INDUSTRY

Ten Oregon Graduate Institute instructors have transferred from the school's science and engineering department to Portland State University. Ed Thompson, OGI dean, said the transition will help the school switch its focus to human and ecosystem health, a process that began three years ago when OGI merged with Oregon Health and Sciences University. According to PSU and OHSU officials, this change lets each school concentrate on its own areas of expertise within computer science and engineering. Under the arrangement, OGI computer science programs including networking and systems, programming languages and formal methods and databases will transfer to PSU's Maseeh College. They will merge with PSU's computer science research and education programs that include research clusters in software engineering, theory and algorithms, learning systems, high performance computing and computer security. The move will help advance Maseeh College's prominence, said Dean Robert D. Dryden. "This is the computer science department Oregon and the region urgently need." OGI School of Science and Engineering's 14 remaining computer science faculty will now focus on health-related computer science and engineering research such as speech recognition, adaptive systems, biosensor development, human-computer communication, software engineering, systems design and digital imaging. And OGI will continue to offer degrees in computer science. "Recognizing that research-funding agencies are committed to projects in health, information technology and the environment, we have been encouraging our scientists and engineers to incorporate an element of health and wellness into their work," Thompson said. Cynthia A. Brown, chair of PSU's computer science department, also sees benefits from the transition. "Achieving a critical mass of computer science talent will attract the best undergraduate and graduate students and provide an outstanding educational resource for working professionals." New faces Oregon Graduate Institute added two instructors, Brian Roark and Deniz Erdogmus, to its School of Science and Engineering. Roark joined the Center for Spoken Language Understanding as an assistant professor of computer science and engineering. Previously, he was a senior technical staff member at AT & T Labs. Roark received a bachelor's in mathematics and philosophy from the University of California, a master's in information science from Claremont Graduate School and a master's in applied mathematics and a doctorate in linguistics from Brown University. He is an editorial board member and reviewer for the journal Computational Linguistics. Erdogmus will be an assistant professor of computer science and engineering and biomedical engineering. Previously, he researched biomedically oriented projects at the University of Florida. A native of Turkey, Erdogmus has a bachelor's in electrical engineering and mathematics and a master's in electrical engineering from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara. He also has a doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida. He is the editor of the journal Neurocomputing, a member of the IEEE Technical Committee for Machine Learning in Signal Processing and a reviewer for more than a dozen scientific journals.