Computer Science and Engineering Holds Second Open House

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering held its second open house on Wednesday, October 27, 1999. More than 200 people attended the event, including Dr. Christine Maziar, U of M Vice President of Research and Dean of the Graduate School; Ted Johnson, CTO of Visio; and Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy, Assistant Director, Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation.

Exhibits

Several companies with close ties to the department came to demo products and meet with faculty and researchers. Companies represented were Honeywell Technology Center, IBM, Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Imation, talentsoft.com, pacificnet.com, SuperPC, Unisys, West Group , Vallon and DataCard. In addition, faculty members and graduate students participated in a poster session. Research topics included: Formal Modeling in Critical Transportation Systems (Heimdahl); Specification-Based Prototyping of Critical Systems (Heimdahl); High Performance Geographic Information Systems (Shekhar); Error Analysis of Speech Recognition Data (Boley); Mining Legal Documents (Boley); Agassiz Project (Yew); Graph Partitioning & Applications (Kumar/Karypis); Data Mining Algorithms & Applications (Kumar/Karypis); Javiz Project (Yew); GroupLens (Konstan/ Riedl); Video-Based Transportation Applica-tions (Papanikolopoulos); Internet Mobile Agents (Tripathi); and, Ajanta - A System for Mobile Agent Programming (Tripathi).

Yousef Saad,Ruzena Bajcsy,& Christine,Maziar Afternoon Speaker Dr. Ruzena Bajcsy, Assistant Director, Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, National Science Foundation, spoke to the CS&E Women's Group at lunch and to an audience in the afternoon. Her afternoon presentation was titled "IT2: An Information Technology Initiative for the Twenty-first Century, NSF Plans for Implementation." Dr. Bajcsy divided her presentation into two parts. In the first part, she explained the IT2 Initiative in detail, elaborating on the scientific content of the program, posing some open questions, and outlining the past NSF plans to pursue to achieve the program goals. In the second part of the presentation, Dr. Bajcsy discussed the identity of computer science as a scientific discipline and its relationship to other physical sciences. She also focused on the information science of computer science and what lessons can be derived from other disciplines with respect to the representation of information contents. Bajcsy's lecture was followed by 30 minutes of intensive discussion.

Tours

Systems staff were on hand to answer questions during the self-guided tours. Tours included a look at the PC Classroom, using Windows NT and Linux; the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) student chapter office; the Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) Practice Lab, a joint venture between the department and Cisco Systems to assist employees of local industry to obtain Cisco certification; and the NSF-funded undergraduate robotics and visualization lab. The first floor tour consisted of a stop at the offices of the Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, where a demonstration of the Power Wall was given; the main department computer room; and a workstation classroom using UNIX workstations from Sun Microsystems.

Reception and Dinner

A reception and dinner were held at the Radisson Hotel Metrodome following the tours. After dinner, Michael Christenson, Stageberg Beyer Sachs, Inc., Architects/Planners, spoke briefly on plans for the Digital Technology Center to be housed in Walter Library. Renovation is currently underway, with a projected completion date of Fall 2001. Some faculty and researchers from the department will be housed in the Digital Technology Center. Dean H. Ted Davis, Institute of Technology, introduced the keynote speaker, Ted Johnson, co-founder, executive vice president and chief technology officer of Visio Corporation. Mr. Johnson spoke about his life, his education in architectural design received at the University of Minnesota, and experiences with entrepreneurial enterprises, including Visio Corporation.

Distinguished Alumnus Award

The day's activities concluded with the presentation of the first Computer Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumnus Award, presented to Ted Johnson by H. Ted Davis in recognition of Johnson's innovations in technical diagramming software, and bringing them to practice as founding Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Visio Corporation.