Dear CS faculty members, students, and friends.

Please see the attached flyer for more information regarding Dr Jiyou Li's lecture entitled "Small-bias Sets" on Friday February 1st at 2:00 in DEH 220.

CS staff

Honors Students to Join in Foundational Research

This spring, four OU honors students will help to lay the foundation for a new research area -- robot-to-robot nurturing. At the same time, they will be pioneering a new mechanism for connecting research and teaching.

Nurturing is a fundamental concept in biology, cognitive science, psychology, child development, sociology, and education, among other disciplines, and serves as the focus of extensive research enterprises. Prof Hougen and his research team, known as the Robotics, Evolution, Adaptation, and Learning Laboratory (REAL Lab), believe that nurturing should likewise be considered a fundamental concept in robotics, with an active research community built around it for both scientific and practical reasons. From a scientific standpoint, there is much to be learned concerning connections between the evolution of nurturing and the evolution of learning, communication, empathy, and related capabilities, both in natural and in artificial systems. From a practical standpoint, robots that can nurture other robots makes extensive robot learning practical and thus enables much greater robot intelligence.

Prof Hougen and the REAL Lab have begun to build the robotics nurturing research community here at OU with the help of OU programs including a grant through the Potentially Transformative Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity Program of the Office of the Vice President for Research and The OU Research Council and the Honors Research Assistantship Program of the OU Honors College.

This spring this REAL Lab initiative will benefit from another OU program -- the Honors Engineering Research Experience (HERE) program. Under this new program, four honors undergraduate students will earn course credit while conducting research. The objective of this course is to provide these students with authentic research experiences by integrating them into the REAL Lab and having them work through the research experience with the research team. And they won't be just doing grunt work, either. Together with the team they will develop specific testable hypotheses related to the topic of robotic nurturing; design, code, and conduct experiments to test these hypotheses; and collect, analyze, and report on the results found -- in short, they will be involved in the entire research process as full members of the research team.

The HERE program will help to formalize the process of involving some of OU's best and brightest students with an innovative research agenda that promises great things. The results are expected to be a model of Sooner excellence.

OU CS Programming gets another honor

Congratulations to the CS Programming Team for placing second in the ACM South Central Division Competition! The team placed first last year and proves to be a force to be reckoned with! Congratulations Coach Hougen, Caleb Eggensperger, Braden McDorman, and Allen Smith!

The School of Computer Science is proud of the accomplishment of one of its faculty members: Dr Amy McGovern. Dr McGovern was awarded the 2012 Teaching Scholar Initiative Award for teaching excellence. The Teaching Scholars Initiative is a colloquium under the guidance of the Center for Teaching Excellence. Their mission is to give faculty an outlet to share their experiences in order to improve student learning at OU.
Congratulations Dr McGovern!

In the midst of the mid-terms, a CS student can find himself/herself wonder what made him/her choose this major in the first place.
If you need to be reassured, take a look at this article by Ted Samson in InfoWorld:
In "Demand for software engineers keeps climbing -- and so do the salaries", Samson details how the increased demand for software engineers is behind increasing salaries, with firms often competing to attract the brightest minds. On average, a software engineer can expect to make about $92,000 a year but this number can easily go up to six figures.
We hope this was enough motivation to get you through your midterms!

OUCS's Mark Woehrer wins ALife 13 Best Paper Award

Mark Woehrer at ALife 13

The paper "Sexual Selection, Resource Distribution, and Population Size in Synthetic Sympatric Speciation"(paper) by Mark Woehrer, Dean Hougen, and Ingo Schlupp won the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALife).  This is the top honor of the world's premier conference on artificial life.  This paper is based on Dr. Woehrer's doctoral dissertation in Computer Science, conducted under the direction of Profs. Hougen (School of Computer Science) and Schlupp (Department of Biology).

Game Changer Research Aims to Forecast Tornadoes

Dr. Amy McGovern

From an article on Science Nation:


 "Tornadoes claim hundreds of lives and cause billions of dollars in damages in the United States. But the tornado outbreak across the South on April 27, 2011, was startling, even for veteran forecasters such as Greg Carbin at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Storm Prediction Center (SPC) in Norman, Okla.
"Through the 24-hour loop here, almost 200 tornadoes had occurred in that period of time and, unfortunately, over 315 fatalities. Primarily Alabama was hit hardest but also fatalities in Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia for this event," says Carbin.
As the warning coordination meteorologist at SPC, he would like to see tools that could help predict these killer storms." 



Dr. McGovern and her team of researchers are working to develop the tools necessary to predict these storms.  Read the full story here...