Description: This paper discusses Mechanical and Energy Engineering curriculum. Abstract: The continuing expansion of the new College of Engineering at the University of North Texas (UNT) has created an opportunity to establish a new Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering and an excellent occasion for the establishment of innovative and interdisciplinary approaches to engineering education. The explicit addition of Energy to the Mechanical Engineering curriculum is a new model of engineering education that parallels the innovations of our current Learning to Learn (L2L) project oriented concept course with the addition of innovative approaches for mechanical engineering and emphasis on energy engineering education. The new Mechanical and Energy Engineering (MEE) baccalaureate-level program will provide the intellectual foundation for successful career preparation and lifelong learning for the students. This innovative curriculum has been designed with a system-level approach to ME-based design., on the fundamentals of undergraduate level energy engineering within the mechanical engineering discipline, and will provide experiential-oriented approaches for the better understanding of classical mechanical engineering principles. It will also provide a new interdisciplinary ME curriculum approach to the most important energy technology areas. We are going to present the curriculum and discuss components of the program from freshman to to senior ...

Description: Abstract: This paper describes an algorithm for open text shallow semantic parsing. The algorithm relies on a frame dataset (FrameNet) and a semantic network (WordNet), to identify semantic relations between words in open text, as well as shallow semantic features associated with concepts in the text. Parsing semantic structures allows semantic units and constituents to be accessed and processed in a more meaningful way than syntactic parsing, moving the automation of understanding natural language text to a higher level.

Description: This paper discusses approximating user distributions in WCDMA networks using 2-D Gaussian. Abstract: In this paper, we present an analytical model for approximating the user distributions in multi-cell third generation WCDMA networks using 2-dimensional Gaussian distributions by determining the means and the standard deviations of the distributions for every cell. This allows us to calculate the inter-cell interference and the reverse-link capacity of the network. The authors compare their model with simulation results and show that it is fast and accurate enough to be used efficiently in the planning process of large WCDMA networks.

Description: This paper discusses efforts to attract and retain students in computer science and engineering fields. Abstract: Computer science and engineering communities have been exploring a variety of activities and techniques to attract and retain more students, especially women and minorities, to computer science and computer engineering degree programs. This paper briefly describes the efforts and results of a plan for actively recruiting young women into undergraduate computer engineering and computer science programs hosted by the University of North Texas (UNT). It also describes a series of activities aimed at improving the retention rate of students already in our programs, particularly during the freshman year. Such recruitment and retention efforts are critical to the country's efforts to increase the number of engineering professionals, and are a priority for the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Department at UNT.

Description: Abstract: This paper describes experiments in metadata generation for learning object repositories. Specifically, the authors present several methods for automatic keyword extraction and evaluate them on a collection of learning objects from an undergraduate history course. The results suggest that automatic keyword extraction is a viable solution for suggesting terms and phrases for metadata annotation.