NSIN is a program of the U.S. Department of Defense and a problem-solving network that adapts to the emerging needs of those working to preserve national security. The organization dedicates its efforts to identifying collaboration opportunities for defense, academic and entrepreneurial innovators to solve national security problems in new ways. The new partnership also involves the Florida Defense Alliance, an organization within Enterprise Florida.

Students at several state universities are either already enrolled in Hacking for Defense (H4D) classes through the new initiative or will be in the coming years. Examples of projects already under way are:

• Students in the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s Senior Computer Science Capstone program are working with the S. Army 44th Medical Brigade at Ft. Bragg to build a new app for more accurate tracking of medications. They also are creating a dashboard and mobile app to better manage Civil Affairs data within the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and helping the U.S. Army create a more robust training environment to combat cyber threats.

• At Florida Polytechnic University, capstone senior design students are working to develop streamlined communication tools for operations group squadron commanders to access mission-critical data effectively.

• Florida Atlantic University students are developing new machine learning models based on reinforcement learning techniques that use data from sonobuoys to improve the Navy’s P-8’s ability to track submarines. They will also be working on artificial intelligence-based solutions that monitor battlefield chat and radio feeds to automatically update the status of friendly and enemy forces on a dashboard.

“This Memorandum of Understanding is an excellent opportunity for our 12 institutions to support an industry critical to the state of Florida,” says Syd Kitson, chair of the Board of Governors of the State University System of Florida. “By preparing our graduates for the types of issues and real-world problems facing the defense industry, we build a dynamic talent pipeline for Florida that fosters innovation and problem-solving.”

In addition to the semester-long courses and student team projects, the partnership also includes:

• Providing fellowships for project teams that pay full-time innovators to continue working on Department of Defense challenges
• Placing problems into university hackathons to generate solutions and identify student talent for recruitment
• Supporting solutions and ventures that address Department of Defense challenges to create new commercial businesses
• Connecting State University System students, faculty, researchers, mentors and defense liaisons to Department of Defense installations, leaders and organizations

Additional goals of the partnership include helping more students earn internships and begin careers in national security-related fields and also expanding faculty research in national security. It may also allow for students to be sponsored for security clearance — making them more competitive for future employment in the industry. Those student-focused components will be led by Florida International University and Florida Gulf Coast University.

NSIN will hire a University Program Director (UPD) who will report to the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, with up to 30 percent of their effort allocated to working with and supporting the chancellor’s office for system-wide coordination and success. This will be the first NSIN UPD ever assigned to a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) institution and a state university system.

This is a State University System-wide collaboration, designed for maximum participation, with all 12 of Florida’s public state universities playing a role in areas such as defense liaisons, applied research, mentorship and student/faculty engagement.

The FDA’s role in the MOU is to facilitate access to military leaders, engage the Department of Economic Opportunity and the Florida Chamber of Commerce to align talent pipeline initiatives, and to promote this program throughout the defense community, with local and state leaders, as well as uniformed service leaders.

With more than 20 major military installations and three of 10 U.S. combatant commands located in Florida, the military and defense are a solid component of Florida’s economy, contributing $95 billion annually and supporting more than 914,000 jobs. Because of Florida’s consistent effort to be the most military-friendly state in the nation, our state is second in the nation for military retirees, third in the nation for veterans, and fourth in the nation for defense contracts — of which more than 50 percent are in manufacturing.

The new agreement formalizes and expands existing FDA relationships in our communities to provide students a window into our military and defense industries as part of final projects but also helps solve some of the most challenging military issues.

This new statewide effort addresses one of the governor’s goals for our military and defense organizations: to create a ready workforce that fills critical defense industry jobs and supports our installations with equipment and solutions.

“The signing of this MOU and ground-breaking program is great news for Florida,” says Jamal Sowell, Florida secretary of commerce and Enterprise Florida president and CEO. “Florida’s military and defense industry is a key economic driver for the state. Enterprise Florida and the FDA will continue to create opportunities, working with our partners, to support Florida’s military installations and strengthen Florida bases.”

This MOU contributes to the FDA reaching its vision of Florida providing the most innovative and comprehensive military, defense and national security support in the nation.

