Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology

The UALR Information Quality Graduate Program posted another record enrollment of 79 students for the fall 2009 semester. The program’s growth of 30 percent outpaced the university’s 10 percent increase in enrollment over fall 2008. The overall university enrollment of 13,167 is also a new record for the university. Founded in 2006 through a collaboration of MIT Information Quality Program, Acxiom Corporation, and the UALR Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology, the Information Quality Graduate Program now includes a Graduate Certificate in Information Quality, a Master of Science in Information Quality, and the Applied Science PhD in Information Quality. The rapid growth from 2009 inaugural class of 25 master’s students to the 79 students enrolled this fall, including 18 in the PhD program, reflects the increasing demand for Information Quality professionals with graduate-level education.

Nitin Agarwal of Arizona State University will join UALR’s Department of Information Science in the Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology this fall, lending his extensive research experience in social computing, knowledge extraction in social media, and Web 2.0.

“He is bringing these research interests directly to teaching. He has played a major role in developing a course on Social Computing and Web Analytics,” said Daniel Berleant, search committee chair.

Agarwal will receive a Ph.D. from Arizona State prior to beginning his career at UALR in the fall. He is one of the authors of the soon-to-be-released book on web science, “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in Blogs.”

“He plans to bring his experience at the leading edge of Web research to a wider audience,” Berleant said.

Agarwal has published four journal papers, nine conference papers,and four book chapters and submitted four other papers. These have appeared in such prestigious forums as ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data and the International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining.

He recently was recognized as an Outstanding Ph.D. student finalist by the School of Computing and Informatics at Arizona State.

“UALR’s Department of Information Science expects its students to benefit directly from Agarwal’s teaching and research expertise in the form of new courses and projects at both the undergraduate and graduate levels,” said department chair Elizabeth Pierce. “Agarwal will complement the department’s curriculum, teaching and research interests in web science, information quality, technology foresight, virtual reality, e-commerce, bioinformatics, and information applications.”

Four students in the Master of Science in Information Quality program have been inducted into the Zeta Chapter of Alpha Epsilon Lambda (AEL), the National Honor Society of Graduate and Professional School Students.

Kenneth Benson, Neal Gibson, Uklit Osatis, and Olukayode Issac Osesina were honored for their ethics, intellectual achievement, and leadership in their graduate work. The induction ceremony was held May 6.

Alpha Epsilon Lambda was formed in 1990 to promote ethics, intellectual achievement, and leadership among graduate students. Before AEL, no honor society was devoted exclusively to recognizing graduate students.

The Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts graduated 112 top high school scholars this spring. More of them chose UALR than any other institution of higher learning to pursue their academic dreams.

Statistics from the state’s first residential high school for high academic achievers show 20 of this year’s graduates were headed to UALR. Of those 20, 12 chose UALR’s Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology.

The second highest number of grads – 17 – chose the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville and eight students chose Hendrix College. Three students picked the University of Central Arkansas and two each headed to Arkansas Tech University, Henderson State University, and Lyon College. One ASMSA grad each picked the University of the Ozarks, John Brown University, and Ouachita Baptist University.

“The word is out to young wanna-be engineers, scientists, and others that UALR is the place to be,” said Katie Young, assistant dean for academic affairs and recruitment in UALR’s Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology. “Our biggest recruiters are former students who have a year or two under their belts at the college and go back to ASMSA testifying to underclassmen that this is where they should go.”

Other institutions that attracted at least one ASMSA student this year included Yale, University of Southern California, the U.S. Naval Academy, Syracuse, Rice, Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, Brown, and Boston University.

For more information about UALR, visit ualr.edu/future.

A group of Arkansas students spent six weeks of their summer vacation in France this year. But instead of relaxing, these future computer scientists spent their time at the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) at Rouen, working on computer applications and hardware designed to improve container shipping and associated logistics.

The students – seven from UALR and one from the University of Arkansas-Fayetteville – each were assigned a portion of the complete project, which dealt with container security, monitoring, and logistics. One of the main focus areas for their research was the feasibility of the use of sensor networks using sensors such as radio frequency identification (RFID) in shipping containers.

Rouen is located on the Seine River, which is home to three individual ports, so these students’ work is particularly applicable there. However, their work has broader implications for all countries engaged in international trade.

The UALR students worked alongside with students from INSA who began creating a transportation-on-demand system that would allow individuals to call public transit to their location at any time.

UALR students stayed in a dormitory at Rouen, but they were able to spend each weekend traveling throughout France and into other European countries. Next year, the program should expand, according to Dr. Srini Ramaswamy, chair of the Department of Computer Science.

“We have three years of funding for the program from the National Science Foundation (NSF),” he said. “We hope to send more students next year, and they will have the opportunity to continue the research begun this year. Eventually, the students’ work could have broad applications for shipping throughout the world.”