ECE Newsletter

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of January 31 - February 4, 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 one of my previous newsletters this quarter I mentioned that we are planning to recruit three new faculty in our department in the areas of: (1) Networks and communications (2) Photonic systems and technology (3) VLSI design and CAD. We have an extremely busy schedule of candidate visits in the coming month. Here is the status so far:

Friday Jan. 21:
Mike Tsatsanis, Ph.D. Virginia, Currently Stevens Institute (Networks)

Wednesday Feb. 2:
Pramod Viswanath, Ph.D. Berkeley, (Networks)

Wednesday Feb. 9:
Sangjin Hong, Ph.D. Michigan (VLSI)

Friday Feb. 11:
John Lach, Ph.D. UCLA (VLSI)

Monday Feb. 14:
Yehea Ismail, Ph.D. Rochester (VLSI)

We are in the process of possibly interviewing the following additional candidates during the second part of February and first week of March:

Selim Shahriar, Ph.D MIT, currently postdoc MIT, (Photonics)
Mary Phillips, Ph.D MIT, Currently Scientific Atlanta (Photonics)
Randall Berry, Ph.D. MIT (Networks)

I encourage everyone to attend the candidate seminars. The seminars will be announced in the ECE newsletters in future weeks. This will be an opportunity for all of us to learn about exciting research done by researchers outside our university. I would also like to get your feedback on what you think of all the candidates that we interview.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Optimization Seminar
DATE: Tuesday, February 1
TIME: 11:00-12:00
PLACE: L324 (ECE conference room)
TITLE: Solving the world largest quadratic assignment problem on metacomputers.
SPEAKER: Jean-Pierre Goux - Northwestern / Argonne National Lab

Photonic Systems and Technology Seminar
DATE: Tuesday, February 1
TIME: 2:00-3:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: EHF Optical Nuller
SPEAKER: Robert Brown, MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Parallel and Distributed Computing Seminar
DATE: Tuesday, February 1
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Loop-Cache: An Instruction Hierarchy Component for Reduced Energy Consumption
SPEAKER: Nikos Bellas, Motorola

Faculty Candidate Seminar
DATE: Wednesday, February 2
TIME: 1:30-3:00 p.m.
PLACE: L324
TITLE: Asymptotically Optimal Waterfilling in Multiple Antenna Multiple Access Channels
SPEAKER: Pramod Viswanath, EECS, University of California, Berkeley

Database Seminar
DATE: Thursday, February 3
TIME: 4:00-5:00 p.m.
PLACE: B211
TITLE: Mining Web Usage Data for Automatic Site Personalization
SPEAKER: Prof. Bamshad Mobasher (DePaul University)

EXAMINATIONS

Friday, February 4: M.S. Final Examination - 2:00 p.m.
Room L324
Fatma Seda Ogrenci
"FPGA Implementation and Analysis of an Iterative Image Restoration Algorithm"
Committee Members: M. Sarrafzadeh (chairman), A. Katsaggelos, and P. Banerjee

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES/AWARDS/HONORS

I am delighted to announce that Professor Andreas Moshovos has been awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for a four-year period, 2000-2004, for $230,000. This award is given each year to a select group of outstanding junior faculty members in science and engineering. Prof. Moshovos joined our department in January, 1999, after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Please join me in congratulating Andreas on this very deserved recognition.

-Prith Banerjee

TRAVEL

Professor Thrasos Pappas traveled to San Jose to attend the Electronic Imaging Symposium where he co-chaired the conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging.

OTHER NEWS

The Master of Information Technology Program (MITP), a professional graduate degree program in the ECE Department, is having three Open Houses for prospective students.

The Open Houses will be held on the fourth floor of the Technological Institute (2145 Sheridan Road, on the Evanston campus) on the following dates:

Wednesday, February 9, 2000 from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Wednesday, March 15, 2000 from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.
Wednesday, April 26, 2000 from 6:30 - 8:30 p.m.

If you are interested in coming to an Open House or in finding out more about the MIT Program, please call Carol Henes, the Associate Director, at 847/467-6557 or send an e-mail message to itp@nwu.edu. The MITP web site contains additional information about the Program. The web site address is http://www.ece.nwu.edu/itp/.

CSRL NEWS

MATLAB
As promised, 5.3 is now the default version of Matlab on the Solaris and HP machines. Since Mathworks no longer supports SunOS, the default on that platform is the latest version available, 5.2.

LINUX REMINDER
Recently, there has been a concerted effort by crackers to break into Linux boxes. Please let me remind you that, for the sake of security, you must not have the same password on your linux box as you do on the centrally-managed Unix machines, such as delta, and the Wilkinson Cluster machines. I cannot stress enough how important this is.

NEWS REMINDER
On Monday night/Tuesday morning, we will be switching over to using ACNS's Usenet news server. The switch-over will be transparent in the sense that you will not have to do anything yourself. However, as noted in a previous newsletter article, you will likely notice that article counts are wrong the first time you access news after the switch-over.

-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.