The School of Computing and Information Sciences held it's 5^th Annual Awards Ceremony on Saturday, December 9th, 2006 at the Embassy Suites Hotel. The school's faculty, staff, and students were in attendance.

The night began with a cocktail reception at 7:30pm, followed by buffet style dinner consisting of:

• tossed garden salad with cucumbers, tomatoes, and carrots
• tortellini pasta salad w/ sundried tomatoes
• freshly baked dinner rolls with creamy butter
• prime rib
• baked talapia
• egg plant parmegiana
• garlic mashed potatoes
• green bean almondine
• fresh fruit
• holiday desserts

After dinner, a beautiful performance by FIU's own Troupe Binti from the Department of Dance. Binit means "sisters" in Swahil and Arabic. The group specializes in ethnic dance using only drums and tamborines.

Dr. Yi Deng Professor & Dean of SCIS

Dr. Masoud Milani Associate Professor & Associate Dean of SCIS

Donaley Dorsett Administrative Services Coordinator & Award's MC

After the performance, Dr. Deng first addressed the attendees by expressing his holiday wishes to all faculty, staff and students. He continued with a well received review of the school's changes, challenges, and accomplishments of the past year. He concluded by acknowledging the hard work of the faculty and staff collectively and expressed his wishes that we think about the future of the school and how we all can contribute to its success. Then the awards were presented to the faculty, staff and students on their outstanding contributions to the School of Computing and Information Sciences.

The Salsa Kings from FIU closed the official awards ceremony. They also ushered in the general dancing by engaging the crowd into coming to the dance floor to learn basic salsa moves. They gave away coupons that offered two free dance lessons with the Salsa Kings.

We'd like to thank the winners, nominees, faculty, staff, the performers and everyone who made this a wonderful event.

The following are some links to photo albums of the event: Album #1, Album #2

We welcome back Tim again to receive the Excellence of Teaching Award for 2005-06, who was the first to win this award in 2002. Since then, Tim has continued to excel in teaching and has consistently ranked among the top in our school in student teaching evaluations. In the last year, his teaching evaluation was 4.7/5.0, and is again the highest in the School. Furthermore, Tim has extended his dedication and knowledge to other aspects for the education of our students. He has continuously updated his course content and material to reflect the rapidly changing technologies. As our Schools undergraduate advisor, he has provided invaluable guidance to hundreds of our students to navigate our changing programs, policies and processes, and is well respected by them. He even wrote a user friendly interface for Panthersoft to change major, remove holds, evaluate transcripts, review UCC equivalencies, etc. This interface is now routinely being used by other SCIS advisors and substantially contributes to their efficiency. Tim, congratulations for a job well done!

This years Excellence in Research Award goes to Vagelis Hristidis. I am very happy that this is the 2nd year in a row that we give this award to our new faculty members, which shows that we are hiring top tier faculty and our school has provided an excellent environment for the young faculty to succeed. In 2005-06, Vegalis have total 11 papers published or accepted in peer reviewed journals or proceedings. Among which, he had 3 papers in premier journals, such as ACM Transactions on Database Systems, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Journal of Information Systems. Furthermore, 6 of his papers appeared in top conferences. Compared to the previous year, he has not only maintained the quality of his publications, but also significantly increased the productivity. Furthermore, he was the PI or Co-PI of 11 grant proposals, and won 2 research grants. Especially noteworthy is his NSF grant, co-Pied with Raju Rangaswami, of $360K, entitled Building Efficient, Native Storage Systems for Semi-Structured Data, is a significant achievement given the stiff competition and extremely low success rate. I am confident to say that this is an outstanding performance for an assisntant professor in any research university. Thank you, Vagelis.

It is my great pleasure to present this years Excellence in Service Award to Ana Pasztor. Ana has long been a champion for womens representation and success in computer science. Several years ago, she founded the student group called Women in Computer Science (WiCS), and has since worked tirelessly and selflessly in building up WiCS. She has trained and mentored a group of excellent student leaders. Under her leadership and mentorship, WiCS today has become a major driving force and made significant impact to our Schools education programs, particularly for our female students. The peer support system of the WiCS, particularly the volunteer-based tutoring program, has helped hundreds of students. Furthermore, WiCS has organized numerous activities and initiatives, for example, research seminars and career mentoring by distinguished academic and industry leaders, events with industry, outreach for high schools, social networking events for students/faculty, charity drive for children, etc. These accomplishments show the power of her dedication and leadership. And I am confident that our school and students will benefit from her contributions for years to come. Thank you Ana.

Shu-Ching has been a great and accomplished mentor to the students in our school! He has served as the major advisor for 10 Ph.D. students and 19 MS students. Anyone who has served as thesis/dissertation advisor would agree that the numbers alone are shocking, and would appreciate how much effort is required! Among these 29 graduate students, one had finished her Ph.D. dissertation, seventeen (17) have successfully defended their Masters theses, one (1) will defend his Ph.D. dissertation this year, and two (2) will defend their Ph.D. dissertations next year. Four more new Ph.D. students are expected to join his group shortly. These numbers also show that he is very popular among the graduate students. Please note that the pairing between a graduate student and his/her advisor is a mutual decision. In fact, it is fair to say that he is the most popular faculty member among the graduate students in SCIS, for two reasons as far as I can see. First, he cares; and second, his excellent research record enables him to create attractive research projects for the students. It is also important to note that his graduate students are among the best performing group in SCIS. For example, Shu-Chings first Ph.D. graduate, Dr. Chengcui Zhang, has since become a tenure-track Assistant Professor at University of Alabama at Birmingham, Department of Computer and Information Sciences since August 2004. At the time she finished her Ph.D. study at FIU, she had seven (7) journal papers, three (3) refereed book chapters, and twenty (20) conference/symposium/workshop papers that co-authored with Dr. Chen. Our School started four years ago the Best Graduate Student Research Award (one per year). Two out of four recipients of this award are Dr. Chens Ph.D. students. All these demonstrate how well a job Shu-Ching has done as an advisor! His office door is always open (literally), and whenever I pass by (which is several times a day), I almost always see him meeting with students.

It is my great pleasure to present Steve with this award the 2nd time in the last 3 years. In the last few years, Steve has played several important roles that help to drive our schools progress and excellence. He has continued to lead our Schools excellent technology group, he is our lead person to industry, he is our marketing and outreach director, and he is the interface to our schools research and education programs. Without exception, he has excelled in all these fronts in the past year. Steve has been working a driver for the development of our blossoming industry partnerships. In the last a few years, we have developed a wide range of collaborations with many companies research, education, workforce development, and funding. Steve has been in the center of these developments. In particular, he has been a principal leader in the development of the Latin American Grid initiative an international partnership led by IBM and our school, with the goal of world class research and innovation, infrastructure development, and the education/training of Hispanic students in computer science and IT. In existence of less than 1 year, LA Grid has already had 10 university partners from US, Mexico, Argentina, and Spain, and has built an international computing grid of 1000+ processors, with many major research, funding, and educational initiatives underway. Steve has been a key player in this venture. Steve is one of the hardest working people in our school; he is competent, trustworthy, dependable, and a friend. He has made my job a lot easier. For that, he has my sincere appreciation and thanks. Please keep up the good work.

Olga joined our office staff as a junior secretary only a couple of years ago, and since then, she has quickly excelled and become a valuable asset to our office. This is particularly so in the past year when she replaced Maria as the grad program secretary. Within a short period of time, she has not only gained proficiency of a complex job description, but also won the trust and respect from the students, faculty as well as her peers. The tasks she deal with on daily basis is complex and multi-fronted, including working with the University Graduate School, the College Graduate Program Office, the understanding of multitude university, college and school graduate program policies and processes, as well as the skills required to work with variety of tools and systems, such as the Pathersoft. Olga has smoothly dealt with these challenges skillfully and competently. This has been the result of her hard work, her willingness to learn, and more importantly her dedication to her job. As the result, she has achieved an excellent level of services to our students and our faculty. Last but not the least, despite of the demands for her to quickly take charge of complex role of graduate secretary, she never complains, always positive, ready to provide assistance, and has been a model citizen and colleague. Thank you, Olga, and please keep up the good work!

Chak is a Team Leader in the Desktop Support Group under Catherine. He has worked 1.5 years for the school. He is being recognized for excellence in team leadership, customer service, and technical skill.

Chak is the key man for creating desktop images for all our open labs. Imaging is a technique that simplifies the management of over 150+ workstation the team must maintain for over 1000 users. Building an excellent image, layering software, resolving conflicts, addressing performance issues is an art and Chak has proven he is quite the artist having created images which performs on a myriad of motherboards, BIOS and driver combinations.

We can count on Chak to help Catherine rally the staff to meet the challenges of high profile events like the recent IBM Technical Leadership Team Meeting and the 2006 ACM High School Programming Competition. Considering the Programming competition, for instance: Build a computer lab in a space not designed to support such activities, having neither adequate power or networking, in 24hrs then break it down and set it back up in our labs in less than 12 hrs. This ad-hoc lab cannot suffer downtime and the competition management software must operate flawlessly-- needless to say the 2006 event was a great success. This effort requires significant technical and project management skills but most of all leadership. It is a team effort and without staff like Chak on the team it would not be possible to pull such events off.

I would like to acknowledge one final characteristic about Chak that I hope all our staff draw upon and that is the ability to understand the "Big Picture". By this I mean, understand how our systems inter-operate and are dependent on each other. Chak knows this well and imparts this knowledge to others, staff and clients alike, making our team more effective and efficient. We congratulate Chak and the desktop team for having a successful year.

Wei Peng joined our school as a Ph.D. student in Fall 2003 with a presidential fellowship right after she got her bachelor degree from China. She started her research work in the area of data mining and machine learning under the supervision of Dr. Tao Li in Spring 2005. During Year 2005-2006, she has 11 research papers published in various conference and journals, including 4 first-author papers, 4 papers in the premier conference in data mining and machine learning, including ACM SIG Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining Conference, AAAI National Conference on AI, European Conference on Machine Learning, International Conference on Information Retrieval. In summer 2006, she did the summer research internship at Xerox Research Center, where she worked on three IPs and filed one patent with her colleagues at Xerox. Her mentor at Xerox commented that "Wei was a truly outstanding and dedicated contributor in the team. I am very impressed by her hardworking and analytical problem solving skills. Wei is a good team player. I enjoyed very much working with her and hope to have her back in the next summer."

Min Chen is a final year Ph.D. student under the supervision of Dr. Shu-Ching Chen. She has published many prestigious papers including 4 journal papers, 3 book chapters, and 14 refereed conference proceeding papers. Several of her papers have been well received in her area and published in prestigious conferences (ACM Multimedia, IEEE ISM, etc.), workshops (MDM/KDD, etc.) and journals (IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, etc.). She has made significant contributions to the "Hurricane Loss Projection Model" project funded the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation. Her exemplary performance has earned her various awards. She was the recipient of the Best Graduate Student Research Award at SCIS in 2004. She received the Outstanding Graduate GPA Award within the Field of Information and Technology in 2003. She has been awarded the Presidential Fellowship from SCIS for three consecutive years. It is worth mentioning that her overall GPA at FIU is 3.95/4.0.

Yujian Fu earned her M.S. degree from Nankai University in China, and joined FIU in Fall 2001 to pursue her Ph.D. degree. She is a final year Ph.D. student under the supervision of Dr. Xudong He. Yujians dissertation research is on formal system modeling and verification, and is funded by the NSF CREST project. Her research has produced several significant results and resulted in 12 refereed publications in high-quality journals and conferences, among which she is the first author of 7 publications. Her paper Validating and Automating Composition of Web Services received the best paper nomination from the 6th International Conference on Web Engineering in 2006. She has received the Presidential Fellowship from SCIS in 2006, and has an accumulative GPA of 3.86/4.0.

Javier joined SCIS after completing his AA degree in Miami-Dade college with a 4.0 average and is the recipient of the Miami Dade College's Scholastic Achievement award in Mathematics. Since starting his BS in Computer Science program in FIU, Javier has been on the Dean's list and has continued getting A's in all his classes and is maintaining a 4.0 GPA. Javier is a highly engaged, inquisitive and attentive student. In particular he always makes sure that his term projects are complete and fully implements all required and optional features. He possesses the unique skill to leverage off his highly extensive knowledge base when learning new material. His questions are always relevant to course topics and indicates his creativity and hard work.

Richard's background in computing is very extensive and spans over 20 years. He is probably the only current FIU student who has real work experience programming in RPG II on an IBM System 32!! But, due to recent advances in computing technologies, Richard decided to dedicate himself to formal studies.

He joined SCIS in Spring 2003 after graduating with an AA degree with honors from Miami-Dade College in 2002 and many years of work experience in industry. He Since joining FIU, Richard has received the grade of A in all his classes except Discrete Mathematics in which he received a grade of A-. The faculty report that Richard is an outstanding student who is able to comprehend complex abstract ideas very quickly and accomplish tasks to a very high professional level. In particularly his term projects are of exceptional quality. Richard's current interests include web application developments and data mining. We are proud of Richard's accomplishments and are looking forward to hear about his future accomplishments.

Ruben Balmaceda has generously donated over 60 hours of tutoring to SCIS students, in a diverse array of subjects such as Java Programming, Visual Basic Programming, Data Structures, and Software Engineering. The students he tutors are always impressed with his patient and gentle demeanor, and willingness to spend as much time with each person as is needed.