Dr. Yu-Ping Wang and Dr. Hong-Wen Deng have received National Science Foundation (NSF) funding for their project, Multiscale Genomic Imaging Informatics (award number DBI-0849932). The award is effective on December 1, 2009 and expires November 30, 2010. Funding for FY 2010 will be $173,226 and $184,297 for FY 2011 .

Dr. Deb O’Bannon, has accepted UMK Provost Gail Hackett’s invitation to serve on the UMKC, Provost-level General Education Task Force as part of our continued campus wide student support efforts focused on “putting students first.” The work on general education will require developing a breadth of understanding regarding the role of general education in higher education, current issues and trends associated with general education, reviewing models of general education at other institutions and gaining a thorough knowledge of the current general education requirements on our campus. During the upcoming academic year, the General Education Task Force will be reviewing our existing general education requirements and working to develop a plan for a campus wide general education review and revision process. Dr. O’Bannon’s participation on this task force is instrumental in helping us shape and lead our campus conversations on general education.

Welcome Week provides UMKC students many activities aimed at helping new and existing students learn about the resources available to them at the university, along with opportunities to meet their classmates and professors. Each year, on the Sunday afternoon before classes start, students are invited to their academic unit to engage with faculty, staff and current students.

New and transfer students in the School of Computing and Engineering (SCE) did just that on Sunday, August 23, 2009, following the UMKC Convocation. Dean Truman welcomed the new students, and several faculty and staff members were available to provide an overview of academic programs, research opportunities and student services.

A short activity gave students a chance to learn more about their classmates and ask questions about SCE. In addition, students learned more about reasons to be involved in student professional organizations directly from the organizations’ student members and learned how to become involved in the student teams, such as the Baja Buggy and IEEE Robotics, that SCE sponsors. 

The afternoon session at SCE ended with raffle where several lucky students won gift certificates, a pizza lunch with the Dean and t-shirts. The grand prize, a Netbook, was greatly appreciated by its student winner. The afternoon concluded with a university-wide barbeque on the University Center lawn.

On September 18, 2009 Dr. Reza Derakhshani will provide a Biometrics presentation to Shawnee Mission South High School’s Human Anatomy and Physiology class.  This is his second visit to South High School.  He will be updating and repeating his 2008 Biometrics presentation to the this year’s 2009 class.  The class roster currently lists 25 students, mostly seniors who are pursuing a career in the field of medicine.  Jan Alderson, Human A & P Instructor, Honors Biology 1 and Head Research Sponsor is the sponsoring teacher at Shawnee Mission South High School.

Haiyang Qian (PhD student), Student Paper Finalist, for “Optimizing Request Denial and Latency in an Agent-Based VPN Architecture,” Proc. IEEE/IFIP Network Operations & Management Symposium, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, pp. 248-255, April 2008.

Ph.D. candidate Jung ha Hong authored a joint paper with Dr. Khosrow Sohraby, On Modeling, Analysis, and Optimization of Packet Aggregation Systems which was accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Communications, one of the most competitive and prestigious IEEE publications.

Dr. Vijay Kumar will spent 8 weeks the summer as a Visiting Faculty Research Fellow at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York.

Dr. Khosrow Sohraby, Associate Dean of Research and Curators’ Professor,  was appointed as Secretary for the national Executive Committee of Professional Engineers in Higher Education (PEHE) and is serving as the Chapter Director for the Western Chapter of the Missouri Society of Professional Engineers.

Dr. William Rychlewski III was nominated campus wide for the Faculty Entrepreneur of the Year Award and was commended in a letter from President Gary D. Forsee which stated: “It is apparent from the nomination materials submitted for you that you have served the University in an outstanding manner.”

Dr. Deep Medhi, Professor of Computer Science, received the Outstanding Interdisciplinary Doctoral Faculty Award, Interdisciplinary PhD Doctoral Students’ Council (IDSC) of UMKC, 2009.

The Networking and Telecommunications Research Laboratory (NeTReL) is part of the Computer Science & Electrical Engineering Department at UMKC. Our research covers performance modeling, network design, network routing, network protection and restoration, protocols, optical networking, mobile computing, wireless networking, network security, network software, sensor networks, and so on. Many of our faculty have been supported by federal grants (NSF and DARPA) and industry contracts.

Telecommunication & Computer Networking has a strong history in Kansas City. Our lab has evolved from the inception of the Computer Science Telecommunications Program (CSTP) at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) in 1984 when Sprint Corporation, a leading Telecommunications Networking company (known at that time as United Telecom), headquartered only a few miles from UMKC campus, provided significant funding for setting up an interdisciplinary educational and research program in an agreement with UMKC. United Telecom has its roots going back more than a century to 1899 when the Brown Telephone Company started providing local telephone service in nearby Abilene, Kansas. Unrelated to this history, often little known, the story of automatic electro-mechanical telephone switching also has its roots in Kansas City. This started when Almon B. Strowger, an undertaker in Kansas City, was suspecting that a competing undertaker’s wife, who worked as an operator at the local telephone company’s manual switch, was directing business to her husband! Obviously, Strowger wasn’t very happy. He developed a model for automatic switching for which he was awarded a patent in 1891 (US Patent No. 447918, awarded on 10/6/1891), and he started the company ‘Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange’ in the same year. Strowger switch is no doubt one of the greatest innovations in the world of networking/telecommunications, and Strowger can be considered the father of automatic switching.

Wireshark (formerly Ethereal), the world’s most popular Internet network protocol analyzer available in the public-domain, is the creation of our alum, Gerald Combs. Gerald originally wrote the code in 1998 and is still the primary maintainer of its overall growth, extensions, and functionalities. Gerald received the School of Computing & Engineering’s Alumni Achievement Award in 2003.