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Suman Roychoudhury Doctoral Thesis Defense

Suman Roychoudhury successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled "Genaweave: a Generic Aspect Weaver Framework Based on Model-driven Program Transformation" on May 19, 2008. The thesis research was conducted under the direction of Dr. Jeff Gray, with supervisory committee members Dr. Puri Bangalore, Dr. Barrett Bryant, Dr. Marjan Mernik, Dr. Tony Skjellum, and Dr. Randy Smith.

(Posted: May 19, 2008)

Faizan Javed Doctoral Thesis Defense

Faizan Javed successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled "Techniques for Context-Free Grammar Induction and Applications" on December 5, 2007. The thesis research was conducted under the direction of Dr. Barrett Bryant, with supervisory committee members Dr. Jeff Gray, Dr. Elliot Lefkowitz, Dr. Marjan Mernik, and Dr. Alan Sprague.

(Posted: December 5, 2007)

Hui Wu Doctoral Thesis Defense

Hui Wu successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled "Grammar-Driven Generation of Domain-Specific Language Testing Tools Using an Aspect-Oriented Programming Approach" on October 29, 2007. The thesis research was conducted under the direction of Dr. Jeff Gray, with supervisory committee members Dr. Mikhail Auguston, Dr. Barrett Byrant, Dr. Marjan Mernik, Dr. Brian Toone, and Dr. Chengcui Zhang.

(Posted: October 29, 2007)

Yu Sun Competes in Regional Programming Competition

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.

UAB CIS fielded two teams at the contest site at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. Across the Southeast, seventy-six teams gathered from many institutions throughout the states of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

Through much hard work (and plenty of practicing beforehand), our teams had a very good showing: UAB ranked higher in this competition than any other institutions in Alabama and Mississippi, taking first and third places among these states. The UAB Hydras (Jeff Frees, Eric Frees, and Mike Stueve) attained 17th place in the Southeast, and the UAB Drakes (Walker Haddock, Yu Sun, and Yu Chang) attained 20th place. Also, Michael Phillips competed on an informal pickup team which placed first among such teams at the Mobile site.

(Posted: October 29, 2007)

Large Outreach Effort Funded by NSF

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has just announced funding in the amount of $1,080,000 over three years for a project entitled "UAB-Birmingham Consortium for Advanced Education in Computer Science." The purpose of this effort will be to create a high quality and engaging program that will introduce high school students to concepts in computer science and provide them with a mathematics foundation for IT-related education and careers. Specifically, the CIS Department will be using Alice to introduce fundamental concepts in programming using video games as a motivating context.

The investigators of this project are Dr. Michael Wyss (UAB CORD), Dr. Jeff Gray (Computer and Information Sciences). Dr. John Mayer (Mathematics), Dr. David Radford (Education), and Dr. Alan Shih (Mechanical Engineering).

(Posted: August 29, 2007)

New Softcom Members

Softcom welcomes new Ph.D. students Zekai Demirezen from Turkey and Yu Sun from China.

(Posted: August 22, 2007)

NSF Funds New Research Project in CIS Department

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a research grant (entitled "A Transformational Approach to Clone Refactoring") to the CIS Department in the amount of $239,953. This three year grant will support research into the analysis and refactoring of code clones, which presents a source of maintenance and evolution challenges.

The Principal Investigator on this grant will be Dr. Jeff Gray. Supporting Dr. Gray in this research will be Ph.D. student Robert Tairas. This work will be performed within the SoftCom laboratory.

More information about this grant is available on the NSF Website. An abstract of the research project is provided below.

(Posted: August 9, 2007)

Alex Liu Doctoral Thesis Defense

Shi-Hsi (Alex) Liu successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled "QoSPL: A Quality of Service-driven Software Product Line Engineering Framework for Design and Analysis of Component-based Distributed Real-time and Embedded Systems" on August 6, 2007. The thesis research was conducted under the direction of Dr. Barrett Bryant, with supervisory committee members Dr. Jeff Gray, Dr. Marjan Mernik, Dr. Rajeev Raje, and Dr. Chengcui Zhang.

(Posted: August 6, 2007)

Fox6 News Covers Middle School Summer Camp

Fox6 news reporter Sarah Verser visited the UAB CIS Department to investigate a story as part of her "What's Right with Our Schools" weekly feature. Sarah's story contains interviews with several middle school students. The theme of the story motivates the need for outreach in Alabama to increase the awareness and opportunities in computer science. Specifically, Sarah focused on the middle school summer camp and how Alice is being used as a fun way to teach computer science principles.

