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Beginning this week, we will send out the weekly ECE electronic newsletter to all ECE faculty, students, and staff. The newsletter lists each week's news about seminars, M.S. and Ph.D. exams, awards and honors received by faculty and students, travel by faculty to conferences, various appointments, and other news items. Please send your entries for each week to "ecenews@ece.nwu.edu" by Thursday, 5PM of the previous week.
I want to welcome all undergraduate and graduate students to the new academic year. In this issue, I want to review the events that happened in our department during the past academic year 1999-2000. This is the only newsletter that will be this long.
Faculty
Two new faculty members joined our department during 1999-2000. Thrasos Pappas (Ph.D., MIT, 1987) joined us as an Associate Professor in the signal and image processing area, and Chris Jelen (Ph.D., Northwestern, 1998) joined us as an Assistant Professor in the solid state engineering area. Two faculty members left our department: Nathan Newman joined Arizona State University and Majid Sarrafzadeh joined UCLA. We will miss them dearly.
During 1999-2000, we recruited for three faculty positions in the areas of photonic systems, networking and communication, and VLSI CAD. We received more than 200 applications, interviewed thirteen candidates, made five offers, and are pleased to report that three accepted our offer. Mary Phillips (Ph.D., MIT, 1990) joined us as an Associate Professor in the photonic systems area, Randall Berry (Ph.D., MIT, 2000) joined us as an Assistant Professor in the networking area, and Yehea Ismail (Ph.D., Rochester, 2000) joined us as an Assistant Professor in the VLSI area.
We are also pleased to announce that Alok Choudhary and Alan Sahakian were both promoted to the rank of Professor this year. Congratulations to both of them.
Research Activity
Our twenty-eight faculty members are grouped into six areas of research: (1) Solid-state engineering, (2) Photonic systems and technology, (3) Networks, communication and control, (4) Signal and image processing, (5) Parallel and distributed computing, and (6) VLSI design and CAD. Our research funding has tripled in the past four years. Our research funding per year was $ 3.2 million in 1995-96, $4.2 million in 1996-97, $8.6 million in 1997-98, $9.4 million in 1998-99, and was $10 million during 1999-00. A funding level of $10 million per year translates to a level of funding of about $357,000 per faculty member per year, which is excellent and compares favorably to the top ten departments in the country.
A key reason for our department's receiving so much research funding in the past four years has been the tremendous amount of collaborative research projects initiated by our faculty. Faculty continued to write numerous research proposals this past year. Some of the key new research grants that we have received in our department this year include a $2 million grant from DARPA entitled "PACT: Power-Aware Architectural and Compilation Techniques" by Prith Banerjee, Majid Sarrafzadeh, Alok Choudhary, Andreas Moshovos, and Horace Yuen; a $1.4 million grant from DOD under the MURI program entitled "Quantum Computing and Communications" by Prem Kumar and Horace Yuen; and an $800,000 DARPA grant entitled "Lightwave Cryptographic Techniques" by Horace Yuen, Majid Sarrafzadeh and Alan Sahakian. Our Motorola Center for Telecommunications received a renewal of funding at $600,000 this year.
Our faculty members have written a large number of high-quality research publications. Last year, our faculty wrote three books, ten book chapters, 160 journal papers and 140 conference papers. One of the papers written by Prof. Prith Banerjee and his student Yanhong Yuan won the Best Paper Award at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium.
Curriculum
I am pleased to inform everyone that both our electrical engineering and our computer engineering undergraduate curricula have been accredited for six years according to the new ABET 2000 criteria. As part of this accreditation, we have to put into place proper objectives, outcomes, and processes to ensure that our students are receiving the very best education, and that we have continuous improvements in our curricula.
The big news in the area of curriculum is that our new undergraduate electrical engineering and computer engineering curricula got under way this past year. For the first time, we offered the two freshman level courses, ECE 202 "Introduction to Electrical Engineering," and ECE 203 "Introduction to Computer Engineering," which were taught by Prof. Alan Sahakian and Prof. Valerie Taylor, respectively. We also offered four new fundamentals of EE courses for the first time this year. The initial reaction from our students is that the new curriculum is a big success.
The big thing this year in the labs is the development of 20 autonomous robotic cars that are part of the ECE 203 course in "Introduction to Computer Engineering." Students use basic knowledge of digital circuits and the PIC micro-controller to design a control system to maneuver the car around a circular track. It was a lot of work putting these labs together for Prof. Valerie Taylor, Norm Flasch, and Albert Lyerla, but students loved it. We have also continued the development of new laboratory experiments for the ECE 202, 221, and 225 courses using the new equipment from Hewlett Packard that we obtained last year. They include fifteen stations, each equipped with a PC, a digital function generator, a digital oscilloscope, and power supply. Finally, Professors Kumar, Sahakian, Taflove, and Ho received funding from the Murphy Society for a lab in the photonics area for the ECE 224 course using several network analyzers.
Students
During 1999-00 we had 253 undergraduate students, up from 239 students in 1998-99. Of these, there were 110 students in electrical engineering (compared to 112 during 1998-99), and 143 students in computer engineering (compared to 127 in 1998-99). During 1999-00 we also had 173 graduate students (compared to 163 in 1998-99). Of this number, 143 were M.S./Ph.D. or Ph.D. students, and 30 terminal M.S. students. We granted 25 Ph.D., 39 M.S., 20 B.S.E.E., and 20 B.S.C.E. degrees in 1999-00. The quality of our students continues to improve every year. The entering freshman class in 1999 had an average SAT score of 1384 and a median score of 1400, which compares favorably with the very best schools in the country.
