DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of January 25 - 29, 1999

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

In this issue, I would like to inform everyone of the activities going on in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering Curriculum Committees (chaired by Mike Honig and Majid Sarrafzadeh respectively). Starting next year, we are planning to introduce a two-quarter sequence of courses in our department which can be taken in any order:

ECE B01: "Introduction to Computer Engineering"
ECE B02: "Introduction to Electrical Engineering"

These courses are being targeted for Freshmen in the ECE department and will also be available to all McCormick students. (We are planning to replace the existing B01 "Intro to Logic Design" with this new course, and the existing B41 and B70 courses by B02). Both the courses will be required of all EE and CE students in the department.

The goals of these courses will be:

1. to introduce EE and CE students to the broad fields of electrical and computer engineering
2. to have relevant and exciting labs (e.g., a robot in B01 and a CD player in B02) that can relate real-world examples to the contents of these courses. This will excite students early on in electrical and computer engineering.
3. to help recruit more students from McCormick into the EE and CE curricula.

During the 1999-2000 academic year, we are planning to offer PILOT versions of the courses (B01 in Winter by Prof. Valerie Taylor and B02 in Spring by Prof. Alan Sahakian). We are soliciting the help of our own undergraduates to develop the labs for each of these courses as C99 projects in future quarters. If you are an undergrad, and are interested in doing an exciting C99 project that will help future generations of students, please contact Prof. Taylor or Prof. Sahakian.

Please join me in congratulating the two undergraduate EE and CE committees for doing this excellent work which will move toward our department's goal of creating an exciting and relevant curriculum.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING SEMINAR
DATE: Tuesday, Jan 26
TIME: 4-5pm
PLACE: L324 (Tech)
TITLE: A Compilation Framework for Hybrid Applications
SPEAKER: Dhruva Chakrabarti

VLSI CAD / ADAPTIVE COMPUTING SEMINAR
DATE: Thursday, Jan 28
TIME: 4-5PM
PLACE: L324
TITLE: System Design for Pixel-Parallel Image Processing
SPEAKER: Amirali Baniasadi, ECE graduate student (Advisor : Prof. Sarrafzadeh)

EXAMINATIONS

There are no exams scheduled this week.

TRAVEL

Prof. Prith Banerjee is traveling to Atlanta, GA, Jan. 24-25, to present an invited seminar in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Prof. Abraham Haddad traveled to West Palm Beach, Jan. 8-10, to participate in an IEEE Awards Board Retreat.

Prof. Scott Hauck is traveling to Seattle, WA, Jan. 28-30, to give an invited talk.

Prof. D. T. Lee is traveling to San Jose, CA, Jan. 24 - Feb. 6, to visit Avanti Corp. and give a talk entitled "$L_\infty$ Voronoi diagrams and applications in VLSI Layout and Manufacturing."

Prof. Nagaraj Shenoy is traveling to India, Jan. 26 - Feb. 28.

OLD NEWS

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

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