Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Main Departmental Office
Discovery Park, Room F201
3940 N. Elm

Mailing address:
1155 Union Circle #311366
Denton, TX 76203-5017
940-565-2767

Barrett Bryant, Chair

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering offers the Master of Science with majors in computer engineering and in computer science and the Doctor of Philosophy with a major in computer science and engineering.

The objective of the master’s degree is to produce professional computer scientists capable of contributing technically to the basic core areas of computer science and computer engineering as well as to application areas. The objective of the doctoral degree is to produce professionals capable of conducting and directing research within the discipline of computer science and engineering.

The department is committed to overall excellence in graduate education. Consequently, the programs of study for these degrees include a mixture of course, laboratory and research work designed to place graduates at the forefront of technical excellence.

The department also supports an interdisciplinary doctorate with a major in information science. See the Department of Library and Information Sciences section of this catalog for more information.

Research

The Department of Computer Science and Engineering has a comprehensive research program that focuses on computer systems, intelligent systems and computer security. Within computer systems, faculty research includes work in architecture, compiler design, parallel and distributed processing, sensor fusion, software engineering, VLSI design, and wired and wireless networks. Areas within intelligent systems include bioinformatics, collaborative learning, computational epidemiology, databases and data mining, game programming, human factors, image understanding and computer vision, medical imaging and natural language processing. Research in computer security includes cryptography. Supporting areas include algorithm analysis and numerical analysis.

Faculty research has been supported through grants from federal and state institutions and private industry including the National Science Foundation, Texas Department of Transportation, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Google and Microsoft. The department enjoys a friendly working relationship with local and national companies. The department’s Advisory Council is composed of representatives from government agencies and high-tech firms. During the past few years they have helped obtain research funding, fellowships and internships for students in the department.

Centers

The Center for Computational Epidemiology and Response Analysis (CeCERA) is a UNT center that operates under the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. The Department of Computer Science and Engineering’s Computational Epidemiology Research Laboratory (CERL) is part of CeCERA. CERL applies computational science paradigms to the domain of public health researchers.

The Center for Information and Computer Security (CICS) has helped UNT earn the designation of “Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education” from the National Security Agency for its strong computer and information security program. This designation places UNT among the top institutions in the country in the field of computer security.

The Net-Centric Software and Systems Center is an NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center that focuses on a collaborative approach of research and development in net-centric and cloud computing systems. This allows us to draw on the expertise of industry and academia. The center explores the development, verification, validation of applications and systems for net-centric and cloud environments, such that the applications and services meet service level agreements (SLAs) including response time, reliability and security.

Laboratories

The Bioinformatics Laboratory conducts research on developing databases and analysis tools for genomics and many other research areas in the life sciences.

The Computational Epidemiology Research Laboratory (CERL) applies computational science paradigms to the domain of public health, thereby providing tools for epidemiologists and public health researchers. CERL is part of CeCERA (the UNT Center for Computational Epidemiology and Response Analysis).

The Computer Systems Research Laboratory focuses its work on researching multithreaded and multicore architectures for both embedded and high-performance applications. Research includes work in processing architectures, memory systems, cache memories and software tools to utilize the special capabilities of underlying hardware systems, and in developing both hardware and software solutions to improve performance, reduce energy consumption and prevent security breaches.

The Computer Vision and Intelligent Systems (CoVIS) Laboratory works to advance the understanding of the theories of machine learning for processing complex data and to develop applications in areas such as medicine and geo-information. The research focuses on both algorithm innovation and hardware integration, which includes computer vision, pattern recognition, data mining, and artificial intelligence. The CoVIS lab is facilitated with state-of-the-art computing resources and various imaging technologies. The lab provides both graduate and undergraduate students a unique, collaborative research cohort to further their career goals.

The Dependable Computing Systems Lab conducts research on failure modeling, failure management, adaptive failure resilience, failure-aware resource management and power-aware dependable computing. The lab conducts both fundamental and applied research to develop highly dependable and energy-efficient distributed and cloud computing systems.

The Geometric Computing Laboratory conducts research to improve the theoretical efficiency of algorithms with particular focus on geometric problems. GCL has been successful in mentoring students and involving them in synergistic activities associated with international conferences funded by UNT/National Science Foundation.

