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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I would like to use this week's newsletter to expound on our plans for improving the instructional labs in the department. We wish to introduce EE and CE students to exciting and relevant labs. We will acquire newer equipment in all the labs, and devise new experiments in the labs, which will complement the revisions in the newer EE and CE curricula. Our guiding principle will be to have labs that are relevant, state-of-the-art, and exciting to the students. A bad, old lab is worse than having no lab at all. In many cases, we will have computer-based labs for courses.
With regard to this goal, we have set up an Instructional Labs committee, headed by Prof. Alan Sahakian, comprised of faculty members who are course directors for courses with labs in them. An undergraduate student also serves on the committee. We will have graduate and undergraduate students in the department develop new lab experiments for the labs in exchange for getting C99 or D99 special projects course credit.
I am pleased to inform you that the Labs committee has already started meeting regularly to discuss their planned improvements. The initial plans are for re-equipping the core EE courses B41, B42, C06, and C53. We have allocated initial seed funding for the department to purchase one set of instruments and six Windows-based PCs to begin this effort. The initial test bench will consist of the latest state-of-the-art digital oscilloscopes, function generators, and personal computers to drive these instruments. A proposal has been submitted to the Murphy Society to purchase ten more sets of instruments and five more Windows machines bringing the total to 11 setups. We are hopeful that the proposal will be funded. We will also approach various companies for donation of other equipment for labs such as C08 and C81, and write proposals to agencies such as the National Science Foundation to get funding to acquire more equipment over the next few years.
Another point is that our labs have now relocated to nice renovated spaces in the ground floor of the Tech building, but we still have very old furniture in the labs. We have been fortunate to receive some funding from the Dean's office to purchase new furniture (test benches, tables, chairs, file cabinets, etc) for ALL the labs (B41, B42, B70, C06, C81, B01, etc.). This will nicely complement the newer equipment that we are planning to get. The new furniture is being ordered this week and should be in place by Winter quarter '99.
The ECE department's instructional labs will get a nice, new look beginning Jan. 1999; ECE will look and feel like a state-of-the-art department in which all our students will be proud to work.
Prith Banerjee
Chairman
Date: Monday Oct 5
Time: 4-5PM
Place: L324, Tech
Title: An Experimental Evaluation of a New HPF Compiler Framework
based on a Commercial Symbolic Analysis Package.
Speaker: Pramod G. Joisha
Date: Wed. Oct. 7
Time: 4-5PM
Place: L324, Tech
Title: Parallel Timing Optimization in a Commercial Logic Synthesis Tool
Speaker: Victor Kim, ECE graduate student
Friday, Oct. 9: MS Final Examination - 12:00 p.m.
Room E133
Sriram Raghavendran
"A Prototype for Visualization of Large Datasets"
Committee Members: Prof. A. Choudhary (Chairman), Prof. L. Henschen and Prof. P. Scheuermann
Subject: F,G,H Wing Vacuum and R.O. Water shut-down
On 10 October 1998 at 6:00 AM to 10 October at 12:00 PM there will be two (2) shut downs:
1) The R.O. Water which supplies F,G,H Wing will be down to repair
internal leaks.
2) The Vacuum System for F,G,H Wings will be down, we will tie in with
the DDC System (Direct Digital Controls). After completion we will
verify the vacuum system operations, and it's interlock with the G
Wing Exhaust Fan (When the G Wing Exhaust System fails it will shut
down the vacuum system). This will be a brief shut down of the G Wing
Exhaust Fan. All Fume hoods through out the G Wing should be in the
closed position during this shut down.
Alok Choudhary attended the DARPA, PI meeting in Santa Fe on Adaptive Computing Systems from Sept 30-Oct 2. This DARPA program sponsors the MATCH project.
Abraham Haddad will travel Oct. 3-5 to Newark, NJ, to attend the IEEE Awards Board meeting and the IEEE Corporate Recognition's Luncheon.
Prem Kumar will travel to Baltimore, MD, Oct. 5-8 to present an invited paper, two contributed papers, chair a session and attend a meeting of the OSA's Publications Council.
MIT Lincoln Labs will be on campus for recruiting on Nov 3, 1998. An Informational session is scheduled for 5pm in Rm. #2C of Norris Center. You can also stop by the Career Services Office located on campus or contact: hackett@ll.mit.edu [Tel: 781-981-7056] for more information.
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Nagaraj Shenoy has accepted a position effective Oct. 1, 1998, as Research Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing.
Upcoming Birthday wishes:
Linda Harries - October 4
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .