News, Events and Announcements

Brian M. O'Connell, Esq., 47, of West Hartford, died Wednesday, (May 21, 2008) at his home. He leaves his wife Sarah Cox. Born in Wethersfield to the late Robert F. and Elizabeth (Shannon) O'Connell he lived in the Hartford area all his life. He graduated from Northwest Catholic High School, Trinity College, and the UCONN School of Law. He practiced law in the Hartford area from 1987 to 1996 and was a professor in computer science and philosophy at Central Connecticut State University. He founded the Young Democrats of West Hartford, and was a member of DeMolay, IEEE, and the Connecticut Bar Assoc. He loved his students, his friends, reading, music, robots, and rocketry. Friends may call on Sunday, May 25, from 3-6 p.m. at the Molloy Funeral Home, 906 Farmington Ave., West Hartford. Donations in his memory may be made to www.alleycat.org. Messages of sympathy and condolences may be made at www.molloyfuneralhome.com

The Spring 2008 MS-CIT Capstone presentations will be held on May 8 at 11:00 a.m. in the Vance Academic Center – Room 102

Capstone announcement

Dr. Zdravko Markov has been named co-principal investigator on a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The project involves developing, implementing, and testing curricular materials that teach core Artificial Intelligence topics using a unifying theme of machine learning. Machine learning involves developing systems or programs that improve on their performance based on experience.

CCSU news announcement

Focused discussion of how and why to build a Topic Map. Every effort will be made to demystify the process using freely available open source automation tools. In an hour the presenter will create a very basic Topic Map based on the XTM standard. The audience will be encouraged to participate by adding relationships to the subject. Once the basic structure is created a very simple XML transformation will be performed using the open source Saxon processor and XSLT to generate viewable HTML pages. All software used will be Open Source and readily available for download.

Colloquium announcement

Job opportunity for 3^rd and 4^th year CS students. Logosportswear.com is an e-commerce company specializing in customized apparel located in Cheshire, CT. They are looking for someone with a good base knowledge of PHP (or Perl/ASP) and JavaScript. This position is part-time with the opportunity to work into a full-time position after graduation. They are making a strong push to bring their web presence to the next level with things like AJAX driven product customizers and other dynamic PHP/JavaScript driven web applications. For additional information, please contact Patrick Cerreta at www.cerretadesign.com.

Spring 2007 issue of Threads, a newsletter published by the Computer Science Department is now available.

Threads (Spring 2007)

Drs. Kurkovsky and Kjell, together with Dr. Gotchev from the Department of Mathematics and Dr. Sharma from the department of Physics, received a nearly half million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation program Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM). Beginning in the fall 2007, this grant will fund scholarships for academically talented but financially needy students majoring in computer science, mathematics, or physics. Scholarships provided through this program will pay up to $5,200 per year for up to four years.

Scholarship program web site