November 2009 - College of Engineering and Computing ...

co m p u ter science
and engineering
message
from the
chair
Michael Huhns
It used to be said that the hallmark of a
great university was a great library, and
rightly so. Scholarship – that is, research
and education – depends on information,
and the library was the place to find it.
Today, however, students get their information
via the Internet, the World
Wide Web, and Google. The libraries of the
world are now online and accessible from
wherever you have a laptop or an iPhone.
Bandwidth, computer access, and a good
search engine have now replaced physical
libraries as the necessity for scholarship.
Scholarship requires not only the ability
to access existing information, but also the
ability to create new information from old.
Computing has become essential for creating
new information. This is true in all disciplines
and across the entire spectrum of
modern science. For example, mapping genomes
and determining the proteins they
produce are more computational problems
than biological problems; creating many
Hollywood movies cannot be done without
computer graphics and animation; decoding
ancient languages from fragments
of text scratched onto stone tablets is more
a problem of information theory than of
linguistics; and discovering new particles
in nuclear physics requires computers to
trace and sort among the nuclear interactions
occurring in a supercollider.
Computing involves more than just
support for other scientific disciplines. At
an engineering level, computers are controlling
the infrastructure of the world,
from the distribution of water and electricity,
to the management of transportation
systems and global commerce. At a
scientific level, computing is an important
area of research in its own right, with efforts
underway to discover the scientific
principles of information, computation,
and knowledge.
Computer science and computer engineering
now are becoming the hallmarks
of a great university. Your Department
CSE CHAIr continued on page 5
summer institute marks a first
For the first time in more than a decade, an
Advanced Placement Computer Science
summer institute was held in South Carolina
to increase the number of high school
teachers with the proper credentials to teach
AP computer science in the state.
Teaching for the institute was done
jointly by Dr. Duncan Buell, Department
of Computer Science and Engineering,
and richard de Paulo, a College-Boardendorsed
consultant from Chesapeake,
Virginia (and the only endorsed consultant
in the southeast region). Fifteen teachers
participated and were registered for graduate
credit for the EDSE 773 course offered by
the USC College of Education. There was
some early work and some late work, but
the primary focus was an intense week on
campus July 13-17.
The fifteen participating teachers came
from different high schools and ten different
South Carolina districts, mostly in the
Midlands and Greenville-Spartanburg, with
one teacher coming all the way from Connecticut.
Normally, funding for AP summer
institutes in South Carolina comes from the
State Department of Education. In these
trying budget times, no state funds were
The Department of Computer Science and
Engineering played a part in two Palmetto
Pillar Awards from the Information Technology
Council and the Midlands Chamber
of Commerce. In the Open Source category,
the award was won by the committee that
organized the Palmetto Open Source Software
Conference (POSSCON), held in
summer 2008 and April 2009, and scheduled
for April 2010. POSSCON had
more than 200 attendees this past April,
and the 2010 conference, being organized
again with departmental involvement on
the committee, will be held in April at the
Columbia Convention Center.
In the Student Achievement category,
Computer Science major
Gary Fredericks won for software
he had written that assists
in reading foreign language
PAGE 6 • noVEMBEr 2009 • momentum • college of engineering and computing
available, but the Consortium for Enterprise
Systems Management stepped in to provide
the funding for the institute. This made it
possible for the teachers to attend, get both
graduate credit and College Board endorsement,
and secure housing in the USC West
Quad, for only a nominal charge.
The department has already been contacted
by the State Department of Education
about repeating the institute in summer
2010 as part of increasing access by South
Carolina students to advanced and rigorous
computer science classes. F
department plays role in
two it awards
documents. His program does an automatic
translation and lookup of words to speed his
reading of foreign texts. Faculty members
who have taught Gary are not surprised at
his winning this award; he is very creative
and dedicated, and he has been involved in
several activities beyond the classroom. F