“Establishing this network at the state level, connecting up Florida’s strong university system and long-established military installations and defense industry is the smart thing to do at this time to position Florida for the future,” says FDA Chair Kellie Jo Kilberg. “Research and innovation are the basis for solving the toughest problems and Florida confirms we want to be serious and bring the right individuals together with this agreement to move forward.”

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Board of Trustees Chair Beverly Seay played an important role in establishing the partnership, as she is the NSIN southeast region’s senior advisor.

A trustee at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ since 2013, Seay advises and connects companies, universities, and investors in modeling and simulation, cybersecurity, blockchain and computing technologies. She brings global experience and a Fortune 500 track record in domestic and global business operations, and she is a recognized leader in innovative and creative technologies.

“NSIN works diligently to build strategic collaborative partners who can bring much to the table in helping to meet the defense and national security challenges of today,” says Tommy Sowers, NSIN’s southeast regional director. “We have worked to establish partnerships with top research universities throughout the country, and Bev is a tremendous help in expanding those partnerships further, in not only Florida but the greater Southeast region of the U.S.”

In the last fiscal year, NSIN has broadened its outreach and services to an additional 500,000 students, 36 states, three territories, the U.S. European Combatant Command, and the U.S. Africa Combatant Command. NSIN programs have brought over 170 new dual-use ventures to the national security ecosystem.

For six consecutive years, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ has been the No. 1 workforce supplier of graduates to U.S. aerospace and defense industries, according to Aviation Week Network. In addition, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ ranks second in the nation (only to Georgia Tech) for teaching the critical skills needed by employers.

“We have exceptional academic talent throughout the Southeast, and I am excited to help our universities prepare students to become the next generation of national security problem-solvers,” says Seay. “Students will benefit from new courses and real-world exercises that mirror what they would do in careers with the Department of Defense or defense-related companies. These partnerships will be especially valuable in Florida and other southeastern states that play such an important role in the defense and homeland security industries.”

Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s programming team has consistently ranked among the best in the nation.

The team, made up of Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ computer science majors — junior Ahmad Barhamje, junior Burnett Scholar Joshua Fair and senior Burnett Scholar David Harmeyer — finished higher than teams from Cal Tech, Stanford, Princeton, Yale and Cornell, to name a few. Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s programming team has consistently ranked among the best in the nation, winning the ICPC Southeast USA Regional Intercollegiate Programming Contest seven consecutive years, and in 2018 ranked No. 1 in North America and No. 10 in the world.

“It’s really rewarding to see so much of the time and effort that we put into training paying off,” says Harmeyer. “Many of the universities that we ended up placing above at the North America Championship are teams that we have trained with in the past. It’s encouraging to see that all of the hard work we put in was worth it when we ended up ahead of them on the final scoreboard.”

The Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ programming team joins 18 other teams that advanced to the ICPC World Finals after competing as one of 59 teams in the North America Championship hosted by the Georgia Tech College of Computing in Atlanta.

Training Problem-solving Athletes

“We tell the team members that programming competition is like any other sport — practice makes perfect and repetition is the key to perfection,” says faculty advisor Ali Orooji, adding that the team practices 35 to 40 Saturdays a year. Each practice session starts with a lecture, followed by a five-hour mock contest and a discussion. In addition, team members during the week solve problems on various sites and read about various programming problems.

“We tell the team members that programming competition is like any other sport.” — Associate Professor Ali Orooji

The competitions are akin to large-scale athletic events and the students perform like athletes, says Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Board of Trustees Chair Beverly Seay, who has long been involved with ICPC. “The hard work, the teamwork to solve a variety of problems under pressure, the dynamic leadership it takes — like our student-athletes, these are the qualities that give our programmers an advantage in the workforce.”

In the competitions, teams try to solve eight or more complex, real-world problems in a five-hour time limit. Teammates collaborate around a single computer using logic, strategy and endurance that requires precision, problem-solving and an understanding of advanced algorithms. They try to solve the most problems in the fewest attempts in the least cumulative time.

Advancing Programmers in North America

This is the first year a championship-level competition was held to determine which teams would qualify for the world event. Previously, regional competitions were held to determine which North American teams would move on, but Seay, who was a driving force to add the championship, says the United States and Canada need to be more competitive in computer science, both in student competitions and in the high-tech workforce.

“With the need for more computing talent across the country, it is our responsibility to groom the leaders of tomorrow in computer science and related areas.” — Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Trustee Chair Beverly Seay

The United States faces a global competitiveness crisis in computer science with nearly one million technical jobs left unfilled last year alone.

“With the need for more computing talent across the country, it is our responsibility to groom the leaders of tomorrow in computer science and related areas,” Seay says. “We need to be more competitive internationally and invest in events that give our students opportunities to showcase their best skills to industry and government.”

“Spending this much time working on challenging programming problems really helps with both implementation skills in the real world and with being able to solve tough theoretical interview questions,” says Harmeyer. “Most of the applicable theory that gets taught at school is stuff that we master pretty quickly working on our own, so then we move to some slightly more obscure data structures and algorithms, as well as some really interesting problem-solving techniques.”

This year’s North America regional competitions started with more than 3,000 competitors to determine which would advance to last weekend’s event.

“It was a very good idea to add the additional level [North America Championship] between the regional and finals,” Orooji says. “It was good to see how we compare against other universities in North America.”

Preparing the Next Generation of Programmers for the World Stage

To help prepare students from North America to become more competitive on the world stage, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ will host a programming camp with top trainers from Georgia Tech, MIT and other universities for about 100 of the top computing students.

The inaugural North America Programming Camp will be held at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ March 30 through April 3.

The camps will also provide companies and agencies opportunities to meet with the teams and recruit members for future job or internship opportunities. Plus, Seay says, the camp will help promote Orlando and Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ as destinations for high-tech talent.

The inaugural North America Programming Camp will be held at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ March 30 through April 3, offering team members the opportunity to practice by working through simulated world-level competitions, and trainers the chance to provide analysis and feedback. To offset the costs for attendees, the camp will be sponsored by Universal Parks and Resorts, the National Security Agency, L3Harris Technologies, Northrop Grumman and others that have an interest in recruiting the nation’s brightest computer science students. One of the camps’ and competition’s sponsors, the NSA, gave North American competitors a challenge problem involving cybersecurity.

Arup Guha, an associate instructor of computer science and one of the team’s seven coaches this year, says Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝â€™s three students have a strong general knowledge base, but they also have specific strengths in different areas.

For example, he says, Harmeyer’s strength is geometry problems; Fair’s background is nontraditional dynamic programming problems, string problems and ad hoc problems; and Barhamje tackles data structures and graph algorithms.

“What we’ve really worked on with this team is collaboration,” Guha says. “They already work well together and in contest they confer with each other before committing to a particular solution path. We’ve found that this improves the team’s accuracy on harder problems, when two of the students think about a problem, to make sure they agree on the general approach.”

Companies or organizations interested in sponsoring the spring programming camps at Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝, should contact Sean Farrell, associate director for advancement in the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Our search committee and search firm are now working to recruit a pool of candidates for the Board of Trustees to consider based on your feedback and recommendations.

If you would still like to share your thoughts on the experiences, qualifications and characteristics you feel the ideal candidate should have to lead Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝, the will be accepting feedback through Feb. 6. A also is available.

The feedback provided in these surveys, as well as the criteria for evaluating candidates, will be discussed at the next Presidential Search Committee meeting, which will take place Feb. 12 at 8:30 a.m. in the Key West Ballroom of the Student Union. The meeting will be live streamed at

Storbeck/Pimentel & Associates, the firm chosen to aid in the search, continues accepting nominations of candidates for the presidency. As you think about whom you could nominate, you can review the presidential search advertisement.

All nominations should be submitted to Alberto Pimentel, managing partner, at apsearch@storbeckpimentel.com

We anticipate selecting the next president this spring. On-campus visits for each of the finalists will feature an open forum, as well as other opportunities for candidates to get to know our university community. We will provide dates and more information when they are scheduled.

I hope you will remain engaged throughout the search process by visiting ucf.edu/presidential-search for updates and additional information.

With your help, I know we will find the best candidate to move our university forward.

Thank you and Charge On!

Seay’s impact on the university and on CECS has been significant and several in attendance recognized her contributions, including President Hitt andAssociate Dean for Academic Affairs, Chuck Reilly.

“As a member of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Board of Trustees, Bev provides thoughtful and enthusiastic leadership, and she has become a champion for the advancement of the College of Engineering and Computer Science,” said Hitt. Master’s student Brandon Naids ’14 recalled how his undergraduate senior design project and career changed direction after a meeting with Seay at a Dean’s Advisory Board dinner.

Seay has generously supported the university for more than a decade as a donor to several programs and scholarships. And as chair of the CECS Dean’s Advisory Board, she has leveraged her contacts within the business community to secure several key donations to benefit Knights in engineering and computer science. As a prominent business executive in the Central Florida modeling and simulation community, her contacts are movers and shakers of industry.

The Dean’s Advisory Board meets each academic semester to provide strategic direction and guidance to the college. As chair, Seay is the consummate volunteer and key activist for the college. “Every day as I walk into the Dean’s Suite, I will think of the impact you have made on this college and how much we appreciate you,” said Reilly.

Seay thanked all in attendance for the honor, saying “It’s been great to be tied to this university; contributing through the university to the community and…helping to set up our next generation for success is something that just makes me feel good when I get up every morning.”

The plaque denoting The Beverly J. Seay Dean’s Suite of the College of Engineering and Computer Science will be permanently displayed outside of the Dean’s Suite entrance.

The ceremonies will be:

Doors open 90 minutes before the ceremonies, and graduates begin processing 20 minutes before the ceremonies, which are expected to last about two hours each.

The Friday morning speaker will be Alan Ginsburg, a real estate developer who founded The CED Companies, which has built more than 85,000 affordable apartment residences. He is active in many professional and charitable organizations, and his philanthropic contributions have benefited causes all over Central Florida, including The Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ College of Medicine Capital Campaign. The college’s Harriet F. Ginsburg Health Sciences Library is named in honor of his late wife. During the ceremonies, Ginsburg will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Public Service.

 The Friday afternoon speaker will be Rick Walsh, a founding member of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Board of Trustees and a former senior vice president for corporate affairs of Darden Restaurants. Today he is president of the KnobHill Group, a strategic counseling and development company. He received the 1985 Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Distinguished Alumnus Award and has served on the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Foundation board for more than 10 years. During the ceremonies, Walsh will be awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Commercial Science.

 The Saturday speaker will be Beverly J. Seay, a business executive in the Central Florida modeling and simulation industry for more than 25 years and a member of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Board of Trustees since last year. She also serves as a board member on the Florida High Tech Corridor Council and on the Steering Committee of the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Downtown Campus. She chairs the dean’s advisory board for the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ College of Engineering and Computer Science, and has helped to establish the Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ Women in Science and Engineering program.

Of the 5,067 students who filed an intent to graduate, there are 4,308 seeking bachelor’s degrees, 659 master’s degrees, three education specialist degrees, 11 educational doctoral degrees, 80 Ph.D.s, and six Doctor of Nursing Practice.

With these expected graduations, Â鶹ӳ»­´«Ă˝ will have awarded 271,257 degrees since classes began in 1968.

Each guest attending the ceremonies, including children and infants, must have a ticket to enter the arena. Tickets are available from graduates. Guests who do not have tickets can view a live telecast of the ceremony via closed circuit television at the FAIRWINDS Alumni Center, Student Union and on Campus Cable Channel 21.

 Parking for guests will be available in garages C, D and H.

 Additional details about commencement can be found at .

Beverly J. Seay was appointed by the Florida Board of Governors to a five-year term that started Thursday. Seay’s appointment is subject to confirmation by the Florida Senate.

Seay is the vice president and general manager for global professional services at CAE Integrated Enterprise Solutions, a leader in modeling, simulation and training for civil aviation and defense. CAE employs about 8,000 people at more than 100 sites across 30 countries.

She also serves on the dean’s advisory board for the College of Engineering and Computer Science, and she is a board member of the Florida High Tech Corridor Council.

Before joining CAE, Seay worked for Science Applications International Corporation for 24 years. She managed the development and delivery of services, systems, products and operations support for modeling, simulation and training for customers such as the U.S. Department of Defense, NATO and several foreign governments.

Seay earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and a master’s degree in computers, information and control engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.