Byung Jang (back row, center) and his students engage in cutting-edge excascale research. The assistant professor has won the NACADA Region 4 Excellence in Academic Advising Award. Submitted photo
Last year, Byunghyun Jang won the University of Mississippi’s Excellence in Advising award. As winner of the campus award, he was nominated for additional recognition through the National Association of Academic Advisors.
Now Jang is NACADA Region 4 winner of the Certificate of Merit for Excellence in Advising.
“It was a really big surprise as I never thought I deserved this award,” said the assistant professor of computer and information science. “I am very humbled by this award, and I feel like this award is given to tell me to improve my advising.”
Jang’s original nomination was made by his graduate and undergraduate research assistants.
“I was very pleased to see that students who work with me on a daily basis enjoy my advising and mentorship,” he said. “I always wanted my students to succeed in their study and research.”
Jang joined the UM engineering faculty five years ago. He teaches undergraduate and graduate computer architecture, compiler and high-performance parallel computing courses.
His research focuses on efficient co-design of software and hardware for high-performance and energy-efficient computing. He formerly had such projects with industry and government agencies such as Samsung, LG, MediaTek, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army.
“I believe that the CIS department at Ole Miss has great potential for growth, and my expertise in high-performance heterogeneous systems can have synergistic effect through collaboration with the faculty and students in the department and across the university,” Jang said. “My grand vision is to make the department and the School of Engineering a leading center for ‘exascale computing’ and to make the classroom full of excitement and motivation through practical teaching and research.”
Exascale computing refers to a computer system capable of reaching performance of at least one exaflop. Such capacity would represent a thousandfold increase over the existing petascale. (One exaflop is a thousand petaflops. A petaflop is equal to a thousand million million operations per second.)
Jang has led efforts on several important projects in prominent companies in his field, including Advanced Micro Devices and Samsung. During his doctoral study, he won an AMD/ATI Ph.D. fellowship, which is awarded to only four doctoral students worldwide annually after rigorous project proposal review.
“I hope that by working with me, my students can have a deep understanding of current computer science and technology fields,” Jang said. “With good skills, hard work and by contributing to this field, they can succeed as engineers, researchers, professors and so forth.”
UM administrators congratulated Jang on his achievement.
“This is indeed good recognition and good news,” Dean Alex Cheng said. “What a wonderful and well deserved honor.”
“The National Academic Advising Association is the gold standard for research, publications and best practices within the profession of academic advising,” said Travis Hitchcock, assistant director for advising in the UM Center for Student Success and First-Year Experience. “To be recognized by them is a huge achievement for Dr. Jang and highlights the university’s commitment to facilitating a quality advising program.”
Jang earned his bachelor’s degree from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea. He earned his master’s degree at Oklahoma State University and his doctorate from Northeastern University.
Established in 1983, the NACADA Annual Awards Program for Academic Advising honors individuals and institutions making significant contributions to the improvement of academic advising. NACADA is a representative and advocate of academic advising and those providing that service to higher education.
The association has grown to more than 11,000 members and hosts an annual conference each fall that has attracted more than 3,000 attendees, as well as 10 regional conferences, international conferences and intensive study of advising through various other events held throughout the year. NACADA publishes a scholarly journal, a quarterly e-publication and occasional special publications.
For more about the Department of Computer and Information Science, go to http://www.cs.olemiss.edu/ or call 662-915-7396.