DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of November 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

In this newsletter, I am pleased to report that we have finally compiled the 1999-2000 Annual Report for the ECE Department. Here are some highlights of statistics for our department.

During 1999-2000, we had 28 full-time faculty in our department, 237 undergraduate students, and 171 graduate students.

In terms of research activities, our 28 ECE faculty expended $8.3 million last year, which is a rate of $300,000 per faculty. This $8.3 million total is lower than our research expenditures of $9.4 million during 1998-99.

In terms of publications, our 28 faculty members and their graduate students have published nine books, nine book chapters, 112 journal papers, and 94 conference papers.

During 1999-2000, we graduated 50 B.S students, 39 M.S. students, and 25 Ph.D. students. I wish to congratulate all our faculty and students for maintaining this high level of research activity in the past year.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

EXAMINATIONS

Wednesday, November 15, 2000: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination - 1:00 pm
Room L324
Zhilin Lan
"Dynamic Load Balancing for Parallel and Distributed Adaptive Mesh Refinement Applications"
Committee Members: V. Taylor (chairperson), A. Choudhary, L. Henschen, and C.-H. Wu

Wednesday, November 15, 2000: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination - 3:00 pm
Room L324
Richard A. Waltz
"Large-Scale Nonlinear Constrained Optimization"
Committee Members: J. Nocedal (chairman), A. Haddad, R. Freeman, and R. Fourer

TRAVEL

Prem Kumar traveled to Baltimore, MD, Oct. 22-24, and attended a DARPA- sponsored QuIST workshop.

Jorge Nocedal is traveling to Boulder, CO, Nov. 8-12, to visit Prof. Richard Byrd (Computer Science Department, University of Colorado) to continue research collaboration.

CSRL NEWS

LASER1

Since we have begun monitoring printer usage in the Wilkinson Lab, we have noticed that unprintable files are regularly sent to the laser1 queue. Only postscript and plain text files should be sent directly to the printer. Examples of unprintable files are raw PDF files, and GIF and JPEG images; when these files are sent directly to the printer, the result is a lot of wasted paper containing one line of gibberish each. The proper way to print PDF files is by opening the PDF file with "acroread" and then using that application's print command. Similarly, to print a graphical image such as a GIF or a JPEG, start up the program "xv" and use the print command. In order to enforce this automatically, we will soon be modifying the Solaris printer scripts to reject unprintable files before they are sent to the printer. When such a file is sent to the printer, it will be scanned. If it's rejected, it will be dumped and an email message will be sent to explain what has happened and why.

FOOD IN THE LAB

On a number of occasions recently we have found food in the lab, usually just left on the tables or on the floor. Please let's keep the lab clean and the equipment from getting damaged. The ECEnet Lab Rules URL is posted on the walls in the Wilkinson Lab. The rules state explicitly that food and beverages are not allowed in the lab. I would like to ask people who see others violating the no-food-and-drinks rule to gently remind their labmates that the rules are set up to benefit lab users as a whole. If that doesn't work, just send email to and we'll try. :-) In all seriousness, your cooperation is greatly appreciated.

-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager

OLD NEWS

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

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