2010 Newsletter
(Kearney Hub article by Rebecca McMickell, Hub Intern)
IT CAREER DAY
The Buffalo County Development Council, University of Nebraska-Kearney, and several area technology companies hosted the Information Technology Career Day for junior high school students on Wednesday, March 3, 2010. Students visited several area businesses: Frontier Communications, the Local Exchange Carrier for Kearney; Intellicom, a complete design, installation and service communications company for all sizes of businesses in Nebraska; Xpanxion, a world wide software development company with one of their offices located in Kearney; the Emergency 911 Communications Center for Buffalo County Sheriff's Department/Kearney Police Department; and the City of Kearney Communications Center. During lunch and throughout the tour UNK students or recent graduates were available to answer questions concerning careers in Information Technology. The CSIS Department presented a short informative overview of their programs during lunch. Approximately 80 high school students from the Buffalo County area attended the event.
2009-2010 CSIS SENIOR SEMINAR CLASS
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The annual presentations of the CSIS senior seminar class were held Thursday, December 17th, 2009. Nick Gewecke, Joseph Ostrander, and Justin Stamm worked together to create a new appointment web application for the Writing Center. They demonstrated this website and illustrated some of the improvements over the current system.
Casey Glatter, Jacob Mason, Anatole Mirasano, and Derek Ruppert worked together to research the possibility of capturing keystroke signals using a laser beam directed at the back of a laptop and recording the vibrations. The vibrations detected in the laser beam are translated into sound waves, and using mathematical formulas, noise is removed and the individual keystroke signals are analyzed.
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SCIMATH COLLOQUIM: CYBER-PHYSICAL NETWORKS
The CSIS Department coordinated the SCIMath Colloquium presentation on April 1, 2010 of Dr. Mehmet Can Vuran, a University of Nebraska at Lincoln Computer Science professor. Dr. Vuran's presentation discussed cyber-physical networks. In his presentation, he discussed three main solutions for the realization of CPNs. His work on wireless underground sensor networks (WUSNs) was presented.
2010 AI ROBOTICS COMPETITION
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For the past eight years, the CSIS Artificial Intelligence class, taught by Dr. Sherri Harms, has held a robotics competition to showcase the concepts they are learning in the course. The students build their own robots using robotics kits, Vex and Legos NXT, and other parts fabricated to fit their needs. They also write the software that controls the performance of their robots. In the competition, the robots are randomly paired to accomplish the task of sweeping the robotics basketball court clean of Legos. The 8’ x 4’ court has been built according to the Midwest Instructional Computing Symposium (MICS) competition specifications.
This year’s robotics competition took place Tuesday, March 9th, 2010. The top placing teams will go on to compete at the regional MICS 2010 robotics competition at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in April. Media coverage of the local competition was provided by NTV and the Kearney Hub. The Hub coverage is available at: Robot Article
Ray Williams developed the winning robot, followed in second place by the robot created by Phillip Lempke and Paden Hogeland. In third place was the robot developed by Nick Gewecke. Congratulations to all the robot competition winners!
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CAREER FAIR IT BREAKFAST
The CSIS Department, along with the Business Management Information Systems, Multimedia and Telecommunications Management programs co-hosted the Information Technology Career Fair Breakfast, prior to the UNK Career Fair on Wednesday, February, 24, 2010. Twenty-nine co-representatives from 16 Information Technology companies visited with sixty-two UNK students representing the four programs. Chancellor Kristensen gave the welcome for the event.
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NJAS SCIENCE FAIR
The CSIS Department hosted a tour for middle school and high school students as part of the Nebraska Junior Academy ofScience Fair on Tuesday, March 23rd. Students were presented with an introduction to the robotics lab, and shown some latest research being conducted by CSIS students Jason Webb and Nick Gewecke.
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2010 BUILD A COMPUTER DAY
The CSIS Department, for the fourth year in a row, assisted with the ESU-10 TECHS Build A Computer Day on Monday, January 18, 2010. Fourteen different schools and 70 students from around Nebraska participated in the event. In addition to building a computer, students installed the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system. During the day, students were introduced to Web 2.0 applications, Jing, Gabcast and ChaCha. Representing the CSIS Department were Dr. Sherri Harms, Dr. Xuli Liu, and two CSIS students, Nick Gewecke and Phil Lempke. During lunch, CSIS faculty met with the ESU 10 staff and the high school teachers to discuss IT careers and the TECHS curriculum.
Other CSIS News:
2011 CSIS News
2009 CSIS News