Office of Public Relations:                                           For more information, contact: Stephen E. Snyder

(229) 931-2028                                                                         (229) 931-2037 ssnyder@canes.gsw.edu

(229) 931-2072 fax

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April 3, 2009

GSW hosts seminar promoting graduate

 education in computer science

            AMERICUS—Woman and minorities are greatly underrepresented within the field of computer science. Georgia Southwestern State University’s (GSW) School of Computing and Mathematics is working to remedy that.

            Friday, April 3, GSW hosted a distinguished lecture series promoting their computer science graduate program. The series was funded by the Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). Georgia Southwestern was one of four successful schools to host the lecture series. The other three institutions were Missouri University of Science and Technology, Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada and the University of New Mexico. M. Brian Blake, Ph.D., of Georgetown University and Xiaolan Zhang, Ph.D., of IBM were the featured speakers.

            Blake is currently an associate professor and chair in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown. He conducts applied research in the development of automated approaches for the sharing of information and capabilities across organizational boundaries. Blake received a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in information and software engineering from George Mason University.

            Zhang has been with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center since 2001 conduction research on secure systems. Her current interests include security and virtualization, trusted computing and software security. She received her Ph.D. in computer science in 2001 from Harvard University.

            Application fees for admission into GSW’s computer science graduate program were waved for students in attendance. Computer science undergraduates from every institution in the region were invited. Approximately 40 people attended.

            For more information about graduate education in computer science at Georgia Southwestern, contact the School of Computing and Mathematics at (229) 931-2100 or go online at www.gsw.edu.