DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of February 28 - March 3, 2000

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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CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

In this newsletter I wish to inform everyone that Prof. Allen Taflove has been selected to receive the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence for 2000. Only two professors are selected in the entire university each year for such an award, so this is indeed quite an honor.

Included in our nomination material were the qualities that we believed merited this honor. I wanted to share these points with you so you can all be proud of Allen, our colleague and teacher:

  1. Allen is a fantastic teacher. He has consistently received CTEC scores around 5.3 to a perfect 6.0.

  2. He is also a world-class researcher, and author of more than 150 papers and a book.

  3. He has been involved with the McCormick Design Competition from its very conception in 1991.

  4. He has been intimately involved with the Engineering Design and Communications courses.

  5. He has been involved in major instructional lab renovations for the ECE department. Specifically, he has been involved with the Motorola Sponsored Freshman Lab on Wireless Communications.

  6. He has been an excellent advisor. He has supervised numerous undergrads, and 11 Ph.D. students thus far.

  7. He has truly impacted the lives of numerous students in a very positive way.
We received extremely strong letters of support for Allen from four of his current students and four of his past students. One of the students commented, "Instructors of his caliber justify the cost of a Northwestern education."

At this point I would like to mention that our department has been fortunate to have faculty who have received this award in the past. Prof. Alan Sahakian received this McCormick Professorship in 1999. Prof. Alvin Bayliss received this award in 1995. Finally, Prof. Jorge Nocedal received the Bette Harris Professorship of Teaching Excellence in 1997. As you can tell, our ECE Department is committed to excellent teaching.

I wish to thank all the current and past students who wrote letters of recommendation in support of this nomination. I also wish to thank Nancy Singer for putting together the nomination material in such a professional manner.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Faculty Candidate Seminar
DATE: Tuesday, February 29
TIME: 10:00-11:00 a.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Finite Field Wavelets and Their Application to Error Control Coding
SPEAKER: Faramarz Fekri, Georgia Institute of Technology

Parallel and Distributed Computing Seminar
DATE: Tuesday, February 29
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: "Solving the World Largest Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) on Metacomputers"
SPEAKER: Jean-Pierre Goux, ECE Department/Argonne National Lab

EXAMINATIONS

Monday, February 28: Ph.D. Final Examination - 9:15 a.m.
Room L324
Mehmet Oguz Sayal
"A Scalable and Adaptive Web Client-Server Architecture"
Committee Members: P. Scheuermann (chairperson), L. Henschen, A. Choudhary, A. Moshovos, and R. Vingralek

Wednesday, March 1: M.S. Final Examination - 2:00 p.m.
"Option C"
Sallee Knight
Committee Members: C. Lee (chairperson), P. Banerjee, and L. Henschen

RESEARCH GRANTS

We have just been informed unofficially that a research grant entitled "PACT: Power Aware Architecture and Compilation Techniques" submitted by Prof. Prith Banerjee (Principal Investigator), Prof. Majid Sarrafzadeh, Prof. Alok Choudhary, Prof. Andreas Moshovos, and Prof. Horace Yuen (Co-Principal Investigators), from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing, has been recommended for funding by DARPA for $2 million for three years. This is being funded under the DARPA Power Aware Computing and Communications Program. Funding is expected to begin July 1, 2000.

CSRL NEWS

SUN WORKSHOP

Sun has recently announced that it is making its Forte software, which includes the Sun Workshop suite of compilers, free to academia. This suite, which previously sold for $384 per simultaneous user, includes: an integrated development environment, a C compiler, a C++ compiler, FORTRAN 77 and FORTRAN 90 compilers, among other things.

I am working with our Sun sales representative to obtain unrestricted media. Once I have the CDs, I will make the software available to all Solaris hosts.

-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager

OLD NEWS

You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRY

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