School Of Computing Newsletter - August 2025
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
Direct all key requests to Contessa in the front office. You can contact her at contessa.m@unf.edu.
- Faculty and staff meeting: August 15 at Noon in Building 15, Room 3120. Lunch will be provided. If you are not able to attend, a Teams link is available for virtual attendance.
- Computing Advisory Board Meeting: August 22, 8 a.m. If you have anything you would like the board to discuss please let Nan or Contessa know.
- Osprey for a Day --- SoC: September 5th, 11:00-11:30 a.m.
WELCOME DR. NAN NIU
Dr. Niu joined SoC on July 1, 2025. A month into the job, he is mostly impressed by the people: students, faculty, staff, administrators, industrial collaborators... those who truly care about our collective goals and carry out everyday tasks. Dr. Niu's priorities are (1) student successes (enrollment + retention + placement), and (2) research visibilities (top-tier publications + editors/panelists + grants/contracts). He has an open-door policy and likes to talk to people (as opposed to only sending emails or doing Zoom/Teams meetings/chats). In addition to doing work in the office, he loves to go outside and connect with people.
For example, he went to a conference in San Jose, CA the first week of August, and enjoyed the wonderful keynotes delivered by researchers from Berkeley, Stanford, UC Davis, Google DeepMind, and Adobe Research. The selfie was with Dr. Aaron Hertzmann -- Principal Scientist of Adobe Research after his keynote. Fun fact: Dr. Hertzmann was on the faculty of the University of Toronto while Nan was a Ph.D. student there. Moral of the story: Go out if you can & you'll meet very, very interesting people!
STUDENT HIGHLIGHT
The road to and in the computing field is different for everyone, but for Iliya Kulbaka, it brought him to the 成人大片 and to eight published papers alongside his graduate education. Computing was not his original plan; he initially thought he would go into the medical field, following in the footsteps of his mother. In high school, he started taking programming classes, and the rest is history.
Kulbaka began his journey in higher education at 成人大片in 2019, obtaining his undergraduate degree in 2022 and his master's degree in 2024. His master's thesis developed reinforcement learning techniques to equip autonomous robots to map and locate gas sources efficiently in real-world environments. His recent publication, "GDM-Net++: Multi-robot 2D and 3D Gas Distribution Mapping via Deep Q-Learning and Gaussian Process Regression," continues his previous work. He is continuing this work for his doctorate, which he is expected to complete in the next few years.
When asked who impacted his journey in higher education, a few people came to mind. "There would be my advisor, Dr. Dutta. He's been great support, he's been able to lead me and show me what to do and how to do it. More on the personal side, it would be my girlfriend and my little sister." His sister has helped him break away from repetitiveness and live more of a normal life outside his research. With all his work, Kulbaka hopes it will one day culminate in something physical that can be held and used.
Finally, we discussed what he wished he knew before entering the School of Computing. "I wish that I knew that you should focus a lot more on individual projects, because that's how you learn a lot more," Kulbaka said. "Incentivize more complex and even multi-semester projects." He emphasized that the job market is more difficult than ever and that a large project would help graduates stand out more in the competitive field.