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.
In this newsletter I wish to report on our graduate admissions status for the 2000-2001 academic year. We have received 674 applications so far for students wanting to pursue M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northwestern. We are expecting to get at least 100 more applications.
This year we have received an outstanding pool of graduate applicants. We expect to admit only about 40 students from this pool of about 800 students for Fall 2000. The Graduate Office assistants, Judy and Romina, have been entering all the information into our new graduate database which the ECE faculty can use to view all applicant information online. The members of the Graduate Committee have started examining the candidate folders and will make the recommendations for admissions around March 1. This is a very busy time of the year for this committee. We are confident that they will be successful in admitting some of the best graduate students into our department for Fall 2000.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
VLSI Design & CAD Seminar
DATE: Monday, February 14, 2000
TIME: 9:30 - 10:30 a.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Design of Low-Power VLSI Circuits
SPEAKER: Prof. Kaushik Roy, ECE Department, Purdue University
Faculty Candidate Seminar
DATE: Monday, February 14, 2000
TIME: 2:00 - 3:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: On-Chip Inductance in High-Speed Integrated Circuits
SPEAKER: Yehea Ismail, EE Department, University of Rochester
Optimization Seminar
DATE : Tuesday, February 15, 2000
TIME : 11:00-12:00
LOCATION : L324 (ECE conference room)
TITLE : The Dark Secrets of Newton's Method
SPEAKER : Jorge Nocedal - Northwestern
Parallel and Distributed Computing Seminar
DATE: Tuesday, February 15, 2000
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Transmeta's Crusoe Architecture
SPEAKER: Victor Kim, ECE Department
Special Seminar
DATE: Wednesday, February 16, 2000
TIME: 5:45-6:30 p.m.
PLACE: Tech Lecture Room 2
TITLE: Global IT Management: Challenges and Strategies
SPEAKER: Susan J. Unger, CIO & Senior VP, DaimlerChrysler Corp.
Photonic Systems and Technology Seminar
DATE: Thursday, February 17, 2000
TIME: 10:00-11:00 a.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Recent Advances in Lightwave Communication Technologies
SPEAKER: Mary Phillips, Scientific Atlanta
There are no examinations scheduled this week.
DoD announced the DURIP awards for the Year 2000. I am pleased to inform you that among the 221 proposals selected for funding, only two are from NU, those of Prof. Bruce Wessels and Prof. Prem Kumar, both members of the new Center for Photonic Communication and Computing within the ECE Department. These awards will greatly strengthen the lab facilities available to center members.
I am extremely pleased to inform you that Prof. Aggelos Katsaggelos will receive the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. This award honors IEEE members for their outstanding contributions in their respective areas of activity. In his case, Aggelos was honored for his contribution to the IEEE Signal Processing Society.
Additionally, I am pleased to inform you that Prof. Carl Kannewurf will also receive the IEEE Third Millennium Medal in recognition of his outstanding contributions in his area of research.
For faculty in need of more power, Sun has promotions on their Ultra 80 model workstations. These workstations feature dual 450MHz UltraSPARC II processors (Solaris is capable of symmetric multiprocessing) each with 4MB of external cache, 1GB of memory, 18.2GB 10,000 RPM UltraSCSI disk, and either PGX32 or Elite3D M6 graphics for from $17,995 to $19,995.
These promotions expire on March 31st. Please contact root if you have any questions.
On a related note, I've noticed that some users have set up web-based e-mail servers (yahoo, hotmail, etc.) to poll the ECE POP server. This means that their ECE passwords are stored on these e-mail servers. I ask that anyone who has his mail set up this way to change it immediately. Yahoo, hotmail, and other such free web-based email servers are hot hacker targets. If they should be broken into, your password will be taken and then we might be attacked next.
As a final note related to POP, I ask that people who have their email programs set up to poll the POP server periodically, to please disable polling when they go home for the day or weekend. The POP server gets a lot of hits, so if we can minimize the obviously unnecessary work it has to do, the server and network will be a lot happier.
-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .