Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series Presents Dr. Lance Fortnow

CS to Feature a Student Every Week

Hello all,

Here at the School of Computer Science we are excited to announce that we will be featuring a student every week. We are very proud of our students and want everyone to see what CS is all about, our students.

So here we go with our inaugural post:

Mamta Yadav – Ph.D. in Computer Science

Mamta is from the Indian province of Rajasthan, a hill station in the north-west part of the country. When she was a little girl, Mamta dreamt of becoming a medical doctor. She inherited a love for mathematics from her dad and was so talented in computer science that after solving many problems for her teachers, they encouraged her to pursue engineering. She received a very high score on the regional placement test, which opened the opportunity for her to go study Computer Science at Rajasthan University. She was convinced it was the right track when she got the chance to work on the university web portal.

After receiving her B.E. there, Mamta followed the advice of her father and her spiritual teacher and came to the U.S. to pursue further her education. She completed her M.S. in Computer Science at Oklahoma City University and after a year working in the industry, she decided to go back to school to complete her lifelong dream: getting a doctor title. She joined OU as part of the School of Computer Science Ph.D. program in Fall 2010. Mamta is currently conducting research for her dissertation under the supervision of Dr. Krishnayan Thulasiraman. She focuses on community detection in network science.

Mamta originally chose to come to Oklahoma because she wanted to study in a peaceful environment. She enjoys the close-knit community and feels like the OU School of Computer Science is a family. According to her, the faculty and staff members are always very helpful and focused on maximizing the students learning experience. Mamta also appreciates all the opportunities that have been offered to her within the department. Working with Dr. Thulasiraman, for example, allowed her to participate in the writing of his new book. She is also very involved in the Computer Science Graduate Student Association for which she was president of the organization in the academic year 2013-14. Her position as a teaching assistant for many CS classes throughout the semesters also convinced her to pursue a career in academia upon graduation.

Mamta puts her skills to good use by volunteering for the Divyajyot Cancer Research Foundation founded by her spiritual teacher. Mamta speaks fluently Hindi, Gujrati, and English. She enjoys writing poems and articles, meditating, cooking and singing.

Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series- Cancelled

The Hitachi Distinguished Lecture for tomorrow has been cancelled.

Paycom Lunch

Paycom will be joining us today for lunch and a Tech Talk discussion covering Mobile Development. I hope everyone can join us.

Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series

Paycom Tech Talk

Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series

Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series today at 2:30 pm in Devon Energy Hall 120.

ConocoPhillips Mixer Tuesday September 9th, 2014

Tomorrow is the day.

Tomorrow Computer Science will be hosting ConocoPhillips for the Big Data Lunch and Learn from 12-1 and the Computer Science Fall 2014 Welcome Party.

There will also be a Software Studio Information Session from 4-5pm in Rawl Engineering Practice Facility B4. 

Three events in one day...what are we crazy??

Friday August 29, 2014 The School of Computer Science will be hosting 3, yes 3 events in one afternoon. We hope you make it to each one.

Only 5 days...

Can't wait to see everyone there!

New Graduate Student Orientation

New CS Graduate Students don't forget orientation tomorrow in Devon Energy Hall Room 130 at 2 p.m. Can't wait to see you all there!!!!!

Conoco Phillips Lunch and Learn August 29th, 2014 Devon Energy Hall

Three Minute Thesis Competition

Would you be willing to present your thesis or dissertation in three minutes? Then check out the 3 MT competition.

Graduate Student Welcome Week August 14-25, 2014

Graduate Student Welcome week is being presented by Graduate Student Life. New Student Orientation will be on August 14, 2014. I encourage all of our Computer Science Graduate Students to participate in the many activities and events.  

Mandatory Exit Exam Meeting for Computer Science MS Non-thesis Students

This meeting is mandatory for all MS Non-thesis students who will be graduating this fall.

CS Orientation for New Graduate Students

School of Computer Science Welcome Party 2014

Dr. Chris Weaver of The University of Oklahoma School of Computer Science receives National Science Foundation Grant

Dr. Christopher Weaver of The University of Oklahoma School of Computer Science has been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation, by the Division of Information and Intelligence. 

