COMPUTER SCIENCE NEWSLETTER October 1, 2002
Major Changes to Undergraduate Curriculum		There will be a major change to the computer science undergraduate curriculum starting next spring and taking full effect in the fall of 2003. A new course, Introduction to Computer Science II (COSC 1320), has been added to the curriculum as a follow-up course to the first course, Introduction to Computer Science I (COSC 1410). The first course will remain essentially unchanged in content and will still use standard C as the programming language. The second course will be on object-oriented programming and will use C++ as the programming language. This addition results in the following changes to the computer science introductory sequence. Current Sequence · COSC 1410 (uses C as the programming language) · COSC 2320 (uses C as the programming language – COSC 1410 is the prerequisite) New Sequence · COSC 1410 (uses C as the programming language) · COSC 1320 (uses C++ as the programming language – COSC 1410 is the prerequisite) · COSC 2320 (uses C++ as the programming language - COSC 1320 is the prerequisite) The addition will result in changing the computer science major by requiring the new course and by changing the number of advanced computer science elective hours from 12 to 9. It will also change the computer science minor to require COSC 1410, COSC 1320, COSC 2320 and 9 hours of approved COSC courses chosen from the 3000 and 4000 level COSC courses. If you are a computer science major or minor and will graduate in the fall of 2003 or later you will have a choice of graduating under the current catalog or under the 2003 catalog containing these changes. The new course, COSC 1320, will be offered for the first time this spring. If you are not sure that you will complete Data Structures, COSC 2320, by next fall you should plan to take COSC1320 this spring or next summer because starting next fall the prerequisite for COSC 2320 will be changed to COSC1320 and will be enforced. If you have already completed COSC2320 and plan to take the current object-oriented programming course, COSC 3318, you should also do so this spring or next summer. This course will be phased out and probably will not be taught again after the summer semester. After that if you want to take a course on object-oriented programming you will have to take COSC1320. Note that if you take COSC1320 it can be counted toward your degree by graduating under the 2003 catalog. Since under that catalog you will only need 9 hours of advanced COSC electives instead of 12 the effect will be the same as graduating under the current catalog and taking COSC3318 as one of you advanced electives. However you cannot count both COSC 1320 and COSC 3318.
2 New Visiting Professors in COSC		The Department of Computer Science welcomes two visiting professors this year. Dr. Theoharis Theoharis is an Assistant Professor at the University of Athens, Greece, where he heads the Computer Graphics Group. He is visiting the UH Visual Computing Lab during the current academic year (2002-2003). Dr. Theoharis received his D. Phil. (doctorate) and M. Sc. degrees from the University of Oxford in 1988 and 1985 respectively and his B.Sc. degree from the University of London in 1984. His main research interests lie in the fields of computer graphics and visualization. More information can be found in his web pages: http://graphics.di.uoa.gr. Dr. Theoharis has recently been involved in the reconstruction of antiquities from broken parts. The problem is essentially approached as a 3D puzzle and involves techniques from many areas of computer science including pattern recognition, vision, optimization and of course graphics. He is a member of the editorial board of the Scientific Programming journal. This semester Dr Theoharis will teach the Computer Graphics and Visualization courses. Dr. Tianzi Jiang, Research Professor and Leader of Medical Imaging and Computing, National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, is visiting with the Biomedical Imaging Lab at the University of Houston for the next two years. Dr. Jiang received a B.S. in Computational Mathematics from Lanzhou University in 1984, an M.S. in Approximation Theory in 1992, and a Ph.D. in Computational Complexity in 1994, both from Hangzhou University (now Zhejiang University). He has been a Fellow of the Max-Planck Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, Leipzig, Germany and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Computer Mathematics. His research interest focuses on Medical Image Understanding, Functional Brain Imaging, Computer Graphics and Visualization, Markov Random Fields, and Vector Machine Learning. Currently funded projects headed by Dr. Jiang span several areas of Medical Imaging, including Segmentation and Classification of White Matter Lesions, Neuroimaging and Computing, Image Understanding and Cognitive Underpinnings, and Perceptual Information Representation and Computing. Dr. Jiang is teaching a graduate course in Evolutionary Programming this semester.