Dr.Yousef Saad

I will begin this note by congratulating two of our best faculty members. Nikos Papanikolopoulos received the department "creative faculty award". This was an award established last year by Dean H. Ted Davis to promote creativity in research and teaching in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Nikos and his research were featured in our previous issue of Soundbyte. Mats Per Erik Heimdahl received the McKnight Land Grant professorship one of the most prestigious awards given by the University. As a matter of fact, the department has received only two such awards since its inception in 1971. The previous one, as you may have guessed, went to Nikos Papanikolopoulos (in 1995). Congratulations to Nikos and Mats, not only for these excellent awards, but also for being outstanding researchers as well as ideal citizens of the department!

I would like next to update our readers about the situation with our enrollments. As I entered my office, February 26th, 1999, Liz Freppert, my secretary, greeted me with this remark: "Anand Tripathi's class (internet programming) has filled up to 110 and has a waiting list of 40 - and this is only the second day of registration!" More recently the waiting list for this same class passed the 100 mark -- the first time ever that this has happened. The situation is similar with many of our classes. What is surprising in addition to the lengths of the waiting lists is that this is happening so early in the registration period. Another important problem -- which differentiates us from other departments -- is that our classes tend to be large at all levels across the board. Some of our graduate (8xxx) classes have enrollments of 80 or 100 students.

Enrollments have had a healthy growth in the last few years but the continuation and vigor of this trend is alarming because the department, whose size of 25 faculty members is relatively modest, cannot absorb a growth of this nature. Large classes can have a damaging impact and can erode the gains made by the department in recent years. They affect morale of faculty and reduce our competitiveness in recruiting. They lead to lower quality education, and result in lower quality research because the time that is left available for research for faculty and teaching assistants decreases. For all these reasons, the department as a whole has moved aggressively with a number of initiatives to prevent class enrollments from growing out of control. We have raised the GPA requirement to enter our program from 2.5 to 2.7. This is one of the highest GPA requirements in the college. This will start to have an effect two years after it is instituted. Many of the students in our classes are not computer science majors, so we have also decided to restrict admission to some classes for non-majors. The goal is to keep the size of the upper division classes under 60 students.

On a different front I am happy to report that we are making excellent progress in recruiting. This year started out on a pessimistic note. The communications of the ACM had 180 postings in their November 1998 issue (versus 140 for November 1997) and 255 postings in December 1998 (versus 180 for December 1997). Most of these were multiple postings. It seemed that all of a sudden all colleges took notice of the shortage of workers in Information Technology. Students too became aware of it, and this increased the demand for teachers.

Read on for additional updates, research profiles, and for information on upcoming events and activities. I take this opportunity to remind everyone in particular about our next open house, which will take place on October 27th, 1999.