Project Staff

The Project Staff (PS) of the AMALTHEA Program consists of graduate students, faculty mentors and assessment & evaluation (A&E) specialists. The role of graduate students in the Program is to closely mentor, educate and interact with the student participants during their research efforts. Additionally, they occasionally provide logistical support in various aspects of the summer experience. On the other hand, the faculty involved in the Program assume a wide range of roles, such as mentorship of students, technical expertise, research guidance, planning and coordination functions as well as overall logistical support. Finally, our A&E specialists support the Program's assessment and evaluation needs.

Graduate Mentors

The graduate students that were involved in the AMALTHEA Program were:

Mingyu Zhong (2007), a UCF doctoral student in EE with expertise in Decision Trees. At present, Dr. Zhong is employed by Google, Inc. in Seattle, WA. Mingyu mentored Garcia and Beck in 2007.
Jimmy Secretan (2007), a CE Ph.D. student, also from UCF, with focus on distributed systems and parallel processing. Currently, Jimmy is performing his doctoral research in the ML Laboratory at UCF. Jimmy mentored Cardona in 2007.
Tudor Klein (2007), a MS student in CE from FIT, whose research interests mainly lie in speech processing and recognition. Tudor is currently employed at Microsoft Corporation, also in Seattle, WA. Tudor mentored Stiles, Schmitt and Gertz in 2007.

The graduate students supporting the 2008 Program are:

Anna Koufakou (2008) is a CE doctoral student at the School of EE & CS at UCF. Her main research interests include Frequent Itemset Mining, Outlier Detection, and Distributed Data Mining. Anna has served as a mentor to several undergraduate students during their Senior Design courses or their Honors in the Major theses.
Ruben Ramirez Padron (2008), a UCF CS doctoral student with focus on Kernel Methods.
Chris Sentelle (2008), a EE doctoral student at UCF, also with focus on Kernel Methods.
John Reeder (2008), a CE doctoral student at UCF with developing experise in Reinforcement Learning and Intelligent Agents.

Faculty Staff

The faculty that have supported the AMALTHEA Program have been so far the following:

Prof. Alison Morrison-Shetlar, Dean of Undergraduate Studies and and Professor of Biology at UCF. Dr. Morrison-Shetlar is a co-Principal Investigator of the REU grant on UCF's side. Her role was mainly to provide expertise on overall program assessment and evaluation issues.
Dr. Kenneth Stanley, Assistant Professor in the SEECS and Director of the EPlex Research Group at UCF. Dr. Stanley's expertise lie in evolutionary computation and neural networks. He closely mentored Amy Hoover in 2007.
Dr. Veton Kepuska, Associate Professor of ECE at FIT with a strong background in speech processing and recognition. Dr. Kepuska is a co-Principal Investigator of the REU grant on FIT's side. Tudor Klein was his graduate advisee and he worked closely with Andrew Stiles, Brandon Schmitt and Tad Gertz in 2007.
Prof. Michael Georgiopoulos is a Professor in the SEECS and Director of the Machine Learning Lab at UCF. Additionally, he is the Principal Investigator of the REU grant on UCF's side and co-Director of the AMALTHEA Program responsible for operations at UCF (Site Coordinator). His expertise are Machine Learning and, in particular, Neural Networks. He was the advisor of Mingyu Zhong and Jimmy Secretan and he mentored Kelvin Cardona, Jason Beck and Maria Garcia in 2007.
Dr. Georgios C. Anagnostopoulos is an Assistant Professor in the ECE Department at FIT. He is the Principal Investigator of the REU grant on FIT's side, Director and Point-Of-Contact for the AMALTHEA Program. He is responsible for all Program operations, as well as Site Coordinator for AMALTHEA at FIT.

A&E Staff

The A&E needs of the Program were serviced by two groups of experts:

The first group consisting of Dr. Tace Crouse, Assistant Director, and Mrs. Dahlia Forde, Research Assistant, both from The Karen L. Smith Faculty Center for Teaching & Learning (FCTL) at UCF. According to its web page, FCTL "... supports excellence in teaching and learning, successful research, creative endeavors and the professional fulfillment of faculty and staff in the local and global environment."

The second group consisted of Dr. Paula Krist, Director, Dr. Patricia Lancey, Associate Director, and Mrs. Beth Jones, Research Assistant, all three from the Office of Operational Excellence and Assessment Support (OEAS) at UCF. According to the office's mission statement, "... (its mission is) to support efforts to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of University operations and the quality of student learning outcomes through assessment."