The Global Software Development Laboratory investigates problems related to teaching people how to work more effectively in global teams. The laboratory examines various software and human issues and how these factors interact in the context of a computer supported collaborative environment. It is also interested in testing whether specific problems can be remediated through direct or indirect intervention and whether these remediation strategies actually improve team performance. The group studies methodologies, techniques and technologies that address these issues.

The Information Management and Knowledge Discovery Lab (IMKD) focuses on information processing and data mining for emerging applications (e.g., spatial, spatio-temporal, streaming, web and sensor databases). Current projects include a number of topics in spatial data mining, geo-stream processing, modeling network similarity, trajectory modeling and privacy preserving. The lab conducts both fundamental and applied research and development to enable the use of information technology for many application domains, such as environmental monitoring, transportation and social networking.

The Laboratory for Recreational Computing (LARC) serves as a center for research, education and development in the field of video game programming.

The Language and Information Technologies Laboratory focuses on research on natural language processing, information retrieval, and applied machine learning, with current projects covering a number of topics in lexical semantics, graph-based natural language processing and information retrieval, and multilingual natural language processing.

The Multimedia Information Laboratory conducts research on multimedia (videos and images) processing, multimedia information extraction, and multimedia information modeling and retrieval, which includes video and image segmentation, motion and color analysis, image quality analysis, and object recognition by region clustering and classification.

The NanoSystem Design Laboratory (NSDL) conducts research in design and CAD for low-power high-performance nanoscale mixed-signal, mixed-discipline systems. NSDL conducts research on power, leakage and timing models; incorporates them in CAD flow through optimization methodology; and demonstrates them through computational intensive applications. NSDL members conduct their research using modern state-of-the-art hardware facilities to meet the computational demands of nanoscale VLSI design and CAD. These facilities include multiple Quad core high-end servers, several terabytes of storage servers and commercial standard electronic design automation (EDA) tools.

The Network Security Laboratory was established to increase general wireline and wireless security awareness of computer science and engineering graduates, to produce skilled security specialists, and to conduct research and development activities to advance the state-of-the-art in wireline and wireless security and communication.

The Software Engineering Language Lab (SELL) maintains a focus on issues relating to software engineering and programming language design and implementation. This focus includes research in software engineering techniques designed to improve the quality of computer language design and implementation as well as research into language design and implementation methods to facilitate development, testing and execution of well-designed software. It also includes research on inferential aspects of programming languages and their synergies with logic, type theory and computational mathematics.

The Software Testing Lab develops and evaluates new approaches that use combinatorial-based techniques.

The Trusted Secure Systems Laboratory explores the fundamental, challenging, and state-of-the-art research problems in building secure computer systems. The goal is to design and develop computer systems architecture that provides isolated execution environment, verification mechanisms for varied trust models, trust guarantee independent of the system software, and minimal or no impact on performance. Various research issues worked on to achieve this goal are cryptographic primitives design to minimize the performance impact and improve security, computer architecture design to provide roots of trust for isolated execution and verification, and virtualization layer design to project the isolation to the application.

The Wireless Sensor Laboratory (WiSL) was established with the following mission: to increase general wireless communications awareness among computer science and engineering graduates, produce skilled wireless specialists, and conduct research and development activities to advance the state-of-the-art in wireless sensors.

Admission to degree programs

Admission to graduate degree programs in computer science and computer engineering is competitive. Applications, complete with transcripts, GRE scores (UNT computer science and engineering graduates are exempt.) and TOEFL scores, must reach the computer science and engineering department by the following dates to be considered for the term/semester indicated.

September 15 — spring term/semester
February 15 — fall term/semester

Assistantships

In addition to completing an application for admission, students who wish to be considered for an assistantship must complete an assistantship application by February 15 for the fall semester and by September 15 for the spring semester. Assistantship applications are available on the department’s web site.

Additional information

Programs are listed below. Information regarding the department’s degree programs, including admission requirements and degree requirements, can be obtained from the department’s web site.

Programs

Master’s Degree

Doctorate

Computer Science and Engineering, PhD

Graduate Academic Certificate

Security Certificate

Graduate Minor

Computer Science minor

Courses

Computer Science and Engineering

Quicklinks

Catalog