Computer Science Graduate Student Newsletter

No.: 1996-07
September 4, 1996

Johnsson Appointed COSC Chair

Dr. Lennart Johnsson, Cullen Professor of Computer Science, has been appointed by the Dean as the Chairman of the Computer Science Department for a three-year term effective September 1, 1996. Dr. Johnsson replaces Professor J. C. Huang who served as the Chairman for four years from 1992 to 1996.

In his memo to the COSC Faculty, Dr. Bear stated that Professor Johnsson "requested that Olin Johnson be appointed the Associate Chairman" to assist him in the management of internal departmental affairs while Dr. Johnsson will concentrate more on the external affairs (fund raising, faculty recruiting, etc.). Johnsson and Johnson will be available at their faculty offices, 592-PGH and 596-PGH respectively. A schedule will be set up for office hours for each of them in 501D-PGH.

As the new Chairman takes over, there will be some changes made. All offices and laboratories on the fifth floor of PGH will be renovated. The department administrative office will be move from 501-PGH to the more centrally located 550-PGH.

New Rule on Graduate Classification

There is a change in policy concerning MS students. Effective immediately, all MS students will be classified as PhD students as soon as they meet the following criteria: (1) completed 30 credit hours of graduate work or completed a graduate degree (master or doctoral level); and (2) maintained a Graduate GPA of 3.00. According to the university's rule, all UH courses 3000 level and above are counted as graduate credits for graduate students.

The change will have little effect on the students whether their degree objectives are MS or PhD. Students who intend to get an MS degree will take COSC6399/7399 and complete a master's thesis as before.

The rule has been applied in all NSM departments except the Department of Computer Science. The Dean has asked the Department to do so for administrative reasons. Mrs. Amanda Vaughan, Graduate Advising Assistant, has been making the change during the last few weeks and will continue to process the reclassification in the coming weeks.

On the other hand, Ph.D. students who don't have 30 credit hours will be classified as MS students temporarily. They will be changed back to Ph. D. status as soon as they accumulated 30 graduate hours.

Graduate Student Publication

Blaz Zupan's paper entitled "Optimization of Rule Based Systems Using State Space Graphs,'' co-authored with his thesis advisor Prof. Albert Cheng, has been accepted for publication in an upcoming issue of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.