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CS Faculty Meeting

CS Faculty Meeting. Agenda: Announcements, new initiatives, and recent good news: Presentation by Denis Dean, Head GIS Presentation by Robert Robb, AVP Research Presentation by Ed Esposito, ECS Presentation by Chris Davis, President of CSGS Survey of Grad Students

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CS Faculty Meeting

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  1. CS Faculty Meeting • Agenda: • Announcements, new initiatives, and recent good news: • Presentation by Denis Dean, Head GIS • Presentation by Robert Robb, AVP Research • Presentation by Ed Esposito, ECS • Presentation by Chris Davis, President of CSGS • Survey of Grad Students • Preliminary discussion on the T/T CS teaching load policy

  2. Good News • Kevin: new NSF grant • Murat: new NIH grant jointly with Vanderbilt U • Murat’s research on Facebook receives coverage by popular media • University received 16.8 Million donation as part of the Tier One initiative • Family news: Jason Jue: father of a new baby boy

  3. Teaching Load Policy Objective:

  4. Senior Design Pre-requisite Issue • CS 4485 Computer Science Project(4 semester hours) This course is intended to complement theory and to provide an in-depth, hands-on experience in all aspects of a software development project. Students will work in teams on projects of interest to industry and will be involved in specifying the problem and its solution, designing and analyzing the solution, developing the software architecture, along with implementation and testing plans. The deliverables will include reports that document these steps as well as a final project report and a user manual of the developed system. Teams will also make presentations during the class as well as demonstrate their software. Prerequisite: CS/SE 3345, CE/CS/SE 3354, at least three CS 43XX classes including at least one elective. (4-0) S

  5. Enrollment Stats (ca. 8/21)

  6. Views on Future Directions of the CS Department Gopal Gupta

  7. CS@UT: Special Challenges • We are a large department • A large BS program (700 students) • A large MS program (450 students) • A large Ph.D. program (150 students) • We have a special location • Surrounded by high-tech industry second only to silicon valley • We have unique challenges • Maintain excellence in all 3 programs • Serve the surrounding high-tech industry • We need to innovate and lead in every aspect

  8. BS Program • Goal: • Be the best program at a public univ. in Texas • Achieved: when top N. Texas students prefer to go to UTD rather than to UT Austin • Steps to achieve the goal: • Ensure that students can program well by the time they finish the CS 1-2 sequence • Tutoring program already in place: expand it • Strengthen the senior design course: • Participate in Dean Spong’s funded project initiative • Recruit industry people to act as mentors to senior design teams • Start a mentoring program for BS students

  9. Graduate Programs • Recognize that we have two types of graduate populations: • Ph.D./MS students (interested in knowledge for the sake of knowledge) • Professional M.S. students (interested in knowledge for the sake of money) • The classes for these two populations need to be separate • Professional MS students tend to negatively affect the learning experience of Ph.D. students • Ties nicely to the teaching load policy (see later) • Allows us to drop admission standards for M.S. students a notch to: • increase our numbers (to increase university revenues) • fulfill industry needs

  10. Teaching Load Policy • Ideal teaching load: • T/T: 2+1 (includes 1 Ph.D. level course) if graduating 0.5 Ph.D. student per year • SLs: 3+3 with prof. development & service • Issues: • more research oriented courses for Ph.D. students (+) • difficult to fill seminar classes as Ph.D. students are not required to take many organized classes (-) • May make it difficult to cover classes, unless MS classes become large (-)

  11. Student Organizations • Aspire to have strong student organizations • Vital to the health of the department • Student organizations already exist: • SACM very active • CS GSA dormant, but being revived • Student presidents of these two organization will sit in faculty meetings • The two presidents will serve as two way communication channel between faculty and the two student populations (undergrad and grad) • Strong student organizations and their close interaction with faculty will help in developing a feeling of community.

  12. Invest Efforts in Fundraising • Writing more/varied grant proposals: • Focus on interdisciplinary research • Incentive program to be announced soon including funds to travel to Washington • Non-traditional programs (ADVANCE, IGERT, GK-12) • Set up a program to provide internal feedbacks (We need to increase our success rate) • Entrepreneurial efforts (next slide) • Teach certificate courses • Learn from business school • Courses on: i-Phone programing, Semantic web, o-o design, IA • Set up high-school summer camps (plans under way) • Raise funds from cos that hire our co-ops • Local companies derive significant economic benefit • Ask them to contribute; Need to work with Jerry Alexander

  13. Encourage Entrepreneurship • North Texas has ingredients similar to Silicon Valley: • Large no. of high-tech companies • A Univ. (UTD) with a large CS dept • (Now) avenues for raising capital [ETF] • No reason why we can’t be just as successful as Stanford! • Need to inculcate a culture of entrepreneurship among our students (with faculty helping them) • Can also be a source of research funding: • Texas ETF is expressly designed to bring University technology to the marketplace

  14. Faculty Hiring • Upper administration’s plan is to not grow CS further significantly • However, some strategic areas need to be expanded upon with senior hires • The undergraduate degree hours have increased by about 5% (senior design)  5% increase in faculty size • So perhaps 4-5 hires in the next few years to compensate for losses and new needs

  15. Towards Tier I Need to work on all fronts: Continue our quest towards excellence in research/teaching (quality vs quantity) Incentive program for publishing in top conferences Continue our quest to become the best BS CS/SE program in a public university in Texas Separate the professional MS program from the Ph.D. program; increase number of MS students Invest effort in fundraising through all means available (federal, state, industry, courses, camps) Encourage entrepreneurship among students Build a strong feeling of community within the department Demonstrate leadership in everything we do CONSTANTLY KEEP REINVENTING OURSELVES

  16. What is needed: More ideas to reinvent ourselves: I’ll get together with each one of you in the near future to hear your ideas Volunteers: To implement some of these ideas A half day retreat in September to chalk up department’s strategic plan

  17. Committee Reports a. Bylaws committee b. Equipment Committee     c. Ph.D. Committee     d. Search Committee     e. Grad Curriculum Committee     f. UG Curriculum Committee     g. Annual Review Committee     h. Scholarship Committee     i. Grad Admissions Committee     j. Colloquium Committee     k. Publicity Committee     l. TA selection committee     m. TA Assignment committee n. Library Committee

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