Home > News > Newsletters > ECE Newsletter, August 2000
Volume 4 Newsletter of Northwestern’s Department of Electrical
and Computer Engineering August, 2000
In This Issue:
- Message from the Chairman
- Freshman Courses
- New Faculty
- ABET Renewal
- Research News Highlights
- Motorola Cash Gift
- University and Department Awards
- ECE Advisory Board
- External Faculty Awards/Honors
- Graduate Student and Alumni News
Welcome to the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Northwestern University. Two years ago our department faculty embarked upon a strategic ten-point action plan, which included:
I am pleased to report that we have made significant progress in each of the above action areas; as a result, we are now ranked 19th among Electrical Engineering departments in the latest 2001 U.S. News and World Report. In the remainder of this message I will outline some of the accomplishments.
Faculty
During 1999-2000 our twenty-eight faculty members (sixteen Professors, nine Associate Professors, and three Assistant Professors), included five Chaired Professors, three Professors of Teaching Excellence, six faculty who have received NSF PYI/NYI/CAREER Awards, nine Fellows of IEEE, one Fellow of ACM, and two Fellows of OSA. Two of our emeritus faculty members are in the National Academy of Engineering.
Two new faculty members joined our department during 1999-2000. Thrasos Pappas (Ph.D., MIT, 1987) joined us as an Associate Professor in the signal and image processing area, and Chris Jelen (Ph.D., Northwestern, 1998) joined us as an Assistant Professor in the solid state engineering area.
Two faculty members left our department. Nathan Newman joined Arizona State University and Majid Sarrafzadeh joined UCLA. We will miss them dearly.
During 1999-2000, we recruited for three faculty positions in the areas of photonic systems, networking and communication, and VLSI CAD. We received more than 200 applications, interviewed thirteen candidates, made five offers, and are pleased to report that three accepted our offer (see related news item). Mary Phillips (Ph.D., MIT, 1990) will be joining us as an Associate Professor in the photonic systems area, Randall Berry (Ph.D., MIT, 2000) will join us as an Assistant Professor in the networking area, and Yehea Ismail (Ph.D., Rochester, 2000) will join us as an Assistant Professor in the VLSI area.
We are also pleased to announce that Alok Choudhary and Alan Sahakian were both promoted to the rank of Professor this year.
Research Activity
Our twenty-eight faculty members are grouped into six areas of research: (1) Solid-state engineering, (2) Photonic systems and technology, (3) Networks, communication and control, (4) Signal and image processing, (5) Parallel and distributed computing, and (6) VLSI design and CAD. Our research funding has tripled in the past four years. Our research funding per year was $ 3.2 million in 1995-96, $4.2 million in 1996-97, $8.6 million in 1997-98, $9.4 million in 1998-99, and was $10 million during 1999-00. A funding level of $10 million per year translates to a level of funding of about $357,000 per faculty member per year, which is excellent and compares favorably to the top ten departments in the country.
A key reason for our department’s receiving so much research funding in the past four years has been the tremendous amount of collaborative research projects initiated by our faculty. Faculty continued to write numerous research proposals this past year. Some of the key new research grants that we have received in our department this year (see related news stories) include a $2 million grant from DARPA entitled "PACT: Power-Aware Architectural and Compilation Techniques" by Prith Banerjee, Majid Sarrafzadeh, Alok Choudhary, Andreas Moshovos, and Horace Yuen; a $1.4 million grant from DOD under the MURI program entitled "Quantum Computing and Communications" by Prem Kumar and Horace Yuen; and an $800,000 DARPA grant entitled "Lightwave Cryptographic Techniques" by Horace Yuen, Majid Sarrafzadeh and Alan Sahakian. Our Motorola Center for Telecommunications received a renewal of funding at $600,000 this year.
Our faculty members have written a large number of high-quality research publications. Last year, our faculty wrote three books, ten book chapters, 160 journal papers and 140 conference papers. One of the papers written by Prof. Prith Banerjee and his student Yanhong Yuan won the Best Paper Award at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.
Curriculum
I am pleased to inform everyone that both our electrical engineering and our computer engineering undergraduate curricula have been accredited for six years according to the new ABET 2000 criteria (see related news story). As part of this accreditation, we have to put into place proper objectives, outcomes and processes to ensure that our students are receiving the very best education, and that we have continuous improvements in our curricula.
The big news in the area of curriculum is that our new undergraduate electrical engineering and computer engineering curricula got under way this year (see related story). For the first time, we offered the two freshman level courses, ECE 202 "Introduction to Electrical Engineering," and ECE 203 "Introduction to Computer Engineering," which were taught by Prof. Alan Sahakian and Prof. Valerie Taylor respectively. We also offered four new fundamentals of EE courses for the first time this year. The initial reaction from our students is that the new curriculum is a big success.
Laboratories
The big thing this year in the labs is the development of 20 autonomous robotic cars that are part of the ECE 203 course in "Introduction to Computer Engineering." Students use basic knowledge of digital circuits and the PIC microcontroller to design a control system to maneuver the car around a circular track. It was a lot of work putting these labs together for Prof. Valerie Taylor, Norm Flasch and Albert Lyerla, but students loved it.
We have also continued the development of new laboratory experiments for the ECE 202, 221, and 225 courses using the new equipment from Hewlett Packard that we obtained last year. They include fifteen stations, each equipped with a PC, a digital function generator, a digital oscilloscope, and power supply.
Finally, Professors Kumar, Sahakian, Taflove and Ho received funding from the Murphy Society for a lab in the photonics area for the ECE 224 course using several network analyzers.
Students
During 1999-00 we had 253 undergraduate students, up from 239 students in 1998-99. Of these, there were 110 students in electrical engineering (compared to 112 during 1998-99), and 143 students in computer engineering (compared to 127 in 1998-99). During 1999-00 we also had 173 graduate students (compared to 163 in 1998-99). Of this number 143 were M.S./Ph.D. or Ph.D. students, and 30 terminal M.S. students. We granted 25 Ph.D., 39 M.S., 20 B.S.E.E., and 20 B.S.C.E. degrees in 1999-00. The quality of our students continues to improve every year. The entering freshman class in 1999 had an average SAT score of 1384 and a median score of 1400, which compares favorably with the very best schools in the country.
Student Placement in Companies and Universities
During 1999-2000, our department took an active role in placing our students in the top ECE companies. The department generated an ECE Resume Booklet in hardcopy and electronic form which contained one page resumes of our B.S. and M.S. students, and two page resumes of our Ph.D. students, and distributed it to more than 40 companies. According to an E-mail survey of graduating students, our B.S. students are going to the following companies: AT&T (1), Agilent/HP (1), Another Country (1), DLJ (1), Level3 (1), Microsoft (1), Motorola (1), Stampysoft (1), Scient (2), 3Com (1), Intel (1), Texas Instruments (1), and Tellabs (1). Many of our undergraduates are going to graduate school: Northwestern (2), Berkeley (1), Illinois (1), MIT (1), Michigan (1), San Diego (1). Finally, our M.S./Ph.D. students are joining the following companies: AMD (1), Dell (1), EMC (1), Ford (1), Intel (1), IBM (1), HP (3), Lucent (1), Motorola (2), MIT Lincoln Labs (1), Request Multimedia (1), Simplex (1), Synopsys (1), and SAIC (1). Three of our Ph.D. students are joining academia: Minnesota (1), Colby College (1) and SUNY, Buffalo (1).
Industrial Relations
During 1999-2000, our ECE Advisory Board consisted of twenty members from industry and eight from academia. We had our ECE Advisory Board Meeting on May 19, 2000 (see related story and photographs).
We are delighted to announce a $500,000 cash gift from Motorola Foundation (see related story) over five years. This gift will allow our department to take on some new initiatives in Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research, a Motorola Sponsored Distinguished Lecture Series, and graduate student recruiting and lab support.
We are also delighted to announce that Microsoft Corporation would like to make a gift of $690,000 to our department during 2000-2001 that would include the purchase of fifty PCs and $50,000 cash support for Microsoft Sponsored Undergraduate Research. We will report on this next year.
Publicity
We have continued to use our pro-active web page to highlight our new curriculum, courses, research and various news events, and seminar listings. For the second year, we have sent an electronic weekly newsletter to our entire faculty, students, staff, and a few advisory board members to keep them updated on our activities.
Administration
I wish to thank the following Board of Directors who helped me run the ECE department during 1999-2000:
Larry Henschen, Director of the Graduate Program; Prem Kumar, Director of the Undergraduate Electrical Engineering Program; Majid Sarrafzadeh, Director of the Undergraduate Computer Engineering Program; Alan Sahakian, Director of Laboratories; Jorge Nocedal, Director of Computing; Peter Scheuermann, Director of Publicity and Publications; Alok Choudhary, Director of Alumni and Industrial Relations; Deneen Marie Bryce, Director of Administration.
The 1999-2000 academic year has been a very exciting year. I am looking forward to another exciting year in the future.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman, ECE Department
Introductory Courses for EE and CE Freshman
As part of our new EE and CE curricula, we have introduced two new exciting introductory courses aimed at freshmen and sophomores.
Our new entry course, ECE 202, "Introduction to Electrical Engineering," covers the breadth of Electrical Engineering and includes topics such as continuous and discrete-time signals, digital signal processing, digital and analog communications, control systems, optics and electromagnetics, lasers and photo detectors, circuits and devices, and electronic materials. ECE 202 is organized around a single unifying example, the compact disc player. Students learn the fundamentals of each topic and see them at work in the CD player in both the lectures and labs. For example, the focus and tracking loops are described as examples of control systems. Thus students can see how the topics they are learning are used and why they are important.
The second new entry course, ECE 203, "Introduction to Computer Engineering," introduces students to computer engineering concepts, both hardware and software, with the emphasis placed on digital logic concepts. Topics include binary number representations, Boolean algebra, simplification methods for combinational circuits, introduction to sequential circuits, and introduction to assembly language programming. The laboratory assignments were designed towards the development of a controller to navigate a remote controlled car (the remote being disabled) through a given obstacle course.
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is pleased to welcome aboard the following three faculty members who are joining us in September 2000.
Professor Randy Berry
Randall Berry received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri-Rolla in 1993 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 and 2000 respectively. In the past few months he has been a postdoctoral associate in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. In 1998 he was on the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Advanced Networks Group. His primary research interests include wireless communication, data networks, and information theory.
Professor Yehea Ismail
Yehea Ismail attended the School of Engineering, Department of Electronics and Communications, at Cairo University from 1988-1993 where he received his B.S. degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering with distinction and honors. During his study, he was a recipient of the outstanding student academic award for four consecutive years (1989-1993). He received his first Master’s degree in Electronics from Cairo University (distinction), Egypt in June 1996. He came to the University of Rochester in September 1996, where he received his second Master’s in Electrical Engineering in 1998. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in April 2000.
He was with IBM Cairo Scientific Center (CSC) from 1993 to 1996 on a part-time basis and worked with IBM Microelectronics at East Fishkill, NY, during the summers of 1997, 1998 and 1999. He has authored a book and more than twenty-five technical papers. His primary research interests include interconnect, noise, innovative circuit simulation, and related circuit level issues in high performance VLSI circuits.
Professor Mary Phillips
Mary Phillips received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois in 1982. She earned her Master’s and, in 1990 she received a doctorate degree in Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her thesis work covered polarization-mode conversion in lithium niobate waveguides, and ultrafast optical nonlinearities in multi-quantum well semiconductors. From 1990 to 1995, she was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. During those five years she investigated analog lightwave systems as used to transmit cable television signals, specifically limitations due to chromatic dispersion and transmitter clipping. She also was part of a team investigating use of cable television networks for transmission of microcellular radio signals.
In May 1995, she joined Atx Telecomm Systems, now part of Scientific-Atlanta. There she did research and product development for lightwave transmission of cable television signals at 1550 nm. Most recently her research has focused on the crosstalk in wavelength-division multiplexed analog systems. She and co-workers discovered a new crosstalk mechanism in optical fiber, which results from nonlinear optical interaction in the fiber followed by polarization-mode dispersion.
She is a member of IEEE and currently is an Associate Editor for Journal of Lightwave Technology.
Her research interests are in optical communications and access technologies.
Department Renewal of ABET Accreditation
Every six years, all undergraduate engineering programs across the country go through an accredita-tion process in order to show that their curriculum and laboratories are up-to-date with modern concepts. In October 1999, our department went through the ABET (Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) review for the period 2000-2006.
This year's ABET accreditation was substantially different from all previous years in that we were supposed to have clear missions and objectives about what we want to accomplish for our students in the undergraduate programs and have clear assessment methods put in place to measure these outcomes. In preparation for this, for the past couple of years the department revised its curriculum and upgraded the laboratories to reflect its new Electrical and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Mission Statement:
"To educate undergraduates in the basic principles and modern practices of the field of electrical engineering (computer engineering) and train our students to think independently, to master the systematic approach to problem solving, and to have a keen awareness of the role of engineering in a modern technological society."
The ABET committee graded us in the following eight categories:
We are pleased to report that the reviewers gave us excellent grades in all categories and we did receive a full six-year accreditation on August 15, 2000. Interested readers can check out our online version of the ABET self-study manual on the web.
From the research grants that the department received we highlight the following collaborative projects:
PACT: Power-Aware Architectural and Compilation Techniques
(Principal Investigators: Professors Prith Banerjee, Majid Sarrafzadeh, Alok Choudhary, Andreas Moshovos, and Horace Yuen.)
After several decades of research and development in computer architecture, compilers and CAD tools, much of our accumulated expertise lies in designing computing systems for high performance while taking cost and complexity into consideration. However, the underlying technologies have been changing and under these new constraints, power consumption is emerging as an additional, equally important factor in computer design. The objective of the PACT (Power-Aware Architecture and Compilation Techniques) project is to develop power-aware architectural techniques and associated compiler and CAD tool support. The specific goals of the PACT project are to:
Develop novel architectural and compiler concepts at various levels that can reduce the total energy consumption in specific applications by factors of 10-100X over conventional, non-power-aware architectures.
Develop compiler techniques to automate the process of generating efficient code that is within a factor of two of the best manual approach with respect to optimizing power under performance and resource constraints.
Demonstrate the usefulness of the compiler and archi-tectural concepts on some real applications. We will target specific algorithms/applications that are of interest to DOD. Moreover, we will develop a prototype of a general-purpose memory system chipset to be used on a variety of systems/applications.
Lightwave Cryptographic Techniques
(Principal Investigators: Professors Horace Yuen, Majid Sarrafzadeh and Alan Sahakian)
The objective of this project is to develop new cryptographic techniques, and to modify the important existing ones, for applications to encryption and authentication in energy-constrained sensors with limited memory and computational capability. The goal is to minimize power consumption in order to maximize the lifetime of the sensor operation and the amount of useful processing that can be carried out within the lifetime.
Motorola Cash Gift of $500,000 for Five years
The Motorola Foundation has approved a cash gift to Campaign Northwestern for $500,000 ($100,000 per year for five years) to support various new initiatives in the ECE department within the McCormick School at Northwestern University. This gift will allow the ECE department to undertake several new initiatives:
(1) A Motorola Sponsored ECE Distinguished Lectureship Series in which we will bring six truly distinguished researchers to our department each year to give seminars and meet with faculty and students; (2) A Motorola Sponsored Graduate Recruiting Initiative which will allow us to offer some extra stipend to the best first-year graduate students, and a graduate student recruiting weekend when we will fly in our best graduate student applicants to visit our campus and meet our faculty; (3) A Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Program, which will provide some stipends for undergraduates to do research with various ECE faculty; (4) A Motorola Sponsored ECE Open House to be held each year; and (5) Motorola Sponsorship of the Annual Design Competition.
Motorola CEO Chris Galvin, Prith Banerjee, and Northwestern President Henry Bienen.
In the winter of 2000 we launched the Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Program, which is intended to encourage more of our undergraduates to pursue independent research through the C99 (399) course credit with various advisors.
A faculty committee received a large number of proposals for the research program, reviewed all of them and selected the following 13 projects for funding in the 1999-2000 academic year:
1. "OC-48 Transceivers for Optical Interconnect Applications," Student: Errling Tao.
2. "Conditional Replenishment for Video Conferencing over Lossy Channels," Student: Pakpoom Hoyingcharoen.
3. "CDMA Simulator with Spreading Code Adaptation," Student: Wiroonsak Santipach.
4. "Data Mining Techniques for Improving Web Performance," Student: Kaw-Yuan Mark Lee.
5. "Floorplanning with Uncertainty," Student: Jane Kim.
6. SimDSP: A Simulation Framework for Architecture Research in DSP/Embedded Applications," Student: Justin Wong.
7. "An Efficiency-Based Microcontroller for a Solar-Powered Racing Vehicle," Student: Candice McGrew.
8. "Web Control Puma Robot," Student: Yee Man Wong.
9. "Benchmarking Tools for Configurable Computing," Student: David Zaretsky.
10. "User Interface and Parallel Algorithms for Data Analysis in Large Scale Scientific Applications," Student: Budyanto Himayan.
11. "Design of a Master Sensor Device for Personal Robot Control," Student: Kenlip Ong.
12. "Motorola Sponsored Wireless Communications Laboratory Instructional Materials," Student: Jed Brewer.
13. "Real-Time Tracking Control System," Student: Jake Brick.
Each student received a stipend of $1250 for each quarter of research. On Friday, June 2, the students presented their research results at a half-day poster session at Motorola. In addition, the poster session also included five freshman presentations under the auspices of the Engineering Design and Communications (EDC) program. The event was extremely well received by over 200 Motorola attendees who asked many questions and complimented our students for their research skills.
University and Departmental Awards
Professor Allen Taflove was named the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence for 2000. Only two professors are selected in the entire university for this award and this is indeed quite an honor. Among other accomplishments, Allen Taflove has been involved with the McCormick Design Competition from its very conception in 1991 and more recently he is heading the Motorola Sponsored Freshman Laboratory on Wireless Communications.
This year the ECE Teaching and Awards Committee gave out the following awards based on nominations from faculty and students:
Professor Chi-Haur Wu—The Best Teacher in the ECE Department for 1999-2000.
Patrick Kung—Best Ph.D. thesis.
Jay Williams—Honorable Mention, Best Ph.D. thesis.
Wiroonsak Santipach—Best Undergraduate Student in Electrical Engineering.
Kenneth Eguro —Best Undergraduate Student in Computer Engineering.
Fei Yeh—Best Teaching Assistant.
Chris Swider—Honorable Mention, Best Teaching Assistant.
In addition we would like to recognize our student Dhruva Chakrabarti for the Dissertation Year Henderson Fellowship.
In 1999-2000 we welcomed to our distinguished Advisory Board Mr. Tim Warmath from Silicon Graphics who replaced Mr. Sidney Griffin.
During the annual meeting on May 19, 2000 the Advisory Board received an overview of the department activities, listened to research presentations of the new faculty and gave the department feedback of its progress since last year. In addition, the board visited the ECE Open House and Graduate Student Poster Session, which included 35 posters presented by our graduate students representing cutting edge work in the six research areas of the department.
The ECE Advisory Board selected the following three posters for awards this year:
Kiarash Bazargan and Seda Ogrenci, "Reconfigurable Computing."
Yikai Su and Anjali Agarwal, "Technology for Ultra-High Speed All-Optical Networks."
Andrew Segall and Passant Karunaratne, "Pre and Post-Processing Techniques for Compressed Video."
External Faculty Awards and Honors
Prith Banerjee was elected ACM Fellow and appointed as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.
Prith Banerjee and graduate student Yanhong Yuan received the Best Paper Award at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium in Cancun, Mexico.
Alok Choudhary was appointed Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.
Abe Haddad received the IEEE Third Millenium Medal.
Michael Honig was reelected for another three year term on the Board of Governors for the IEEE Information Theory Society.
Aggelos Katsaggelos received the IEEE Third Millennium Medal and was reappointed editor-in-chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.
Carl Kannewurf received the IEEE Third Millennium Medal.
Andreas Moshovos received an NSF Career Award.
Jorge Nocedal was reappointed editor for Mathematical Programming.
Thrasos Pappas has been appointed vice-chair of the Technical Committee on Image Processing and Multidimensional Signal Processing of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
Majid Sarrafzadeh was appointed Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems.
Peter Scheuermann was appointed Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Data and Knowledge Engineering.
Graduate Student and Alumni News
Michael Englert and Edward Wang received IEEE Chicago Section Awards, for Scholarship and Leadership, respectively.
Kiarash Bazargan defended his Ph.D. thesis "Designing Algor-ithms and Architectures for Reconfigurable Computing" this summer. He is joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2000. His research interests are Reconfigurable Computing, Embedded System Design, VLSI Physical Design and High-Level Synthesis.
Lisimachos Kondi, who completed his Ph.D. thesis at North-western University in 1999, joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo as Assistant Professor in August 2000. His research interests are in the areas of Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing, especially video compression and wireless video transmission.
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© 2002 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science,
Northwestern University. All rights reserved.
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