Computer Science Graduate Student Newsletter

No.: 1996-09
November 4, 1996

COSC Research Funding Up

Externally funded research has increased dramatically in the last few years in the Computer Science Department. According to a memo from Dean Butler, Computer Science faculty was awarded $2,886,364 for research. COSC ranked among the third in the seven departments in the College of NSM.

The table below shows the amount of total external research funding for the Computer Science Department and UH over the last 6 years. The figures, obtained from OSP, include grants from federal, state and private sources. 


Year      COSC              UH
1990-91   246,246          41,371,314
1991-92   467,388          52,700,017
1992-93   124,050          49,041,305
1993-94   467,795          55,248,857
1994-95 1,875,129          49,573,377
1995-96 2,886,364          46,920,321

New Multidisciplinary Course

A Special Topic course on Cognitive Science (ELEE 6397) will be offered in the Spring semester. Topics covered in this course include knowledge representation, pattern recognition, decision making, memory, perception, and natural language understanding. There will be several instructors involved including Dr. Ernst Leiss from COSC and other professors from ECE, Philosophy, Psychology, and Optometry. An important part of the course will be devoted to research projects assigned to small groups of students, preferably with different backgrounds.

COSC to Offer MS Degree via ITV

The Department of Computer Science will be offering the MS degree through distance education soon. Students will be able to take courses at remote locations (West Houston Institute, North Houston Institute, University Center at Woodlands, and UH at Ft Bend), and employer sites (TI, Compaq, and NASA).

The Department has made a commitment, according to Dr. Olin Johnson, to offer at least two courses through ITV (2-way audio and 1-way video) starting Fall 1997. These graduate courses will be rotated so that it should be possible for students to complete much of the course work of a master degree without having to come to the campus on a regular basis.

The degree requirements, including the thesis, are exactly those for our current MS degree.

Davisons Adopt Twins

Dianna and Dan Davison adopted twin, three-and-a-half-year-old boys on Thursday, October 24, 1996. Jacob Austin Davison and Geoffrey Phillip Davison are doing fine and are enjoying their new house and pets, not to mention their parents. "They particularly like waking up Daddy very early in the morning!" said the exhausted but proud father.

An anonymous corporation donated a MassPar valued at $449,000 to Dr. Davison's Lab. recently. Prof. Davison will use this high-performance computer to compare protein and DNA sequences in the Human Genome Project, a world-wide study analyzing the complete structure of human DNA to locate about 100,000 human genes.

Speaker to Discuss Interview Technique

To help students to sharpen their interviewing technique, Dr. S. Huang invited Mr. John Bell to come to campus to give a presentation on the subject. The talk is scheduled on Tuesday, Nov. 5 at 2:30. Bell has held regular and consulting positions with local and international companies for 14 years. All CS students are welcome to attend.