Changes in PhD Program
The Computer Science faculty has approved a new set of Ph. D. degree requirements.  The objective of this new plan is to speed up the study of our Ph.D. students and make it more inline with that of other research universities.  The new requirements are available online

Effective Fall 2004, all Ph. D. students will come under this new plan with the following exception.  Students who have started their QE (any one who has taken at least one QE exam) will continue to follow the QE rules stated in the original Ph. D. requirements.

Student Organization Formed
Cougar CS is a UH Computer Science student organization formed recently by a group of Computer Science students.  The club’s main purpose is to present workshops and tutorials for business-oriented and internet-based programming languages such as JAVA, ASP.NET, PHP, HTML, as well as providing a network of peers for study sessions and career development advice through our events. They also plan to invite speakers from local businesses and large companies who are interested in hiring CS students. All full-time and part-time students of all majors at the Main Campus are welcome to join.  For more information about Cougar CS, please visit the website at: www.uh.edu/cougarcs/.  Mr. Thomas Nguyen is serving as the president of the club this year.

Faculty News
The Workshop on OpenMP Applications and Tools (WOMPAT 2004) will be held in Houston, Texas, U.S.A. in May 2004. Both the workshop and the OpenMP lab will take place on the campus of the University of Houston. Dr. Barbara Chapman is serving as the Program Chair of the workshop. The workshop consists of two full days of invited talks and contributed presentations. Invited speakers include Tim Mattson, the past Chair of the OpenMP Architecture Review Board, John Gustafson, who leads the Sun Microsystems HPCS project team, Rusty Lusk who was instrumental in forming the MPI standard, and Jay Hoeflinger of Intel who will talk about OpenMP implementation and industrial deployment.

National Institute of Health (NIH) awarded a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Grant to Genomics USA, Inc.  Dr. Yuriy Fofanov is a co-investigator of the funded project titled ”Population-scale HLA typing on microarrays.”  The UH portion of the award amounts to $70,000.

Dr. Albert Cheng received a grant from UH’s Institute for Space Systems Operations (ISSO) for his research project titled “Optimizing system reward in battery-powered spacecraft and rovers.” 

Student News
Ms. Mehnaz M. Bhayani, a Computer Science undergraduate student received a $7,000 scholarship from the Association of Women in Computing (AWC).  Ms. Bhayani enrolled in the COSC program in Fall 2001 and will be a senior next year.  She is one of the first six NSM Ambassadors selected to represent the college and the department.  She has been teaching second grade at the Clear Lake Religious Education Center for the past four years.  For more information on the Kathi Bowles Scholarship for Women in Computing, please see AWC’s web site.

The Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) has awarded COSC undergraduate Ms. Valerie Hajdik the Distributed Mentoring Project (DMP) scholarship for Summer 2004 (http://parasol.tamu.edu/dmp/). This award provides a $6,000 stipend for 10 weeks of summer research with a participating mentor. Ms. Hajdik will be visiting Texas A&M University to fulfill the requirements of this project.

Priya Raghunath will visit the Research Center Karlsruhe (FZK) in Germany this summer to do joint project work on data handling in computational grids.  Priya is a student of Dr. Barbara Chapman.

Two COSC graduate students Jharna J. Chokhawala and Robert C.-C. Chu received NSF Travel Awards to attend and present papers, co-authored with their advisor Dr. Albert Cheng, at the prestigious IEEE Real-Time/Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, Toronto, Canada, May 2004.  Their papers' titles are “Optimizing Power Aware Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks'' (Chokhawala and Cheng) and “Static and Dynamic Methods to Improve Total Reward of Tasks in Battery-Powered Devices'' (Chu and Cheng).