New Edition to CS Faculty
The Department of Computer Science is please to announce the appointment of Dr. Rong Zheng as an Assistant Professor starting this Fall.  The Department plans to add two to three new professors in this academic year.

Dr. Rong Zheng received her Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2004. She earned her M.E. and B.E. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University, China.  Zheng's research interests span networking and embedded systems, in particular energy-efficient architecture in wireless LAN networks and sensor networks, localized algorithms in large-scale distributed systems, hybrid simulation tools for computer networks. Her work will mainly consist of a theoretical aspect namely algorithms and performance modeling; and a system aspect, i. e., protocol design and system integration.>

Dr. Zheng will be teaching a new Computer Science graduate course “Wireless Network and Mobile Computing” this Fall.  In her personal life Dr. Zheng enjoys reading, table tennis, skiing and sampling food from all over the world.

Faculty News
Congratulations to >Dr. Rakesh Verma on his promotion to full professor.  Dr. Verma joined the Department in 1989 after receiving his Ph. D. degree in Computer Science from SUNY Stony Brook.  His research interests are Artificial Intelligence and Logic in Computer Science.

Grants Highlights
Prof. Ioannis Pavlidis is the Principal Investigator of a newly awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) grant from the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS). The award is at the level of $640,169 for three years.  Dr. Pavlidis will collaborate with the Medical Usability Lab of >Columbia University (New York, NY) and the Physiology Lab of >Mayo Clinic (Rochester, MN) for the human experimentation aspects of the project. The research titled: "Interacting with Human Physiology" aims to add a new dimension in human-computer interaction (HCI).  The project aspires to use the abundant computing resources at home and the office in combination with novel sensing, algorithmic, and interface methods to enhance the user's experience and at the same time create a new preventive medicine paradigm.

Dr. Ioannis Kakadiaris and >Dr. Ravi-Chandar (UT, Austin) received an NSF collaborative research grant, "Physics-Based Modeling and Simulation for Post-Mastectomy Breast Reconstructive Surgery," in August of this year ($464,000). Breast cancer is the second most frequent cancer diagnosis among American women today, after skin cancer. Post-mastectomy breast reconstruction is the third most frequently performed reconstructive procedure, superseded only by tumor removal and hand surgery. Currently, there are no methods that would predict the outcome of the surgery. The psychological distress that accompanies a lump found in the breast and the subsequent mastectomy is compounded by the limitations of contemporary reconstructive procedures. Without a trusted reconstruction procedure, the specter of a disfiguring operation adds to the fear. The goal of this project is to develop a predictive methodology for post-mastectomy breast reconstructive surgery to replace the trial and error method currently practiced. Successful completion of this research has the potential to improve the quality of life for individuals recovering from post-mastectomy reconstruction operations. Other collaborators of the project are >Drs. >Mike Miller (Surgeon) and >Charles Patrick (Bioengineer) from the UT M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

Dr. Jaspal Subhlok received an NSF grant on “Automatic Performance Skeletons for Grid Computing” recently. Performance modeling is central to effective use of high performance computational resources. Performance skeletons represent a fast, innovative and accurate approach to estimating the performance of long running applications on diverse and unpredictable grid environments. Accurate performance estimation with this method typically takes only a few seconds of skeleton execution for applications that run for several hours. This 3-year $225,000 project is performing research to enable automatic construction of performance skeletons of resource intensive applications. The central challenge is that the performance skeleton must mimic application execution behavior, such as computation, memory and communication patterns in order to model application performance. The project is also developing a framework for resource selection in grid environments with performance skeletons.

Dr. Ricardo Vilalta received an NSF Collaborative Research grant on “A Statistical Learning Tool for the Analysis and Characterization of Mars Topography.” The $310,887 grant allows him to conduct joint research with >Dr. Tom Stepinski at the Lunar and Planetary Institute (LPI) of Houston, TX on Mars Topography.