CS Grad Council Meeting Minutes – Tues., May 1, 2001

Secretary – Pete Schoenhoff

 

The meeting was brought to order at 7:50 pm.  Members present were Ameya Datey, Vinoth Jagannathan, Wendy Schafer, Pete Schoenhoff, Josh Steele, and Marc Vass.  Craig Ganoe visited the meeting, and Pradip Tumatti attended to address the council about a concern.

 

I)           First Item of Business – GTA Ranking Discussion

Pradip opened this issue by addressing the council.  His concerns were as follows:

·        The criteria for GTA ranking and selection, as posted on the website, are not being followed.

·        The “-OR” for support:  The website ways that there is a penalty after four GTA assignments.  The actual applied penalty is for number of semesters in Virginia.

Pradip is not concerned for himself, but rather for the department.  A professor had told him that the system seeks intended to encourage research.

Marc explained that at the recent faculty meeting, it was mentioned that the department can give funding to whomever they wish (specifically, the PhD students), and that Dr. Kafura mentioned the possibility of removing “coursework only” as an option for Masters work.  Ameya estimated that at least eight new professors would be needed to support such a plan.

Ameya suggested that a better measure than time is needed to ascertain progress in research.  He also suggested that advisor opinion would also be a tainted measure, and probably unusable – and that perhaps field could be considered.  The department could then choose which specialty areas and research topics they were interested in nurturing.

Wendy and Pradip proposed “thesis milestones,” which could be checked by a jury which could meet periodically (perhaps every three months).  They might consider progress, papers published, scope and difficulty, etc.

The language requirement was questioned.  The question of discrimination was raised.  The council was divided on this issue; with some suggesting that the Department was abusing the Indian Students, and others countering that the Indian Students were abusing the department.  Several feel that foreign students are given false expectations with regard to funding.

The final consensus and concern was that we are loosing students – especially those interested in pursuing PhD work – because of the current funding practices.

  • Rules are not being followed
  • Subjective rules are applied, or are only applied when convenient
  • Some of the rules themselves are inappropriate.

Pete suggested a web-published “traceability matrix” which could show:

  • What the basic department values are, which funding decisions support (for example, “American citizenship,” or “academic excellence”
  • The measure(s) chosen to judge students against the values (GPA, or advisor rating, for example)
  • The specific scale for the above measures – and what one must do to achieve various levels
  • The relative worth (as a percentage) of each measure.
  • The current stats for the department (without names) so that students might ascertain for themselves the likelihood of getting a GTA position.

 

Wendy suggested we ask the GPC to address this issue and perhaps consider revising the current process. This issue was tabled until a later meeting.

 

II)          Josh – updates on interior

 

Josh spoke about current state of affairs with regard to:

·        Backups: looking into solutions

·        Virtual Network Client – won’t be on the next clone.

·        Snooping – won’t be possible on the next clone.  As is it is possible, but the “snoop-ee” is made aware whenever his machine is being snooped.

·        Printer quota – it is possible/likely that this will be raised.

·        When four “pages” are all printed to a single sheet of paper, the quota is charged with four pages.  – looking into a solution

·        We will request to be able to print double-sided.

·        Mice –looking into he problems.

·        “sudo” (a low-level super-user access) to be installed on csgrad.

·        Storage space on csgrad is also being addressed.

 

Lockers & research space application process will take place in the fall.  Students with current space may hold on to it.

 

III)        Ameya – student seminar series

 

May 10th (Thursday) 2pm.  –  End of the year.  All researching students (especially those graduating) are invited to come and talk about their work.  –Bring Your Own Lunch.  Ameya will post some flyers/posters.

 

 

IV)               Pete – will contact Chad Wingrave to find out how to do awards.

V)                Vinoth will ask Pankaj or contact the GSA president about getting on the GSA list, to find out about meetings and events.

VI)               Mentorship program – tabled until next meeting

VII)             Survey – Pete will coordinate effort.  Will first try to get old survey from Rob or Tracy, and hopefully redistribute ASAP.  – Add to survey – purpose of grad council, and how to contact us.

VIII)            Pete – suggested setting up Wiki-wiki on csgrad to support effort to coordinate research knowledge.

IX)               Josh – suggested posters to advertise

 

 

Topics

v     HCI

v     Virtual environments

v     Networking

v     Parallel computing

v     CSCW

v     Visualization

v     Ed tech

v     Scientific Computation

v     Digital Libraries

v     Simulation

v     Software Engineering

v