As we enter this new millennium, I cannot help but reflect with great pride on what we have accomplished as a department over the past ten years, and I look forward with great enthusiasm to what we can achieve during the next ten years in the exciting and explosive field of information technology (IT).

The numbers tell a lot about our fantastic success story. Ten years ago, our undergraduate enrollment was only 300, our annual research expenditure was approximately $700,000, and people were wondering why any sensible person would buy an outrageously expensive personal computer for kids to play video games on at home. Today, our enrollment has more than doubled to 620, our department has the highest GPA entrance requirement in the Institute of Technology (tied with Chemical Engineering and Materials Science), our annual research expenditure has more than sextupled to slightly more than $4M this year, and the Internet has made a personal computer in every home a necessity. More than half of the 26 faculty members have been recruited to the department in the last ten years. They brought a new vitality and fresh perspective to the department with five of them receiving prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Awards, one receiving a Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering, and four receiving the University's McKnight Land-Grant Professorship awards. Our faculty members have appeared on national TV, are frequently interviewed by news media to provide latest IT information, chair major technical conferences, and have even started new IT companies. Information technology has affected almost every aspect of our daily life, and there is definitely a sense of excitement in the department that we are at the forefront of this new revolution.

I am deeply honored to have been given the opportunity to lead this department into the new millennium, and I feel compelled to maintain the momentum of our success. We are deeply committed to raising the national ranking of our department. In this pursuit, "quality" is key to our ultimate success. We will continue to recruit high quality faculty members and graduate students to our department. We are in the process of further increasing the quality of our research activities by revising our upper division and graduate level curriculum, improving the process of our Ph.D. qualifying examination, and expanding our Cray Distinguished Lecture Series and our weekly departmental colloquia to invite internationally renowned researchers to our department. We will further improve the quality of our teaching by encouraging faculty members to participate in various teaching programs in the University and of our student advising by actively involving our departmental student organizations such as the local ACM Chapter and the Computer Science Graduate Student Association. We will increase our interaction with industry. Our new industrial partners program will encourage research alliances with industry to leverage our research enterprise, to assist with the recruitment of our graduates, and to form a closer, long-term relationship with the IT industries within the state and nationwide. We want to reach out to more of our alumni. We thank them for their strong support over the years, and we would appreciate their continued support in the future. On October 19, 2001, we will hold our biennial departmental Open House --the first of this millennium! We hope more alumni will come back and join us this year. More details of the new industrial partners program and the Open House can be found on pages 7 and 8 of this newsletter, or by visiting our departmental web site.

We are very encouraged this year that the Dean's office and University administration have made a significant commitment to the growth of our department by including 17 new faculty positions (thereby expanding the total student enrollment by 50% -- to around 900) in the University's biennial budget request to the state legislature. A new building for the department is also included in the University's capital spending plan in the next few years. It remains to be seen how these new initiatives will be received by the state legislature. These new commitments from the college and the University have certainly boosted morale and excitement in our department. We are encouraging our alumni and industrial partners to support the passage of this request by faxing or emailing your state representatives. Please visit the web site for additional information.

I feel strongly that with so many dedicated faculty members, department staff, alumni and industrial partners, the next ten years will be the best yet for our department.

-Pen-Chung Yew