Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
Engaging in College Internships
For our March Lunch & Learn we'll be turning our attention to college internships. We are very pleased to announce the following exceptional panel of representives from our local colleges, including:
Dr. Michael Battig
Saint Michael's College
Dr. Xindong Wu
University of Vermont
Dr. Ali Rafieymehr
Champlain College
A representative from VTC was also invited but due to a scheduling conflict could not attend.
Goals of this panel discussion will include:
- Allow businesses to share with educational institutions what they need from colleges and their interns
- Enable colleges to share with businesses what they can do to help them
- Share experiences with interns placed in various companies and their roles
- Explain the life cycle of the college year in order to address questions like "when should businesses look for interns?" and "when should they recruit in hopes of finding graduates?"
The latter is an especially important part of the discussion as the needs of businesses don't always align with the cycle of a college year, which causes some businesses to avoid recruiting from colleges all together.
It again looks to be a great discussion so come on out, enjoy a sandwich, network with your colleagues and engage in this very interaction session!
Speaker Bios
Dr. Michael Battig
Saint Michael's College
Chair / Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
mbattig@smcvt.edu
Michael Battig is the Chair of Computer Science at Saint Michael's College as well as an Associate Professor of multiple courses at the college. He obtained his B.S. in Systems Analysis from Miami University in 1984, his M.S. in Computer Science from University of North Texas in 1991 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Mississippi State University in 1998. His areas of expertise include Software engineering, testing object-oriented software and computer science/information systems education.
Recently, Dr. Battig wrote the journal article "Examining the impact of a new Information Systems Program and NSF STEM funding on computing enrollments," for Information Systems Education Journal (November 2007). He also presented the article at the 24th Annual Information Systems Education Conference (November 2007).
Additionally Dr. Battig has been helping to set up the information technology and computer science program at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul, Afghanistan. He travels periodically to Kabul to work at the university, and maintains online communication with university officials when he is in Vermont.
At Saint Michael's, Dr. Battig is one of three professors who earned the college a $578,500 grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant enables Saint Michael's to provide 20 scholarships in math and computer science.
Outside of his work at the college, Dr. Battig enjoys basketball, bicycling, camping, dual-sport motorcycling and reading.
Dr. Xindong Wu
University of Vermont
Chair / Professor
Department of Computer Science
xwu@cs.uvm.edu
Xindong Wu has been a Professor and the Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Vermont (USA) since September 1, 2001. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, Britain. His research interests include data mining, knowledge-based systems, and Web information exploration.
He has published over 200 refereed papers in these areas in various journals and conferences, including IEEE TKDE, TPAMI, ACM TOIS, DMKD, KAIS, IJCAI, AAAI, ICML, KDD, ICDM, and WWW, as well as 25 books and conference proceedings. His research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as industrial companies including Microsoft Research, U.S. West Advanced Technologies and Empact Solutions.
Dr. Wu is the founder and current Steering Committee Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), the founder and current Editor-in-Chief of Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS, by Springer), the Founding Chair (2002-2006) of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Intelligent Informatics (TCII), and a Series Editor of the Springer Book Series on Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing (AI&KP).
He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE, by the IEEE Computer Society) between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2008. He served as Program Committee Chair for ICDM '03 (the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining) and as Program Committee Co-Chair for KDD-07 (the 13th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining), and is currently serving as Program Committee Chair (Knowledge Management Track) for CIKM 2010 (the 19th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management).
Professor Wu is the 2004 ACM SIGKDD Service Award winner, the 2006 IEEE ICDM Outstanding Service Award winner, and a Chair Professor in the Changjiang (or Yangtze River) Scholars Programme (
) at the Hefei University of Technology (appointed by the Ministry of Education of China in 2006). He has been an invited/keynote speaker at numerous international conferences including IEEE ICDM 2010, IEEE IRI 2010, IEEE GrC 2009, IDEAL 2009, JCKBSE 2008, HAIS 2008, NSF-NGDM'07, PAKDD-07, IEEE EDOC'06, IEEE ICTAI'04, IEEE/WIC/ACM WI'04/IAT'04, SEKE 2002, and PADD-97.
Dr. Ali Rafieymehr
Champlain College
Division Dean
Division of Information Technology & Sciences
rafieymehr@champlain.edu
Dr. Ali Rafieymehr is the dean of the Information Technology & Sciences division. Rafieymehr holds a B.S. in mathematics from the College of Mathematics and Economic Management in Iran, an M.S. in computer engineering from the University of Lowell (Massachusetts), and a Sc.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
He brings to the College a combination of academic and industry experience, including teaching posts at, most recently, Western New England College and Saint Anselm College and professional positions with such organizations as Harvard Business School, Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq Corporation, and Avici Systems.