Computer and Information Science and Engineering

Distinguished Professor and Chair Sartaj Sahni receives the Honorary Professor Award from Asia University, Taiwan

Distinguished Professor and Chair Sartaj Sahni received the Honorary Professor Award from Asia University, Taiwan on May 22, 2009. Other recent recipients of this award include Professors Lofti Zadeh (University of California, Berkeley) and Amir Pneuli (New York University).

Assistant Professor Alper Üngör receives the prestigious NSF CAREER Award

Alper Üngör, as assistant professor in the CISE Department at UF, received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his research titled "Computational Geometry, Mesh Generation, and Geometric Modeling". CAREER Award is considered one of NSF's most prestigious awards honoring the scholars who are likely to become academic leaders in the future. NSF has given this award since 1996 to junior faculty who effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution. This award provides $400,000 funding for Dr. Üngör's research for the next five years. This is the eleventh CAREER Award in the CISE Department, and the first in the area of Algorithms. This is also the second NSF grant for Üngör's research group.

Dr. Üngör's recent work has been on figuring out "how to connect the dots". He designed algorithms connecting the dots modeling a geometric shape and producing optimal (in output size and quality) triangulations. His time-optimal algorithm has been well received in the theory community as it comes with a proof of being the fastest possible algorithm. Experiments show that several variations of this algorithm run significantly faster than the previously available software. Üngör’s algorithm and implementation are already integrated into award-winning triangulation software and is in use by thousands of engineers and researchers resulting in more efficient scientific simulations. Extension of these methods to higher dimensions and to dynamic problems is challenging but the promise for real life applications is great. Üngör believes that only by improving our understanding of the fundamental concepts we can provide efficient and correct solutions to more real life problems. He expects the next few years to be very exciting for the researchers in the geometric algorithms field. (Full Story Here)

Assistant Professor Tamer Kahveci receives the prestigious NSF CAREER Award

Tamer Kahveci, an assistant professor in the CISE Department received the prestigious NSF CAREER Award for his research project titled "New technologies for querying pathway databases." The CAREER program recognizes and supports early career-development activities of teacher-scholars who are most-likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century, according to the NSF website. The award provides $400,000 over a five year period. This brings the Department's number of CAREER awards to two digits.

Dr. Kahveci's research group is bringing a new computational perspective to understanding how organisms function through a complex network of interactions. The first step in this direction is to understand how these interactions can be modeled to formulate the functions of sub-networks. Modifying or simply knocking out a sub-network can have a butterfly effect on the rest of the network. The possibility of having such an effect depends on how that sub-network interacts with the rest of the network, the current state of the network and the state of the external stimulants. Dr. Kahveci's lab is developing efficient and scalable computational methods to compute or approximate this effect as a function of the steady state of the network. (Full Story Here)

CISE PhD Students and professors receive best scientific paper award at ICPR

UF CISE PhD students Karthik Gurumoorthy and Ajit Rajwade along with their supervisors Anand Rangarajan and Arunava Banerjee, received the best scientific paper award in the signal processing and representation track at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR) held in Tampa from 8th to 12th December 2008. Their paper is entitled "Beyond SVD: Learning Matrix Orthonormal Bases for Compact Image Representation". ICPR is one of the most popular conferences in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. (Full Story Here)