Computing Degrees Regain Popularity

According to the survey done by Computing Research Association (CRA) for the period of 2007-2008, undergraduate computing degrees in US see 8.1% increase in enrolment. The summary of the reports:

• Total enrollment per department by majors and pre-majors in U.S. computer science programs is up 6.2 percent over last year. If only majors are considered, the increase is 8.1 percent. This is the first increase in total enrollment in computer science programs in six years.
• The average number of new undergraduate students per department in U.S. computer science programs is up 1.7 percent over last year. If only majors are considered, the increase is 9.5 percent.
• Bachelor's degree production in computer science was down 10 percent this year, compared to a nearly 20 percent decline last year.
• Diversity in computer science undergraduate programs remains poor. The fraction of Bachelor's degrees awarded to women held steady at 11.8 percent this year. As was the case last year, nearly two-thirds of those receiving bachelor's degrees were White, non-Hispanics.
• Total Ph.D. production among the responding departments grew to 1,877 for the period between July 2007 and June 2008. This represents a 5.7 percent increase over last year.

Check out the full report here:
http://www.cra.org/govaffairs/blog/archives/CRATaulbeeReport-StudentEnrollment-07-08.pdf

CMS Seminar: Inferring Certain Pseudo-random Sequences

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Centre of Mathematical Sciences Seminar Series

Date: 27 March 2009 (Friday)
Time: 2 - 3 pm
Venue: PD208B, FICT, UTAR, PJ.
Speaker: Dr. Oon Shea Ming, UM
Title: Inferring Certain Pseudo-random Sequences

==========================================
Dear all,

This week's CMS talk will be on this Friday, 2-3pm. The speaker is Dr.
Oon Shea Ming from Universiti Malaya.

Please note the change of the venue, it will be on PD208B, due to room
renovation.

Thank you very much.

regards,
Kheng

Scopus Training

We are pleased to inform you that there will be a training session on
Scopus as mentioned in my last briefing. We'd appreciate it if you
could help to inform your lecturers. All are welcome to attend.

Date: Mon 23 Mar 09
Time: 2.30 pm.
Venue: Seminar Room 2, PB Block, UTAR.

Thank you.

Regards,
Mr Chang
Main Library
User Services
Tel:  603-7958 2628 Ext 8216

CCIS Seminar: Provenance for Web Services and the Grid

Dear All,

We have our first talk for our research group

Topic:   Provenance for Web Services and the Grid
Date:    Friday 27 March 2009
Time:    2.00 - 3.00 pm
Venue:   PD606, Block PD, UTAR.
Speaker: Dr Victor Tan

Abstract:
Web services today are utilized in diverse ways as part of a Grid infrastructure, where they are frequently invoked as part of a composed workflow sequence. In situations such as this, there may arise a requirement to trace the origin of results generated from a workflow run , which may be relevant when community resources are owned and managed by multiple stakeholders  who are dynamically organised in virtual organisations. This talk examines the concept of provenance and how it enables users to trace how a particular result has been arrived at by identifying the individual services and the aggregation of services that produced such a particular output. It summarizes the work accomplished in the EU Provenance project which was to design, conceive and implement an industrial-strength open provenance architecture for grid systems, and to deploy and evaluate it in complex grid applications.


Regards,
Mariam Nainan
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Information and Communication Technology
Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman

Research Seminar: Passion on Research: How to write a research proposal?

Dear All,

Good day.

The Centre for Media and Creative Communication will organize a talk entitled
'Passion on Research: How to write a research proposal?'.

This talk is organized in response to one of the issues discussed, "research and
its challenges", and we discovered that 'writing a research proposal' posts a
number of queries to our academic staff.

We are honoured to have Dr. Chia Oai Peng to present a talk on the above. The
details are as follows:

Date:  25 March 2009 (Wednesday)
Time:  2.30pm to 4.00pm
Venue: PC201

Agenda:

2.30pm - 3.00pm: Passion on Research: How to write a research proposal?

3.00pm -3.30pm: Comments on some research proposals

3.30pm -4.00pm: Question and answer session (refreshment)

Attached is a brief bio-data of Dr. Chia Oai Peng.

We welcome and look forward to your participation.

Thank you.

Warm regards,
Au Yong
Chair
Centre for Media and Creative Communication
Faculty of Creative Industries
Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman

Work Completion Seminar: Slot-Based Switching for All-optical Fixed- and Variable-length Packet Switches

Dear all,

You are cordially invited to attend the Work Completion Seminar for one of our Master of Computer Science candidates, Mr Andrew Tan Khin Huat. The details of the event are:

Date: 13 March 2009 (Friday)
Time: 9.00am - 10.00am
Venue: PD006, FICT, UTAR.
Speaker: Andrew Tan Khin Huat
Synopsis:
All-optical switching has been studied intensively in the literature to address the high cost of opto-electro-optical (OEO) conversion in traditional optical networks. However, most of the existing all-optical packet switching schemes assume optical packets must be of fixed size, and must also be perfectly aligned to the slot boundaries before switching. Such inflexibility has in turn become an obstacle to a realistic implementation of all-optical packet networks.
In this dissertation, we propose a model for all-optical switching that can efficiently process variable- and fixed-length packets. As the model adopts a time-slotted structure, it is called Variable-length-Packet Fixed-length-Slot (VPFS) Switching. We then study the theoretical requirements and constraints of VPFS. To resolve the contention issue in the VPFS model, we also propose a Variable-length-Packet Fiber-delay-line Assignment (VAPFA) Algorithm. We compare the VAPFA algorithm with other similar solutions by simulation to benchmark and determine its superiority. It is shown through simulation that VAPFA is capable of near 0 packet loss up to a data load of 0.8.
Through our research, we also found that most slot-based algorithms, including VAPFA assume perfect packet alignment in order to achieve good throughput. To relieve such a rigid constraint, we therefore propose a compromise scheme called Partial Alignment that can achieve higher throughput than non-aligned schemes, yet without incurring much detrimental effects to the scheme in general. Optimized with the switch architecture, the partial alignment scheme nearly achieves the results of full alignment in simulation.

CCIS Seminar: Face detection using Adaboost: Theory and Implementation

Dear all,

You are cordially invited to attend a talk on "Face detection using Adaboost: Theory and Implementation" by Mr. Ho Wing Teng from CVIS Group. The details

Date: 11 March 2009 (Wednesday)
Time: 2.30pm - 3.30pm
Venue: PD007, FICT, UTAR
Title: Face detection using Adaboost: Theory and Implementation
Speaker: Mr. Ho Wing Teng
Abstract:
In this talk, we will first present the concept of Adaboost learning theory and its implementation for real-time face detection applications. It will follow by a more technical presentation on the implementation of the technique using OpenCV library.

--
with best regards,
Yong Haur

Research Workshop: Library Resources

Dear all,

We are pleased to inform you that the first research workshop will be held
on 6/3/09 (this friday), 2pm-3pm, at PD practical lab 4.

In this research workshop, Mr. Chang Tiam Chau from library will come over
to talk on library resources. He will focus on IEL, Science Direct, Scopus
and JCR besides other relevant online journals (such as ieeexplore).
If you require help with citations, Mr. Chang will be able to share
information on citation styles like APA and MLA.

For those of you who intend to start your PhD study but do not know what
library resources we have at UTAR, you are strongly encouraged to attend
the workshop. For your information, the subscription of the academic digital
libraries is not cheap. For instance, personal subscription to ieeexplore
is USD35 for 25 papers a month. This is in addition to the member fees of
IEEE. I hope that we together can better utilize the library resources
so that we won't unsubsribe the services next year due to low utilization.

Please forward this message to your postgraduate students as well.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Regards,
Soung

CMS Seminar: Famous Problems in Combinatorics

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Centre of Mathematical Sciences Seminar Series

Date: 4 March 2009 (Wednesday)
Time: 2 - 3 pm
Venue: PD605
Speaker: Prof. Chia Gek Ling, UM
Title: Famous Problems in Combinatorics

============================================================================

Dear all,

This week's CMS talk will be on Wednesday, 2-3pm. The speaker is Prof.
Chia Gek Ling.

Prof. Chia currently hold a Professor position in Universiti Malaya.
Prof. Chia's main research interests are in Graph Theory and
Combinatorics. This talk will discuss on the some interesting problems
in Combinatorics such as Four Colour Theorem and Squaring Squares
Problem.

Thank you very much.

regards,
Kheng