ETSU´s MS Degree Program in Computer and Information Science (CIS) is a two year program that emphasizes a practical, hands-on approach to studying computation. The program features concentrations in the following areas
- Applied Computer Science
(database design, distributed systems, verification and validation, and algorithms) - Information Technology
(e-commerce, e-business, security, and system administration),
Graduate electives have included courses on database management, corporate IT management, computer graphics, computer gaming, forensics, XML, and other contemporary technologies (e.g., PHP and mySQL, Flash, and ERP).
Students in both concentrations choose one of two culminating experiences: a three-semester-long group project, or a thesis.
Representative theses include
- an analysis of the costs and benefits of using patches to secure the ETSU campus network;
- work on extending OpenGL with additional primitives for shape definition;
- an analysis of the relative usability of PHP, Python, and Perl;
- and an investigation of the use of sound to diagnose disk failures.
Representative capstone projects include
- a computer resource accounting database for Oak Ridge National Laboratory;
- an XML model of civil aviation data for the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO);
- a system for representing speech disorders and their treatment protocols;
- and an ongoing effort to promote the use of high performance computing at ETSU, involving the parallelization of rendering applications and simulations of physical phenomena, such as intergalactic collisions and photon transport.
The department manages three primary computing laboratories, housing about 90 Wintel PCs, seven Windows-based servers and two Unix-based servers, with four additional servers for other projects. A fourth, hands-on laboratory that is normally isolated from the greater campus network hosts about 60 more networked PCs, and an additional 60-computer cluster.
Click here for additional program-related information regarding graduate assistantships, second-career students, alumni, and faculty credentials.
