Changes for 94-95 Academic Year

Dr. Farokh Bastani, COSC Professor, has returned to the
department after a one-year development leave.  He spent the
year visiting several research institutes around the country. 
Prof. Bastani's wife, Dr. Y. Yen, will be on leave from the
Computer Science Department at Michigan State University during
1994-95.  Dr. & Mrs. Bastani had a new baby boy recently.

Dr. Louis Slothouber will be leaving the department at the end
of the summer to start a new software/consulting/contracting
business centered around an expert system shell for Apple's
Newton PDA. Initially, he will be teaming with a large software
contractor in the Clear Lake Area  to bid on a number of
projects for NASA and other space related industries. Until
those contracts are awarded, Dr. Slothouber will consult on
various existing contracts, and try to market his expert system
shell to the market at large.

Mrs. Nancy Tran, COSC Undergraduate Advisor Assistant, had a
baby boy on August 11.  She will return to work in October.

Mrs. Carolyn Sterling, COSC Graduate Advisor Assistant, will be
leaving the department at the end of August.  She will be a
Teaching Assistant in the College of Technology while working
toward her MS degree.  Mrs. Sterling has been working for the
department for seven years and has assisted almost current every
graduate student in the department. All of us appreciate her
hard work over the years.  We wish her the best of luck on her
new career and challenge.

Section Numbers Posted

In the past, students taking thesis (6399, 7399), dissertation
(8399), and special problem (6398) courses had to see Mrs.
Christine Hebert for the section numbers.  Now that students can
register by phone, we want to eliminate the extra trip to the
department office.  From now on, we will post all the section
numbers on the bulletin board outside the department office. 
This should make life during registration a little easier.  

This change was suggested by a graduate student.  We are willing
to listen to other suggestions.  The next step is to put it on
the computer so that students can access this and other
information electronically.  An experimental Mosaic Home Page
for the Computer Science Department is under development.  

New COSC Graduate Students 

More than 50 new graduate students have reported to the
department so far this year.  To better prepare these new
students, an orientation program was held  on August 19.  About
40 students attended the meeting.  Drs. Leiss, Johnson, K.
Cheng, Bastani, J. Huang, Verma, and Paris showed up to greet
the new students.  Among the new students, there are several who
have earned a Ph.D. degree in other disciplines.

New Form for COOP Program Petition

Foreign students are allowed to participate in cooperative
training during their study under some conditions.  There have
been many requests to participate in such COOP programs
recently.  To help the Graduate Advisor in making decisions on
these cases, a new form was designed recently.  This form is
available from the department office.

Graduate Student Publication

Jeng-Rung Chen's paper entitled "A Fast, Partially
Parallelizable Algorithm for Predicting Execution Time of EQL
Rule-Based Programs," co-authored with his dissertation advisor
Dr. Albert M. K. Cheng, was accepted for publication by the 1994
International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP-94). They
traveled to St. Charles, Illinois, to present the paper on
August 15-18, 1994.



Department of Computer Science, University of Houston, Houston, 
TX 77204-3475

Number  1994-09	August 23, 1994