DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of May 3 - 7, 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 inform everyone that we have been successful in constituting an Advisory Board for the ECE Department for the period 1999-2001. The 28-member Advisory Board consists of professors from top universities and representatives from top ECE companies. These Board Members will be attending our first meeting on Friday, May 21, from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. and will critique the various initiatives going on this year in the department.

The Board consists of:

University Members:

• Prof. Jacob Abraham, University of Texas at Austin
• Prof. Arvind, MIT
• Prof. Ed Davidson, University of Michigan
• Prof. Leah Jamieson, Purdue
• Prof. Mary Jane Irwin, Penn State
• Prof. Steve Kang, University of Illinois
• Prof. Ed McCluskey, Stanford
• Prof. Ron Schafer, Georgia Tech

• Dr. John Dever, Consultant
• Mr. Dick Taylor, Tellabs Operations
• Dr. Thomas Ryan, Tellabs Operations
• Dr. David Carney, Consultant
• Dr. John Spencer, Microsoft
• Dr. Patrick White, Arthur D. Little
• Dr. David Kuck, Kuck and Associates
• Mr. James Tucker, 3Com Corporation
• Ms. Maria Ho, Texas Instruments
• Dr. William Cooper, Intel
• Dr. Justin Rattner, Intel
• Dr. Frank Splitt, Consultant
• Dr. Devadas Varma, Cadence Design Systems
• Dr. Tom Anderson, Hewlett Packard
• Dr. Frances Laidlaw, Motorola
• Dr. Ron Stout, Lucent Technologies
• Mr. Arup Ratan Gupta, Lucent Technologies
• Dr. Bill Tetzlaff, IBM
• Dr. Marc Snir, IBM
• Dr. Sidney Griffin, Silicon Graphics

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

OPTIMIZATION & DISTRIBUTED ENVIRONMENTS SEMINAR
DATE: Wednesday, May 5
TIME: 10:30-11:30 a.m.
PLACE: M228 (IEMS conference room)
TITLE: Software Interoperability Issues for Large-Scale Numerical Simulations
SPEAKER: Lois Curfman McInnes, Argonne National Lab.

VLSI CAD/ADAPTIVE COMPUTING SEMINAR
DATE: Wednesday, May 5
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Reducing Switching Activity on Datapath Buses with Control-Signal Gating
SPEAKER: Todd Haverkos, ECE graduate student (Advisor: Prof. Sarrafzadeh)

EXAMINATIONS

Monday, May 3: Ph.D. Final Examination - 3:30 p.m.
Room B211
Dmitry Levandovsky
"Quantum Noise Suppression in Optical Fibers"
Committee Members: P. Kumar (chairman), H. Yuen, A. Taflove, and W. Kath

Monday, May 3: M.S. Final Examination
Timothy M. Johnson
"Option C"
Committee Members: M. Honig (chairman), C. Lee, and S. Jordan

Monday, May 3: M.S. Final Examination
Wei-Hsin Chang
"Option C"
Committee Members: C. Lee (chairman), S. Jordan, and M. Honig

Thursday, May 6: M.S. Final Examination - 1:30 p.m.
Room L324
Christopher Bachmann
"A Hardware Testbed for Distributed Heterogeneous Adaptive Computing"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), S. Hauck, N. Shenoy, and A. Choudhary

Friday, May 7: Ph.D. Final Examination - 9:00 a.m.
Room A230
Jian Chen
"Mesh Partitioning for Distributed Systems"
Committee Members: V. Taylor (chairman), P. Banerjee, A. Moshovos, and T. Canfield

Friday, May 7: Ph.D. Final Examination - 4:30 p.m.
Room L324
Michael Vasilyev
"Multimode Optical Tomography of Quantum States"
Committee Members: P. Kumar (chairman), H. Yuen, S.-T. Ho, and W. Kath

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES/AWARDS/HONORS

Prof. Scott Hauck and his co-authors have been informed that they will receive the 1999 IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems Best Paper award, which will be officially announced in June at the Design Automation Conference. The award is for the paper "Mesh Routing Topologies for Multi-FPGA Systems," which appeared in the September 1998 issue of the Transactions on VLSI.

Congratulations to Scott Hauck on this award.

OTHER NEWS

We are extremely pleased to learn that our faculty candidate in the area of signal and image processing, Dr. Thrasos Pappas, from Bell Labs, has accepted our offer as an Associate Professor. Dr. Pappas received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1987, and has been working at Bell Labs from 1987 to 1999. He will be joining our department Sep. 1, 1999.

OLD NEWS

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRY