DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of November 6 - 10, 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.

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 nancy@ece.nwu.edu and we will get you on that email list. Mention which category you belong to.

CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

I am pleased to announce the Microsoft Sponsored Undergraduate Research Program for the year 2000-2001. During the 2000 year, we will fund 10 research projects at a total funding level of $50,000 using the large gift we have received from Microsoft earlier this year. The purpose of this program is to encourage more undergraduates to do research with our faculty. The topic of research can be on any field of electrical and computer engineering, and need not be related to Microsoft's immediate needs.

As part of this program, we will be able to provide stipends for 10 undergrad students in the ECE department (five in electrical engineering, five in computer engineering). Each selected student will get a stipend of $1250 for each quarter they do an undergraduate research as part of a ECE 399 project (not counting design competition) with any ECE faculty member. The faculty advisor supervising the project will get a $1250 unrestricted grant. It is expected that the project will take two quarters, hence each student will get a total stipend of $2500 over two quarters and each faculty will get $2500 over Winter and Spring quarters.

All electrical engineering and computer engineering juniors and seniors are eligible for this program but they need to be registered for ECE 399 in the respective quarters. The students are encouraged to email their proposals electronically to Nancy Singer nancy@ece.nwu.edu by Thursday, Nov. 30, 2000. Decisions will be made by Dec. 8, 2000. This way students will know if they need to register for ECE 399 in January 2001, well before the Winter Quarter.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

EXAMINATIONS

There are no examinations scheduled this week.

RESEARCH GRANTS

The proposal submitted to AFOSR by Professors Razeghi and Jelen entitled, "Type-II Superlattices for Very Long Wavelength Infrared Detectors," has been accepted for funding support starting in November 2000 for a three-year period with total funding of $450,000.

TRAVEL

Prith Banerjee is traveling to San Jose, CA, November 8-10, to attend the International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD).

Professor Manijeh Razeghi chaired a session and gave an invited talk entitled, "Advanced Electronic and Optoelectronic Devices from Engineered type-II Sb-based Superlattices," at the 10th International Symposium on the Physics of Semiconductors and Applications (ISPSA-2000), Cheju Island, Korea, November 1-3, 2000.

Valerie E. Taylor is traveling to Dallas, TX, November 5-9, to attend the SC Super Computing Conference,

CSRL NEWS

PRINTER USAGE UPDATE

At the end of each month, we calculate how many pages were printed in that month. In October, over 22,000 sides were printed on laser1. That's the 3rd highest on record (dating back to April of 1998). At this rate, we will be unable to afford to continue buying the high-quality paper we currently use. Further, we may in the not-too-distant future have to revert to charging users per printed page to offset the costs of paper and toner. We will continue monitoring laser1 usage on a per-user basis.

PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE

This is a reminder to users that your passwords on ECE's centrally- administered Unix computers should be different from any other accounts you have elsewhere, including (or especially) on linux-based department computers, since none of those are centrally-managed.

I'll also remind you that you should not have your ECE mail retrieved by services such as hotmail or yahoo via POP. It's fine to forward your mail to these services, but it's critical that you do not set them up to get your mail via POP.

Please make yourself familiar with the Computing Facilities Policies and Procedures page

http://www.ece.nwu.edu/CSEL/policies/

which contains, among other things, the ECEnet Rules page.

On the general Computing Facilities page

http://www.ece.nwu.edu/CSEL/Computing-environment.html

you'll find our Frequently-Asked Questions page as well as a wealth of other information regarding the ECE computing facilities.

-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager

OLD NEWS

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

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRY

Please send email to ecenews@ece.nwu.edu before Thursday 5PM of previous week to be included on current week's news. Include information about seminars, exams, travel, research grants, professional news, personal news.