The CSIS Department selected Aaron Steele and Jon Miller as outstanding graduates for the spring 2009 semester. This award is based on scholarly activities, as well as sudent academic achievement and service to the department, university and community. Aaron and Jon distinguished themselves in all three areas.
Aaron graduated with a CS comprehensive major and physics and
mathematics minors. Aaron’s list of accomplishments is extremely
impressive. Aaron was the president of our student ACM organization. A
sample of the activities he facilitated through ACM include: bringing
in outside presenters, hosting LAN parties, leading a state-wide
petition drive to allow for Internet access over power lines and
hosting open student forums on issues relevant to students. He was also
the UNK Cornerstone President, the Vice President of the Physics Club,
and volunteered for Habitat for Humanity and Campus Kitchen, which
provides left-over campus food to homebound individuals. He also
volunteered as a science fair judge for high school students. He was a
UNK Academic Peer Tutor and received the Distinguished Tutor Award for
the University in 2008. He was a First Year Program Peer Leader for the
Mathematics Department. He has provided secretarial and technical
support to the vocations office of the Catholic Diocese of Grand
Island. Aaron also assisted elementary children as part of the Walking
School Bus program. Aaron conducted research in both computer science
and physics. He presented research on using Scalable Automatic Case
Elicitation in Case-Based Reasoning at the National Conference for
Undergraduate Research (NCUR)in 2008 and 2009, at the UNK Student
Research Day (SRD) in 2008 and 2009 and at the Nebraska Research and
Innovation Conference in October,
2008. He published a paper at the International Conference on Cognitive
Science (ICCS) in March, 2009. Aaron’s physics research was on cloud
irradiance simulation. He presented his physics research at NCUR and at
the UNK SRD in 2008 and 2009. Independently, Aaron conducted research on emulating Network Drives with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
(SMTP) and speech recognition, which he presented at NCUR and UNK SRD
in 2009. This fall, Aaron will be attending the University of Miami at
Ohio on a full-ride graduate fellowship.
 |
Jon Miller graduated with a double major in CIS & Telecomm Management. Jon was an exceptional student and a valuable contributor
to several team projects, including the UNK online community website and the poll experiment in the seminar class. In Jon’s spare time, he uses his deep baritone voice and musical talents to sing and play guitar with a musical group that performs for many Christian organizations, as well as for penitentiaries. Last summer, Jon was an intern at Principal Financial Group in Des Moines, IA. Jon is now employed with Principal full-time. |
 |
From January through May 2009, Qiang Zhou joined the UNK CSIS Department as a visiting faculty member. Zhou teaches computer science at Shandong University at Weihai, China. While at UNK, Zhou audited several CSIS courses and studied curriculum issues and teaching methodologies. He gave a presentation on embedded systems, which he also teaches in Weihi. We enjoyed getting to know more about Shandong University at Weihai’s computer science program and having Zhou in our department. |
 |
Shahla Alavi was awarded the Friend of the CSIS Department for 2009. This award goes to a person or organization that has gone above and beyond in support of our programs and students. Shahla has been a faculty member in the CSIS Department for the past 20 years. Due to the current budget situation faced by the University, Shahla’s position was eliminated. Shahla is now an Instructional Designer for UNK Information Technology Services. We are extremely thankful for the years of dedicated service to the CSIS Department and know that she will do well now that she is teaching the UNK faculty and staff. |