Faculty Research
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Dr. Yixin Chen
Dr. Yixin Chen, Assistant Professor, joined the faculty in 2006 after three years on the faculty of the University of New Orleans. He has a PhD in computer science from Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Wyoming.
Chen's research focuses on the design, analysis, implementation, and applications of machine learning algorithms. He is especially interested in solving real world problems arising from biomedicine and life science. He has worked on various projects on content-based image retrieval, automatic image annotation, knowledge discovery in taxonomic research, and control of robotic manipulators. Chen is serving as an Associate Editor of the journal Pattern Recognition for a two-year term ending in August 2008.
At the graduate level, Chen teaches courses on machine learning, image processing, and artificial intelligence.
- Dr. H. Conrad Cunningham
- Dr. Pamela Lawhead
- Dr. P. Tobin Maginnis
- Dr. Philip J. Rhodes
- Dr. Stephen V. Rice
- Dr. Paul M. Ruth
- Dr. Dawn E. Wilkins
Dr. H. Conrad Cunningham, Professor and Chair, joined the faculty in 1989 and assumed the role of Department Chair in 2001. He has a doctorate in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis and several years of professional experience in the aerospace industry and university research settings.
Cunningham's current research focuses on methods and tools for the design of flexible software families, including both component-based systems and object-oriented software frameworks. He is collaborating with Dr. Yi Liu (South Dakota State University) on the development of the BoxScript component-oriented programming language and with Liu and PhD student Pallavi Tadepalli on the elaboration of the function generalization approach to software framework design. He is also working with Tadepalli on new distributed algorithms for B-trees. Recently, he began collaborating with Charles Jenkins, instructor and PhD student, and Dr. Stephen Rice on issues related to the generic representation and modeling of resources in simulation programming languages. More broadly, Cunningham's research interests and expertise are in software architecture, component-based software development, concurrent and distributed computing, formal methods, and programming languages. He recently served as the Program Chair for the 2007 International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Programming in Java (PPPJ).
Cunningham teaches courses at the graduate level on several software engineering topics, functional and logic programming, concurrent programming, and program derivation.
Dr. Pamela B. Lawhead, Associate Professor, joined the faculty as an instructor in 1983, becoming an Assistant Professor in 1994 upon completion of her PhD in computer science from the University of Mississippi. Since 2001, she has also served as the Director of the Institute for Advanced Education in Geospatial Sciences (IAEGS).
Lawhead's research focus is on software development, especially in the area of systems for the delivery of innovative, effective online education. She heads IAEGS, a group that has created a unique, integrated course delivery system designed as a Web browser application with multiple communicating windows. At this level, her interest is in dynamic, online course creation and delivery. She is also very active in the use of robotics in computer science education, working with Dr. Frank Klassner of Villanova University and Dr. Myles McNally of Alma College. She is currently collaborating on an NSF ITEST grant with Dr. Wanda Dann of Carnegie Mellon University and Dr. Steve Cooper of St. Joseph's University (currently at NSF) to integrate the ALICE graphical programming system into multicultural high school environments.
Lawhead has taught various graduate courses on software engineering, multimedia programming, and research and writing methods.
Dr. P. Tobin Maginnis, Associate Professor, joined the faculty in 1979. He has a PhD in experimental psychology from the University of Mississippi. He became involved in computing in the 1970s through his work building realtime software to control laboratory instrumentation.
Maginnis' research deals with free, open source software and applied systems theory. He investigates extending the Linux operating system components such as the file system and kernel application program interface. He is also interested in developing novel distributed operating systems using a single system image model as well as distributed computing on the emerging multi-bus, multi-core processors. His current work involves developing distributed, real-time, synthetic aperture radar on the Cell Broadband Engine (CBE), extending general algorithms and the Linux kernel, to use CBE-like architectures. As well as extending Linux file systems to more efficiently use peta-byte sized random access storage.
At the graduate level, Maginnis teaches various courses on operating systems and networks.
Dr. Philip J. Rhodes, Assistant Professor, joined the faculty in 2004 after receiving his PhD from the University of New Hampshire.
A principal component of Rhodes' PhD research was concerned with access to very large spatial data sets for visualization and analysis. This work focused on avoiding the delays due to disk access. In 2005, he received funding from the National Science Foundation to extend this work to network access to data sets stored remotely. Along with PhD student Baoqiang Yan, he has recently been exploring the application of similar techniques to manipulating spatial data in cluster and grid computing environments.
At the graduate level, Rhodes teaches on scientific data representation and analysis, visualization, and graphics.
Dr. Stephen V. Rice, Assistant Professor, joined the faculty in 2003 with 25 years of experience in industrial and university-based research and development. He has a PhD in computer science from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.
Rice's current research is in the areas of computer simulation and pattern recognition. He is collaborating with CACI International, Inc., to develop the SIMSCRIPT III object-oriented simulation programming language. He is working with Charles Jenkins, instructor and PhD student, and Dr. Conrad Cunningham on tools and methodologies for simulation and modeling of resources. Rice is also collaborating with Dr. Yixin Chen on tools for analyzing geocoded video recordings, with application to roadside bomb detection. Rice continues his work of the past ten years on computer audio, encompassing audio comparison, retrieval, visualization, and monitoring.
At the graduate level, Rice teaches courses on computer simulation, computer audio, pattern recognition, compiler construction, and algorithms.
Dr. Paul M. Ruth, Assistant Professor, joined the faculty in 2007 after receiving his PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University.
Ruth's current research interests are in the areas of machine and network virtualization and their application to high-performance and grid Computing. He is currently working with the Mississippi Center for Supercomputing Research (MCSR) to increase the efficiency of high-performance cluster computers using machine virtualization. He has worked with the nanoHUB grid portal and brings with him experience deploying systems using large grid resources, such as the TeraGrid and Open Science Grid.
Ruth teaches graduate-level courses in computer networking, operating systems, and parallel and distributed programming.
Dr. Dawn E. Wilkins, Associate Professor, joined the faculty in 1995. She has a PhD in computer science from Vanderbilt University and has 24 years of experience in university-level research and teaching.
Wilkins' current research focuses on applying computing techniques from machine learning and algorithms to biological data. Much of her recent work has involved analyzing microarray data for medical applications, with the University of Mississippi Medical School and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital (SJCRH), and environmental concerns, with the Environmental Laboratory at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC). She is currently president-elect of the MidSouth Comptational Biology & Bioinformatics Society (MCBIOS).
At the graduate level, Wilkins teaches courses in bioinformatics, computational biology, parallel programming, algorithms, artificial intelligence, machine learning, databases and data mining.
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 24, 2007