Agenda for CSE Department Meeting 3-17-21

Advisory Board Meeting

• SurveyMonkey: April 14pm, April 15am, or April 16am?
• I am thinking: 2.5 hours with a short break. Online of course
• 30 min. department overview, intros, and Dean Corey greetings
• 25 min. teaching - contribute 1-2 slides on things learned, things new, impact of covid, best practices...
• 15 min. Q&A on teaching
• 10 min. break
• 20 min. research - contribute 1-2 slides on research activities
• 25 min. with cherry picked students
• 25 min. discussion and feedback and next steps
• Does IT have a representation on our advisory board?
• Current (reconfirmed) membership includes Bill Claycomb, Mike Fisk, Danny Quist, Bob Robey, Son Tran
• Does IT have a representation on our advisory board? Who would be best?
• BTM: want to nominate one best person for our advisory board?

SRS CSE Department Showcase

• Entries due in 10 days, March 27; in prep for and addition to institute-wide competition
• I would really like to know how many to expect

IT Program Discussion

Review Current IT Program

What are the pain points, and what should it be doing that it is not?

Enrollment: Grow or Close?

Solutions:

• new/improved identity, a STEM-school-compatible identity rename?? w/ specialty focus (name problem: we are not the stereotype/generic IT)
• ...without new faculty! we cannot provide all the courses we want for IT leverage NMSU to increase specialization / course operations
• focus on specialized CS? or specialized MGT?
• EMGT grad students aren't interested in CS/IT
• CS is Foundational to Science of Computing, creating new (kinds of) computing systems and new applications
• IT is more about applying/integrating/deploying computer systems, making them more useful to bus/gov, leading / managing technical projects
• *Need* a dedicated IT Website
• BA in IT? 3+
• What prevents new HS grads from coming to NMT for IT instead of UNM/NMSU?
  • Advertising, admissions requirements, institute requirements, ...
  • (Lack of) urban center
  • Football!
  • UNM has associates only, in business section
  • UNM has Master in Cybersecurity and Business Analytics (risk, decision theory, witted adversary risk analysis)
  • (how to teach theoretical vs. real-world attacks: psychology of cybersecurity and other jointly-taught courses)
  • Too similar to CS?
  • IT has not enough MGT courses.
  • Software development focused too much on design, not on implementation (front end software engineering, needs back-end including UX, testing)
  • Business classes (e.g. project management) a little weak, not current industry practice
  • Initially designed to accomodate cybersecurity, changed to CS+MGT, lost identity somewhere along the way
  • The fall-back position for failed CS majors
  • Compared w/ Facebook hiring, soft skills are missing (customer relations? UX, project management)
  • most current students are going to network support, risk management, data science, HPC administration ...
  • industry demand vs. student demand
  • collecting more information is needed, broader than just Facebook
  • ACM IT Curriculum Guidelines 2017: #1 security, #2 database, #3 info mgt.
  Attach Faculty to each possible Focus:
  IT Cybersecurity Focus (Dongwan, Jun?)
  What would we add to increase IT's cybersecurity focus
  IT Software Engineering Focus (??)
  Testing, Usability/User Experience, ...
  IT Business Analytics Focus (??)
  project management, risk management, usability, data science, applications AI/ML
  IT System Administration Focus (??)
  network management/administration
  Game Development Focus? Belongs in CS, not IT
  Game AI, graphics