Tag Archives: Computer Science

Presentations Showcase Student Learning and Research

SCE students – get ready to be creative, engaged and challenged. To get an idea of what’s in store for you, take a look at how computer science students and mechanical engineering students participated in presentation/poster sessions last spring. Keep in mind that the three presentations/poster sessions described below are only a few examples of the many projects our SCE students become involved in at SCE. Our faculty know that collaboration and participation are fundamental to successful computer science and engineering professional practice!

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Kaustubh Dhondge Receives 1st Place Outstanding Graduate Poster Presentation Award at GPN 2013 Annual Meeting

SCE’s Kaustubh Dhondge showcased his research paper, FUEL: Fast, Ubiquitous, Easy-to-use, and Low-cost Authentication for Smartphones, a “scheme for authenticating users by leveraging existing ambient light sensors on smartphones”, at the May 29-31, 2013 GPN (Great Plains Network) 2013 Annual Meeting. His research, conducted with Hyungbae Park and his advisor Dr. Baek-Young Choi, has resulted in a prototype that “utilizes a light sensor available on smartphones and a low-cost hardware token in order to authenticate a user of a smartphone to unlock it or to allow access to web and cloud services.” Continue reading →

Haiyang Qian (PhD ‘2012) is finalist in prestigious competition

Haiyang Qian (PhD’2012) is a finalist in the international doctoral dissertation competition organized by IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management (IM2013) which will be held in Ghent Belgium May 27-31, 2013. Event details are available on the IM 2013 website. Dr. Qian’s dissertation examines “Data center resource management with temporal data center resource management with temporal dynamic workload.”

Authors who completed their dissertation in 2012 were asked to submit their work in the form of an extended abstract of the dissertation, not exceeding 6 pages (excluding for references) to an open call for dissertation digest by the IFIP/IEEE IM2013 dissertation selection committee. The extended abstracts were first reviewed by at least three anonymous reviewers and the dissertation selection committee then identified a list of finalists. As a result, seven dissertations, including Haiyang’s, have been chosen as finalists by this selection process. All finalists are asked to submit a copy of their dissertation, in addition to the extended abstracts. All finalists have been invited to present their dissertation work during the IFIP/IEEE IM’2013 conference in Ghent, Belgium. Besides Haiyang, the finalists include two from Canada, and one each France, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain.

We congratulate Dr. Haiyang Qian for being selected as a finalist to this prestigious dissertation competition and wish him well for the final presentation in Ghent. His dissertation advisor was Dr. Deep Medhi, Curators’ Professor of Computer Science Electrical Engineering and UMKC Trustee’s Faculty Fellow.

SCE supporter & student sells company he co-founded to Microsoft

Eleven years ago Steve Dispensa co-founded Phonefactor which quickly became a leader in multifactor authentication (MFA) solutions. A gifted computer scientist, Steve found the undergraduate and graduate coursework he took from several SCE computer science faculty provided him the theoretical and technical knowledge he needed as the Chief Technical Officer for Phonefactor. The innovation and significance of Phonefactor’s work in authentication solutions was internationally recognized when Microsoft announced it had acquired Phonefactor on October 4, 2012. As the announcement explained, “The acquisition of PhoneFactor will help Microsoft bring effective and easy-to-use multifactor authentication to our cloud services and on-premises applications,” said Bharat Shah, corporate vice president, Server and Tools Division for Microsoft. “In addition, PhoneFactor’s solutions will help Microsoft customers, partners and developers enhance the security of almost any authentication scenario.” Steve serves on our SCE undergraduate computer science degree advisory board, providing SCE input and feedback on its computer science programs from an industry perspective. More about Phonefactor’s acquisition can be found here.

Professor Brian Hare Discusses Voting Online With 41 Action NEWS

We just might be ready to try online voting in 2020. SCE Teaching Professor Brian Hare discussed with 41 Action NEWS the various hurdles that must be cleared to make online voting an option. Until online voting applications can keep your vote secret, verify the voter’s eligibility to vote, prevent voters from being intimated to vote in a certain way and guarantee the count is accurate, online voting cannot be considered as an option. With this in mind, Professor Brian Hare thought the technology might be ready by 2020 for some trial runs.

Computer Science and Engineering Majors earn top dollars

According to the CNNMoney article, The 15 college majors with the biggest payoffs, engineering and computer science majors can expect great starting salaries upon graduation. Our SCE students will be glad to know that “to get the best financial return on an investment in four years of college… it helps to have a head for numbers”. Here’s how the majors stacked up:

Median pay for a recent college graduate with a full-time job in 2010, the researchers found, stood at $53,976. But these 15 majors commanded substantially more:

1. Pre-med $100,000
2. Computer systems engineering $85,000
3. Pharmacy $84,000
4. Chemical engineering $80,000
5. Electrical and electronics engineering $75,000
6. Mechanical engineering $75,000
7. Aerospace and aeronautical engineering $74,000
8. Computer science $73,000
9. Industrial engineering $73,000
10. Physics and astronomy $72,200
11. Civil engineering $70,000
12. Electrical and electronics engineering technology $65,000
13. Economics $63,300
14. Financial management $63,000
15. Mechanical engineering technology $63,000

Alum Saravan Rajendran Promoted to VP at Cisco

Saravan Rajendran was recently promoted to Vice President of Engineering, Data Center Group at Cisco. He completed a Masters in Computer Science and Telecommunications in 1992 at UMKC. He also holds over 17 patents in the areas of switching, service chaining and virtual networking Rajendran is responsible for the Nexus 1000V product line across multiple hypervisors, Nexus 1010 and projects in the areas of virtual and cloud services. He is also responsible for the Virtual Interface Card (VIC), third party adapters as well as storage solutions in Cisco’s flagship server platform – Unified Computing System ( UCS). Rajendran has an active role across Cisco and with partners in the development and execution of Cisco’s virtualization strategy.

