I am a tenured Professor in the CECS deparment at Cal State University Long Beach (CSULB). You can read a description of the classes I teach which include the database courses: CECS-323, CECS-423, and CECS-521. I am involved in curriculum development at the undergraduate and graduate levels. I graduated with a Ph.D. in 1997 from the computer science department at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Prior to graduate school, I earned a BS in computer science at the University of California Riverside (UCR).

My office is in the ECS building, 5th floor, ECS-547. You can reach me via e-mail using: first.last@csulb.edu

Spring 2013 Schedule

HSI STEM Project

I'm one of the co-principal investigators (coPI) on the HSI STEM grant. In 2011 the U.S. Department of Education awarded CSULB a five year grant through its Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) designation to help increase the number of Latino students earning degrees in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

• CSULB Press release Cal State Long Beach Receives a 5-Year, $4.4 Million HSI Grant to Promote Latino Student Success in Science, Math, Engineering Fields
• List of HSI STEM grant recipients by HACU (Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities).
• US Department of Education's Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program

HSI STEM Promotores de STEM: Job openings

All positions for the 2012/13 academic year have been filled. Check back in Spring 2013 as we recruit for the next academic year.

As part of the HSI STEM grant, the Promotores de STEM program will be established for the College of Engineering (COE) and the College of Natural Science and Mathematics (CNSM). The HSI STEM Program is seeking 10 Promotores de STEM from the COE and 10 from the CNSM who are interested in working on a university-wide initiative to improve the recruitment, retention, academic performance, and graduation rates of Latino students in STEM majors. Promotores will be trained to mentor and tutor first generation-educated Latino undergraduate students.

• Flyer with recruitment information for Promotores de STEM

Research

My most recent interest lies in the area of computer science education. I have been part of multi-institutional research teams studying the design skills of undergraduate computer science students. My interest now is in the application of the computer science education research techniques to study the database design skills of students and to improve teaching of fundamental topics in database systems.

During my doctorate graduate studies and in the first few years as a professor, I performed research in the areas of software information agents, search engines, and information integration. My PhD thesis considers the problem of detecting duplicate records in a database -- such as those found on mailing lists used by mass-mail marketers.

Any interested graduate students considering the thesis option to satisfy the requirements for the MSCS degree, please feel free to contact me. I can help you choose a topic, suggest topics of interest, or direct you to other faculty members. Of most interest to me are the topics of database systems, information retrieval, and web technologies.

MSCS Thesis Students

The CSULB Library maintains a record of all graduate theses completed. I strongly recommend that graduate students interested in the thesis option review the MSCS theses completed by CECS students. Below you'll find the list of MSCS thesis students I've advised along with information about the thesis completed.

• Phylypo Tum: Information retrieval for Khmer documents : challenges and approaches to word segmentation, 2007. CSULB Library record of Phylypo's thesis.
• Sangari Rajagopal Achary: An author recommendation system using both content-based and collaborative filtering methods, 2011. CSULB Library record of Sangari's thesis.
• Greg Raitz: Case study: accessibility of campus financial website and PDF reports, 2011. CSULB Library record of Greg's thesis.

Publications

• F. Menczer, A. Monge, N. Street: Adaptive Assistants for Customized E-Shopping. IEEE Intelligent Systems 17(6): 12-19, Nov-Dec 2002
• F. Menczer, N. Street, N. Vishwakarma, A. Monge, M. Jakobsson: IntelliShopper: A Proactive, Personal, Private Shopping Assistant. Proc. 1st ACM Int. Joint Conf. on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS 2002) pp.1001-1008
• F. Menczer, A.E. Monge: Scalable Web Search by Adaptive Online Agents: An InfoSpiders Case Study. In M. Klusch, ed., Intelligent Information Agents, Springer, 1999.
• My Ph.D. Thesis: Adaptive detection of approximately duplicate database records and the database integration approach to information discovery. University of California, San Diego, 1997.