Stevens CS News

Have a Great Summer! 24 May 2007

With all our best wishes to those who graduated today and are off to do great things with their lives, I also want to wish those who remain with us an Enjoyable and Restful summer, and look forward to seeing you again in the fall!

It has been an interesting year for the Department of Computer Science. In the last two semesters we have seen these accomplishments:

1. We have four new masters programs, and a veritable plethora of graduate certificate programs. The new masters programs are in enterprise computing, service oriented computing, security and privacy, and multimedia experience and management.
2. We have introduced major revisions in our flagship M.S./C.S. program, to make it more flexible and more in tune with the needs of our graduate students. We have provided study plans that allow part-time students to graduate in two years and full-time graduate students to graduate in one year.
3. We have a new undergraduate major, in service oriented computing, that joins our information systems major in providing a focus on front-end client-oriented applications, as opposed to the traditional hardware/software focus of the computer science and cybersecurity majors.
4. We have made revisions to our existing undergraduate majors, so that we now have an almost-common freshman year for all majors, and much in common in the sophomore years. We are doing this to maximize the flexibility of our students to switch majors within the department within their first two years here. We are also moving some of the very successful software engineering material from senior year down into earlier years, so that students can see it and take advantage of it earlier.
   
5. We have introduced several new courses, in topics such as information architecture, software development process, machine learning, visualization, human computer interaction, mainframe systems programming, service oriented architecture, and mobile and pervasive computing. These courses are approved and we plan to roll them out over the next year (a couple will not arrive until Fall 2008).
6. We now have a "perpetual calendar" that tells you when we plan to offer each course, to help you in developing your study plan. See the course catalog for undergraduate and graduate courses. For undergraduates worried about revisions to study plans: Don't be! You can find revised study plans here. For any course that we are phasing out, we provide a substitute course that covers substantially the same material. In one case, the replacement course is just more in tune with the educational goals of our students, but if you really want the original course, we have a substitute course that substantially covers the same material there as well.
   
7. We have just finished a long process of interviewing and hiring of several new faculty members (more on that as we get closer to the fall semester). All I can say is: I recommend the hanger steak at Amanda's, I had it about a dozen times this spring!

Our congratulations go to Professor Rebecca Wright, who is taking up the prestigious position of Associate Director of DIMACS at Rutgers University. We take consolation that she will not be far away, and her intelligence, energy and organization are an inspiration to all of us. We retain our strength in the security research area with our new hires, and we carry on with the activities that Rebecca started, including the Third Joint Stevens/IBM Research/Columbia University Security and Privacy Day that will be held at Columbia University on June 1.

Again, best of luck this summer, and see you all again in the fall, when I expect the pace of curricular change will have slowed somewhat and I can focus on my big challenge for next year: Convincing our undergraduates not to overload on courses just to get some extra piece of paper that no employer gives a damn about. Be smart: get an employer to pay for a masters degree as a hiring bonus.

But that's a conversation for the fall.

Blinklist | Del.icio.us | Digg | Furl | Ma.gnolia | Newsvine | Spurl | Technorati

What's going on with the undergraduate courses? 6 Apr 2007

If you are an undergraduate in a computer science major, you will have noticed some changes to the courses being offered as you registered for courses this fall, especially if you are a freshman. We are phasing out two courses:

• (CS and CyS majors) CS 335 Computational Structures covers a lot of material that is already covered in CS/MA 503 Discrete Mathematics for Cryptography. The latter course is required for CyS students, but it is debatable if it is necessary for a general CS major. We are replacing CS 335 with a course that brings down a lot of software engineering material from CS 551 and CS 552, where this material has been very successful, as well as adding a security component. We expect that this material will also help students as they start taking courses with larger assignments.
• (CS major only) CS 494 Compiler Design covers a lot of material that is already covered in CS 434 Theory of Computation and CS 392 Systems Programming. We will allow either CS 392 or CS 511 Concurrent Programming as alternatives for it (CS 511 is available as an alternative because we do not have a graduate evening equivalent for CS 392).
• CS 434 Theory of Computation remains, but it is now renumbered and renamed to be CS 334 Automata and Computation.
  