Student Placement in Companies and Universities
During 1999-2000, our department took an active role in placing our students in the top ECE companies. The department generated an ECE Resume Booklet in hardcopy and electronic form which contained one- page resumes of our B.S. and M.S. students, and two-page resumes of our Ph.D. students, and distributed it to more than 40 companies. According to an E-mail survey of graduating students, our B.S. students are going to the following companies: AT&T (1), Agilent/HP (1), Another Country (1), DLJ (1), Level3 (1), Microsoft (1), Motorola (1), Stampysoft (1), Scient (2), 3Com (1), Intel (1), Texas Instruments (1), and Tellabs (1). Many of our undergraduates are going to graduate school: Northwestern (2), Berkeley (1), Illinois (1), MIT (1), Michigan (1), San Diego (1). Finally, our M.S./Ph.D. students are joining the following companies: AMD (1), Dell (1), EMC (1), Ford (1), Intel (1), IBM (1), HP (3), Lucent (1), Motorola (2), MIT Lincoln Labs (1), Request Multimedia (1), Simplex (1), Synopsys (1), and SAIC (1). Three of our Ph.D. students are joining academia: Minnesota (1), Colby College (1) and SUNY, Buffalo (1).
Industrial Relations
During 1999-2000, our ECE Advisory Board consisted of twenty members from industry and eight from academia. We had our ECE Advisory Board Meeting on May 19, 2000.
We are delighted to announce a $500,000 cash gift from Motorola Foundation over five years. This gift will allow our department to take on some new initiatives in Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research, a Motorola Sponsored Distinguished Lecture Series, and graduate student recruiting and lab support.
Publicity
We have continued to use our pro-active web page to highlight our new curriculum, courses, research and various news events, and seminar listings. For the second year, we have sent an electronic weekly newsletter to our entire faculty, students, staff, and a few advisory board members to keep them updated on our activities.
Administration
I wish to thank the following Board of Directors who helped me run the ECE department during 1999-2000: Larry Henschen, Director of the Graduate Program; Prem Kumar, Director of the Undergraduate Electrical Engineering Program; Majid Sarrafzadeh, Director of the Undergraduate Computer Engineering Program; Alan Sahakian, Director of Laboratories; Jorge Nocedal, Director of Computing; Peter Scheuermann, Director of Publicity and Publications; Alok Choudhary, Director of Alumni and Industrial Relations; Deneen Marie Bryce, Director of Administration.
The 1999-2000 academic year has been a very exciting year. I am looking forward to another exciting year.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
Thursday, August 3, 2000: Ph.D. Final Examination - 3:00 p.m.
Room L324
Chris Fernandes
"A Dialogue-Enhanced Mediator to Discover User Intent in Heterogeneous
Database Queries"
Committee Members: L. Henschen (chairman), G. Krulee, M. Sarrafzadeh,
and A. Choudhary
Monday, August 21, 2000: M.S. Final Examination - 10:00 a.m.
Room L324
Ryan Kastner
"Methods and Algorithms for Coupling Reduction"
Committee Members: M. Sarrafzadeh (chairman), L. Henschen, and
A. Moshovos
Monday, August 21, 2000: Ph.D. Final Examination - 3:00 p.m.
Room L324
Kiarash Bazargan
"Designing CAD Tools for Reconfigurable Computing"
Committee Members: M. Sarrafzadeh (chairman), P. Banerjee,
L. Henschen, A. Moshovos, and J. Crenshaw
Wednesday, August 23, 2000: M.S. Final Examination - 1:00 p.m.
Room L324
Todd Haverkos
"Toward Parameterizeable Micro-Sequencer-Based Design of IP"
Committee Members: M. Sarrafzadeh (chairman), L. Henschen, and
A. Moshovos
Thursday, September 14, 2000: M.S. Final Examination
Lei Yu
"Option C"
Committee Members: L. Henschen (chairman), P. Banerjee, and P. Kumar
Milica Popovic won a student award (EMF Clinical Application Award) for her presentation entitled, "Phantom Model and 3-D FEM Simulations: Conduction of Externally Generated Low-Frequency Signals through Muscles,"(M. Popovic, A. Taflove, N. Stoykov, and T.A. Kuiken), at the Bioelectromagnetics Society Annual Meeting held in Munich, Germany, June 11-16.
Abraham Haddad
Aggelos Katsaggelos
Please welcome Rene Hall, our new department assistant, who filled the vacancy left by Linda Harries. Rene was previously a department assistant in ORSP (Office of Research and Sponsored Programs). She brings with her many years of experience with budget preparations from reviewing ORSP forms, reviewing proposals, and setting up grant accounts for new awards, prespending, etc.
Larry Henschen has accepted a position as Associate Dean of the Graduate School under Dean Rick Morimoto, replacing Jim Duncan. His duties started Sept. 1. It is a three-year, half-time appointment. The Graduate School will now have a representation from the McCormick School and the ECE Department. Larry will continue to be the Graduate Director of the ECE Department but will have a reduced teaching load.
Jackie Diaz, Research Assistant Professor of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and the Center for Quantum Devices, accepted a position at Intel Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, starting in August. She spent many years at Northwestern, first as a Ph.D. student, and the last three years as a Research Assistant Professor. We wish her the best of luck in her new career at Intel.
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .