DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of March 13 - 17, 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

One of the initiatives in our department has been to increase research activity through collaborative projects involving multiple faculty. You may recall that departmental research funding has been increasing every year with a record $9.4 million during 1998-99 (an increase from $8.7 million in 1997-98).

The current year (2000) has been very good for us. We have recently been notified of several new multi-investigator grants that were awarded to ECE faculty members in the last couple of months.

First, I am pleased to inform you all that a MURI (Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative) proposal involving MIT and Northwestern University on "Quantum Computing and Quantum Memory" has been funded by the U.S. Army for a total of $5 million for three years (2000-2003). Northwestern University's share of the project is $1.4 million. The principal investigators of the project are Prof. Jeff Shapiro from MIT, and Prof. Prem Kumar and Prof. Horace Yuen from Northwestern.

Second, we have been informed 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-PIs) from ECE and the Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing, will be funded by DARPA for $2 million for three years. This is being funded under the DARPA Power Aware Computing and Communications Program.

Third, we have just been informed that a research grant entitled "Lightweight Cryptographic Techniques," submitted by Prof. Horace Yuen (Principal Investigator), Prof. Majid Sarrafzadeh, Prof. Alan Sahakian (co-PIs) and Northeastern University, will be funded by DARPA for $800,000 for three years. This is being funded under the DARPA Sensors ITO Program.

In addition, our faculty have been extremely busy in submitting several other joint proposals. At least five proposals were submitted to the National Science Foundation's Information Technology Research Program in February 2000. Several other DARPA proposals have also been submitted.

Now that research funds have arrived, we will be able to support graduate and undergraduate students as research assistants to work with various faculty members on exciting multi-disciplinary research.

I wish to congratulate all the faculty members for successfully writing so many multi-investigator proposals this year.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Optimization Seminar
DATE : Tuesday, March 14. 2000
TIME : 11:00-12:00
LOCATION : L324 (ECE conference room)
SPEAKER : Michael Gertz - Argonne National Lab.
TITLE : A Trust-Region Based Interior Point Method for Non-linear Programming

EXAMINATIONS

Monday, March 13: Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination - 3:00 p.m.
Room L324
Yong Ma
"Electrically Modulated Microdisk Resonator Fabricated by Thin Film Processes for Optical Fiber Communications"
Committee Members: S.-T. Ho (chairman), A. Sahakian, P. Kumar, and H. Cao

OTHER MEETINGS

Continuing Education Seminar
Sponsored by the Master of Information Technology and Master of Engineering Management Programs
"Security Issues in Information Technology"
DATE: Friday, March 24, 2000
TIME: 8:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
ROOM: Tech L361
DEADLINE FOR RESERVATION: March 21
MORE DETAILS: http://www.ece.nwu.edu/newsweek/securitysem.html

TRAVEL

Professor Prith Banerjee traveled to College Station, TX, March 9-10, to present two Distinguished Lectures in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Texas A & M University.

Professor Jorge Nocedal is traveling to Paris and Toulouse, France, March 17-26, for research collaboration with Jean Charles Gilbert and Annick Sartenaer in Paris, and Meteo France in Toulouse.

Professor Bruce Wessels traveled to Ballston, VA, March 8-9, to attend an NSF panel. He will be traveling to Aachen, Germany, March 11-16, to attend a professor meeting.

CSRL NEWS

SERVICES AND SUPPLIES

The Computing Facilities Staff sells various computing supplies, and processes workstation and peripheral orders on behalf of the user community. We also administer a self-maintenance program under which Sun workstation owners can purchase in-house hardware maintenance for their machines, at competitive prices. See http://www.ece.nwu.edu/CSEL/services_supplies/ for details.

-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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