School Of Computing Newsletter - March 2026
What's Inside This Issue
- Important Information
- Updates
- Achievements
- Faculty Highlight
- Student Highlight
Important Information
- Osprey for a Day — March 6th
- Computing Advisory Board Meeting — March 27th, 8:00 a.m.
- SoC Faculty & Staff Meeting — March 27th, 12 p.m.
Achievements
Iliya Kulbaka, a Ph.D. student of SoC, has his paper, "Tiny is Mighty Enough: Evaluating Tiny and Large Language Models for Controlling Autonomous Agents", accepted at the IEEE Conference on AI (https://www.ieeesmc.org/cai-2026/), Granada, Spain, May 8-10, 2026. Congratulations!
Anne Howell, an undergraduate student majoring in Computing & Information Sciences with a concentration in Data Science presented two oral presentations and two posters at the FL MAA Annual Conference (https://www.florida.maa.org/) in Bradenton, Florida, on February 20-21, 2026. Congratulations!
Dr. Niu's co-authored paper, "Synergistic enhancement of requirement-to-code traceability: A framework combining large language model based data augmentation and an advanced encoder", has recently been published in Information and Software Technology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2026.108045 .
Faculty Highlight
Richard Lentz has been with UNF since 2012, he started as a student and by 2015 was a grader and has held a position at UNF since. He got his Bachelors and Masters in Computing and Information Sciences from UNF.
Lentz worked at Computer FX, a computer repair shop, for ten years, along with being a System Administrator and Research support (Research Technology Services RTS) before teaching at UNF full time.
His favorite course to teach is System Administration, saying “I love this class because it teaches practical skills and showcases how different services come together to create functional infrastructure.”
Lentz would like to at some point teach all of the IT specific courses at the School of Computing. Outside of work he enjoys playing PC video games and cooking.
Student Highlight
A major development for the School of Computing was the addition of the Ph.D. degree track. Through the program students can gain a Doctor of Philosophy in Computing with a concentration in Cybersecurity or Intelligent Systems.
One of the first students in this path is Jonathan O’Berry, and he is the first to pass the Ph.D. qualification review, which is a major step towards achieving his doctorate.
The decision to begin his Ph.D. came after he recognized that the industry is leaning towards graduate level education.
O’Berry did the accelerated Bachelors to Masters program, gaining his B.S. in Computer Science in 2023 and his M.S. in Computing with a concentration in Computer Science in 2024.
His master’s thesis delved into using computer vision to assist in the diagnosis of Media Haze, an eye condition. He now is working with Dr. Kanewala on research into the quality of large language models. His Ph.D. will be on a concentration in Intelligent Systems.
The biggest challenge he has faced is the workload of the program, he said that it is not that the content is more challenging it is the amount of work that goes into research.
The next step for O’Berry is forming his thesis review committee and then the candidacy application. Following his Ph.D. he would like to work in research and development, being open to many industries such as aerospace and FinTech.
The biggest thing for anyone to go into this type of educational level is to remain diligent in working hard, and as O’Berry said to not procrastinate as much as possible.