This is a five year project beginning August 1, 2014 with a $496,124.00 budget. 

Career: Interactive Gesture-Based Manipulation and Visualization for Exploratory Learning and Research 

Abstract

Visual exploration and analysis of data is increasingly important for advancement in virtually every area of human endeavor. Whether recorded directly by people or indirectly using machines, data captures our observations and interpretations of the world. When people interact with data, it is almost always in a visual form like graphics or text. The goal of this project is to vastly expand the usefulness of interactive visualizations by providing a general way to create and edit data inside the visualizations themselves. The key new idea of the project is that visualization users can perform sequences of gestures with common input devices to express their observations and interpretations directly in visual form. The visualizations not only show data, but also serve as meaningful graphical spaces in which to edit that data. By extending the data processing workflows and display techniques that are currently used in popular visualization tools and software libraries, we can flexibly and expressively translate the details of interactions into precise data changes with simultaneous visual feedback.

The innovative contributions of the project will include a general method to support interactive data editing in visualizations, a diverse collection of data editing gestures, a set of patterns to guide the process of designing visualization tools with data editing features, a declarative programming language for quickly building those tools, and a variety of built tools that show off real applications of data editing in visualizations. The project focuses on developing, evaluating, and distributing tools for scholarly research in the digital humanities. It tightly integrates education to bring together students and researchers from computer science, information science, and the humanities, and provide them with concrete opportunities to engage in authentic interdisciplinary collaboration. Scholarly research and education in the humanities involves open-ended exploration, analysis, and interpretation of complex data sets in diverse areas of study. This makes it an exemplary first target to demonstrate how gesture-based visual editing can be broadly applied to data analysis in virtually every segment of society. The broader impacts of the project will spring from the availability of a new, foundational, general-purpose methodology to support data entry, organization, annotation, and correction. Project products will include publications, tutorials, videos, the visualization gesture system as open source software, a compendium of data editing gestures, and a gallery of demonstration visualization tools for public download. Information on the project and resulting resources can be accessed on the project web site (http://www.cs.ou.edu/~weaver/nsf-career/). 

University of Oklahoma Awarded Mellon Foundation Grant for the Development of Digital Latin Library

Norman, Okla.—The University of Oklahoma has been awarded a $572,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the development of a digital library of Latin texts of all eras.  The Digital Latin Library—a Linked Open Data resource—represents a significant collaborative effort to advance access to these texts. The Society for Classical Studies (formerly the American Philological Association), the Medieval Academy of America and the Renaissance Society of America endorsed this project.

“I am excited about hosting this project at the University of Oklahoma because it is consistent with the high value we place on humanities scholarship, and because it will enhance scholarly endeavors on an international scale.  The project will complement and derive substantial benefit from other digital initiatives, particularly with regard to Open Access Data, and greatly enhance the collaborative culture across the University and beyond with our external partners,” said David L. Boren, President, University of Oklahoma.

Samuel J. Huskey, OU Department of Classics and Letters and principal investigator on the project, will collaborate with June Abbas, OU School of Library and Information Studies, and Chris Weaver, OU School of Computer Science.  External collaborators on the grant include New York University, St. Louis University and Duke University.  The Digital Latin Library has two components:  The Digital Latin

Library and the Library of Digital of Latin Texts.  The Mellon grant was awarded for the first year of this three-year project.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for OU and its burgeoning digital humanities community.  It show what can happen when professors and students from different disciplines work together as a team.  I am grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its support and to all of the people at OU who helped to bring this project here.” 

The Digital Latin Library will provide a single point of access to texts and resources for reading and working with them, e.g., images of inscriptions and manuscripts, reference works, tools for analysis, etc.  The Library of Digital Latin Texts will provide resources and support for the production of new scholarship and educational materials.  A number of interfaces will facilitate activities such as reading and annotating texts, textual or visual analysis and collaborative learning and scholarship.

Some will use the Digital Latin Library’s space for private study or teaching, others will use it to produce new critical editions and commentaries.  They will have the option of submitting them for publication in the Library of Digital Latin Texts, which will have three series:  classical, medieval and neo-Latin texts.  All publications will be peer-reviewed and endorsed by one or more of the three learned societies affiliated with the Library.  The Library of Digital Latin Texts may be the boldest part of this entire project, since it will be a major step forward for textual criticism and critical editions.

