DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of September 25 - 29, 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 Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Program for the year 2000-2001. In this second year of the program, we will fund ten research projects at a total funding level of $50,000. The purpose of this program is to encourage more undergraduates to do research with our faculty. The topic of research can be in any field of electrical and computer engineering, and need not be related to Motorola's immediate needs.

As part of this program, we will be able to provide stipends for ten undergrad students in the ECE department (five in electrical engineering, five in computer engineering). Each selected student will receive a stipend of $1250 for each quarter they do undergraduate research as part of an 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 two quarters. Students can take this over any two quarters (Fall, Winter, and Spring), e.g. Fall and Winter, Winter and Spring, Fall and Spring, etc., but they need to register for ECE 399 projects.

Sometime in the first week of June 2001, each student and faculty member will be asked to visit Motorola in Schaumburg and participate in a half-day poster session describing the results of the research. It will be an opportunity to interact with Motorola engineers at that site.

I have appointed a committee consisting of Prof. Allen Taflove (Director of Alumni and Industrial Relations), Prof. Aggelos Katsaggelos (Director of Motorola Center for Telecom Research), ande Prith Banerjee (Chairman) to review all proposals.

All electrical engineering and computer engineering sophomores, juniors, and seniors are eligible for this program but they need to be registered for ECE 399 in the respective quarters. The students have been asked to email their proposals electronically to Nancy Singer (nancy@ece.nwu.edu ) by Thursday, Sep. 28, 2000. Decisions will be made by Oct. 4, 2000.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

EXAMINATIONS

Friday, September 22, 2000: M.S. Final Examination - 9:00 a.m.
Room L324
Alexander K. Jones
"Matrix and Signal Processing Libraries based on Intrinsic MATLAB Functions for FPGAS"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), A. Choudhary, and V. Taylor

Thursday, September 28, 2000: Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination - 10:30 a.m.
Room L324
Malay Haldar
"Optimized Hardware Synthesis from MATLAB"
Committee Members: A. Choudhary (chairman), P. Banerjee, A. Moshovos, and Y. Ismail

Thursday, September 28, 2000: Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination - 2:30 p.m.
Room L324
Anshuman Nayak
"Automatic Parallelization and Optimization of MATLAB Applications for Multi-FPGA Systems"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee, (chairman), A. Choudhary, A. Moshovos, and Y. Ismail

Friday, September 29, 2000: Ph.D. Oral Qualifying Examination - 3:30 p.m.
Room B211
Adam Rybaltowski
"Investigation of Laser Radar Systems Based on Mid-Intrared Semiconductor Lasers"
Committee Members: P. Kumar, (co-chairperson), A. Taflove (co-chairperson), M. Phillips, and C. Jelen

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES/AWARDS/HONORS

Mary Phillips gave an invited short course, "Fiber Transmission of Cable Television Signals," at the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2000). The conference was held in Munich, Germany from September 3 to 7th.

Prof. Manijeh Razeghi recently gave the following three invited presentations:
"Blue Lasers," DARPA Photonic Wavelength and Spatial Signal Processing (PWASSP) Review Meeting, Williamsburg, VA, September 12-13, 2000; "Toward Miniaturization for High Performance Infrared Imaging," Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Arlington, VA, September 14, 2000; and "Quantum Sensing," Office of Naval Research, Arlington, VA, September 15, 2000.

TRAVEL

Prof. Alan Sahakian is traveling to Cambridge, MA, Sept. 24-26, to attend the IEEE Computers in Cardiology Conference.

CSRL NEWS

Pop Server Switchover

On Wednesday, September 27th, we will be moving the pop server to a newer faster machine. On Monday, October 2nd, we'll be disabling the old pop server. There should be no downtime, as the switchover should be seamless. However, we would like to remind users to make sure they are using pop.ece.nwu.edu in their pop mail (Eudora, Netscape, etc.) clients. As usual, please report any problems to root@ece.nwu.edu

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.