Rajendran is one of three founders of the Nexus 1000V concept and led the execution of the product to market in partnership with VMware. During his 14+ years at Cisco, he has been a key architect of L3 switching concepts in the Catalyst 6500 platform, led a number of L4-7 load balancing projects and incubated the Application Oriented Networking (AON) BU. Rajendran was a co-founder of Desana Systems which grew from a company of 8 to 120 employees delivering an intelligent L4-7 switch in 2001.

UMKC now has three alums who are Vice Presidents at Cisco. Dr. Deep Medhi, UMKC Curators’ Professor of Computer Science, remembers Saravan Rajendran as his first ever graduate research assistant when he was a new faculty member in the Computer Science Telecommunications program at UMKC. Dr. Adrian Tang was Saravan Rajendran’s UMKC MS faculty advisor. UMKC and SCE congratulate Saravan and thank his company, Cisco, for the equipment Cisco has provided for our UMKC SCE computer science and telecommunications laboratories.

CS Alum Jane Zupan at home in both France & US

Alum Jane Zupan has recently been promoted to Vice President of Marketing at Nuxeo. Jane obtained her Master in Computer Science (MS-CS) from UMKC SCE in 2001. After completing her MS, Jane worked in Paris for eight years – first for optical networking company Corvis – and then she moved into the software space. She is now based in Boston, traveling to Paris often because of her work. Jane remains in touch with SCE professor Dr. Medhi, her MS advisor while here at UMKC SCE.

Kaustubh Dhondge & Hyungbae Park win poster award at GPN conference

Kaustubh Dhondge & Hyungbae Park won the second place student poster award for their poster, “Energy-Efficient Cooperative Opportunistic Positioning for Heterogeneous Mobile Devices”, presented at the Great Plains Network (GPN) Conference, held in Kansas City, Missouri from May 30 to June 1, 2012. Kaustubh Dhondge also presented the paper at the Graduate Student Networking Research Summit. Both Mr. Dhondge and Mr. Park are Ph.D students at UMKC SCE studying computer science, telecommunications and networking disciplines. They have developed an energy-efficient system for mobile devices to obtain their geographic location information. This work (ECOPS) was developed for and tested on Android powered mobile devices. In ECOPS, unlike any other existing approaches the mobile devices cooperate with each other autonomously to know their actual geographic location without any dependence on infrastructure. The experiments to validate its energy efficiency and location accuracy were done at the UMKC soccer field and found that ECOPS provides location accuracy as good as 5 m, and with significantly more energy efficiency than a GPS only scheme, while overcoming various service limitations.

Their research and resulting applications are helping remove universal limitation of smart devices– poor battery life. When smart devices are used in mission critical environments like battlefields, mountaineering expeditions and disaster area assistance, the need for judicious battery usage becomes even more compounded. Kaustubh Dhondge’s & Hyungbae Park’s goal in doing this research was to design a system for these smart devices that provides highly accurate location information while significantly using less energy consumption versus the traditional approach of each device using their own inbuilt GPS. For example, in a battlefield environment this approach will increase the operational time of devices in the network which can make a difference between the success and failure of a mission and help protect soldier’s lives. The research was conducted under the guidance of their Ph.D. adviser, Professor Baek-Young Choi. The other faculty involved and guiding them in the work is Dr. Sejun Song who is with Texas A&M University.

Xinjie Guan & Xili Wan Awarded GENI Summer Camp Scholarships

Xinjie Guan and Xili Wan are two of ten students in the nation to win the first annual GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) summer camp scholarships. Ms. Guan, a third year telecommunications and networking Ph.D. student at UMKC SCE, and Mr. Wan, a fourth year telecommunications and networking Ph.D. student at UMKC SCE, spent May 29, 2012 – June 2, 2012 at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York learning how to use the GENI resources/tools such as ProtoGENI, Flack, Instools, and OpenFlow. They gained hands-on lab experience with those resources and developed a team-based project that established certain network topology and investigated the impact of new flow attack to OpenFlow switch.

Attending the GENI summer camp greatly improved Ms. Guan’s and Ms. Wan’s skill in using GENI resources/tools. Furthermore, they obtained many significant suggestions from GENI experts on how to design and begin their next research projects. GENI infrastructure is becoming a mature virtual lab for networking related researches and compared to traditional simulation, GENI resources and tools provide more convincible results as they support experimentation on real nodes throughout the network. Xinjie Guan’s faculty advisor is Professor Baek-Young Choi and Xili Wan’s faculty advisor is Professor Xiaojun Shen. SCE heartily congrats Ms. Guan and Mr. Wan on their awards and knows the experience they have gained will benefit them greatly. For more detail about the camp download the file – GENI.