The goal for the first year of this project is to assemble the content management system for the library component of the Digital Latin Library, complete a user behavior study to optimize resources for different classes of user, develop and test a version of the visualization environment for texts in the Library of Digital Latin Texts, and produce a number of scholarly and educational materials on the development and use of born-digital critical edition.  For more information about this project, please contact Samuel J. Huskey at huskey@ou.edu.

Microsoft Hosts OU CS Party

OU CS students are taking over Microsoft! OU CS and Microsoft hosted a party in Redmond, WA last Friday for current students and alumni working as interns or full-time at Microsoft. Dr. Radhakrishnan joined them to celebrate their accomplishments and a wonderful partnership!

Projected Job Openings

First Annual CS Banquet!!

1st Annual CS Banquet

Please join us in celebrating the accomplishments of the School of Computer Science!

Date:  Friday, April 11, 2014

Time:  6:00-8:00 PM

Venue:  Jim Thorpe Multicultural Center

-Dinner will be served.

-Attire:  Semiformal

-Tickets:  $5 each (Purchase tickets & RSVP in DEH 150)

**Tickets will not be sold at the door.  You must pre-purchase.

 

For accommodations on the basis of disability, contact 405.325.4042.

Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series

Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series in Computer Science

The next lecture will be held:

 Wednesday, March 26, 2014 

at 4:30 PM in DEH 120.

Speaker:  Dr. Ben Shneiderman

Abstract:  Interactive information visualization tools provide researchers with remarkable capabilities to support discovery.  These telescopes for high-dimensional data combine powerful statistical methods with user-controlled interfaces.  Users ca begin with an overview, zoom in on areas of interest, filter out unwanted items, and then click for details-on-demand.  With careful design and efficient algorithms, the dynamic queries approach to data exploration provides 100msec updates even for million-item visualizations that can represent billion-record databases.  The Big Data initiatives and commercial success stories such as Spotfire and Tableau, plus widespread use by prominent sites such as the New York Times have made  visualization a key technology.  The central theme is the integration of statistics with visualization as applied for time series data such as (www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/eventflow), and social network data (www.codeplex.com/nodexl).  By temporal pattern search & replace and network motif simplification complex data streams can be analyzed to find meaningful patterns and important exceptions.

Bio:  Ben Shneiderman is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Founding Director (1983-2000) of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/) at the University of Maryland.  He is a Fellow of the AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, in recognition of his pioneering contributions to human-computer interaction and information visualization.  His contributions include the direct manipulation concept, clickable web-link, touchscreen keyboards, dynamic query sliders for Spotfire, development of treemaps, innovtive network visualization strategies for NodeXL, and temporal event sequence analysis for electronic health records.  Ben is the co-author with Catherine Plaisant of Designing the User Interface:  Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction (5th ed., 2010) hhtp://www.awl.com/DTUI/.  With Stu Card and Jock Mackinlay, he co-authored Readings in Information Visualization:  Using Vision to Think (1999).  His book Leonardo's Laptop appeared in October 2002 (MIT Press) and won the IEEE book award for Distinguished Literary Contribution.  His latest book, with Derek Hansen and Marc Smith, is Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL (www.codeplex.com/nodexl, 2010).

Dr. Atiquzzaman as Founding Editor-in-Chief

Dr. Atiquzzaman of the School of Computer Science has been appointed as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Vehicular Communications (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/vehicular-communications/), a new journal from Elsevier.  The aim of the journal is to publish high quality peer-reviewed papers in the area of vehicular communications.  The journal was officially launched in December at IEE Globecom (the flagship conference of the IEE Communications Society) in Atlanta.

 

Dr. Hougen Receives Teaching Scholars Award

Dr. Radhakrishnan Recognized for Book Publication

OU Computer Science Students Develop Transit Software for Oklahoma Rural Communities

CS COLLOQUIUM- Friday, February 14th

IBM Info Session - THIS WEDNESDAY

The CS Hitachi Distinguished Lecture Series Kicks off January 24th