DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of November 23 - 27, 1998

This page contains news related to the ECE department of the current week. Specifically it includes current information about seminars, exams, travel, research grants, professional news, personal news scheduled for this week.

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CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

One of the goals we had set up for our department this year was to try and place our students in the top ECE companies in the country. Last week we created the ECE Resume Book which contained one page resumes of all graduating B.S. and M.S. students and two page resumes of all graduating Ph.D. students. We have sent the booklet to the following companies: AT&T, Lucent, IBM, Hewlett-Packard/Convex, Intel, Microsoft, Silicon Graphics/Cray, Dell, Compaq/Digital, Gateway, Sun Microsystems, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, LSI Logic, Honeywell, Rockwell, Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, Ameritech, Nortel/Bay Networks, Cisco Systems, General Electric, GTE, Loral Space Communications, MCI/WorldCom, Qualcomm, Tellabs/Ciena, 3Com/US Robotics, Xerox, Boeing/McDonnel Douglas, Eastman Kodak, Northrop Grumman. These are the companies where we would like to place our students. Hopefully this proactive action on our part will result in these companies visiting our campus either this year or next year as part of their recruiting process.

One of the other goals that we had set up this year was to improve our ability to attract higher quality graduate students to our department. In keeping with that goal, we want to attract some of our own excellent undergrads to pursue graduate study in our department. Next week, we are arranging a meeting with all the EE and CE juniors and seniors in our department to meet the professors who are members of the ECE Graduate Committee, and to consider going to grad school either at Northwestern or elsewhere. We have reserved the ECE conference room L324 for Tuesday, Nov. 24, from 12-1 p.m. Among the topics to be covered are:

  1. The benefits of going to graduate school
  2. How tuition and assistantships work, how you don't have to pay to go to grad school but actually get paid to learn
  3. How does one apply? What are the requirements? What's this about taking GRE exams, etc.? How does one prepare?
  4. What our standards are for incoming grad students?
  5. What research we are doing in the department?
Even though we realize that at this time many of the seniors are applying for jobs, it is not too late to consider graduate school. We hope to be able to convince some of our our own seniors to consider our department for graduate school.

Happy Thanksgiving.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Parallel and Distributed Computing Seminar
DATE: Monday, Nov. 23
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Metacomputing, Scheduling, and Prediction
SPEAKER: Warren Smith, ECE grad student

EXAMINATIONS

There are no exams scheduled this week.

OTHER MEETINGS

Tuesday, Nov. 24, 12:00-1:00 p.m.: Meeting with EE and CE Juniors and Seniors in L324 to discuss graduate school opportunities. Pizza and drinks will be served.

RESEARCH GRANTS

The Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant with AFOSR will be funded for an additional two years at the rate of $500,000 per year. The earlier commitment for three years at the same level ends May'99; the project is now extended to May'01. The investigators on this project are: Prem Kumar (PI); Seng Ho and Bruce Wessels (Co-PIs).

"Investigation of the thermodynamic and kinetic factors involved in synthesis of III-N thin films," ONR, N. Newman (PI), $467,127, 11/98 -3/02.

"Improving the Quality of InGaAIN Thin-films Using a Fundamental Chemical Approach," ONR, N. Newman (PI),$70,632 (total 6/96-3/99, $273,066), 11/98-3/99.

"Application of Surface Science Methods to Improve the Performance and Reliability of Microwave Power Modules," Northrop-Grumman Corp., N. Newman (PI), $9,660, 8/98-12/98.

TRAVEL

Jorge Nocedal will be traveling to Mexico City, Nov 21-28, to continue research collaboration with J.L. Morales, ITAM.

OTHER NEWS

On Monday, Nov. 30, the Chicago Tribune will publish a news article about the breast cancer detection work done by Prof. Allen Taflove and his ex-Ph.D. student Prof. Susan Hagness, who is now an Assistant Professor in the ECE department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Congratulations to them on bringing such visibility to our department.

OLD NEWS

You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRY

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