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COMPUTER SCIENCE NEWSLETTER
January 31, 2003 |
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COSC Seeking
Department Head
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The
Department of Computer Science is currently accepting applicantions for the
position of Department Head. The
successful candidate will provide vigorous leadership in building the
department, including the recruitment of several new faculty, building the
funded research base, and interacting with the administration of the Departmental
and University faculty on long range planning. Areas of concentration are high performance computing,
networks, computational science, computer graphics/vision, and
scientific/engineering data visualization. The
Department is experiencing a period of strong growth and expects this trend
to continue. The Head will also lead
in maintaining an innovative curriculum and continue to initiate
collaborative research programs. Applicants
should have a Ph.D. in computer science or a related field and have a strong
interest in both teaching and leading-edge research. Significant
opportunities for collaborative research exist within the University, at Rice
University, with the Texas Medical Center, the NASA/Johnson Space Center, and
the region's oil and gas industry. Applications, including a vitae, a list of
publications and funding, should be sent to: Department Head Search CommitteeDepartment of Computer ScienceHouston, TX 77204-3010 USA713-743-3263 (voice), 713-743-2709 (fax)pettitt@uh.edu (email)
Review
of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position
is filled. University of Houston is an equal opportunity/affirmative action
employer. Minorities, women, veterans, and persons with disabilities are
encouraged to apply. |
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Pavlidis’ New Book on Programming Cameras
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Faculty Gets New Research Grants |
Dr.
Ioannis Kakadiaris received a major research grant from National
Health Institute (NIH) late last year.
The project is called "Computational modeling of living brain
tissue based on reconstructed morphology to guide functional imaging
experiments." Dr. P. Saggau (Neuroscience, Baylor College of
Medicine) is the PI of the project.
Dr. Kakadiaris and Dr. C. Colbert (Biology and Biochemistry,
UH) are co-PIs of the project and will co-direct the UH portion of the effort
totaling $840,683. The goal
of this new Baylor/UH project is the development of a computational and
experimental framework to allow real-time mapping of functional imaging data
(e.g., spatio-temporal patterns of dendritic voltages or intracellular ions)
to neuronal structure, during the very limited duration of an acute
experiment. Dr. Marc
Garbey received a $300,000 NSF research award titled “Efficient
Algorithms for Meta-computing of PDEs” this month. The objectives of this research are (1) to develop a family of
hierarchic domain decomposition methods for elliptic solvers, for general
discretisation that are optimized according to the memory configuration of
the distributed parallel system, and (2) provide algorithm that are efficient,
robust, highly tolerant to low memory bandwidth and high latency when it is
needed, and that scale with the memory.
Dr. Garbey joined the Department as a full professor in Spring 2002. Dr.
Jaspal Subhlok received a $25,000 Faculty Development Initiative
grant to study Interactive Multimedia Course Prospectus. A course prospectus will contain a
multimedia introduction to the syllabus, audio/video clips from lectures,
interactive quizzes to test background knowledge, and animations to demonstrate
key concepts and problem solving. If successful, this pilot project will lead
the way to a completely new way of disseminating information about courses
and degree programs in the University, especially for distance education
courses. Three other CS faculty members, Dr. Ioannis Kakadiaris, Dr.
George Zouridakis, and Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, are collaborating
on this project. |
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Graduate Students |
Congratulations
to Mr. Mitesh Doshi, a Computer Science Master's student in the Biomedical
Imaging Lab, who has won the prestigious Educational Communications
Foundation Scholarship for his work on “Quantification of Tumor Parameters by
PET Imaging." Please
join us in congratulating Darshan Iyer, who just received a
prestigious Keck Foundation scholarship.
His research project is entitled "Computational Tracking of Brain
Activity Synchronization." His
Keck advisors are Dr. George Zouridakis and Dr. Yuriy Fofanov. Darshan is a PhD candidate in
Electrical Engineering doing his dissertation in the Biomedical Imaging Lab
in Computer Science. Musodiq
Bello, a CS PhD student has also received the Keck Fellowship
to pursue work on "Statistical Shape and Appearance Deformable Models
for Biomedical Image Analysis".
His mentors are Dr. Wah Chiu of Baylor College of Medicine and Dr.
Ioannis Kakadiaris. |
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Policies Concerning Graduate |
The
following policies were published by Dr. Christoph F. Eick, Director
of Graduate Studies and Ms. Amanda Vaughan, Advisor recently. It was e-mailed to all graduate students
with a CS account. There
are several matters we would like to discuss that concern our graduate
student population. The first issue concerns students that for whatever
reason cannot take classes for a particular "long" (Spring or Fall)
semester. If this is the case, you have to file for a "leave of
absence" from our graduate program to remain in "good
standing". Starting in 2003, students that have not been enrolled for
two "long" semesters and did not file a leave of absence will be
removed from our graduate programs. The
second issue concerns keeping your postal address, your e-mail address, and
your visa status current in the UH administrative database. This is very
important because it enables us to contact you without delays and dependent
on your visa status different UH policies apply to you. 1.
Postal
address: Students must file changes of address with the Office of
Registration and Academic Records.
There are three ways to do this:
(a) You may do so on-line at
https://www.stu.uh.edu/iXpress/Newmenu_sys/srv/intro.dml. (b) A form may be downloaded from
http://www.uh.edu /enroll/rar/forms.html and submitted to 108 E Cullen. (3) You may also call (713) 743-1010 and
press 4 and 5 and upon proper identification a service representative will
help you. 2.
E-mail
access: Two e-mail accounts are available to every Computer
Science student. One is a UH e-mail
account and one is a Computer Science e-mail account. To apply for a UH account, students should
bring their current Cougar 1Card to the IT Support Center counter in Room 56
of the M.D. Anderson Library basement; the counter is open from 8 a.m. to 8
p.m. Monday through Friday. For more
information regarding services provided by Information Technology, refer to
http://www.uh.edu/infotech/services/accounts.html. Also, International Student Services has a very good web page
explaining how to update and redirect your e-mail alias at
http://www.uh.edu/intservices/redirectalias.pdf. They are strongly encouraging those on student visas to use the
UH e-mail alias because they send important notices to international students
through this means. To apply for a CS
account, obtain an application from 501PGH.
It is important to get a CS account because we e-mail important
information of interest to all graduate students. The department has created an alias on which all graduate
students opening a CS account are placed. 3.
Visa
status: If your visa
status changes after being admitted, you should take the INS paperwork to
International Student Services, 306 SSC, and ask them to change your visa
status in the UH database. The
third issue only concerns those on F-1 and J-1 student visas.
Beginning with the Spring 2003 semester and in all future Fall and Spring
semesters, all students holding F-1 and J-1 student visas must satisfy one of
the following conditions: (1) Be
enrolled in a minimum of nine semester hours, or (2) petition the department
and the college to take fewer than nine semester hours. This petition must include evidence that
the student intends to graduate during the semester being petitioned (for
example, application for graduation, thesis defense date, etc.). Such a petition will be approved only once
in a student's career. This policy
also applies to students on fulltime CPT. Finally,
there are several issues concerning PhD students that should be discussed in
the near future. We plan to schedule a special event (or events) dedicated to
PhD students in February 2003 in which we will address those issues. |
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