Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1997 22:32:11 GMT Server: NCSA/1.5.2 Last-modified: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 15:42:52 GMT Content-type: text/html Content-length: 9855 CS Department News Summary

Computer Science Department News Summary

Aug 1996
(This news was taken from the College of Science and Math Newsletter 1996, Department News section. Welcome to those of you who found us through that medium.) Each faculty member has a home page as do some of the students . Our current brochures and other documents also are available. We encourage all alumni to place their own Home Pages here as well. We plan to add more features and information in coming months. Check back every once in a while!

The past year was exciting and productive for the department. As a beta test site for Intel products, the department works with Intel in the area of distance conferencing. and we recently began building closer relationships with Great Plains Software and Cargill.

The introduction of closed student laboratories into our starting course sequence received excellent reviews and has helped many students in those courses build better and more satisfying foundations for success in Computer Science. If you have comments or suggestions on the undergraduate curriculum. please let us know.

The graduate programs continue to be in high demand with six doctoral graduates and nine master's graduates this year. Plans to expand distance education offerings continue. Possibilities include offering the doctoral degree through a variety of media including computer conferencing, e-mail and CD-ROM.

Department faculty continue to publish widely More than 30 papers appeared in 1995 in a wide variety of journals and conference proceedings. The department's first major fundraising project was a success. Every faculty member contributed to raise our endowment for undergraduate student scholarships to nearly $17.000.

Ron Vetter, Bill Perrizo, Paul Juell, Valery Soloviev, and Ken Nygard began an NSF-funded project to develop a state-of-the art high speed networking laboratory around an ATM switch. Perrizo, and Vetter continued their work on a multi-state project to build resource centers accessible by the citizens of the upper Midwest, and Perrizo serves as the half-time university dean of research while Vetter is an associate editor to IEEE Computer.

Nygard, Juell, Xudong He, and Valery Soloviev continue their funded research projects, and Vasant Ubhaya conducts technical research with faculty members from Pennsylvania State University, Texas A and M and University of Waterloo. Vasant Ubhaya also organized and chaired invited sessions and presented papers at conferences at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Texas A and M. Ken Magel continued his research on object-oriented testing methods with several graduate students.

Bob Gammill continued to push the department toward low-cost. easily used. UNIX-based local area networks. John Martin completed the revision for a second edition of his book on descrete structures. Bruce Erickson and Mark Pavicic are pioneering the efforts of the department to introduce C++ in the undergraduate curriculum. Juell, Nygard and several other faculty are researching World Wide Web activities.

The department's web address is www.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu.

William Perrizo receives grant for high speed database study

Bill Perrizo, professor of computer science, will research client/server databases on high speed networks with his $667.118 grant. "Military decision makers depend more and more on computerized management information systems both for gathering data, and for making sure that data is secure at multiple levels," Perrizo says.

He says the grant will allow him to develop and evaluate methods for distributed client/server database management over high speed fiber optical networks.

Ken Nygard track ND school districts

North Dakota's schools range from one room schoolhouses in the far west to sprawling. growing schools like Grand Forks Red River High School in the east. In rural areas where population is declining, there are mergers and consolidations every year. School districts are in a constant state of flux.

For many years district boundaries were recorded in legal documents and penciled onto various maps by district superintendents. Consistency was rare and it was difficult to obtain statewide information concerning school district boundaries. The situation was helped significantly with the development of School Maps, a geographic information system software.

NDSU computer science professor Ken Nygard and his assistants developed School Maps software from scratch, and first used it to study transportation issues. That led to mapping school districts and now is expanding to include a wide variety of analyses.

Work with the school districts remains a top priority. Nygard, research associate Mike Haugrud, and their research assistants update the districts once a year, usually by July 1. No small job according to research assistant Michael Greene . He was in charge of organizing nine filing boxes full of correspondence. proposals and legal documents regarding mergers and changes throughout the state before the map was adjusted for the 1995-96 school year.

Nygard says one reason School Maps is important is the way it puts school issues on a quantitative level rather than an emotional one. "People in North Dakota are enormously sensitive to this issue." Nygard says in regard to school mergers and closures. "Schools are considered the lifeblood of a town. Without them people feel the town would wither. With the realization that mergers are a necessary action at times, research assistant Jocher Layher, a Fulbright scholar from Germany, is developing a program that will measure the efficiency of school districts. Nygard says the program has many possible uses. A similar program in North Carolina reduced the number of school buses in the state by several hundred within the first year of use. "It's a controversial program. but you can see the benefit of it."

Nygard and his colleagues are proud of the way School Maps can use simple algebraic equations to make all kinds of combinations on the maps. Haugrud can. for instance, subtract the 1991 school census from the 1993 census and determine which districts are losing and which are gaining in population. The districts are color coded to make the visual even clearer.

This kind of presentation of information is a tremendous improvement over the past when a page full of numbers and statistics was the only output easily available. The bright colors and combinations of School Maps are much more effective to lawmakers, citizens and school boards.

"It's a great tool for analyzing trends. We can define the difference between new and old data and display that in a map. bar graph or a pie chart." Nygard says. These capabilities were used in the last two legislative sessions as statewide education issues were addressed.

The public can access and download School Maps from its website at ndsun.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu/www/SMAPS/. The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction works in cooperation with Nygard and has instituted School Maps in their Bismarck offices The program also is accessible from their web site.