"Leaders of the Pack"
This year, four top leadership positions are all held by students from the College of Engineering - presidents of the Student Senate, Engineers' Council, and senior class and the Technician editor (a CSC student). Dedication to excellence and the leaders of the Pack make a winning combination for NC State. To read more, visit
www.engr.ncsu.edu/news/achieve/educate.html#leaders.

Departmental Research Grants, Gifts, and Support
Integrated Industrial Information (I-cubed) has renewed its ePartners membership with an unrestricted cash contribution of $2,000.

EMC Corporation recently contributed $25,000 in unrestricted funding, renewing their Super ePartners membership for another year.

IBM has award Drs. Ed Gehringer and Laurie Williams $20,000 as an IBM Eclipse Innovation Award to fund their proposal titled "Distributed Extreme Programming with Eclipse". The project will run from January to December of this year. A key component of Extreme Programming is pair programming - two co-located programmers working together at one computer. However, the distributed nature of many development teams makes it hard to practice XP effectively. Consequently, few outsourced software projects can benefit from XP. They either bend the rules of XP, resorting to XPB. (XP but), or they reject XP and its practices outright. To facilitate true XP with remote customers or distributed developers, collaboration tools are needed. Ed and Laurie propose to couple Eclipse with the Syncshare Server (http://www.kizna.com/products_sync.html), a powerful collaboration server written completely in Java. Eclipse and Syncshare have inspired our Sangam project (http://sangam.sourceforge.net) an Eclipse plugin tailored toward distributed pair programming. The Sangam prototype has proved that pair programming is possible using Eclipse and the Syncshare Server. However, much work needs to be done to make it robust. Important features such as dynamic peer-synchronization need to be implemented to make for a more realistic pair-programming experience.

IBM also awarded another $25,000 IBM Eclipse Innovation Award to Dr Laurie Williams (and Co-PI Dr. Michael Rappa of the College of Management) for their proposal "Establishing an OpenSeminar for Eclipse-based Software Engineering Education". The project will run from January through December of this year. Experience has shown that Eclipse provides an excellent infrastructure for software engineering education. Eclipse is readily available for student use and is a popular and effective development environment. By carefully choosing from available plug-ins, educators can customize the Eclipse development environment to map to the learning objectives of the course. Students learn important lessons about open source technology and program modularity. However, educators are busy and changing curricula and development platform can be time consuming. Laurie and Michael propose the creation and the initial population of an OpenSeminar for Eclipse-based software engineering education. The OpenSeminar will enable professors from different universities to work collaboratively to create an online seminar and to customize it to the needs of their own students. These educational resources will also be freely available to all Eclipse users via the Internet.

Tekelec in the Research Triangle Park has awarded Dr Laurie Williams $35,735 to fund her proposal titled "On Assessing Transitions to Extreme Programming". The project will run from January to August of this year. Software organizations are increasingly adopting the software development practices associated with the Extreme Programming (XP) methodology. The research team will work with two Tekelec software development teams to adapt and transition to the XP practices and methodologies for use in their projects. Additionally, the research team will assess the teams transitions relative to the Extreme Programming Evaluation Framework which has been published as an NCSU CSC technical report.

Faculty/Staff News
Dr. Dennis Bahler has agreed to serve as Director of Undergraduate Programs from February 1st through June 30th of this year succeeding Dr. Robert Fornaro. Dr. Fornaro will retain responsibility for the ABET/CAC self-study.

Welcome to Melissa (Missy) Seate, who joined our department this month as an Accounting Clerk. In this role, she will assist with processing the biweekly payroll, travel reimbursements, vendor invoices for payment along with other departmental office duties. She received her BA from UNC-CH, and has an extensive accounting background. She has worked at Duke Medical Center, Spectrum Planning and Development, and The Forest at Duke. Missy's office is located in 226 Withers Hall and her telephone number is 919-513-7300.

Congratulations to Jennifer Craddock for being selected as Research Facilitator (responsible for processing research proposals) replacing Ginger McGlamery effective January 5. Jennifer has been cross-training over the past six months to provide support for this critical position, which should make for a smooth transition. Jennifer will be located at the EGRC on Centennial Campus.

Dana Lasher, director of student services, and Ken Tate, director of the ePartners Program, have recently been selected as a “Pride of the Wolfpack Award” winners in the College of Engineering.

Congratulations to Dr. Vince Freeh and his wife Jennifer, on the birth of their 4th child, Anna Maria Freeh, on January 18th.

Congratulations to Drs Injong Rhee, Lisong Xu, and Khaled Harfoush for their work on improving TCP performance for high-speed networks (a network with large delay and huge bandwidth. E.g., Internet2 or ESNet). This work is published in INFOCOM 2004. In the paper, they proposed a new protocol called BIC that improves the performance of TCP and they also implemented the protocol in Linux. The exciting news is that this protocol was tested by a third party at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) along with 6 other protocols being proposed by other researchers around the world including Caltech, Rice, UC-Berkeley, University College of London. BIC turns out to be the *best* protocol among these protocols. The work is reported in http://dsd.lbl.gov/DIDC/PFLDnet2004/papers/Bullot.pdf. Recently Caltech has created a lot of publicity around FAST (see http://netlab.caltech.edu/FAST/).

ACM/AITP Meeting Sponsorships Available
A reminder to all our ePartners, a complementary named sponsorship event is available for the ACM/AITP Meeting on April 21st at 7 pm. You simply need to provide a guest speaker and a technical topic of 30-40 minutes in length. Other nights are also available for sponsorship. For more information, please contact Ken Tate at 919-513-4292 or kmtate2@ncsu.edu.

Scientists Develop Technology to Enable High-Performance Computing
An optical network provisioning protocol to enable more efficient computing applications has been successfully demonstrated by scientists at MCNC Research & Development Institute and North Carolina State University, including computer science professors, Drs. Harry Perros and George Rouskas. To read more, visit http://www.ncsu.edu/news/press_releases/04_01/005.htm.

Averitt Recognized as an IT Leader
Samuel F. Averitt, vice provost for information technology, chair of the North Carolina Networking Initiative (NCNI) and alumnus of the College of Engineering, has been selected as one of Computerworld magazine’s Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2004. The award was announced in a special Jan. 5 edition of Computerworld. The annual award honors 100 top IT and business executives for their exceptional technology leadership. This year’s winners will be honored at the Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference in Palm Desert, Calif., in March. Suzanne Gordon, who is vice president of IT at SAS Institute Inc., a member of the NC State Board of Trustees, and a CSC alumna, received the award in 2003. To read the entire article, visit http://www.ncsu.edu/BulletinOnline/01_04/averitt.htm.

'Naming Rights' Available for New Facility
The official groundbreaking ceremony for our new 100,000 sq. ft, $41M state-of-the-art teaching and research facility on Centennial Campus was held on October 24th, 2003. At that same time, we launched the official Naming Rights Campaign with opportunities ranging from $25,000 to over $1M. Premiere naming spaces include an expansive atrium and a series of terraces designed to host events of all sizes, as well as labs, classrooms, conference rooms, and faculty offices. More information is available at http://epartners.ncsu.edu/naming_rights.html, and more details will officially be released on this campaign in the coming months. If you have questions or would like more information, please contact Ken Tate at 919-513-4292 or kmtate2@ncsu.edu.

Back to Main ePartners News Page.