Department News

The CIS Faculty and Teaching Staff held an offsite retreat on August 18, 2008 . Long-range planning, strategic discussions, and enhancements to departmental services, teaching, and research were covered.

The "XO Expo" will be held at the McWane Center on August 23rd. Dr. Jeff Gray is one of the event speakers, discussing technology education in Alabama.

Gary Warner, the UAB CIS Director of Computer Forensics, was recently featured on the UAB Media Relations site. He demonstrates a new e-mail spam technique that attempts to lure the public to download malicious software.

The 2009 AOSD conference will be organized by two SoftCom members. Dr. Jeff Gray is serving as Organizing Chair and PhD student Robert Tairas is the webmaster for the conference and also the primary AOSD website.

The CIS Department concluded 7 weeks of summer camps for students in 5th-12th grades, which brought to the UAB campus students from 5 states and 2 countries.

Vetria Bryd and Ritu Arora, both CIS Ph.D. candidates, have been awarded scholarships to attend the 2008 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference.

On May 29-30, the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) organized the first "Outreach Roadshow Worskhop" at Google from support by the National Science Foundation.

Enis Afgan, a student in the CIS CCL lab, was selected to participate in the 2008 IPDPS TCPP Ph.D. Forum, the IEEE's flagship conference in parallel computation.

Robert Smyly, a student at Mountain Brook High School, was awarded the Intel Excellence in Computer Science Award at the Central Alabama Regional Science Fair on March 8th, 2008.

Lin Yang and Yu Sun recently won awards at UAB Graduate Research Days, held February 28, 2008.

On February 29th, the UAB ACM and the CIS department hosted CIS Jeopardy. This event is a game show style contest in which three teams of students and faculty compete against each other by answering computer science trivia questions.

Four CIS students presented their research at the ACM MidSoutheast Conference in Gatlinburg, TN. Among these participants, two student presentations were selected to win top awards for their categories. This success also marks the fifth year in a row that a UAB CIS undergraduate placed in the top three for their category.

On October 13th the UAB CIS Competitive Programming teams placed 1st and 3rd at their contest site for the ACM International Computer Programming Competition, beating all other schools in Alabama and Mississippi and producing UAB's best-ever finish in the Southeast region overall.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded the Computer and Information Sciences department a three year research grant that will support the development of a comprehensive data and information management environment for microarray image analysis and microarray data mining from multi-modalities such as images and literatures.