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I would like to wish everyone a very Happy New Year. I hope everybody had a good winter break. Classes for the Winter quarter start on Wednesday, January 5.
I am pleased and excited to announce that the Motorola Foundation has approved a cash gift to Campaign Northwestern for $500,000 ($100,000 per year for five years) to support various new initiatives in the ECE department within the McCormick School at Northwestern University. This gift will allow the ECE department to take on several new initiatives: (1) A Motorola Sponsored ECE Distinguished Lectureship Series in which we will bring six truly distinguished researchers to our department each year to give seminars and meet with faculty and students; (2) A Motorola Sponsored Graduate Recruiting Initiative which will allow us to offer some extra stipend to the best first-year graduate students, and a graduate student recruiting weekend when we will fly in our best graduate student applicants to visit our campus and meet our faculty; (3) A Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Program, which will provide some stipends for undergraduates to do research with various ECE faculty; (4) A Motorola Sponsored ECE Open House to be held each year; and (5) Motorola Sponsorship of the Annual Design Competition. More details about each of these initiatives will be announced in future ECE Newsletters.
The check will be officially presented to us at a Motorola-NU Alumni Reception in Schaumburg to be held in January or February 2000.
This gift was made possible through the hard work of several people. I would like to thank Northwestern University President Henry Bienen and Campaign Northwestern Chairperson Don Perkins for initiating a dialog with the Motorola CEO Chris Galvin to consider such a gift. I would like to acknowledge the tremendous work that Wes Lindahl and Lisa Cochrane from the Corporate Relations office at Northwestern did to follow through with our original proposal to Motorola with a much more polished final proposal. I would like to acknowledge the help of the following ECE faculty: Prof. Prem Kumar, Prof. Majid Sarrafzadeh, Prof. Mike Honig, Prof. Larry Henschen, Prof. Allen Taflove, Prof. Peter Scheuermann, Prof. Alok Choudhary, Prof. Jorge Nocedal, Prof. Alan Sahakian, Prof. Aggelos Katsaggelos, and Prof. C. C. Lee, for attending numerous meetings with the Motorola personnel as this concept was being developed over the past year. I would like to thank Dean John Birge for visiting Motorola with me in November and supporting this strong relationship. Finally and most importantly, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Bob Barnett, Frances Laidlaw, and Ken Zdunek of Motorola without whose strong support this gift would not have been possible.
I look forward to working with Motorola over the next five years in making our ECE department much stronger. This latest cash gift will nicely complement the Motorola Sponsored Telecommunications Research Center.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
Prof. Prith Banerjee and his graduate student Yanhong Yuan have been notified that they will receive the Best Paper Award in the Applications Area at the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS2000) in Cancun, Mexico, for their paper entitled, "A Parallel Implementation of a Fast Multipole Based 3-D Capacitance Extraction Program on Distributed Memory Multicomputers." The conference will be held in May 2000.
Prof. Prith Banerjee traveled to Calcutta, India, December 12-28, to: 1) Attend the International Conference on High-Performance Computing, Dec. 17-21 as program chair of the conference and to present a paper, 2) To visit the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Dec. 16 and present a seminar, and 3) To visit the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Dec. 23 and present a seminar.
Prof. Prem Kumar is traveling in Calcutta, India, from Dec. 27 to January 10, attending the "Winter Institute on Foundations of Quantum Theory and Quantum Optics" at S.N. Bose National Centre For Basic Sciences, and presenting the invited paper, "Quantum correlations in parametric amplification: their measurement for testing the state reduction rule of quantum mechanics."
Prof. Nate Newman is traveling to Santa Barbara, CA, January 4-7, to attend a DARPA "Spins in Semiconductors" Workshop.
Prof. Jorge Nocedal is traveling to Cancun, Mexico, January 5-10, to attend the INFORMS Meeting 2000.
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .