DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of February 26 - March 2, 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.

If you are not receiving this email, please contact <nancy@ece.northwestern.edu> and we will get you on that email list.

CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

Our faculty recruiting process is in full swing this quarter. In the past two weeks, we have interviewed four candidates, and three more candidates are visiting us this week. We have been having good attendance from both the faculty and the students at these seminars. Please keep it up. We will be requesting feedback on the candidates from faculty and students in the first week of March.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Faculty Candidate Seminars

DATE: Monday, February 26, 2001
TIME: 11:00 - 12:30
PLACE: Room L324
TITLE: "Crosstalk: Analysis and Optimization"
SPEAKER: Hai Zhou, Ph.D. (University of Texas, Austin), Senior R&D Engineer, Synopsys Inc.

DATE: Tuesday, February 27, 2001
TIME: 3:00 - 4:30
PLACE: Room L324
TITLE: "The Square Root Law for TCP, and Applications"
SPEAKER: Teunis J. Ott, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Telcordia Technologies

DATE: Thursday, March 1, 2001
TIME: 11:00 - 12:30
PLACE: Room L324
TITLE: "Medium Access Control in Wireless Networks with Multipacket Reception: Signal Processing and Optimal Protocols"
SPEAKER: Qing Zhao, Ph.D. Candidate, Cornell University

EXAMINATIONS

Wednesday, February 28, 2001: M.S. Final Examination - 1:00 p.m.
Room L324
Min-John Lee
"3D Object Classification using Support Vector Machines"
Committee Members: W.-C. Lin (chairman), C.-H. Wu, and G. Krulee

Thursday, March 1, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination - 9:00 a.m.
Room MLSB 2058B
Joseph Wojkowski
"Experimental Development of Uncooled Lattice-Mismatched Heteroepitaxial InAsSb-based Infrared Photodetectors"
Committee Members: M. Razeghi (chairperson), C. Jelen, A. Sahakian, J. Birge, and C. Kannewurf

Thursday, March 1, 2001: M.S. Final Examination - 11:00 a.m.
Room MLSB 2058B
Peter Sandvik
"Design and Development of Ultraviolet and Solar-Blind Al(x)Ga(1-x)N Photodetectors"
Committee Members: M. Razeghi (chairperson), C. Jelen, A. Sahakian, and C. Kannewurf

Friday, March 2, 2001: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination - 9:00 a.m.
Room L324
Amirali Baniasadi
"Performance and Power in Clustered Architectures"
Committee Members: A. Moshovos (chairman), P. Banerjee, A. Choudhary, and Y. Ismail

TRAVEL

Professor Prem Kumar traveled to Washington, DC, February 21-23, to serve on a review panel at the NSF in the Electronics, Photonics, and Device Technologies (EPDT) program of the Electrical and Communications systems (ECS) Division.

Professor Allen Taflove is traveling to Washington, DC, February 26-27, to participate in a Naval Research Lab review panel overseeing a project by SAIC, Inc. Their project involves the development of design codes (computer software for physics modeling) for vacuum electron devices such as traveling wave tubes and klystrons. Also on the review panel will be a scientist from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and a program official from DARPA.

Professor Bruce Wessels is traveling to SUNY, Stony Brook, NY, March 1-2, to attend a DARPA contracts meeting.

CSRL NEWS

LASER1 QUEUES

As was mentioned in previous editions of the ECE newsletter, the high paper usage of laser1 compelled us to log per-user laser1 printing statistics. Analysis of this data has shown that the printer is being used inordinately by grad students. Since the Wilkinson lab is funded as a teaching lab, it may not be used for research purposes. Together with the ECE Computing Facilities Committee, the Computing Staff has therefore decided to remove laser1 queues from all Unix workstations not located in the Wilkinson lab. Grad students with laser1 queues on their PCs are not to use this printer.

SSH2 SUPPORT

NU has very recently purchased a site license of SSH protocol version 2 with fallback support for SSH-1. This is a comprehensive license that includes the following components:

See AT's web page

http://charlotte.at.northwestern.edu/bef/sshdist.html

for more information and for the client programs. ECE's "PC Software and Services" web page will soon be updated to include a link to the above page.

Finally, this week we will begin converting to this version of the SSH server on all ECE Unix hosts. Terra Term SSH uses protocol 1. If you don't want to upgrade at this time, you will not have problems, but you should move to SSH-2 as soon as you can.

-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.northwestern.edu> before Thursday 5PM of the previous week to be included in the current week's news. Include information about seminars, exams, travel, research grants, professional news, and personal news.