Message from the Chairs: International Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Networking

Abstract

The Chair's Message Welcome to the Fall 2008 issue of Bits and Bytes. It is a pleasure to share with you news of some of the activities which have occurred within our department over the last year, and as you look over the newsletter, you will see that there has been considerable activity and change for faculty and students. Kim, a former student of Dr. Piatkowski and currently a faculty member at Oakland University, presented a colloquium (A synopsis of his talk is on page 2.) as part of the festivities honoring Dr. Piatkowski's retirement. We wish Dr. Piatkowski a long and happy retirement. will continue to participate in departmental research activities here as an adjunct faculty member. Dr. Li Yang, whose research area includes databases and data mining, was promoted to full professor effective August 2007. Dr. Wuwei Shen, whose research includes software engineering, received tenure and was promoted to associate professor effective August 2008. During the past year we graduated our ninth and tenth Ph.D. students, and currently we have seventeen students pursuing the Ph.D. degree in computer science. The Ph.D. students who graduated were part of a record setting group for WMU. For the first time, there were over 100 doctoral students receiving degrees campus-wide from WMU. Grant and research activities continue in CS. Faculty members have continued their work in publications, conference presentations, and externally funded research, both private and federal. For example, Dr. Zijiang (James) Yang is a principal investigator on a recently awarded grant from the National Science Foundation in the amount of $400,000; Boeing has renewed its grant with Professors Ala Al-Fuqaha, Wuwei Shen, and Dionysios Kountanis; and Cisco has awarded another grant to Professors Al-Fuqaha, Kountanis, and Guizani. Several faculty have also participated in community events held at the CEAS Parkview Campus. In the spring about 130 junior and senior high school students from the Kalamazoo Area Math and Science Center (KAMSC) attended two days of sessions on a variety of engineering and applied science topics. Dr. Karlis Kaugars introduced games programming to students, who actually wrote a small game program. At WMU's first Science Olympiad, Drs. Karlis Kaugars and Ajay Gupta helped supervise events for some 400 students from area middle and high schools competing in the engineering activities. CS faculty participation involved directing the Trajectory event, in which teams designed, constructed, calibrated and operated a device capable of launching a …