The CIS Department offers seven weeks of summer computing camps (five camps for high school students and two camps for middle school students). For more information on all summer camps, please visit the UAB CIS Summer Camps web page. Additional news coverage on the robotics camp for high school students was featured by NBC and ABC - hosting of videos pending permission from those news stations.

During the 7-week 2007 summer camp session, students from 4 different states (California, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama) came to UAB to participate in the camp sessions.

The supporters of this camp are the National Science Foundation, MedMined and ComFrame.

To view the news story at the Fox6 website, please click here.

(Posted: August 2, 2007)

Dr. Jeff Gray Featured in UAB Reporter

Jeff Gray was featured in the July 23, 2007 issue of the UAB Reporter. The article discusses Dr. Gray's recent CAREER award and his work in mentoring young students in computer science.

(Posted: August 1, 2007)

Yuehua Lin Doctoral Thesis Defense

Yuehua (Jane) Lin successfully defended her doctoral thesis entitled "A Model Transformation Approach to Automated Model Evolution" on July 6, 2007. The thesis research was conducted under the direction of Dr. Jeff Gray, with supervisory committee members Dr. Barrett Bryant, Dr. Aniruddha Gokhale, Dr. Marjan Mernik, and Dr. Chengcui Zhang.

(Posted: July 6, 2007)

Dr. Jeff Gray Wins NSF CAREER Award

Dr. Jeff Gray has been awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award, which is presented annually to a selected number of faculty members at universities across the nation. Since the inception of the CAREER award in 1995, Dr. Gray is the fourth faculty member at UAB to receive the award and the first within the CIS Department. Dr. Anthony Skjellum, Chair of the CIS Department, received the CAREER before joining UAB.

According to the National Science Foundation, CAREER awards support exceptionally promising faculty members who are committed to the integration of research and education. The award recognizes young faculty members who are most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.

This award is in recognition of Jeff's research in the area of model-driven engineering and his initiation of numerous activities that improve the awareness of computing in Alabama. The $400,000 grant will provide support for new lines of research as well as educational opportunities for students across the K-12, undergraduate, and post-graduate spectrum. More information about the specific proposed research and outreach activities is available at http://www.cis.uab.edu/gray. More information about the award.

(Posted: April 27, 2007)

CIS Papers Win IEEE Awards

On April 2, 2007, the IEEE Alabama Section announced the awards for the 2005-2006 Prize Paper Competition. Dr. Chengcui Zhang received both the first and second place awards with her papers "Spatio-Temporal Vehicle Tracking Using Unsupervised Learning-Based Segmentation and Object Tracking," published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, special issue on Robotic Technologies applied to Intelligent Transportation Systems, and "A Latent Semantic Indexing Based Method for Solving Multiple Instance Learning Problem in Region-based Image Retrieval," published in the IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM 2005). The latter paper was co-authored with Ph. D. Candidate Xin Chen. Dr. Barrett Bryant received the third place award for the paper "Transforming Business Process Models: Enabling Programming at a Higher Level," published in IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC 2005). This paper was co-authored by Ph. D. graduates Wei Zhao and Fei Cao.

(Posted: April 18, 2007)

Dr. Barrett Bryant Receives ACM Distinguished Service Award

Dr. Barrett Bryant was awarded the ACM SIGAPP (Special Interest Group on Applied Computing) Distinguished Service Award on March 14, 2007, at the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2007). This award is given annually to a SIGAPP member who has made significant contributions to the SIG over a period of many years. Dr. Bryant established the Programming Languages Track of SAC in 1994 and continues to co-chair this track. He served as Editor-in-Chief of Applied Computing Review from 1996-1999 and was SAC Program Chair in 1997, SAC Vice-Chair in 1998, and Chair of SAC in 1999 and 2000. From 1999-2001 he served as Chair of the SIGAPP Executive Committee and has served as SIGAPP Chair since 2003.

(Posted: April 16, 2007)

NPR Interview and Keynote Focuses on UAB CIS Outreach

On April 3, 2007, Dr. Jeff Gray was the keynote speaker for the Eighth Annual Colloquium on Information Technology, sponsored by Troy University. The keynote presentation was given at the Rosa Parks Museum Auditorium in Montgomery and entitled, "Automating Software Evolution through Model-Driven Engineering."

