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 newsletter, I want to update you about the activities with regard to graduate student admissions for the 1999-2000 year. One of the initiatives that we had planned to take this year was to improve our ability to attract excellent graduate students. We were able to accomplish this by describing our latest research activities on our ECE Web site, by sending out our detailed Annual Research Report to more than 200 professors in top universities, and by encouraging our own Northwestern undergraduates to go to graduate school here.
I would like to thank Kathie Heidenfelder Cerveny, Judy Stein, and Larry Henschen for working with the Graduate Committee to prepare a new database using ACCESS for entering graduate student application materials. This new database allowed us for the first time to produce lists of students by various areas of research interest and to make these lists available electronically to the faculty. Each faculty member could then use various metrics to electronically sort through the hundreds of applicants and identify the best students, going from there to the candidate files for detailed information such as recommendation letters. I believe this ACCESS database greatly streamlined the process of graduate admissions this year.
Finally, I would like to mention the outcome of our graduate admissions process. We made 14 offers to new students for various fellowships (Cabell and Murphy), and 8 students accepted our offers by the April 15 deadline. We also made 9 offers for teaching assistantships, and 5 students accepted our offers by the April 15 deadline. In addition, other students have been admitted -- some with research assistantships and others without aid. The students that chose not to join us picked really top schools like Illinois, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon. We are fortunate to have some students choosing our department over schools like Illinois. We are extremely happy with the quality of graduate students that will be joining our department in the 1999-2000 year. I want to thank the Graduate Committee for doing an outstanding job in recruiting students this year and hope to continue this momentum next year.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SEMINAR
DATE: Monday, April 26
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Using Prediction to Accelarate Coherence Processing
SPEAKER: Xiaohui Shen, ECE, Northwestern University
OPTIMIZATION & DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENTS SEMINAR
DATE: Wednesday, April 28
TIME: 10:30-11:30
PLACE: M228 (IEMS conference room)
TITLE: Automatic Preconditioning for the Generalized Minimum
Residual Method (GMRES)
SPEAKER: Darin Diachin, Northwestern University
VLSI CAD/ADAPTIVE COMPUTING SEMINAR
DATE: Wednesday, April 28
TIME: 4-5PM
PLACE: L324
TITLE: An Overview of the GARP and RAW Projects in Adaptive
Computing
SPEAKER: Chris Bachman, ECE graduate student (Advisor: Prof. Banerjee)
Tuesday, April 27: Ph.D. Final Examination - 2:00 p.m.
Room L324
Sanjay Goil
"High Performance On-Line Analytical Processing and Data Mining on
Parallel Computers"
Committee Members: A. Choudhary (chairman), P. Banerjee,
P. Scheuermann, and V. Taylor
Wednesday, April 28: Ph.D. Final Examination - 3:00 p.m.
Room B211
Tania Nield
"The Virtual Data Integator: An Object-Oriented Mediator For
Heterogeneous Database Integration"
Committee Members: L. Henschen (chairman), M. Sarrafzadeh,
P. Scheuermann, and G. Krulee
Thursday, April 29: Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination - 10:00 a.m.
Room G247
Michael Patrick Chudzik
"Superconducting Multilayer Thin Films for High-Current Applications:
Orientation Engineering and Charge Transport"
Committee Members: C. Kannewurf (chairman), R. Chang, A. Sahakian,
T. Marks, U. Balachandran, and M. Lanagan
Prof. Prem Kumar has received a grant of $66,667 from NSF for the project entitled: "Squeezed-Light Generation by Means of Traveling-Wave X(2) Interactions in Lithium Niobate Waveguides," effective May 1, 1999 through April 30, 2000. This is a continuing grant which has been approved on scientific/technical merit for approximately two years.
Prof. Jorge Nocedal is traveling to New York, NY, April 22-27, to present a seminar entitled, "Automatic Preconditioning and Stable Projections for the Conjugate Gradient Method," at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .