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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In this week's newsletter I want to discuss some issues related to the department's operating budget. We are given a certain budget from the central administration to take care of basic infrastructure support such as labs, computers, phones, copying, printing, supplies, instructional support, seminars, furniture, student societies, support for some staff, postage and mailing, etc.
Unfortunately, over the past ten years, the department's operating budget has not increased significantly; yet our needs have increased. For example, five years ago, professors did not use class notes (copies of transparencies of lectures) as much, and students did not do as many computer assignments that required lots of computer printouts and new computers, etc. Five years ago, our department's research budget was less than $2 million; this year the research budget has grown to $6 million. This has resulted in more mailing, more copying, more printing, more phone charges, all of which were being paid by the department. This resulted in our inability to channel our limited resources to significantly upgrading the infrastructure of the department.
This year, with our mission plan to improve the quality of education and research performed in the department, we have looked at the budget in great detail. In consultation with the ECE Directors, and the ECE faculty, we approved a new set of departmental policies and a new budget appropriation for various items this week. This will enable us to place more emphasis on the following:
In addition to these budget reappropriation measures, I have discussed our need for increased funding for various initiatives with the university administration. I am confident that our requests will be heard and we will be able to move forward on many of these new initiatives with extra support from them. But we all felt that we cannot afford to wait for the new funds to arrive; we must begin with what we have. Otherwise the department will be stagnant.
Thank you very much for your patience and understanding.
RESULTS OF WEB DESIGN CONTEST
On behalf of the judges of the ECE Web design contest (Allen Taflove, Prem Kumar, Jamie Cooley, Jill Lavelle, and myself) it is my pleasure to announce that the entry
URL: http://www.ece.nwu.edu/~pham/ece/ designed by Cuong Pham and David Zaretsky was selected as the winning design for our next ECE web page.
I am pleased to inform them that they will receive the $500 cash prize to be shared between the two of them (I assume $250 each). I am asking them to get the new web page up and running by Monday Oct. 19 if possible...
The judges have given them some specific feedback to modify the page before it becomes public.
I would also like to congratulate each of the other entry submitters - Hoomen, Candice, Max, Mathew, and Chris, for their submissions. They were all very good. They will receive a second prize of $100 each for their hard work. Our final web page will combine features from many of the other web entries.
Please join me in congratulating all of them.
Prith Banerjee
Chairman
DATE: Monday Oct. 19
TIME: 4-5PM
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Automatic Parallelization for Distributed Memory Parallel Machines
- Issues, Challenges and State-of-the-art.
SPEAKER: Dr. Nagaraj Shenoy
DATE: Wed. Oct. 21
TIME: 3-4PM
PLACE: L324
TITLE: "An application of data mining: customer profiling".
SPEAKER: Mehmet Sayal
DATE: Wed. Oct. 21
TIME: 4-5PM
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Generic Global Placement and Floorplanning
Authors: Hans Eisenmann, Frank M. Johannes
SPEAKER: Maogang Wang, ECE graduate student (Advisor: Prof. Sarrafzadeh)
DATE: Thursday, Oct. 22
TIME: 4PM-5PM
PLACE: A230 (Civil Eng. conf room)
TITLE: Diagnostic Test Generation Using Test Elimination
SPEAKER: Prof. Sudhakar Reddy, Chairman, ECE, Univ. of Iowa.
Friday, October 23:Ph.D. Final Examination - 2:00 p.m. Room L324
Junho Shim
"An Intelligent Cache Manager in Data Warehousing Environment And its
Application to the Web Caching"
Committee Members: Prof. P. Scheuermann (Chairman), Prof. L. Henschen,
Prof. A. Choudhary, Prof. V.Taylor and Radek Vingralek (Lucent
Technologies, Bell Laboratory)
Subject: HVAC system shut-down for C Wing
There will be a shut down of the Air conditioning and ventilation
system of C Wing from 6:00 AM Saturday October 24 to 9:00 AM Sunday
October 25, 1998. This shut down will allow the installation of a
sound attenuator to lower the fan noise at high cooling levels.
Alok Choudhary traveled to Washington, D.C. on Oct. 14th to attend a meeting at DARPA for project review of the Integrated Sensors Inc.
Michael Honig will travel to Bedford, MA and Washington D.C. Oct. 18-23 to attend the IEEE Military Communications Conference (Milcom `98) and Multiaccess, Mobility and Teletraffic for Wireless Communications (MMT `98) He attends these conferences as a co-author and invited speaker.
Prof. Randy Freeman is a "Daddy"! Baby Michael Jacob Freeman was born on Saturday morning (Oct. 10) at 1:15 AM..........Baby weighed in at 8 lbs.! Congrats! to all!
Wayne Martin will be joining the department on Monday, 10/19, as our new Accounting Clerk. Wayne brings with him many years of experience in the accounting field, as well as experience in the Electrical Engineering field. We look forward to having Wayne join our team.
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .