Administration
The Chair is directly supported by two positions.
1. Pat Ipavich is the Director of
Administration and manages the Director of Business and Finance, the
department's Librarian/Information Specialist, the Chair's Administrative
Assistant, and a Business Services Specialist responsible for keys, phones,
parking assignments, furniture, building maintenance and mail.
2. Adelaide Findlay provides secretarial services to the Chair.
The Computer Laboratory staff is directed by Brad Plecs, who is currently supported by five full time professionals. They are responsible for both the research and administrative computing facilities of the Department. With the exception of a few specialized laboratories, computing for undergraduates is provided by the campus’s Office of Information Technology.
The undergraduate office, directed by James Maybury (who
also has instructional responsibilities) is responsible principally for
undergraduate advising, and management of teaching assistants and instructional
staff. Two faculty members – Profs.
The graduate office is directed by Gwen Kaye. That office handles admissions, schedules all classes (undergraduate and graduate), and makes TA assignments, maintains records of all current graduate students, and conducts orientation sessions for new students. Ms. Kaye is supported by one administrative assistant.
Staff support for all activities is one of the greatest challenges facing the Department. While the Chair’s office was supported by another staff member responsible for public relations and outreach, budget reductions have forced us to eliminate that position. The person in this position was going to help us design and implement a campaign to raise funds for a chaired position in our Department. We felt that this was critical to help us recruit at the senior level. Now, we will need more support from both the College and the Campus to make a CS chair a high priority funding item. Finally, when the previous assistant who was responsible for facilities and mail resigned, we promoted an Executive Administrative Assistant from the chair's office to that position and left the chair's executive assistant position unfilled. The sections of the report on graduate and undergraduate education discuss the impact of staff shortages on those operations.
The table below shows staff support for these three functions – chair’s office, undergraduate education and graduate education – at three of our aspirational peers – University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington and University of Illinois - and compares them with staffing at Maryland. In all cases, our department is understaffed in comparison, and this has had a substantial impact on our ability to support our programs and students.
|
University |
Chair’s office |
Undergraduate office |
Graduate Office |
|
Maryland |
2 |
2 |
2 |
|
Illinois |
5 |
4 |
4 |
|
Texas |
3 |
3 |
3 |
|
Washington |
4 |
3 |
3 |
Budgets
There are several sources of support for the Department’s salary and operating budget. These include:
1. State budget – funds provided by the campus through appropriations from the State legislature.
2. Access – a program on campus that channels funds, on a temporary basis, to departments with significant stress on their undergraduate education programs.
3. Summer school – which returns funds to academic departments proportional to tuition raised from their summer offerings.
4. DRIF – which provides funds to Departments based on contract and grant overhead generated in previous years.
In addition, between 1999-2003 there was a fifth significant source of funds – the Maryland Applied Information Technology Initiative (MAITI) – which was a state initiative to increase the number of graduates in the information technology area. This program terminates during this fiscal year. When the program was initiated, it was intended that the funds temporarily provided by the program would be replaced by permanent base budget increases to the State budgets of participating institutions and departments.
The table below shows the Department’s state budget for the past eleven years:
|
Year |
Budget (millions) |
|
1993 |
3.06 |
|
1994 |
2.88 |
|
1995 |
3.15 |
|
1996 |
3.10 |
|
1997 |
3.23 |
|
1998 |
3.61 |
|
1999 |
4.23 |
|
2000 |
4.64 |
|
2001 |
5.19 |
|
2002 |
5.80 |
|
2003 |
5.56[1] |
The decline in funding from FY 2002 to FY 2003 is a combined result of a rescission to our State budget of 5% (approximately $270,000), and a decline in our MAITI funding of $450,000, which was partially offset by an increase to our base budget of $275,000 (see below). Funds from ACCESS, summer programs and DRIF have remained steady at approximately $325,000, $60,000 and $150,000 annually and respectively. Funds from MAITI, however, have dropped precipitously during the past two years. That funding profile was:
|
Fiscal Year |
MAITI funds |
|
1999 |
200,000 |
|
2000 |
150,000 |
|
2001 |
640,000 |
|
2002 |
601,000 |
|
2003 |
153,000 |
The decrease in funding from 2002 to 2003 was very significant – $450,000. This was partially compensated for by a permanent increase to the Department’s state budget of $275,000 provided by the Provost. But the remaining MAITI funds disappear altogether next year, so that the Department’s revenues will decrease by another $150,000 from FY 2003 to FY 2004.
While budgets are decreasing, the Department’s faculty salary obligations significantly increase next year because two faculty members hired last year come on board at 100% only next year. Associated with this are increased, although temporary, costs for startup packages for those faculty.
The bottom line is that if the Department were to operate next fiscal year (2004) at its current rates of expenditures, it would end that year with a deficit of more than $800,000. How have we dealt with this? The following steps have been taken to decrease spending, on the one hand, and increase funding, on the other:
1. Three full time instructors will be released at the end of this academic year, resulting in a saving of $150,000. With current declining enrollments the Department will still be able to provide enough sections of courses at introductory levels at the same level of staffing as this year. Unfortunately, we had hoped that the declining enrollments would allow us to use our resources to significantly improve the undergraduate experience for our younger students, but at this point we will only be able to maintain the current level of quality. This is discussed in more detail in the section on undergraduate education.
2. Teaching assistants will be reduced by twelve, saving approximately $180,000.
3. Operating costs, mostly associated with the department's computer support laboratory, will be reduced by $50,000.
4. The two staff positions in the chair’s office will remain unfilled—$70,000
5. The Dean is providing the Department with an additional $100,000 in permanent base budget.
6. The Provost is providing the department with one time funds of $280,000 to ensure that we have sufficient instruction and TA support in our upper division courses.
These measures will allow the Department to end next year with a balanced budget, but provide no funding for needed staff growth, faculty recruiting or improvements to our undergraduate or graduate programs.
Most of our Department's office and lab space is in the A.V. Williams
Building. An appendix provides a detailed tabulation of how this roughly 37,000
square feet of space is used
for offices, laboratories, conference rooms, library, etc. Growth in our
research and education programs over the past decade has resulted in
significant stress with respect to space. In particular:
While many of our aspirational peer institutions – especially Texas,
Illinois, and Washington – have made significant investments in physical
infrastructure for computer science research, Maryland has not been able to do
this yet. A new computer science research facility is on the campus’s long
range building plan, but it could realistically be more than a decade before
plans are drawn up, let alone ground being broken. Our current building was
financed internally by the campus, and put up quickly. It essentially has no
architecture, and was certainly not designed to support computer science
research and education. It might be our greatest impediment to improving our
national ranking. Until such time as the campus makes raising funds for a new
computer science building one of its very highest priorities, we see little
prospect for the situation being improved in any significant way.
The
campus has, on the other hand, provided our department with excellent space for
education. This past year, the new Computer Science Instructional Center (CSIC)
opened. The CSIC is located adjacent to A.V. Williams, and is connected to it
by a sky bridge. It contains a 140-seat lecture hall, two 90-seat lecture
halls, seven 35-to-50-seat classrooms, a Linux instructional lab, and support
space. All classrooms have built-in video projectors, computers, laptop
connections, and wireless Internet access. The large lecture hall is equipped
with video cameras to allow lectures and classes to be both broadcast over the
Internet and recorded for later playback. A small, student-staffed technical
support room, a control room, a pantry, and a lobby provide for conferences and
gatherings. The control room provides for full projection and recording visual
and voice - as well as the transmission of internet and web services - for the
three lecture halls.
The Department maintains its own computing facilities in support of
both its research and graduate educational missions. While most computing
resources for undergraduate class work are provided by the campus Computer
Science Center, the department's own computing resources support some advanced
undergraduate courses with special needs. Six permanent staff members maintain
the Department equipment: a Director of Computing (
Each Department office in the A.V. Williams building has one or more
wall plates, which contain ethernet, fiber optic, and telephone outlets.
Ethernet and fiber outlets are connected to ethernet switches running at 100
Mbit and Gigabit ethernet speeds, and running on a gigabit ethernet backbone.
Cisco routers connect the building switches to the campus network and the
internet. The Department has a wireless ethernet network as well, allowing
mobile computing users to remain connected to the network while in meetings,
conference rooms, hallways, visiting other offices, or roaming certain parts of
the University of Maryland campus.
Current research facilities include over 300 workstations running Sun
Solaris, 200 PCs running Microsoft Windows, 50 PCs running Linux, and about 30
Apple Macintoshes, half running the new OSX and half running the older OS9. Six
public laser postscript printers, a color scanner, and a color laser printer
are available for use.
Most faculty have one or two workstations in their offices. Graduate
students, approximately 8 to 16 in each laboratory of 500 to 800 square feet,
have at least one workstation per person in each room. There is one public
workstation lab with 16 workstations for the use of graduate students, and
about 100 workstations around the department that are part of a public cluster.
The labs are used for research, class work and special projects by both
undergraduate and graduate students. Two instructional labs are available for
undergraduate classes, one with 20 Windows 2000 PCs (to be closed at the end of
this academic year, as discussed above), and one with 25 Linux PCs.
The Department administrative staff - the Chair's Office, Business
Office, Undergraduate and Graduate Offices - also depend on the Department
computer facilities. Administrative staff use primarily Microsoft Windows
machines and some Apple Macintoshes.
The Computer Science Library has a collection of about 2600 books, 202
journals, 62 of which are currently received, and over 5000 technical reports.
The library also provides course reserve readings and reference books. In
addition, the Department's librarian provides reference assistance to the
Department and to UMIACS. Reference assistance ranges from simple informational
and directional questions to more intense research questions. In 2002, the
library answered 4679 basic reference questions and 565 research reference
questions. The librarian also keeps the Department and UMIACS informed on the
University Libraries' new sources and programs. The electronic resources and
databases have been of great interest to library users including IEEE and ACM
publications. The librarian is responsible for the publication and maintenance
of the Technical Report collection, both paper and electronic. Due to budget
constraints, there was a need to combine staff responsibilities. The librarian,
whose title was changed to Information Specialist, is also responsible for the
coordination of our High School Programming Contest and the department's newsletter.
The very large EPSL (located two blocks from our Department) and other
University Libraries are additional resources for our faculty and students.
While the CS Library focuses on providing materials for the Department's
graduate level courses, the Engineering Library focuses more on Electrical
Engineering materials. Furthermore, the Computer Science Librarian of the EPSL
consults our Department's librarian and a rotating faculty liaison with regard
to collection management, especially the journal collection of EPSL. The
journal collection at EPSL is much larger that ours, and through planning over
the last several years, there is little repetition in the EPSL and Department.
The University Libraries have recently provided access to the IEEE electronic
library, IEEE Xplore, to the ACM Digital Library, and to numerous online
journals and full-text databases. These electronic resources allow for easy
access to important research materials.
An appendix tabulates the gender and race
composition of faculty, staff and students in our Department. The
Department has actively recruited women faculty members, having made offers to
many over the past five years and hiring two (
In November 2001, 20 women and minority graduate students from the US
and Canada came to our campus for a workshop entitled “Research, Careers, and
Computer Science: A Maryland Symposium.” The participants presented their
research, met Maryland faculty and students, and participated in interactive
sessions about academic jobs. These sessions focused on teaching, research,
obtaining funding, the tenure process, distinctions between academic and other
jobs, and time management. This event was sponsored by both the Computer
Science Department and UMIACS. More information can be found on the workshop
website: http://www/cs.umd.edu/users/oleary/workshop/.
In addition, approximately five years ago, women students in the
Department of Computer Science started a Society of Women in Computer Science.
Since that time this group has become a student chapter of Association of Women
in Computing. The purpose of the organization is to promote the education of
women in computing, to further the professional development and advancement of
women in computing, and to promote communication among women in computing. The
group is very active in the Department with a Department wide book swap at the
beginning of every semester, mid-semester sponsorship of information sessions
on senior level courses to be offered in the subsequent semester, women
graduates roundtable on transition from undergraduate days to the workplace or
to graduate school, corporate presentations on on-going projects, and an
end-of-semester picnic with the student organizations Association of Computing
Machinery and S.C.O.R.E.
[1] At the beginning of this fiscal year the Department’s State budget was $5.92M, but mid year reductions decreased that budget to $5.56M.