In support of Dr. Gray's lecture, Carolyn Hutcheson of Troy Public Radio interviewed him and Dr. Mehmet Sahinoglu (Eminent Scholar at Troy) about the colloquium. This interview was broadcast throughout Alabama, Florida, and Georgia on National Public Radio.

The interview provided an opportunity to discuss the state of computing education within Alabama and the opportunities that UAB CIS is offering to middle school and high school children.

The interview is available (with permission from WTSU) here.

(Posted: April 9, 2007)

Yuehua Lin Receives Dean's Award

Yuehua "Jane" Lin has been selected to receive the 2007 Dean's Award for Outstanding Graduate Student in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. The Dean's Award is given each Spring to a graduate student who exhibits outstanding scholastic achievement and leadership. Jane will be formally recognized as the recipient of this award at the Honors Convocation to be held on May 4th at the Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center.

Jane's research record of distinction includes 18 papers, including 3 book chapters, 6 journal papers, and 9 conference and workshop papers. She has served as a Research Assistant on both DARPA and NSF grants. Her perfect GPA during doctoral study is complemented by her passing of the Level 1 qualifying exam "With Distinction" after just one semester of study at UAB.

(Posted: March 14, 2007)

Dr. Jeff Gray invited to join Board of Directors for Alabama Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education Coalition

CIS' Dr. Jeff Gray has been invited to join the Board of Directors for the Alabama Mathematics, Science, and Technology Education Coalition (AMSTEC). The mission of AMSTEC is "to improve mathematics, science and technology education in the state of Alabama through the facilitation of communication among education, business and public policy organizations." Dr. Gray received this prestigious appointment as a result of his leadership and outreach in the state through activities such as the Alabama K-12 Teachers' Workshop, which brought together key educators from throughout the state last summer to discuss how to advance the role of computing within Alabama's K-12 education.

Dr. Gray is also the coordinator of a state-wide high school programming contest, the Alice Film Festival, and co-organizer of summer camps for K-12 students. The camps are in collaboration with Dr. Puri Bangalore, Dr. John Johnstone, Dr. Kenneth Sloan, and Dr. Anthony Skjellum.

(Posted: March 7, 2007)

Semantic Designs visits UAB CIS

Dr. Larry Akers of Semantic Designs (Austin, TX) visited the CIS Department throughout the week of January 29-February 2nd. Dr. Akers conducted training sessions on the Design Maintenance System (DMS), which is a program transformation system used in several Department research projects. A department seminar talk was also presented by Dr. Akers to the local community.

(Posted: January 31, 2007)

SoftCom members to attend two CRA-W events

CIS doctoral students Yuehua Lin, Sherita Andrews and Wangwang Li will attend two separate events sponsored by the CRA-W.

Sherita Andrews and Wangwang Li are recipients of a travel scholarship to attend the "2007 Grad Cohort Workshop" in San Francisco, CA, on March 2-3, 2007. The Grad Cohort is funded by generous donations from industry and represents the cornerstone of CRA-W's Grad Cohort Program. The ultimate goal of the program is to increase the ranks of senior women in computing by building and mentoring communities of women through their graduate studies from across North America. All of the students will meet for two days with 10 to 15 senior computing researchers and professionals who will share strategies for surviving and thriving in graduate school as well as more personal insights about their professional experiences.

Yuehua (Jane) Lin has been accepted to attend the "CRA-W Managing the Academic Career for Faculty Women" workshop, which will be held on March 7, 2007 in Covington, KY. The workshop is part of the annual Conference on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE). The mentoring workshop has been generously funded by the National Science Foundation and includes full support for transportation and registration. The goal of the workshop is to provide critical mentoring information for women at all career levels in undergraduate teaching. The target audiences of the workshop are pre-tenure faculty and graduate students in Computer Science and Engineering who are interested in an academic career, as well as post-tenure (senior) faculty seeking to improve their teaching and mentoring skills.

(Posted: January 31, 2007)

Softcom Welcomes New Students

Softcom welcomes new Ph.D. students Haisong Li and Wangwang Li from China.

(Posted: January 4, 2007)

SoftCom members have strong presence at OOPSLA

Several of the members of the SoftCom lab will be very active at OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications), which is the premier conference on object-oriented technology. This year's OOPSLA will be in Portland, Oregon, from October 22-26.

Some of the events that the SoftCom members will be participating include:

- Three of the eight students selected to participate in the OOPSLA Doctoral Symposium are from the SoftCom lab. The students are Yuehua Lin, Hui Wu, and Robert Tairas. This is the first time a single lab received this many invitations. Other participants at the doctoral symposium are from New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, China and Brazil.

- Yuehua Lin has been invited to participate in the OOPSLA Student Research Poster competition, which is the qualifier for the ACM Finals.

- Robert Tairas' paper on clone visualization was accepted into both the Eclipse workshop at OOPSLA, and also the Eclipse poster reception (hosted by IBM).

- Dr. Jeff Gray is organizing two workshops at the OOPSL/GPCE event, and serving on the program committee of another workshop. The OOPSLA Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling is in its 6th year at OOPSLA and will have over 40 attendees; the GPCE workshop on Quality of Service will be in its first year. Dr. Gray is also on the program committee of the GPCE conference, which is co-located with OOPSLA.

(Posted: October 16, 2006)

Softcom paper among the most downloaded

The paper "Marshaling and Unmarshaling Models Using the Entity-Relationship Model," authored by SoftCom members Fei Cao, Barrett R. Bryant, and Wei Zhao, which appeared in Proceedings of the 2005 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (March 2005), was the third most downloaded paper from the ACM Digital Library in June 2006, according to Communications of the ACM 49, 9 (September 2006), 24.

(Posted: September 9, 2006)

Softcom researchers author cover feature in IEEE Computer

The special issue on "Model-Driven Development" will showcase the work done in the SoftCom lab related to approaches that support evolution of large software and system models. The paper is authored by Assistant Professor Jeff Gray, and his doctoral students Jane Lin and Jing Zhang. The citation for this paper is:

Jeff Gray, Yuehua Lin, and Jing Zhang, "Automating Change Evolution in Model-Driven Engineering," IEEE Computer (Special Issue on Model-Driven Development), February 2006, pp. 41-48.

(Posted: January 17, 2006)

Several Softcom researchers involved in Student Research Competition and Doctoral Symposium at OOPSLA 2005

The doctoral students from the Softcom lab will have a strong presence at two top conferences in software engineering and programming languages.

At the 20th ACM conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) the Softcom students are involved in several activities, including:

- 5 of the 16 students to participate in the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at OOPSLA are Softcom students! These include Alex Liu, Hui Wu, Faizan Javed, Carl Wu, and Jing Zhang

- Faizan Javed will be participating in the Doctoral Symposium (this is the 3rd year in a row that a Softcom student has been invited)

- Jane Lin will be presenting a refereed poster

- Hui Wu has been invited to offer a tool demonstration

At the 20th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Jane Lin and Hui Wu have been invited to the Doctoral Symposium.

This year, OOPSLA will be held in San Diego, CA, on October 16-20, 2005. The ASE conference will be in Long Beach, CA, on November 7-11, 2005.

(Posted: August 15, 2005)

Dr. Jeff Gray receives NSF award on "Model-Driven Performance Analysis Framework for Distributed, Performance-Sensitive Software Systems"

UAB CIS Assistant Professor Jeff Gray has been awarded a collaborative NSF grant totaling $377,000 (NSF CSR-SMA-#0509342).

The title of the grant is "A Model-Driven Performance Analysis Framework for Distributed, Performance-Sensitive Software Systems" and will focus on innovative methods for design-time validation of performance concerns for software architectures and processes. The research supported by this grant will be performed in collaboration with Dr. Aniruddha Gokhale of Vanderbilt University, and Dr. Swapna Gokhale from the University of Connecticut. The NSF Program Manager for this grant is Dr. Frederica Darema.

The 12-month award will begin on September 1, 2005.

(Posted: July 13, 2005)

Dr. Barrett Bryant re-elected as chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP)

Dr. Barrett Bryant has been re-elected for a second term as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing (SIGAPP). SIGAPP's mission is to further the interests of the computing professionals engaged in the development of new computing applications and application areas and the transfer of computing technology to new problem domains. Dr. Bryant has served as SIGAPP Chair since July 1, 2003, and his second term will continue until June 30, 2007.

(Posted: July 5, 2005)