Research Mentors
Dr. Vangelis Metsis – Associate Professor of CS – has worked with multiple undergraduate students on research projects involving machine learning, biosignal analysis, human activity monitoring, and human-computer interaction with the use of various sensors. As a Faculty Research Associate at UT Arlington, 2012- 2015, Metsis (co-)supervised more than 10 undergraduate students, the majority of whom, were funded by NSF REU funds. At Texas State, Dr. Metsis has mentored undergraduate students in previous REU sites as well as multiple high-school students, who participated at the TxState Mathworks math summer camp. Many of the projects resulted in publications where an undergraduate student was the leading author. Dr. Metsis has served as a mentor in previous REU sites and has supported multiple graduate and undergraduate students to participate at international conferences through federal travel awards. He has also served as a Doctoral Consortium mentor at ACM PETRA 2012-2015, IEEE HAVE 2014, and IEEE ICHI 2015 conferences.
Dr. Mina Guirguis – Professor of CS – has a track record in involving undergraduates in his research and ensures that they form an integral component of his research team. At TxState, he has involved more than 25 undergraduates directly in his research and has published 16 refereed articles, with 17 of them, in addition to 9 refereed posters, in reputable venues (e.g., IEEE, ACM and Elsevier). 9 of those 14 articles were led by an undergraduate student. He has supported the travel of 8 undergraduates to 13 different venues. In 2014, Guirguis has developed and delivered a 3-day robotics workshop for the training of 18 under-represented undergraduate students (14 females) as part of the NSF STEP award. Guirguis has been serving as an HSLAMP mentor for Hispanic undergraduate students. He has supervised undergraduate honor theses. He is the member of the LBJ Institute for STEM Education and Research at Texas State and an academic alliance member of NCWIT developing various education and research activities focused on engaging undergraduates in Computer Science and ensuring their retention. Finally, Guirguis holds demonstration sessions for visiting elementary, middle and high school students from nearby schools and on many occasions, his undergraduate students deliver the demo based on their research projects.
Dr. Xiao Chen – Associate Professor of CS – has directed multiple undergraduates in her research. In 2008, Dr. Chen involved Taylor Groves on a network communication protocol design project that was published in IEEE ICCCN. Taylor received an “Excellent Research Award” from the department and is currently a Ph.D. student at The University of New Mexico. In 2009, Dr. Chen supervised two undergraduate students on network research projects producing a paper in the PDCN 2010 Conference. Dr. Chen served as an REU mentor for our previous REU Site (MCPS REU) and involved 6 undergraduates in research. This has led to two publications, one in IEEE ICC and one in IEEE ICCCN. In 2012, Dr. Chen supervised two undergraduate students on a sensor networks project yielding a paper in IEEE Globecom. Chen has also involved 4 undergraduates in building driver drowsiness detection systems using wireless wearables and the research results are published in the REUNS workshop at IEEE MASS.
Dr. Jelena Tešić – Assistant Professor of CS – received her Ph.D. (2004), M.Sc. (1999) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA, and Dipl. Ing. (1998) in Electrical Engineering from University of Belgrade, Serbia. Dr. Tešić has authored over 30 scientific papers, has 2700+ citations to date (h-index 21), and holds 6 U.S. patents. Dr. Tešić’s research interests lie in the area of large unstructured data science, more specifically graph network science for social networks and survey analysis, computer vision, and deep learning for object localization, identification, tracking, and activity recognition from overhead data. Dr. Tešić has advised five students within REU programs 2018-2020. The students contributed to peer-reviewed publications and open-source software package releases, see DataLab12.github.io for more details. In recent years Dr. Tešić served as an Area Chair for ACM Multimedia, IEEE ICIP, and IEEE ICME 2018 and 2019. She has served as Guest Editor in a Special Issue on Collaborative Tagging of Multimedia, in IEEE Multimedia Magazine, July-September 2008 issue, and as a reviewer for numerous IEEE and ACM Journals.
Dr. Dan Tamir – Associate Professor of CS – received the M.S. and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Florida State University, Tallahassee, in 1989. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Texas State University, San Marcos. From 1996 to 2005, he managed applied research and design in DSP Core technology in Motorola SPS. From 1989 to 1996, he served as an Assistant/Associate Professor in the CS Department at Florida Tech. Between 1983 and 1986, he worked in the Applied Research Division, Tadiran, Israel. He has published more than 50 refereed journal and conference papers in the areas of combinatorial optimization, computer vision, audio, image, and video compression, human-computer interaction, and pattern recognition. His Ph.D. minors include mathematics, philosophy, and digital music. He has a vast exposure to diverse cultures and experiences and a passion for studying, learning, openness, and understanding. Dr. Tamir has been a member of the Israeli delegation to the MPEG committee and a Summer Fellow at NASA Kennedy Space Center.
Dr. Anne H. Ngu – Professor of CS – is a Professor and the Ph.D. Program director with the Department of Computer Science at Texas State University. Her main research interests are in information integration, Internet of Things, health informatics, scientific workflows, service computing, databases, and agent technologies. She has worked in different countries as a researcher, including Institute of Systems Science in Singapore, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, CSIRO in Australia, Telcordia Technologies, Lawrence Livermore National Laborartory, and the Microelectronics and Computer Technologies Corporation (MCC) in Austin, Texas. From 1992-2000, she was a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia where she specialized in teaching databases and performing research in next generation database systems. She also held an adjunct Associate Professor position at UNSW from 2002-2006 and a visiting scholar position at University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 2015. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Australian Research Council. She was a recipient of the national NCWIT Undergraduate Research Mentoring Awards in 2013. The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) created this award to recognize computing professors for their outstanding mentorship, high-quality research opportunities, and efforts to encourage and advance undergraduates (particularly women and minorities) in computing-related fields.