DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of January 24 - 28, 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 root@ece.nwu.edu and we will get you on that email list, mention which category you belong to.

CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

In a previous newsletter I had announced the cash gift of $100,000 per year for five years from Motorola Foundation to support various ECE department initiatives. One of the initiatives is the Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Program to encourage more of our undergraduates to pursue independent research through the C99 (399) course credit with various advisors.

A committee consisting of Prof. Choudhary, Prof. Katsaggelos and Prof. Banerjee received a large number of proposals for the research program and reviewed all of them. We are pleased to inform you that the following proposals have been selected for funding as Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Projects for the 1999-2000 academic year.

  1. "OC-48 Tranceivers for Optical Interconnect Applications"
    Student: Errling Tao, B.S. EE, Advisor: Prof. Prem Kumar
    (Winter and Spring 2000 quarters)
  2. "Conditional Replenishment for Video Conferencing over Lossy Channels"
    Student: Pakpoom Hoyingcharoen, B.S.E.E., Advisor: Prof. Thrasos Pappas
    (Winter and Spring 2000 quarters)
  3. "CDMA Simulator with Spreading Code Adaptation"
    Student: Wiroonsak Santipach, B.S. EE, Advisor: Prof. Mike Honig
    (Winter and Spring 2000 quarters)
  4. "Data Mining Techniques for Improving Web Performance"
    Student: Kaw-Yuan Mark Lee, B.S. C.E., Advisor: Peter Scheuermann
    (Winter and Spring 2000 quarters)
  5. "Floorplanning with Uncertainty,"
    Student: Jane Kim, B.S. C.E., Advisor: Majid Sarrafzadeh
    (Winter and Spring 2000 quarters)
  6. "SimDSP: A Simulation Framework for Architecture Research in DSP/Embedded Applications,"
    Student: Justin Wong, B.S. CE, Advisor: Andreas Moshovos
    (Winter and Spring 2000 quarters)
  7. "An Efficiency-Based Microcontroller for a Solar-Powered Racing Vehicle"
    Student: Candice McGrew, B.S. CE, Joint Advisors: Prof. Nate Newman and Prof. Alan Sahakian
    (Winter and Spring 2000 quarters)
  8. "Web Control Puma Robot"
    Student: Yee Man Wong, B.S. CE, Advisor: Prof. Chi-Haur Wu
    (Winter 2000 quarter)
  9. "Benchmarking Tools for Configurable Computing"
    Student: David Zaretsky, B.S. EE and CE, Advisor: Prith Banerjee
    (Winter 2000 quarter)
  10. "User Interface and Parallel Algorithms for Data Analysis in Large Scale Scientific Applications"
    Student: Budyanto Himayan, B.S. E.E./C.S., Advisor: Prof. Alok Choudhary
    (Winter 2000 quarter)
  11. "Design of a Master Sensor Device for Personal Robot Control,"
    Student: Kenlip Ong, B.S. E.E, Advisor: Chi-Haur Wu
    (Spring 2000 quarter)
  12. "Motorola Sponsored Wireless Communications Laboratory Intructional Materials"
    Student: Jed Brewer, B.S. EE., Advisor: Prof. Allen Taflove
    (Spring 2000 quarter)
  13. "Real-Time Tracking Control System"
    Student: Jake Brick, Advisor: Aggelos Katsaggelos
    (Spring 2000 quarter)
In each case, we will pay the student a stipend of $1250 at the end of each quarter. In addition the faculty advisor will get $1250 per quarter transferred to his unrestricted grants for advising.

On Friday, June 2, we will invite the students and their advisors to attend a half day poster session at Motorola to present the results of their research.

Congratulations are in order for the students and faculty on being selected. The committee looks forward to seeing the results of this research.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Parallel and Distributed Computing Seminar
DATE: Tuesday January 25
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Scheduling Heuristics for Clustered Superscalar Processors
SPEAKER: Amirali Baniasadi, ECE Northwestern

VLSI Design & CAD Seminar
DATE: Thursday, January 27
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324 (ECE Conference Room)
TITLE: FPGA Implementation and Analysis of an Iterative Image Restoration Algorithm
SPEAKER: Seda Ogrenci, ECE graduate Student

EXAMINATIONS

There are no exams scheduled this week.

OTHER NEWS

I regret to announce that Professor Nate Newman has decided to leave our faculty, effective March 15, 2000. He has accepted a faculty position as a Professor of Material Science at Arizona State University. Please join me in wishing him the best of luck in his new career. We will certainly miss him in the department.
-Prith Banerjee

CSRL NEWS

DELTA

Delta.ece.nwu.edu will be upgraded to a Sun Ultra 10 with 440MHz UltraSPARC IIi processor and 256MB of memory within the next two weeks. At the same time, its operating system will be upgraded to Solaris 2.7. Delta is currently a SPARCstation 10 with 64MB of memory and is running SunOS 4.1.4. The upgrade will be a major improvement, so will be immediately noticeable.

SecureCRT REMINDER

I would like to remind the students and staff that we have previously purchased 500 licenses of SecureCRT, a Windows implementation of SSH, the Secure Shell protocol. SSH is basically an encrypting telnet. It can, therefore, be used instead of S/Key for secure logins. It is superior to S/Key in that one's entire session is encrypted, instead of just one's password. It is also much friendlier than S/Key. It looks no different from telnet. Please see http://www.ece.nwu.edu/CSEL/scrt.html to obtain SecureCRT.

X-WIN32

Last year, the department acquired 25 licenses for X-Win32, an X Windows server implementation for Windows machines. This software is very popular, so the licenses were exhausted very quickly. The University has now acquired an unlimited number of licenses for the next three years. Anyone who wishes to use this sofware should send email to xwin32@ece.nwu.edu and request a license key. The software itself can be downloaded from the vendor's web site: http://www.starnet.com/download/

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.