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Founded in 1975, the Computer Science program is one of the original programs of the University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL). The program is hosted in the Division of Computing and Mathematics (DCM), which is in turn under the School of Science and Engineering (SCE). SCE is one of four schools at UHCL.
The computer science department currently has 14 full-time faculty members, with 12 of them having a PhD in computer science or a closely related field. It shares a same faculty body with the Computer Information Systems (CIS) department. Dr. Bun Yue, Professor of Computer Science and Computer Information Systems, is the CS chairperson and Dr. Andrew Yang, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Computer Information Systems, is the CIS chairperson. The program offers a Bachelor of Science degree and a Master of Science degree. The B.S. degree is accredited by the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) since 1998. The program currently has more than 100 undergraduate students and above 200 graduate students. The CS programs target to prepare their students to be life-long learners and also be productive in their professional work quickly. A strong balance of core computer science theory and practical leading edge computer technology shapes the curriculum and its course. The programs require strong traditional computer science courses found in other leading universities as well as required by the ABET accreditation. The faculty members are exceedingly quick in incorporating leading edge technologies from industry into the curriculum. Technologies such as Java, J2EE, ASP, C#, .NET, XML, CGI-Perl, etc., were integrated into the curriculum and courses immediately when they became available. There are also a large collection of 'practical' courses covering a wide range of computing fields, such as Web development, E-Commerce, network programming, .NET development, advanced Java development, design patterns, systems administration, etc. In recent years, to acquire computer resources to support these courses, the faculty members have successfully awarded three grants from the National Science Foundation. With matching funding from the university and other internal and external funding, the grants provide close to $1 million funding to the department to build its several laboratories: the Windows lab, the Solaris lab, the Systems Administrations lab, the computer security lab and the capstone project labs. The CS faculty is renowned for his teaching quality. Several faculty members are active in computer science education and have published technical papers accordingly. Many of them are active in regional and local teaching conferences, bringing new teaching philosophy and techniques from other disciplines into the program. Two of them have won the UHCL distinguished teaching award and one CS faculty member is the UHCL Piper teaching award recipient. Many other faculty members are finalists of the UHCL Piper teaching award.
UHCL is located right next to the NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Clear Lake, which boasts the highest density of astronauts and high technology professionals in the United States. In fact, the Clear Lake city was created for JSC in the sixties. As a result, there are many high tech companies surrounding the university. They have sponsored research projects, mentored student projects, hired our students and provided highly qualified professional scientists and engineers to serve as adjunct faculty members. UHCL is about 30 minutes from Houston, the fourth largest city in the United States. |
Faculty members are also active in their research areas. These areas include artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, E-Commerce, data mining, real-time systems, semi-structured data, algorithms, operating systems, numerical methods, etc. They are also dedicated to incorporate their research into teaching courses, and have co-authored many papers with students in the last few years.