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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I would like to welcome everyone to the beginning of a new academic year. This is the first issue of the weekly electronic newsletter that is sent to all undergraduate students, graduate students, staff, faculty, and some members of our ECE Advisory Board. For those of you who are new to the newsletter, it is published on Friday of each week and describes activities that will take place the following week (Monday through Friday). The newsletter lists various activities such as departmental seminars, M.S. and Ph.D. examinations, awards and honors received by students, faculty and staff, business travel performed by faculty, and other miscellaneous news. If you have an item you would like to insert in the newsletter, please email the item to "ecenews@ece.nwu.edu" before Thursday of the previous week. The newsletter is edited each week by Carol Surma who did a wonderful job with it last year. The newsletter is also placed on the web site for our department.
In this issue, I would like to review the activities that took place in the department during the summer quarter (when the newsletter was not published).
First, in July we prepared a detailed ABET (Accreditation Board of Engineering Training) Report for our electrical engineering and computer engineering programs in preparation for the ABET 2000 accreditation visit that will happen Oct. 10-12, 1999. More details will be provided in a later newsletter.
Second, we produced a printed, color ECE Newsletter in August which summarized our activities during the 1998-99 academic year. It was edited by Prof. Allen Taflove who did a terrific job. The newsletter was mailed to all our alumni, faculty, current students in the department, parents of all our undergraduates, members of our ECE Advisory Board, about 200 top faculty members in various universities around the country, and program managers of various funding agencies. For an online version of the newsletter, please look at our department web site.
Third, I regret to announce that three faculty members from our department left us for careers elsewhere. They are Prof. Der Tsai Lee, Prof. Scott Jordan, and Prof. Scott Hauck. We will miss them greatly in this department but wish them well in their future careers. Because of these last-minute resignations, we had to make changes in the scheduling of courses. We regret any inconvenience this may have caused our students.
Fourth, I would like to welcome two new faculty members: Prof. Thrasos Pappas and Prof. Chris Jelen who will start teaching this first week in Fall 1999. Please welcome them to the department. Prof. Pappas works in the area of image and signal processing and Prof. Jelen works in the area of solid-state engineering.
Fifth, we produced the newest version of the ECE Graduate Study Manual and the ECE Undergraduate Study Manual for the 1999-2000 year. The manuals have been distributed to all graduate students over the summer. Undergraduate students should pick up their copies in room L356.
Finally, we appointed a new set of committees and ECE Directors for the 1999-2000 academic year. Please look at the ECE web site for more details. The names are also listed in the ECE graduate and undergraduate study manuals.
Welcome to the new academic year.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
I look forward to seeing you all there.
Larry Henschen, Graduate Director
VLSI Design & CAD Seminar
DATE: Wednesday, September 22
TIME: 4-5 pm
PLACE: L324 (ECE Conference Room)
TITLE: Congestion Minimization During Placement
SPEAKER: Maogang Wang
There are no examinations scheduled this week.
Peter Scheuermann received an NSF grant on "Scalable architecture for replication on the web" for $220,000 over three years.
Valerie Taylor's proposal entitled, "CADRE: NETwork-Computer for Computer Architecture Research and Education (NETCARE)." has been funded for a total amount of $1.2M over four years. This is a joint proposal with Jose' Fortes and Rudolph Eigenmann at Purdue and Miron Livny at University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Valerie Taylor received the official award notification for the project entitled: "Next Generation Software: Prophesy, A Performance Modeling Framework for the Analysis of Complex Applications and Systems" sponsored by NSF. The total award is for $800,000 for approximately three years. This is a joint project with Rick Stevens at the University of Chicago/Argonne National Laboratory.
Jorge Nocedal has been reappointed as co-editor for the Mathematical Programming journal.
The paper, "Noiseless Optical Amplification of Images," by Sang-Kyung Choi, Michael Vasilyev, and Prem Kumar, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 1938 (6 September 1999) was selected for showcasing in the Physical Review Focus, an internet magazine of the American Physical Society (www.aps.org). The Focus Story, "Gain without Pain," can be viewed at: http://focus.aps.org or directly going to the story link http://focus.aps.org/v4/st12.html.
Prith Banerjee traveled to Syracuse, NY, on July 22, to attend a Ph.D. examination of a student (Mahmut Kandemir) at Syracuse University as an external examiner.
Prith Banerjee traveled to San Diego, CA, Aug. 3-6, to attend and present a paper at the 8th International Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC99).
Alok Choudhary is traveling to Aizu, Japan, Sept 17-23, to present a paper at the International Conference on parallel processing (ICPP'99), 1999.
Abraham Haddad traveled to Beijing to attend the 14th IFAC World Congress, June 30-July 10, where he presented a paper entitled, "Quantized Control of Stochastic Stable Linear Systems," chaired a session, and attended the IFAC Executive Board, IFAC Assembly, and IFAC Council meetings as chairman of the IFAC Policy Committee.
Aggelos Katsaggelos traveled to:
Prem Kumar traveled to Milan, Florence, Rome, Pavia, in Italy; and Budapest, Hungary, 6/12/99 - 7/9/99. He presented an invited paper, chaired a session, taught a short course, and gave several seminars at various universities.
Prem Kumar traveled to Holmdel, NJ, Sept. 3-5, to give a talk entitled, "Some Recent Classical and Quantum Applications of Nonlinear Fiber-optics" at Lucent Technologies.
Prem Kumar is traveling to Washington, DC, Sept. 22-24, to visit DARPA and NASA.
Nate Newman traveled to Millau, France, Aug. 29-Sept. 13 to attend the Advanced Study Institute Workshop on Microwave Superconductivity.
Jorge Nocedal traveled to Boulder, CO, Aug 13-17, for research collaboration with Prof. Richard Byrd.
Jorge Nocedal traveled to Oxford, England, July 11-25, where he gave a plenary talk at the Foundations of Computational Mathematics Meeting. The title of the presentation was "Some Open Questions in Nonlinear Optimization". He also traveled to Cambridge, where he presented a talk entitled "Handling Ill-Conditioned Jacobians".
Jorge Nocedal traveled to Palo Alto, CA, Sept 15-19, to visit the EESOR Department at Stanford and discuss research problems with Profs. W. Murray and M. Saunders. He also visited Weidlinger Associates to work on collaborative NEOS project.
Alan Sahakian traveled to Rosemont, IL, June 12-15, to chair the session, "Mapping Biosignals" at the Third International IEEE Workshop on Biosignal Interpretation and present an invited paper entitled, "Processing Signals from the Atria of the Heart." He also attended as the Conference Publications Co-Chair.
Majid Sarrafzadeh traveled to Berkeley, CA, to present a seminar on "Physical Design Challenges of Reconfigurabel Computing," Sept 15, 1999.
On June 21, 1999, Prof. Henschen visited with faculty of the Department of Computer Science of Beida (Bejing University). The discussions centered around research topics and applications from Beida students to graduate study in our department. Professor Henschen described our application review procedure and admissions policies and also discussed several new Northwestern initiatives such as a new Summer Institute for incoming international graduate students. The professors from Beida expressed a strong interest in establishing relationships with US research universities in general, and Northwestern University in particular. Short-to-medium term visits by our faculty would likely be welcomed.
Belated Birthday wishes to:
George Nejmeh
Tim Johnson
Norm Flasch
Jill Lavelle
Upcoming Birthday wishes:
Pred Bundalo
Carol Surma
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .