Author: Michael

Warfare Center participates in first Ventura County education summit, reinforces commitment to educators

VENTURA, Calif.- The Ventura County P-20 Council hosted the first-ever Ventura County Education Summit to strengthen existing ties, and establish new ones, between educators and businesses at the Ventura County Office of Education (VCOE) Conference and Educational ServicesCenter building, Nov. 26. Vance Brahosky, Deputy Technical Director,Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division, was among four business sector representatives, including Haas Automation, Corwin Press and The Trade Desk, who participated on a special panel to discuss strides taken to bridge the gap between education and business.

“We don’t have as strong of service as we require if we’re not reaching out to the community in events like this,” said Brahosky. “We will not miss opportunities to do that.”

Source: DVIDS – News – Warfare Center participates in first Ventura County education summit, reinforces commitment to educators

Computer Science 3rd Advisory Board meeting

On November 29, we held our 3rd biannual Computer Science Advisory Board Meeting.

There were two parts to the meeting, a lunch with presentations by CI faculty and administration, and the Capstone Showcase, which takes place at the end of each term:

1:00-3:00 Lunch and Presentations

  1. Chris Meissner welcome & introductions
  2. Richard LeRoy, Advancement
  3. Amanda Carpenter, Career Development
  4. Jason Isaacs, Mechatronics with
 Alberto Venegas, Ethan Warner and Mark Getzinger
  5. Brian Thoms, ABET
  6. Zane Gittins, HAAS & MSCS
  7. Michael Soltys, Chair’s report

After Chris Meissner’s welcome, and introductions of all present,

Richard LeRoy on the mission of the board

Advisory Board 11.29.2018

Brian Thoms on ABET

Brian Thoms distributed a draft of the departmental ABET document, and  asked our board members to comment on our PEO (Program Educational Outcomes), which describe what we expect from our graduates 5 years after graduation (they are different for our 3 undergraduate programs: Computer Science, IT and Mechatronics). Please read the PEOs, and send your comments to Brian Thoms <brian.thoms@csuci.edu>.

Presentation slides of Brian Thoms:

ABET-BrianThoms-slides

Jason Isaacs on Mechatronics

MechatronicsEngineering_AdvisoryBoard

Zane GIttins on Cybersecurity

CSUCI_Advisory_Board

Michael Soltys Chair’s report

AdvisoryBoard-Nov29-2018

Pictures from Capstone Showcase

Comp Sci alum Joel Helling working as a Software Engineer at GBL in Camarillo

Joel Helling is a Software Engineer at GBL Systems Corporation and part-time lecturer at CSUCI. He started working at GBL Systems, a government contractor based in Camarillo, in 2014 working on various projects from automated website design, implementation, and testing to desktop application development. Currently, he develops Test and Evaluation tools for the Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) and supports the development of the Testing and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA) Software Development Activity (SDA) including maintaining and updating legacy applications, and designing and implementing new software tools.

Joel completed his Master’s in Computer Science in 2018. His Master’s Thesis, under the advisement of Dr. Soltys, discussed the intersection of stringology and graph theory by relating indeterminate strings with undirected graphs and proving some properties of the indeterminate string and its associated alphabet size. The paper was later published in the Journal of Theoretical Computer Science. Currently, Joel is also working as a part-time lecturer for CSUCI. See here for details.

Geetanjali Agarwal successfully defended her MSCS thesis on image recognition

My student Geetanjali (Geet) Agarwal defended her masters thesis titled Aneka – Wavelet Image Hashing Algorithm, see announcement, where the contribution is a framework of hashing algorithms for image recognition. This important work is done in collaboration with the SoCal High Technology Task Force (HTTF). Geet deployed the AWS to accomplish her results, including EC2 instances and MySQL databases used to run experiments on thousands of images. Geet’s thesis will be available after the final draft is ready.

Hill fire and Woosley fire November 2018

On November 8, 2018, we saw long plume of smoke from behind the mountain north of our house in Newbury Park: the beginning of the Hill Fire. The smoke has getting darker, and started covering the sky. The Santa Anna wind was blowing hot and dry from the North-East. About an hour later we received a message that there was a mandatary evacuation for our area. We started packing right away, but we took the advice more urgently when we saw tongues of fire on the crest of the mountain less than a mile north of us. We got in the car, and started heading out, only to be stuck in a long procession of cars making their way to the 101 and out of danger. We took the Portrero road through Hidden Valley, and we arrived at Westlake Village, where we waited for news. When it became apparent that we would not be coming home that night, we drove south to family. We wanted to return 3 days later, when the mandatory evacuation was lifted, but by that time the Woosley Fire has made its way to Mt. Boney, close and visible about a mile south of our home. We saw a lot of fire activity, and constant fly over and dumping the “red stuff” – the “red stuff” is mostly water, mixed with ammonium phosphate or sulfate (fertilizers), with guar gum or clay (thickeners) and iron oxide (color). The air quality was very poor, with residents getting headaches and nausea. We decided to evacuate again, this time north.

Iddo Tzameret and Stephen Cook strengthened our results from 2004 in the computational complexity of linear algebra

During my PhD years (1997-2001) in the Computer Science department, at the University of Toronto, my advisor Stephen Cook and I worked on laying the computational complexity foundations of Linear Algebra. To that end we deployed Berkowitz’s algorithm for computing the characteristic polynomial, as it allowed us to state major theorems of linear algebra in the theory NC2 (fast parallel computations). We published the final version of our result in the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic. Recently, Iddo Tzameret and Stephen Cook strengthened those results considerably in this paper.