Newsletter [Electronic Version]
Number  1995-05                                       May 2, 1995
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Dr. Lennart Johnsson Joins COSC

The Department of Computer Science recently announced the
appointment of Professor Lennart Johnsson of Harvard University
as its first chaired professor.

Dr. S. Lennart Johnsson received his Ph.D. degree in Control
Engineering from Chalmers Institute of Technology, Gothenburg,
Sweden in 1970.  He was a Postdoctoral Scholar at UCLA
(1970-71), Research Associate at California Institute of
Technology (1979-83), Visiting Professor at Linkoping
University, Sweden (1985), Visiting Scientist at Argonne
National Laboratories (1985), and Acting Head of the Numerical
Computing Group at Thinking Machines (1986).  He was Associate
Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Yale
University between 1983 and 1990.  Currently he is the Gordon
McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Harvard
University.  He was also the Director of Computational Sciences
at Thinking Machines until early this year.

Professor Johnsson is Editor of International Journal on High
Speed Computing and Journal of Parallel and Distributed
Computing.  He is also on the Editorial  Board of the following
Journals: International Journal of Supercomputing Applications,
Journal of Scientific Programming, Journal of Numerical Linear
Algebra with Applications, and Journal on Concurrency: Practice
and Experience.  Dr. Johnsson is also a Board Member of the
Computing Research Association.

Dr. Johnsson has visited the campus four times during the last
few months.  He is expected to bring several new professors to
the department in the next few years. 

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Game Playing on Computers Prohibited

The Computer Science Faculty voiced their concerns on certain
activities on the department computing facilities.  The primary
concern is playing computer games on our workstations and
microcomputers.  A motion was passed in a recent faculty meeting
stating that "activities including playing games that unduly
affect other users will not be tolerated."  

There are also some concerns about locking up workstations for
an extended period of time by some users.

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TA's for Summer and Fall

Teaching Assistants for the Summer and new Teaching Assistants
for the Fall semesters have been appointed by the Chairman.  All
current TA's will continue to receive support subject to the
following two reviews.  The first review is based on the
academic performance of the TA.  This has been completed by the
Scholarship Committee.  The second review is based on the
performance of the TA on their teaching duties.  This will be
done at the end of the semester.

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Spring Qualifying Examinations

Ten graduate students signed up to take the Spring Qualifying
Examinations for a total of 14 examinations.  This represents a
slight drop from the past two semesters. 

QE Areas          No. of Students 
Data Management         3 
Programming Languages   2
Operating Systems       5 
Software Engineering    4 

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Graduate Student Publication

A paper co-authored by Miss Yuan Cai, Mr. Chien-Chi Lin and
their advisor Dr. S. Huang has been accepted for publication in
the 1995 International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP).
The title of the paper is "Embedding Two-Dimensional Grids into
Hypercubes with Dilation 2 and Congestion 5."