Computer Science Graduate Student Newsletter

1996-04                                     April 16, 1996


NSF Grant on Real-Time System
A new National Science Foundation (NSF) grant on "Optimization 
of Real-Time Rule-Based Expert Systems" was award to Dr. Albert 
Cheng recently.  This three-year award provides $236,313 for 
computer equipment and three research assistants. (Students 
interested in these positions may send e-mail to Dr. Cheng at 
cheng@ cs.uh.edu.)  

The focus of this NSF-sponsored research is to develop the 
scientific foundation and to implement practical tools for 
optimizing and synthesizing knowledge- based systems to meet 
specified response-time and fault-tolerance constraints.

Dr. Albert Cheng is an Assistant Professor and the Director of 
the Department's Real-Time System Lab.  He will be promoted to 
the rank of Associate Professor in Fall 1996. 

New Course on Scientific Visualization 
A graduate Special Problem (COSC 6397) course, Scientific and 
Engineering Data Visualization, will be offered for the first 
time this Fall by Dr. R. Bowen Loftin. 

This course will explore the basic issues of human perception 
and cognition that impact data visualization and trace the 
influence of computation and related fields on realizing the 
human potential for discovering patterns and relationships in 
large data sets. Special attention will be paid to three-
dimensional immersive visual environments and to the 
contribution of non-visual sensory channels (auditory, haptic, 
and vestibular) to data visualization.      

This is a course intended for students of the physical sciences, 
life sciences, social sciences, business, and engineering with 
an interest in solving complex problems in their disciplines 
through the use of advanced visualization techniques.  Each 
student will complete a special project in visualization 
related to their field of study. 

Prof. Loftin, Director of UH's Virtual Environment Technology 
Lab., said he will explore the possibility of teaming arrangement 
of two graduate students from different areas (e.g., computer 
science and biology) who would "pool" their skills to produce a 
jointly-developed application to which each can make significant 
contributions. 


Chairman Search Comm. Formed 
The Department is expected to hire a new Chairperson to lead the 
department starting Fall 1997.  NS&M Dean John Bear has formed a 
committee for the search of the next chairman.  Five Computer 
Science professors (Drs. L. Johnsson, O. Johnson, S. Huang, 
Rusinkiewicz, and Eick) were included.  

In addition, three professors were selected from outside the 
department.  They are: Dr. John Wolfe (UH Electrical Engineering 
Chairman), Dr. Monti Pettitt (UH Chemistry & CS), Dr. Ken 
Kennedy (Rice CS).  

Dr. J. C. Huang's term will expire at the end of the summer.  
Dean Bear is currently polling the Computer Science faculty for 
an interim chairman for 1996-97.  A decision is expected by the 
end of the semester.

Graduate Student Publication 
Ms. Sharon Gu's paper, entitled "Improving the I/O Performance 
of Real-Time Database Systems with Multiple-Disk Storage 
Structures'' co-authored with her project advisor Dr. Albert 
Cheng, has been accepted for presentation by the 25th 
International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP) to be 
held in Bloomingdale, Illinois, in August 1996.

A joint paper by two graduate students, Chien-Chi Lin and Xin 
Ma, and their advisor Dr. Stephen Huang was also accepted by 
the ICPP 1996.  The title of the paper is "Edge Embedding of 
Two-Dimensional Grids in Hypercubes with Dilation Two and 
Congestion Three."

QE Sign-Up Deadline: April 24, 1996 
The deadline to sign up for the qualifying examinations for this 
semester is Wednesday, April 24, 1996.