Time seems to fly by so quickly when one is either having a lot of fun or is terribly swamped. I believe that this past year we had some of both.

Last year was certainly eventful, given the spectacular collapse of the dot-com industry, the events of September 11 and the ensuing war, and the effects of these on an already slowing economy. Fortunately, our department weathered this turmoil and fared extremely well.

First of all, with the strong support of President Yudof and Dean Davis, our department received ten new faculty positions to expand our program. These new positions, together with the Qwest Endowed Chair and several other positions associated with the Digital Technology Center, will give great new impetus to our program. We are devoting considerable effort towards recruiting the brightest and the best faculty members to fill these positions.

Last October, we held a very successful and well-attended Open House and Technology Forum. Professor Arvind from MIT received our Distinguished Alumnus Award and gave a very well-received speech at the award luncheon. Dr. William Pulleyblank from IBM delivered the keynote address. More highlights and pictures of the event can be found elsewhere in this newsletter.

Last year, our alumni donations reached an all time high, topped by a donation of $1.5 million from Linda and Ted Johnson to establish a Digital Design Consortium which will include our department and the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Ted Johnson is the vice president of Microsoft's Business Tools Division. (Please see the article on page 3.) The Consortium will be housed within the Digital Technology Center, and our computer graphics faculty will be among the key players in this new effort.

We also concluded a very successful accreditation visit by ABET for our Computer Engineering program last December. Student enrollment in our Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs continues to grow at a very rapid rate, and we currently are, by far, the largest program in the college. Despite this tremendous growth, student evaluations for our undergraduate classes have continued to improve, and reached an all-time high this past year. Our faculty has also put in a lot of effort in revising the undergraduate curriculum this past year, and will continue this effort this year.

Our faculty members continue to win highly-competitive, external research grants. Our research expenditures last year exceeded $4.5M--an all-time high. Furthermore, Professor Vipin Kumar of our department led a multi-university effort which included several of our faculty members (Ravi Janardan, George Karypis, Jon Weissman, Baoquan Chen, and Shashi Shekhar) as well as faculty members from other IT departments in a successful effort to renew the Army High Performance Computing Research Center. The 5-year, $22.5 million contract (with a further 3-year, $13.5 million option) will enable the center to focus on a variety of interdisciplinary computational science research topics of interest to the Army, including chemical and biological defense, energetic materials, nanotechnology, signature modeling, and virtual computing environments for future combat systems. The center will also provide faculty and students with access to state-of-the-art high performance computing resources such as a CRAY T3E-1200 and IBM RS6000s.

I am happy to share these success stories with you, and would also like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks to you for your strong support over the past year. The faculty join me in wishing you a very Happy New Year!

-Pen-Chung Yew