Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology

Jeremy Rodgers, a rising junior from Mills High School, scrutinized his calculations before placing his soda straw “rocket” in a launching pump, sending it off on a graceful arc over the front lawn of UALR’s engineering building.

He was one of 15 Little Rock School District high school students chosen to participate in a two-week Aerospace Summer Academy sponsored by the Central Arkansas Aerospace Alliance. The consortium is a partnership between UALR, the Little Rock School District, Pulaski Tech, the Little Rock Airport Commission, and area aerospace and aviation companies to promote student interest in aerospace careers. The goal: to encourage bright science-minded students to consider careers in the aerospace industry.

Central Arkansas is going to need all the high-skilled workers it can educate. The sector is expected to grow and expand. Just this month Dassault Falcon Jet announced it is doubling its operations in Little Rock.

“It’s incredible the stuff you can do,” Rodgers said, after he and his fellow campers took a quick math prep course that exposed them to trigonometric calculations. In between the math lessons, they toured Dassault Falcon Jet’s plant and several other area aerospace industries. They also spent several days on the UALR campus, exploring the advanced engineering labs and the 3-D Virtual Reality Center of UALR’s Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering.  Vernard Henley, director of educational outreach and diversity at UALR’s engineering and information technology college, said the two-week academy experience showed the students how math theories learned from a textbook can be applied to send a rocket soaring across the sky. The object, Henley said, is to capture their interest and open their minds to possibilities.
It seems to be working for young Jeremy Rodgers.

“I’ve never taken trig and now I love it,” said Rodgers, who had planned on playing football to get into college. “I’m getting hooked. I’m starting to like this more than football.”

Dr. Mary L. Good, Founding Dean of the Donaghey College, was presented the first “Sid McMath Lifetime Achievement Award” at a special luncheon hosted by the Lions World Services for the Blind on Thursday, June 28th. First Lady Ginger Beebe presented the award to Dr. Good, after a number of speakers highlighted Dr. Good’s lifetime of achievement and her ongoing role at UALR. In accepting the award, Dr. Good mentioned the role her family, friends and colleagues at UALR had in allowing her to receive the honorary award. Watch for additional details and photos in the local media and on the UALR homepage.

Lions World Services for the Blind has announced it will present the first annual Sidney McMath Lifetime Achievement Award to Dr. Mary L. Good, founding dean of UALR’s Donaghey College of Information Science and Systems Engineering and world renowned scientist and educator.

Arkansas First Lady Ginger Beebe will present the award June 28 at a fundraising luncheon at the Peabody Hotel in Little Rock. Television anchor B.J. Sams will emcee the event. Tickets are $100 per person or $1,000 for a table of 10. For more information or to purchase tickets, contact Paula Graves at (501)664-7100 or by e-mail at pgraves@lwsb.org.

The lifetime achievement award was established in honor of former Arkansas governor Sidney S. McMath.  He became a vigorous pubic advocate for the Lions World Center.

A team of UALR graduate students won the top place for predicting software bugs in alternative software libraries at the International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories at the 29th Annual International Conference on Software Engineers (CSE) held at Minneapolis in May.

Hemant Joshi, who received his Ph.D. from UALR last month, and Chuanlei Zhang, as well as computer science Professors Coskun Bayrak and Srini Ramaswamy finished in first place, submitting the best approach for predicting software bugs in large-scale software development projects.

Joshi will join Acxiom this month. Zhang has been supported by a research grant from Acxiom since her arrival at UALR. Both are from the UALR College of Information Science and Systems Engineering.

Competing teams were required to predict – before Jan. 31 – the number of bugs or changes that would happen between Feb. 1 and April 30 for the industry-standard Eclipse software development environment using their open source development logs.