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.
We all know that we are gradually moving to a paperless society, and most students, faculty, and visitors now look for the latest up-to-date information about departments on the web. It is therefore very important that we have an exciting web page that highlights our strengths and is current. About two years ago, our department web page was redesigned by some student volunteers after a web design contest. They did an excellent job.
Unfortunately, our web page has remained relatively unchanged for the past two years. In view of that, Carol Surma has put in a lot of effort on redesigning the "News" link of the ECE web page. In the past, that link gave us simply a listing of the weekly newsletters. Visitors would have to sift through all the weekly news to find out what has happened during an entire quarter or a year. The seminar announcements were buried inside each weekly newsletter. Now she has created categories for major highlights of the year, awards, grants, seminars, etc., so that a visitor can see the activities of the department at a glance. Please check it out and email suggestions to Carol. I wish to thank Carol for the excellent job she has done in maintaining the web page.
We have started a second project with the Eta Kappa Nu student chapter to help redesign the web page for the next major change. Ken Eguro and Laura Tiefenbruck, the Eta Kappa Nu officers, together with their faculty advisor Prof. Allen Taflove, have taken on this challenge along with the rest of the Eta Kappa Nu student members. They have planned to modify the faculty web pages, the courses, and undergraduate and graduate information.
We hope to see a much redesigned visitor-friendly web page in the near future. I wish to thank Eta Kappa Nu in advance for their efforts.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
Parallel and Distributed Computing Seminar
DATE: Tuesday, May 9, 2000
TIME: 3:00-4:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Scheduling Queries for Tape-Resident Data
SPEAKER: Sachin More, ECE Northwestern
VLSI Design and CAD Seminar
DATE: Thursday, May 11, 2000
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: A Priori Interconnect Estimation: The Road to Future Systems
SPEAKER: Dr. Dirk Stroobandt, Post-Doctoral Researcher,
CS Department - UCLA
Tuesday, May 9, 2000: Ph.D. Final Examination - 9:00 a.m.
Room L324
Elena Vasilyeva
"Advanced Conformal Dual-Band Antenna for Wireless Communication"
Committee Members: A. Taflove (chairman), A. Sahakian, M. Epstein, and
A. Bayliss
Tuesday, May 9, 2000: Ph.D. Final Examination - 10:00 a.m.
Room A230
Maogang Wang
"Placement Problem in Large Industrial Circuits"
Committee Members: M. Sarrafzadeh (chairman), P. Banerjee,
A. Moshovos, V. Taylor, and D. Stroobandt
Friday, May 12, 2000: M.S. Final Examination - 10:00 a.m.
Room L324
Xin Li
"System Buffer Size Analysis from an Application's Perspective"
Committee Members: V. Taylor (chairperson), P. Banerjee, A. Moshovos,
and A. Choudhary
Prith Banerjee traveled to Ann Arbor, MI, on May 5 to attend a symposium at the University of Michigan in honor of Prof. Ed Davidson's retirement.
Prof. Banerjee is traveling to San Francisco, CA, May 6-7, to attend an ACM Awards Banquet and receive the ACM Fellow Award.
Prem Kumar is traveling to San Francisco, CA, May 6-11, to attend CLEO/QELS 2000 and present the paper entitled, "An all-optical picosecond-pulse packet buffer based on four-wave mixing loading and intracavity soliton control" by Lijun Wang, Yikai Su, Anjali Agarwal, and Prem Kumar.
Design Competition is proud to present its ninth (9th) annual competition, DC2000, to be held on Saturday, 5/13/2000, Garrett Lawn, from 7 AM until 3:30 PM.
This year's theme surrounds the "soccer" game, thusly named "DC Cup 2000." Twenty-one top-notched teams, of almost 100 student participants of various majors, will let loose their autonomous robots to compete head-to-head on a massive obstacle course that is 16 feet by 11 feet in size.
Prizes are as follows:
1st place, $2,000;
2nd place, $1,000;
3rd place, $500;
Most innovative design, $50; and
Other consolation prizes to be announced.
Furthermore, there will be a raffle in which two Lego Mindstorms sets and a number of Microsoft software packages (including Windows 2000 Professional) will be given away. During the lunch hours, two $500 scholarships will be awarded to two deserving Chicago-land highschool students -- Design Competition and Ford Motor Company Scholarships.
Please come out on a beautiful Spring day to enjoy a competitive and fun-filled event, free food and refreshment, and *good* music. :-) You might even get your face and voice on TV and radio.
DC Cup 2000 has been made possible by the generous support and sponsorship of: Dean John Birge, Motorola, ADC Telecommunications, Ford Motor Company, Tribune Interactive, Video Productions Inc., Andersen Consulting, Lucent Technologies, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Northrop Grumman, Rauland Borg, Tech Corporate Partners Office, and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.
-Cuong Pham
Design Competition Executive Chair
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .