COMPUTER SCIENCE NEWSLETTER Department of Computer Science September 15, 2001
Change in Department Administration	Dr. Stephen Huang was appointed Interim Chairman of COSC by NSM Dean John Bear in August. Dr. Monte Pettitt and Dr. William Fitzgibbon, COSC co-Heads for the last 16 months, are returning to their original responsibilities in their respective department. Dr. Christoiph Eick will take over Dr. Huang’s position of Director of Graduate Studies starting September 15. Dr. Rakesh Verma will remain as the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Professor Robert Anderson will assume the job of Assistant Chairman. This latest change in administrative jobs will bring the Department closer to normalcy.
Drs. Yeh and Hillford to teach for COSC	Dr. Daniel D. Yeh received his Ph. D. degree in Computer Science from Northwestern University in 1983. He has taught in several universities including Cleveland State, Arizona State, and California-Riverside. Professor Yeh taught at UH once during 1990-91. He is teaching a section of our 4330 Operating Systems this semester. His areas of interests include Parallel Processing, Algorithm, and Computer Architecture. Dr. Victoria Hillford received her Ph. D. degree from UH under th supervision of Professor Farokh Bastani in 1998. Her dissertation title is “Impact of Knowledge and Data Distribution on Software Performance and Reliability.” Her areas of specialization are Software Engineering and Software Reliability.
Congratulations to these PhD Students	Congratulations to Carlos Barron for successfully defending his proposal defense on "Human Motion Tracking Using an Uncalibrated Camera". His thesis advisor is Dr. Ioannis Kakadiaris. Ms Ruth Miller also defended her proposal on “Querying of Textual Information using XML Annotation.” Her dissertation co-advisors are Dr. Marek Rusinkiewicz and Dr. S. H. Stephen Huang.
COSC Enrollment Continues to Drop	The department experienced a surge in both graduate and undergraduate enrollment during the last few years. In order to bring the number of students down to a more manageable level, several steps were taken to achieve that during the last academic year. Unofficial enrollment data indicated that we have 349 graduate students compare to 479 students last Fall, a 27% drop. At the same time, the undergraduate enrollment has dropped from 638 last Fall to 513 this semester.