I warmly welcome you to the first issue of the Oakland University Department of Computer Science and Engineering’s quarterly newsletter. Here you will find the latest news about the department, its initiatives, exceptional programs, students, faculty, and alumni.

When I joined OU at the beginning of this year, I was attracted to the department’s challenges, opportunities moving forward and the exciting vision of “Reimagining Oakland University” to 1) partner with industry and local community in both education and research and be flexible and adaptable to meet their needs; 2) be recognized as strong research and scholarly environment; and 3) enhance our visibility as a university of choice. In alignment with that vision, our department organized a retreat last August to discuss our CSE values, mission, and vision to define together our strategic plan.

We have risen to the challenge of implementing our ambitious strategic plan. To meet the needs of industry, the local community and our students in both education and research, we established two new research centers: An NSF funded center on Pervasive AI as part of the Industry University Cooperative Research Centers program, and another funded center by Department of Energy on Cyber Security for Manufacturing in collaboration with Automation Alley. We also partnered with tool builders to establish joint training workshops in AI and Smart manufacturing to equip our students with needed skills in industry. All these efforts are enhancing our mission in improving the hands-on capabilities of our students and serving the local industry via our translational and basic research and also training opportunities.

The current generation of our students is changing the education model from "Just in Case" to "Just in Time" education. Thus, we prepared proposals for over 10 Stackable Certificates, many new undergraduate/graduate degrees and provided flexible teaching delivery methods, including both online and in-person, to support our students and industry needs, which allowed us to increase our enrollment by over 13%. We have also been adding new, cutting-edge elements to our curriculum. In all these initiatives, we worked very closely with our newly established CSE advisory board composed by over 30 distinguished members from the State of Michigan, industry, government, DoD and beyond. We also understand that a large portion of our students are first generation students who may be less exposed to graduate education compared to second generation students. Thus, we are creating 6 programs for combined BS and MS programs where our students can double count 12 credits to get a master's degree with specialized skills in Software Engineering, Cyber Security, IT, AI, etc.

To make our research stronger, we worked together by expanding more collaborative research. We established new research development pipelines including brainstorming, proposals development, red teams review and beyond. We were not just able to triple our funding to be over $7 million but also to diversify it from several competitive sources including federal agencies, DoD, industry, local communities and beyond.

To enhance our visibility, we organized this year the very prestigious research conference in Computer Science, ASE 2022, here at Oakland University. Over 400 participants traveled from the different corners of the world to attend the event here at OU. Our proposal to organize another prestigious international research conference, MODELS 2025, here at OU in 2025 was just accepted.

We look forward to keeping you posted on our progress on each of these vital fronts, and on the remarkable accomplishments of our students, faculty, and alumni.

The future is bright.

Marouane Kessentini, Professor and Chair