DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of April 9 - 13, 2001

This page contains news related to the ECE department for the current week. Specifically, it includes information about seminars, exams, travel, research grants, professional news, and personal news.

This newsletter is also emailed by Friday afternoon of the previous week to all faculty, staff, and students in ECE.

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CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

I am pleased to inform you that the search process for faculty positions is coming to a close this year. We have made offers to four faculty candidates, one in each of the following areas: (1) computer architecture, (2) VLSI CAD, (3) networks and communications, and (4) signal and image processing. The official offer letters went out this week. We hope to hear from the candidates by the end of the month. For reasons of confidentiality, we cannot release the names until they accept. As soon as they accept, we will let everyone know. We are looking forward to working with these new faculty next year.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Special Seminar
DATE: Thursday, April 12, 2001
TIME: 3:00 p.m. (coffee at 2:30)
PLACE: Tech L324
TITLE: "Why Basketballs Turn Into Footballs in Confocal Imaging"
SPEAKER: Professor Ian T. Young, Delft University of Technology, Dept. of Applied Physics, Delft, The Netherlands

EXAMINATIONS

Tuesday, April 10, 2001: M.S. Final Examination
Sheeraz Daudi
"Option C"
Committee Members: L. Henschen (chairman), P. Scheuermann, and P. Banerjee

Thursday, April 12, 2001: M.S. Final Examination - 4:00 p.m.
Room L324
Robert K. Anderson (RESCHEDULED)
"An Algorithm for Generating a Pipelined Multiplier of Arbitrary Length and Precision"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), A. Sahakian, and A. Choudhary

Friday, April 13, 2001: M.S. Final Examination
Supbhawong Vichaphund
"Option C"
Committee Members: C. Jelen (chairman), L. Henschen, and P. Banerjee

Friday, April 13, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination - 3:00 p.m.
Room L324
Lance Hester
"A Self-Organizing Wireless Network Protocol"
Committee Members: C.-C. Lee (chairman), M. Honig, A. Haddad, and L. Henschen

RESEARCH GRANTS

I am pleased to inform you that DARPA is going to fund our new cryptography project, "Ultra-secure and Ultra-efficient Quantum Cryptographic Schemes for Optical System, Networks, and the Internet." The senior people involved are: Horace Yuen, PI; Prem Kumar, co-PI; Geraldo Barbosa, co-PI; and Mary Phillips, co-PI. DARPA will fund a total of $2.1M over a 3-year period.

-Prem Kumar

TRAVEL

Professor Jorge Nocedal traveled to Santa Fe, New Mexico, April 3-10 to chair a session and present the paper, "The Potential of Interior Methods in PDE constrained Optimization" at the First Sandia Workshop on Large-Scale PDE-Constrained Optimization.

Professor Manijeh Razeghi gave an invited Talk, "CQD Vision of the III-V Semiconductor Sb-based Mesocopic Optoelectronic Devices," at the Mid-Infrared Optoelectronics Materials and Devices (MIOMD) 4th International Conference, Montpellier, France, April 1-4, 2001.

CSRL NEWS

MATLAB

The University has agreed on a price with Mathworks and has subsequently obtained another year's license for Matlab. We have already updated the license files on both the Solaris and HP-UX machines.

In addition, Matlab version 6 (a.k.a "release 12") has been installed. Gradually, we'll move to that release in favor of version 5.3. For those that would like to use the latest version, issue the "matlab6" command. As incentive to use this version, we have several additional trial toolboxes and blocksets for release 12. Use them now, for they expire on July 1st. Here is a list of the trial software:

CD PLAYERS

The SPARC-based Solaris boxes now have two CD-player applications installed: "xmcd" and the venerable "workman". If time permits, we'll also install the Winamp-like XMMS program which can play audio CDs, mp3s, waves, and more. Building XMMS is a bit of a chore, which is why it will take longer.

-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager

OLD NEWS

You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .

HOW TO SUBMIT ENTRY

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