news 2009 Eight Hour Start up Competition Five teams made-up of students from UNC Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics (CCI) competed in the second annual 8-Hour Start-Up Competition on Friday, November 13th. After a grueling day of competition, the team of Joshua Schroeder, Antoine Campbell, and Thomas Phifer came out victorious. Special thanks goes to Alumni (and judge) Paul Bates and John Lucas for their generous donations. "The 8-Hour Startup Competition was a great experience! It was great having people from Microsoft, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and other places in the IT industry be the judges. I learned a lot about programming for the web and what I am capable of in 8-hours." – Thomas Phifer- Students were asked to design a travel business that integrated airline booking, hotel reservations, and event search at popular destinations. The competition is an innovative approach to connect students with prospective employers in the Charlotte area. It is designed to demonstrate students' ability to take on a challenging, real-world problem by building a working prototype of a web application that solves the problem in 8-hours. Students must also present to a panel of judges, comprised of faculty and industry affiliates, to convince them that their project should be funded. Students could either use Microsoft .NET, Java, or LAMP to construct the prototype. Criteria include functionality, security, and usability.

Message to Students We offer a wide range of academic and research programs in Information Technology and Software Engineering. Academic curriculum is intellectually challenging with strong hands-on laboratory components using state of the art technology. The department maintains close relationships with a large number of companies that make us a top recruitment choice. Financial assistance is available for both undergraduate and graduate students Charlotte Metro ISSA Scholarship Human Computer Interaction Distributed AI Critical Infrastructure Protection Information Security More Information

Dr. Ehab Al-Shaer Joins the Department Prof. Al-Shaer is the Director of the Center for Cyber Defense and Network Assurance (Cyber DNA). Dr. Al-Shaer's primary research areas are network security, security management, fault diagnosis, and network assurability. Prof. Al-Shaer received his MSc and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Northeastern University (Boston, MA) and Old Dominion University (Norfolk, VA) in 1998 and 1994 respectively.* *Prof. Al-Shaer edited/co-edited more than 10 books and book chapters, and published about 90 refereed journals and conferences papers in his area. He has been a Co-Editor of number of books, Guest Editor for number of journals, invited speaker, tutorial presenter and panelist in many conferences and industrial seminars. Prof. Al-Shaer is the General Chair of the 16^th ACM Computer and Communication 2009-2010 and NSF Workshop in Assurable and Usable Security Configuration, August 2008. Prof. Al-Shaer also served as a Workshop Chair and Program Co-chair for number of well-established conferences/workshops in his area including POLICY’08, IM’07, ANM-INFOCOM’08, CCS-SafeConfig 09, MMNS’01, and E2EMON 04-05. He also served as a member in the technical program and organization committees for many IEEE and ACM conferences including INFOCOM, ICNP, IM/NOMS, ICDCS, GLOBECOM, ICC, MMNS DSOM, and E2EMON. He was awarded the Best Paper Awards at the IEEE IM 2003 and POLICY 2008, and received a NASA fellowship in 1997. Prof. Al-Shaer also received funding awards from NSF, Cisco, Intel, Sun Microsystems. **

Announcements other recent news Dan Oakley Received Award from U.S. Office of comptroller of Currency DanceDraw Collaboration SIS Department Hosts the "8-hour startup" competition April 11, 2008 SIS Department and NC A&T Jointly Host Faculty Development Workshops on Cybergames June 22-29 2008 The Department of Defense Information Assurance Scholarship Program provides graduate and undergraduate full scholarships for U.S. citizens to attend UNC Charlotte for two years and pursue studies in Information Security and Privacy. The application deadline for the academic year beginning in the Fall semester of 2010 is February 5, 2009. The department offers an Honors Program. More information is available here. College of Computing and Informatics 2008-09 Distinguished Lecture Series Weekly College of Computing and Informatics Research Seminar will be held in Woodward 106 every Friday 3-4.

New grants Celine Latulipe, David Wilson, and Sybil Huskey received an NSF grant “Dance.Draw: Embodiment as Input for Collaborative, Creative Expression.” The project will explore ways to allow dancers to create information with their movements in real-time and study how to involve the audience in the interaction loop. Brent Hoon Kang received NSF grants to study behavior of malicious botnets. Xintao Wu received an NSF grant to look at new ways of generating testing data for databases.

College of Computing and Informatics Starts the Honors Program in Fall 2008 The goal of the Honors Program in Computing and Informatics is to identify creative, imaginative, and exceptional undergraduate CCI students and develop their potential through encouragement, opportunity, and recognition. Benefits of the program include smaller classes and a more challenging curriculum. More Information