Spring 2008

Greetings from Happy Valley! We are embarking on another exhilarating year. Computer Science and Engineering has had an extremely productive year. Our doctoral program was ranked 22nd in the nation by U.S. News and World Report. Our faculty and students have received a number of awards.

CSE faculty and research centers had a bumper year in research funding. In particular, the newly formed Networking and Security Research Center received $2.9 million in this year's funding alone.

Our Computer Engineering Doctoral Program was ranked 16th nationwide in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings.

This year the Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award for the Computer Science and Engineering Department went to Mike Keebaugh. Mike is president of the Intelligence and Information Systems business at Raytheon based in Garland, TX. He received his B.S. in mathematics and his M.S. in computer science from Penn State in 1967 and 1971, respectively. Tom La Porta, the director of the Networking and Security Research Center, was awarded the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award. Padma Raghavan was promoted to full professor. She is the director of the Scalable Scientific Computing Laboratory at Penn State. Hongyuan Zha, director for the Center for Machine Learning was promoted to full professor.

Computer Science and Engineering continues to be the driving force of the nation's economy in the fields of science and technology. The outcome of research conducted in our school will continue to permeate every aspect of our lives. We in the CSE department at Penn State are very excited to be part of this information revolution.

In response to the critical national challenge posed in the area of security, we have recruited outstanding faculty in this area. This year we have recruited three new faculty. Trent Jaeger joins us from IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. He is an international expert in the area of Linux security and has several significant contributions. Trent received his Ph.D. degree from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Bhuvan Urgaonkar joins us from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His area of expertise is in distributed systems. Yanxi Liu will join us January 2006 from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Her area of expertise is in computer vision, graphics, and medical image analysis.

It is indeed my privilege to be a part of Penn State and to be associated with outstanding faculty, students, staff, and alumni. May we bring home the bowl this year.