CS Graduate Student Newsletter [Electronic version] Number 1994-13 December 1, 1994 ---------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. King Receives IEEE Award The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) presented the 1994 Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Accreditation Activities to Prof. Willis King recently. The award is to recognize Dr. King's "pioneering and leadership activities in accreditation of computer science programs." IEEE is the world's largest professional organization with over 300,000 members. In a related story, Dr. King was reelected the President of Computing Sciences Accreditation Board (CSAB) for 1994-95. CSAB is the governing body for accreditation of undergraduate computer science programs in the U.S. Founded in 1985, it has accredited 136 programs so far. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Three Professors Share 2 UH-ISSO Grants Dr. Farokh Bastani, Dr. Albert Cheng and Dr. J. C. Huang received two ISSO (Institute of Space Systems Operations) Research Grants recently. ISSO award is an internal grant providing seed money for research. Each grant support one Research Assistant for several months. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 14 Students Signed Up for Qualifying Exam Fourteen graduate students have signed up for the qualifying examinations this Fall. Even though there were 15 students taking the QEs last Spring, the number of students taking 2 examinations is up significantly (from 3 last Spring to 8 this Fall). The number of students taking the four QEs are listed in the table below. Examination Area # Students Computer Architecture 8 Artificial Intelligence 6 Numerical Analysis 5 Theory of Computation 3 Total 22 ---------------------------------------------------------------- New Ph.D. Course Interpretation It is the consensus of the faculty that 4000-level courses should not be counted toward a Ph.D. degree. This new interpretation applies to all Ph.D. students. The Graduate Advisor will accept 4000-level courses only if they were officially approved in the past. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Section Numbers Available On-Line Section numbers for COSC 6398, COSC 6x99/7x99 and 8x99 are not listed on the course schedule. This information is available on WWW/Mosaic now. Students may also send an e-mail to "david@cs.uh.edu" with a subject of "sections". The account is set up to automatically respond with the information. This is a temporary arrangement. It will eventually be moved to another account. Graduate students will soon be able to have their WWW personal pages linked to the department home page. Details will be announced by Professor Stephen Huang soon. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Changes in COSC Staff Mrs. Amanda Vanghan joined the Computer Science staff recently. She took over the position of Assistant to the Graduate Advisor vacated after Carolyn Sterling left. Amanda used to work in the office of the International Student and Scholar Services (ISSS). Ms Nancy Tran, COSC Undergraduate Advisor Assistant, left the department for another position within UH. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Graduate Student Publication A conference paper submitted by P. R. Venkata Subramaniam, a Ph.D. candidate, was accepted by the Sixth IEEE Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing. The paper, "Simultaneous Access Renegable Priority Queues," is co-authored with his advisor, Dr. Kam-Hoi Cheng. They presented the paper during the conference on October 26-29, 1994, in Dallas, TX.