FIRST CERTIFICATES AWARDED IN INTERNET-BASED CSE PROGRAM AT SYRACUSE

Six students from the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in China have received the first International Certificates in Computational Science from the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse University. NPAC Director, Professor, and CRPC researcher Geoffrey Fox presented the certificates to Yuejin Du, Weigang Li, Xinran Liu, Lihong Wang, Peng Wu, and Xiaochun Yun in China on July 22. The pilot project is the result of an agreement signed by Professor Jiaqi Liu, vice president of HIT, and project leader Fox in December 1995 to offer a formal higher education program over the Internet and study how such a program may be conducted effectively.

The program, entitled the Internet-based Computational Science Education Program (ICPSEP) '96, featured NPAC-designed curriculum and coursework that was accessed via the World Wide Web by these selected students from a mirror site at the Parallel Computing Technology (PACT) laboratory at HIT. Professor Fang Bin Xing coordinated the program from HIT, and HIT Professor Xiaoming Li worked with Senior Scientists Don Leskiw and Nancy McCracken at NPAC to implement the courses.

The ICPSEP certification program included four 10-week courses designed to teach students the basic concepts and techniques of contemporary parallel programming and prepared them for future work in distributed parallel computation. Homework and projects were assigned and collected via email or ftp.

According to Fox, the program garnered positive evaluations from all of the participants, and was covered in a dozen Chinese newspapers. The articles are available on the Web at http://old-npac.ucs.indiana.edu/users/gcf/npacscreendumps96/foilsepimagedir/009IMAGE.html.

Current plans are to extend the offerings of professional certificates in Web Technologies to a set of "scalable certificates" in five levels, ranging from a one-day certificate to an entire Master's program. Syracuse University's Continuing Education Program will offer a Certificate in Internet Engineering, a concentrated program of four one- semester courses offered March to June 1997. Course materials will be implemented using Web technologies and, according to current plans, will be offered simultaneously in Syracuse, New York City, and China using different delivery techniques.

For more information, see http://www.npac.syr.edu/Education/index.html.

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