Besides replacing two courses, we have switched around the order in which we teach some courses:

• We moved CS 442 Database Management Systems from spring to fall so you can take it before CS 546 Web Programming. This allows CS 546 to drop the databases material and cover important material that's missing right now, such as AJAX and REST.
• We moved CS 492 Operating Systems from fall to spring so you would have a chance to take CS 392 before it. CS 392 replaces CS 494 compilers, and is useful preparation for operating systems. Students registered for CS 492 have been transferred to CS 442.
  
• To make room for these changes, CS 496 Programming Languages is being moved to the spring semester. People who registered for CS 496 this fall are being transferred to CS 392, the course that is the preferred replacement for CS 494. If you have already taken CS 392, you should choose some other CS elective. If you have already taken both CS 392 and CS 494, then either one can be considered an elective.
  
• Since it no longer has CS 335 as a prerequisite, we are moving CS 434-now-334 from the spring to the fall semester. Students registered for CS 335 have been transferred to CS 334.
  

If you are an upper level classman, you can also avail of these changes. If the rescheduling of the undergraduate courses (CS 492 and CS 496) causes problems for the courses you were planning to take this fall, you have the option of taking CS 510 instead of CS 496, and CS 520 instead of CS 492.

We appreciate your patience as we make these changes. We would not be doing this if we were not convinced that ultimately they would greatly improve your educational experience. A representative comment from a senior in the department is that "I only wish [that] it had beeen put in place four years earlier, so I could benefit." Better late than never.

Blinklist | Del.icio.us | Digg | Furl | Ma.gnolia | Newsvine | Spurl | Technorati

Talks in Security, Vision and Machine Learning 10 Feb 2007

We have a veritable flurry of outside speakers giving computer science talks in the next few weeks. These are top-notch researchers in the field presenting their research in security, vision and machine learning. You can see the dates at either the department calendar or the seminars web page. Even if you do not intend to pursue a career in research, you should grab this opportunity while you are in school to be exposed to the state of the art in IT. If you are thinking about a career in research, this is a great opportunity to find out about some of the best research being done now by young PhDs.

You should add yourself to the seminars mailing list to be notified of the talk titles and abstracts closer to the days.

Blinklist | Del.icio.us | Digg | Furl | Ma.gnolia | Newsvine | Spurl | Technorati

Welcome Back! 17 Jan 2007

I hope everyone had a good break. As you can see, the crack web consulting company of Dewey, Cheatham and Howe did a makeover of the CS web site over the break. The main motivation for the change was that the old web site offered the same perspective to all visitors, and you had to guess where the information you were looking for was located. The new site offers different perspectives for different classes of visitors. We've included the links we think you'll find useful on the left. Please let me know if you have other links to suggest.

We're running this blog out of blogger mainly because it provides a RSS feed, and I invite you to add this to your list of feeds. Blogger also provides a facility for posting comments, and I do hope we will see some dialogue back and forth in the next few months. Postings will be a combination of informational and opinion about some current practices in the department (more on that later).

Our course catalog now has, for each course, a sample syllabus and a list of learning outcomes. While the former will vary based on the instructor's preferences, the latter should be fairly constant and require the approval of the department curriculum committee to be changed. I hope you will find this helpful in choosing your courses, now and in the future. Please bear with us as we populate these pages. We are putting it out now so people can benefit from what is there.

A couple of other additions to the web site: a department calendar, a search engine and a department news feed. I invite you to read the piece about the Hess donation. This is a Fortune 100 company that had very complimentary things to say about Stevens undergraduates!

Again, welcome back, and have a great semester! For those job-hunting now, best of luck!

Blinklist | Del.icio.us | Digg | Furl | Ma.gnolia | Newsvine | Spurl | Technorati