I am pleased to announce that Ms Angela Leverett will join the program as its new executive director on August 2. Ms Leverett comes to us from Georgia Southern, where she gained considerable experience working on the WebMBA, a similar consortial program. Please join me in welcoming Ms Leverett to CSE.
AND FINALLY ...
If you see something in this update that you want to comment on, please send me an email at hreichge@spsu.edu or call me on 678-915-7399. Also, if you know of somebody who might be interested in receiving the Dean's updates, please ask them to send me an email. We will gladly add them to our mailing list. Finally, if you prefer not to receive the Dean's updates, please let me know as well.
Han Reichgelt
Dean, School of Computing and Software Engineering