DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of May 17 - 22, 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.

This newsletter is also emailed by Friday afternoon of previous week to: {faculty,staff,gradstudents,ee-undergrads,co-undergrads}@ece.nwu.edu.

If you are not receiving this email, please contact root@ece.nwu.edu and we will get you on that email list, mention which category you belong to.

CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

In this newsletter, I would like to invite all students, staff, and faculty of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department to attend the ECE Open House and Research Fair on Friday, May 21. This event has been scheduled to coincide with the ECE Advisory Board Meeting in the morning of that day. In the last newsletter, we listed the members of our Advisory Board which consists of 20 members from various companies and eight members from other universities.

A detailed schedule of the day's events is posted in the Department Office.

A summary schedule is as follows.

FRIDAY -- MAY 21
Morning events open to board members and ECE directors
8:30 a.m.-12:00 noon: ECE Advisory Board Meeting (Room L324)
12:00-1:00 p.m.: Lunch for Board Members (Faculty Lounge)
Afternoon events are open to all
1:00-2:00 p.m.: ECE Open House of Labs
(Visit MG18, CG50, and M338)
Official Opening of EE labs in MG18 by President Bienen, Dean Cohen and Tom Anderson from Hewlett-Packard

1:00-5:00 p.m.: ECE Research Fair (Poster Sessions by 40 graduate students)
4th floor L wing corridor
(Food and drinks will be served)
(We are working on giving out free t-shirts as well)

5:30-6:00 p.m.: Official opening of Motorola Sponsored Wireless Comm Lab by Bob Barnett, Executive Vice President of Motorola
Room M471

6:00-7:00 p.m.: Motorola Sponsored Reception
Faculty Lounge (4th floor L wing)
(Snacks and drinks served)

All students, staff, and faculty are encouraged to attend the Open House of Labs, Research Fair, and Reception from 1:00-7:00 p.m.

Please join us for this exciting event for the ECE department this year, and spread the word to undergraduate students in other departments.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING SEMINAR
DATE: Monday, May 17
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: A230
TITLE: "High-Availability in Scalable Distributed Data Structures"
SPEAKER: Witold Litwin, U. Paris 9 Dauphine, France

OPTIMIZATION & DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENTS SEMINAR
DATE: Wednesday, May 19
TIME: 10:30-11:30 a.m.
PLACE: M228 (IEMS conference room)
TITLE: " GPCG: A Case Study of Scalability and Performance in Object Oriented Optimization Software"
SPEAKER: Steve Benson, Argonne National Laboratory

VLSI CAD/ADAPTIVE COMPUTING SEMINAR
DATE: Wednesday, May 19
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: FPGA Routing Architecture: Segmentation and Buffering to Optimize Speed and Density
SPEAKER: Elaheh Bozorgzadeh, ECE graduate student (Advisor: Prof. Sarrafzadeh)

EXAMINATIONS

Tuesday, May 18: M.S. Final Examination - 9:00 a.m.
Room L324
Suresh Babu Periyacheri
"Matlab Functions for Reconfigurable Computing"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), N. Shenoy, A. Choudhary, and V. Taylor

Wednesday, May 19: M.S. Final Examination - 12:00 noon
Room M228
Georgios Yiorgos Bertos
"A Microprocessor-Based EPP Position Controller for Electric-Powered Upper-Limb Prostheses"
Committee Members: A. Sahakian (chairman), D. Childress, A. Katsaggelos, and D. Kelso

Wednesday, May 19: M.S. Final Examination - 1:00 p.m.
Room L324
Guangyu Gu
"Accelerating Photoshop Applications with Reconfigurable Hardware"
Committee Members: S. Hauck (chairman), M. Sarrafzadeh, and V. Taylor

Wednesday, May 19: M.S. Final Examination - 2:30 p.m.
Music Technology Room 125, Music Admin. Bldg.
Adrian Jost
"Clarinet Sound Synthesis by Physical Modeling with Analysis of Control Variables"
Committee Members: R. Freeman (chairman), A. Katsaggelos, and G. Kendall

Thursday, May 20: M.S. Final Examination - 9:00 a.m.
Room MLSB 2058
Joseph S. Wojkowski
"Uncooled InAs(x)Sb(1-x) Infrared Photodetectors for the 5-8 mu m Atmospheric Absorption Spectrum"
Committee Members: M. Razeghi (chairman), A. Sahakian, L. Henschen, J. Diaz, and C. Kannewurf

TRAVEL

Prof. Mike Honig is traveling to Houston, Texas, May 16-20, to attend the IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference. He is the co-author on two papers: 1) MMSE Space-Domain Interference Suppression for DS-CDMA (with W. Phoel), and 2) Multi-Dimensional Amplitude Control (with G. Rajappan).

Prof. Prem Kumar is traveling to Naples, Italy, May 22-28, to attend the 6th International Conference on Squeezed States and Uncertainty Relations and participate in the meeting of the International Advisory Committee of the conference. He will present the paper, "Quantum optics with short pulses: some recent experimental and theoretical developments."

OTHER NEWS

We are pleased to announce the addition of two new staff members in ECE.

First, is Chris Bachmann. Chris has joined us as a Technical Support Consultant. Working with Chris Walsh and also Dr. Banerjee. You can reach Chris at 7-7325 or via email at cbachman. Chris' office is located in Room M334, along with Tim Johnson.

Second, is Romina Jimenez-Noeckel. Romina has joined us as a Dept. Asst. working in the Graduate Coordinators office along with Judy Stein. Romina is also handling the collection of ABET materials. You can reach Romina at 1-7727 or via email at "romina". Romina's office is located in Room L351, along with Judy Stein.

We welcome both Chris and Romina to the department and wish them much success in their new positions.

OLD NEWS

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

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRY

Please send email to ecenews@ece.nwu.edu before Thursday 5PM of previous week to be included on current week's news. Include information about seminars, exams, travel, research grants, professional news, personal news.