COMPUTER SCIENCE NEWSLETTER April 7, 2003
Fees Going Up and So May the Tuition		Due to the financial difficulties facing the State of Texas, there is a possibility that the tuition for the next academic year may be increased. While we won’t know about the tuition until late in the summer, we do know the fees are going up. As a whole, the fees are going up 19% at UH. At the department level, the Equipment Access Fee will go from $50 for the first course (and $20 for each additional course) to $70 per course. The department is eliminating the $40 Graphics Lab fee for the Graphics courses. The increase is needed to maintain the departmental computer labs and other academic supports. At the College level, the Retention Fee will be replaced with a new Academic Support Fee that is higher and charged to all undergraduate courses. For more information on the tuition and fees, please read Daily Cougars.
Change in Curriculum and Degree Requirements		The Computer Science Faculty approved several changes in our undergraduate and graduate curricula recently. Some of these changes will have to be approved by College- and University-level committees before they can be included in the Course Catalog. COSC 4351 (Fundamentals of Software Engineering) will soon replace COSC 4310 (Structured Programming Languages and Compilers) as a required course for both Science and Business Options. This will bring our curriculum more in line with the model curriculum by ACM and IEEE Computer Society. Once approved, a current student may choose to switch to this new requirement. In addition, COSC 3480 (Design of File and Database Systems) will become COSC 3380 by removing the Lab requirement. The Department has also reached an agreement with the DISC department so that our Business Option students may obtain a minor in DISC with only two additional DISC courses. In the past, our students have to take 4 or 5 additional courses in DISC to qualify for a DISC minor. DISC has agreed to use some of our approved electives as “substitutes” of their required courses. As a result, our students can now get a minor with two additional courses in DISC. Current rules for our MS degree do not allow MS students to change from the Thesis Option to the Non-Thesis Option. This has been a commonly heard complaint from our students. The admission requirements and prerequisite courses of the two options are also different. A new “unified” requirement has been approved by the faculty in March. Under the new deregulated plan, students will be allowed to choose the option with few restrictions. Students will be allowed to switch between the plans with the following exceptions: A Thesis student, supported by the Department (such as a TA) or by a COSC faculty member (such as an RA) for any period of time during the student’s study, cannot switch to Non-Thesis. Non-Thesis students selected for support are not required to change their degree plan. This new degree plan will be submitted for approval in the Fall 2003 semester.
Faculty News		Dr. Ioannis Pavlidis, Associate Professor of Computer Science, has been awarded a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) grant to perform basic research in Deception Detection at a Distance. He will be cooperating with a multi-disciplinary team that includes researchers from the University of California and Rutgers University. The project is a pilot study that if successful may lead to a major multi-year research effort. In the current phase, Dr. Pavlidis' group will be funded with $100,000 for one year. Dr. Pavlidis is also the General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance to be held in Miami, FL this July. Dr. Ioannis Pavlidis has also received a new grant from the Technical Support Working Group (TSWG) of the Department of Defense (DoD). The $1.5M grant is a joint effort of UH ($250K for the computational component), Mayo Clinic ($250K for the biomedical component) and Honeywell Laboratories ($1M for the engineering component). The objective of the project is to build a prototype Deception Detection machine that will be able to determine deceit at a distance in a highly automated fashion. The machine operation will be based on the relevant research that Dr. Pavlidis carried out in the past 3 years. He will be the technical authority for the entire project. The primary application sites will be border and airport control checkpoints. This is a high visibility project and serves as an illuminating example of a Homeland Defense research project. It is anticipated that the Government may start fielding some of these prototypes on an experimental basis in 2-3 years from now. Congratulations to Dr. Ioannis Kakadiaris, for being selected as one of the winners of the James E. Muller Vulnerable Plaque New Investigator Prize For Clinical Research by the Association for the Eradication of Heart Attack (AEHA). Dr. Kakadiaris was also selected by the IEEE Computer Society as a Distinguished Visitor for 2002 –2004. In addition, Professor Kakadiaris has been nominated by the Department for several Teaching Excellence Awards at UH. Dr. Jaspal Subhlok, Associate Professor of Computer Science, has received a research award from NSF (National Science Foundation) recently. The project titled “Automatic Resource Selection in Dynamic Networked Computation Environments” will be funded at $150,000 for two years. This project will perform fundamental research in middleware for resource selection in dynamically shared network environments based on computation and communication resources. Dr. George Zouridakis, Associate Professor of Computer Science, was recently invited to join the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions of Biomedical Engineering, one of the most prestigious International Biomedical Engineering Journals.