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In this newsletter, I wish to provide an update on the ECE Advisory Board Meeting and ECE Open House that was held on Friday, May 21, 1999. We had about 20 members of the ECE Advisory Board, consisting of members from industries and academia, attend the Board Meeting in the morning. During that time, we provided them with an overview of the many initiatives we have taken this year in the department, namely the new undergraduate EE and CompE curriculum, the new labs in electrical engineering, the new initiatives in graduate student recruiting, and the new initiatives in the area of student placement and industrial relations. I wish to thank the ECE Directors Majid Sarrafzadeh, Mike Honig, Larry Henschen, Prem Kumar, and Alan Sahakian for giving excellent overview presentations in each of these areas.
In the afternoon, we had an opening ceremony of the Electrical Engineering Circuits Labs in MG18 by President Bienen, Dean Jerry Cohen, and Tom Anderson from Hewlett-Packard. The new lab was made possible through funding from the President, the Dean, and Hewlett-Packard. Three of our undergraduate students, Cuong Pham, Amit Wadwa, and Satwa Tiwari, showcased some new lab experiments using this new equipment. They designed these experiments as C99 projects this year. I wish to thank them and Prof. Alan Sahakian for supervising these labs. I also wish to thank Norm Flasch and Albert Lyerla for getting the new equipment in the labs set up on such short notice just before the Open House.
We also had a demonstration in CG50 of the new C07 labs in Analog Communication under the direction of Prof. Mike Honig, some cool robot design projects in ECE C98 under the direction of Prof. Chi-Haur Wu, and some ECE C47 Microprocessor Design Projects under the direction of Prof. Larry Henschen. Finally, we had a demonstration of the new ECE Wilkinson Lab by Prof. Alok Choudhary and some students. I wish to personally thank all the students who participated in the demos of the labs that day.
Later in the afternoon, we had the First Annual ECE Graduate Student Poster Session. Thirty-three posters were presented by more than 50 graduate students on their Ph.D. dissertations. All six areas of research in this department were represented. I wish to congratulate all the graduate students for putting together such a wonderful show, and thank them for standing for four hours in front of the posters in such a crowded space. Two best poster awards were announced, one to Milica Popovic, and another to Lisa Singh and Bin Chen. I want to thank Prem Kumar for arranging the poster session with the help of Kathie Heidenfelder-Cerveny. It was a real success. We will definitely make this a yearly event.
In the evening we had the official opening of the Motorola Sponsored Wireless Communication Lab in M471. The opening was performed by Chris Galvin, CEO of Motorola, and Bob Barnett, Executive Vice President of Motorola. Three groups of freshman students showcased their Engineering Design and Communication projects on the design of various antennas to improve the capabilities of the portable radios that are in the lab. The oral presentations by these groups of students were simply superb, and it made a very strong impression on the Motorola representatives. I know that Bob Barnett was about to make job offers to each of these students on the spot! I wish to thank Allen Taflove, Alan Sahakian, and those three groups of students for their terrific effort in the Wireless Lab Opening. After that event, we had a Motorola-sponsored reception where all the faculty and students in the ECE department had an opportunity to meet various top Motorola executives.
Finally, I wish to thank Nancy Singer and Deneen Marie Bryce for coordinating the entire ECE Board Meeting and Open House. My sincere apologies to anyone I may have missed in my word of thanks above. The entire event was a team effort, and we could not have done it without everyone's participation.
We took lots of photographs, copies of which will be posted on the ECE bulletin board in two weeks. We have ordered extra copies of most photographs so that students and faculty can pick up copies that they like from Deneen's office in two weeks.
Almost every Board Member has gone back and emailed me about how much they enjoyed the day and are looking forward to coming back next year.
Thanks again to everyone for making this happen.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
VLSI CAD/ADAPTIVE COMPUTING SEMINAR
DATE: Friday, June 4 (NOTE: DIFFERENT DAY)
TIME: 4-5PM
PLACE: B211 (NOTE: DIFFERENT PLACE!)
TITLE: Semi-synchronous circuit physical design
SPEAKER: Dr. Takahashi Atsushi, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Wednesday, June 2: Ph.D. Final Examination - 1:00 p.m.
Lisimachos P. Kondi
"Low Bit Rate SNR Scalable Video Coding and Transmission"
Committee Members: A. Katsaggelos (chairman), M. Honig, S. Jordan, and
A. Sahakian
Wednesday, June 2: Ph.D. Final Examination - 3:30 p.m.
Elena Vasilyeva
"Investigation of Advanced Conformal Multiband Antennas for Wireless
Communications"
Committee Members: A. Taflove (chairman), A. Bayliss, M. Epstein, and
A. Sahakian
Thursday, June 3: Ph.D. Final Examination - 11:00 a.m.
Faisal Ishtiaq
"H.263 Scalable Video Coding and Transmission at Very Low Bitrates"
Committee Members: A. Katsaggelos (chairman), A. Sahakian, S. Jordan, and
M. Honig
Friday, June 4: Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination - 3:30 p.m.
Gregory Kanter
"All Optical Switching and Squeezed Light Generation in Periodically
Poled Lithium Niobute"
Committee Members: P. Kumar (chairman), H. Cao, G. Luther,
A. Sahakian, and M. Plonus
Professor Scott Hauck has been appointed as the June and Donald Brewer Junior Professor for a two-year period, September 1, 1999 to August 31, 2001 for his contributions to research and teaching in the ECE department. Along with the title and honor, Prof. Hauck will have a discretionary fund of $10,000 for each of the two years. This Chair is awarded to our very best young faculty in the McCormick School of Engineering.
Prof. Abe Haddad is traveling to San Diego, CA, June 1-6, to attend, present a paper entitled, "Stabilization of stochastic quantized control systems." and chair a session at the 1999 American Control Conference (ACC'99). He will also be attending the meeting of the AACC Board as an officer.
Prof. Seng-Tiong Ho presented a paper at the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics organized by the Optical Society of America held in Baltimore, Maryland, May 24-26 1999.
Prof. Nate Newman was in Phoenix, Arizona, on May 27 to give a seminar on "Microwave Dielectric Resonator technology" for the Physics Department at Arizona State University.
Prof. Aggelos Katsaggelos gave a presentation entitled "Current Issues and Developments in Video Coding and Transmission" at the US Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, April 9, 1999. The talk was transmitted real time to a number of sites.
Prof. Katsaggelos also represented Northwestern and gave a presentation on May 11 at the Motorola Science Advisory Board (SABA) Induction meeting, at the Motorola Galving Center in Schaumburg IL. The topic of his presentation was: "Current Issues and Developments in Multimedia Signal Processing."
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .