Congressman Ruben Hinojosa Announces Grant Awarded to UPTA for Computer Science Research Program

Press Release

Congressman Rubén Hinojosa (D-TX-15) announced the National Science Foundation has awarded a grant of $171,710 to the University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) for its computer science program. The grant is to be used to research new techniques for designing algorithms for hard combinatorial problems. An algorithm is commonly known as a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.

"UTPA has shown continued success in all of its science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) field programs throughout the years and that is why they continue to receive funding through grants to help future scientists continue their important research," said U.S. Rep. Hinojosa.

The start date for the grant is August 1, 2012 and will be under the direction of Dr. of Computer Science, Yang Liu of UTPA. Dr. Liu works with graduate students on his research. The students involved will study the progress of programs and bring fresh ideas that will make problem solving faster. Dr. Liu explains that the idea is to research the capability of using multiple computers at the same time to problem solve math and science equations and theories.

The National Science Foundation describes the program in scientific detail as follows:

"Efficient algorithms are fundamental to various areas in computer science. This project will study new techniques for designing efficient algorithms for hard combinatorial problems. The interaction between theoretical analysis and practical implementations of such hard problems will be explored. Furthermore, this project will advance the study of algorithms and systems in a minority-serving institution where under-represented students will gain valuable experience in foundational cutting-edge research.

More precisely, this project will investigate novel measures for some classical and important NP-hard problems, algebraic techniques for designing exact and parameterized algorithms, and parallel/distributed implementations of exact and parameterized algorithms. The first part is devoted to studying the effects of new measures on designing algorithms for well-known NP-hard problems such as the Boolean Satisfiability Problem. The second part is focused on expanding the power of algebraic techniques to those seemingly difficult problems involving vertex deletion. The last part is to devise a clever way to implement resulting algorithms on a parallel/multi-core machines."

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