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In this newsletter I wish to comment on the recently completed ABET 2000 visit of our undergraduate electrical engineering and computer engineering programs. During October 10-12 of last week, we had our ABET EE visitor, Professor Sherra Kerns, and our ABET CompE visitor, Dr. David Cochran, evaluate our undergrad EE and CE programs.
They carefully looked through our curricula (both current and new), our course and lab materials, interviewed faculty, students, and alumni, and visited our labs and computing facilities.
At the end of their visit, they met with the Provost of the university and graded us in eight categories.
I wish to thank all the faculty and the ABET team (the undergrad EE and undergrad CE committees for 1998-99) for preparing for this visit so well.
I wish to thank Mike Honig for leading the writing of the ABET self-study report and preparation for the electrical engineering program with the aid of Prem Kumar, Alan Sahakian, and Aggelos Katsaggelos. I would like to express my appreciation to Majid Sarrafzadeh for writing the self study report for the computer engineering program with the help of Valerie Taylor. Both Mike and Majid started the ABET visits on Sunday with two excellent slide presentations that clearly impressed both our visitors with the strengths of our programs.
I would like to recognize Romina Jimenez-Noeckel, Jill Lavelle, Carol Surma, and Nancy Singer for assisting us in collecting all the course materials for the ABET visit (and there were a LOT of materials) and presenting and arranging them so well in the two conference rooms.
Special thanks go to our students (freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors), co-op students, and alumni who spent time meeting with the visitors. Both visitors told me at the exit interviews that they were extremely impressed with the quality of the students.
I would like to thank Jorge Nocedal for arranging a tour of our computing labs (and the students who did the demos), and Prem Kumar, Mike Honig, Aggelos Katsaggelos, Andreas Moshovos, Chi-Haur Wu, and Norm Flasch for participating in the lab tours on Monday. It was clear that the visitors were very excited looking at the robot demos done by Prof. Wu.
Finally, I would like to thank Nancy Singer for arranging the schedules of both our visitors so well over three days and arranging for coffee, drinks, and cookies in both conference rooms.
I am pleased that the visit went so well and now we can all go back to our serious work of teaching and research in this department.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
Parallel and Distributed Processing Seminar
DATE: Monday, October 18
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Future Directions in Trace Cache-based Microarchitecture
SPEAKER: Dr. Sanjay Patel, ECE Dept. University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign
VLSI Design & CAD Seminar
DATE: Wednesday, October 20
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324 (ECE Conference Room)
TITLE: Automatic Generation of FPGA Routing Architectures from
High-Level Descriptions
SPEAKER: Chandra Mulpuri, ECE graduate student
Database Seminar
DATE: Thursday, Oct. 21
TIME: 3:00-4:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Resolving subtle semantic heterogeneity using
interactive mediation
SPEAKER: Chris Fernandes, ECE graduate student
Distinguished Lecture Series:
DATE: Friday, October 22
TIME: 3:00 p.m.
PLACE: Room L324
TITLE: "WIRELESS NETWORKS: PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS"
SPEAKER: P. R. KUMAR, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
There are no examinations scheduled this week.
Prof. Nate Newman has received a research grant from the Naval Research Laboratory for "the investigation of the mechanism of microwave loss in ferroelectrics". The grant award is for $31,269 for the 1999/2000 year.
Professor Manijeh Razeghi traveled to Alanya, Turkey, September 15-17, to attend the International Advisory and Steering Committee, Low Dimensional Structures and Devices (LDSD'99) where she gave the opening remarks and presented several papers.
Peter Scheuermann gave an invited talk on October 13 at the Eighth International Conference on Computer Communications and Network in Boston. He also visited NASA Goddard on October 14 where he gave a colloquium on the same topic.
Professor D.T. Lee's appointment as Adjunct Faculty in the ECE Department has been approved for a period of three years, from Sep. 1, 1999 to Aug. 31, 2002. He will be continuing his collaborative work with Prof. Wu and other faculty in our department.
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .