FIU’s School of Computing & Information Sciences celebrates 25th anniversary

FIU’s School of Computing & Information Sciences celebrates its 25^th anniversary this week with a two-day event highlighting its achievements, alumni, capabilities and the future of the school.

The event kicks off Friday, Nov. 9, with a full day of speakers and panel discussions in the Graham Center Ballrooms at Modesto A. Maidique Campus. Following registration and breakfast from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m., welcome remarks will be delivered by FIU President Mark B. Rosenberg, College of Engineering & Computing Dean Amir Mirmiran, SCIS Director Ram Iyengar and event chair, professor Masoud Sadjadi. More than 200 people are expected to attend.

Speakers at Friday’s symposium include:

• Jeffrey D. Ullman, Stanford W. Ascherman Professor of Computer Science (emeritus) at Stanford University, whose work on automata theory and knowledge-bases served as a foundation for modern computer science.

• Wenliang Du, professor of computer science at Syracuse University and an Outstanding FIU SCIS Alumnus whose research expertise includes Web and Smartphone System Security.

• C. V. Ramamoorthy, professor emeritus at University of California at Berkeley, who has conducted pioneering work on extracting parallelism from sequentially executable programs and the design of distributed systems.

• James F. O’Brien, professor of computer science at University of California at Berkeley and an FIU Distinguished Alumnus and Torch Award winner, who is an innovative computer graphics researcher whose work appears in many computer games and movies.

• Bjarne Stroustrup, Distinguished Professor and holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science at Texas A&M University, who is the creator of the C++ Programming Language used worldwide to power computer operating systems and applications.

A number of panel discussions on computer science topics will be presented throughout the day, as well as a formal dinner in the GC Ballroom, plenty of networking opportunities and an open house to engage the community with the work being done by SCIS researchers. On Saturday beginning at 10 a.m., tours will be given at the school’s labs, including the Discovery Lab, the High Performance Database Research Center, the Distributed Multimedia Information Systems Lab, Partnerships for International Research and Education (PIRE) Lab, Knowledge Lab and the Systems Research Laboratory.

Formed in 1987 from the former Department of Mathematical Sciences, the School of Computing and Information Sciences is now the second largest engineering college-based computer science degree-awarding program in the U.S. External research funding has topped $4 million in each of the last four years. Many faculty members have earned NSF and DOE Career Awards, research awards from Google, IBM, Xerox and NetApp. Alumni work as faculty members at top research universities around the country and major companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Citrix.

“We think it will be a spectacular tech event for our campus and South Florida,” said Masoud Sadjadi, associate professor and anniversary committee chair. “The speakers we have for this event are giants in their field and have done pioneering research in computer science. This is a great opportunity for our students, faculty and alumni to interact with them and expose what we are doing at FIU to the rest of the world.”