Industrial Advisory Board Meeting -- Minutes
	Dept. of Computer Science
	SUNY Stony Brook

	Hampton Garden Suite
	Crest Hollow Country Club

	November 13, 2003  2:30-4:30PM



Attending Advisory Board members: Mark Combs, Bruce Germano, Peter Goldsmith,
	Yogesh Gupta (CA), Gudgjon Hermannsson, Joseph Katz,  Frank O'Reilly,
	Eugene Sayan, Glenn Wasserman, Peter Weinberger, Scott Williams 

Attending from Stony Brook: Michael Bender, Ari Kaufman, Rob Kelly, Amanda Stent,
	R. Sekar, Yacov Shamash (Dean), Erez Zadok, Rong Zhao,
	Richie von Rauchhaupt (student)


Particularly interesting and important points are marked (*) 



Ari Kaufman, Chair of Computer Science, presented an overview of the
department's teaching, research, and service missions.

Issues raised during his presentation included:

(1) Increasing women and domestic applicants to our undergraduate and
graduate programs.   Our percentages of both women and domestic students
appear to be slightly below the averages reported for departments at similar
schools.   Increasing applicants from these pools seems to be the key,
perhaps with increased publicity...

-> Follow up:  Rob Kelly - ug recruiting,  Sekar - grad recruiting


** (2) The idea of scheduling departmental research open houses for the local
community was raised.  Other departments (e.g. astronomy/physics and marine
sciences) do appear to have such programs, which do help to recruit students
and raise the profile of the department in the region.

-> Follow up: Find volunteer / setup a committee, possibly in coordination
with our GRC.


** (3) Another idea would be to increase interaction with LISTnet.  We should
send departmental speaker to appropriate LISTnet events.

-> Follow up: Rong Zhao


Steven Skiena, ABET Accreditation Chair, presented an overview of the
CS undergraduate program and accreditation efforts.

Issues raised during his presentation included:

(4) Releasing software version II -- Several industrial members of the
board stressed the importance of teaching students to maintain and
support existing code, because most software in the real world is not
built from scratch.

-> Follow up: Leo Bachmair -- ug committee


** (5) The board raised the question of why we do not require a full-year
senior design project.  Historically, we did have a full year senior
software engineering course in the past, before we required our CSE 219
course on software design and development.   However, the issue should
probably be considered again.  Industry projects could be made available
for this course.

-> Follow up: Leo Bachmair -- ug committee


** (6) Several board members stressed the growing importance of overseas
outsourcing.  This places greater emphasis on project management skills
versus technical software development.  Other related skills are
code review, specification languages/UML, and proper documentation.

-> Follow up: Leo Bachmair -- ug committee


** (7) Peter Weinberger made the observation that our department should
``Only teach what is teachable.'', i.e. what industry already knows how
to do.  The wish-list industry sometimes wants our grads to know do
not all fall in the teachable category.

Note item for Leo Bachmair -- ug committee


(8) The board was in agreement about the importance of improving student's
technical communication skills, and warmly received word of our plans to
strengthen out technical communications requirements.

Note item for Leo Bachmair -- ug committee


(9) Students should be encouraged to have web-sites and list the URL
on their resumes.   Paper job applications are in general not encouraged
these days, but instead apply on the company's Human Resources site.
Not all jobs appear on monster.com

-> Follow up: Brian Tria (about increased disk quota)

** (10) None of the board members expressed any interest in our
choice of programming language, or objections to our choice (Java in 
the intro classes) once we raised the question.   This would probably
surprise many of our students who worry about the issue.

Note item for Leo Bachmair -- ug committee


** (11) Several of the board members stressed the growing importance
of Linux as a software development platform.  Windows will continue
to dominate the desktop, but more back office operations are destined
to run on Linux.

-> Follow up: Leo Bachmair -- ug committee


** (12) All members of the board appeared happy with the quality of our
graduates which they had personal experience with.  Members of the
board seemed quite enthusiastic about helping our department, and 
encouraged us to hold our next board meeting on campus even though
most members would incur additional travel.