DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of February 5 - 9, 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.

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CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

In this newsletter I would like to write about two events. First, we had an annual meeting of the Motorola Telecommunications Center at Northwestern on Friday, February 2. A group of top executives from Motorola learned about the excellent research being carried out by our faculty and graduate students. About ten research projects were presented to them. As many of you know, Professor Aggelos Katsaggelos is the Director of the Motorola Center and was responsible for coordinating this meeting.

Second, the week of February 5 is the time to meet with advisors to prepare for advance registration for Spring 2001 quarter. We had to make a few last-minute changes in the Spring 2001 schedule because of some course conflicts. Please check the latest schedule on the ECE web site and the SES web site. Finally, we are working on next year's (2001-2002) teaching schedule this week. As soon as that is ready we will put it up on our web site as well. This will help you better select your Spring 2001 courses.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

EXAMINATIONS

Friday, February 9, 2001: M.S. Final Examination - 2:00 p.m.
Room L324
Stavros Tzavidas
"A Novel Setup for Generating Stereo Panoramic Video"
Committee Members: A. Katsaggelos (chairman), T. Pappas, A. Sahakian, and B. Gandhi

TRAVEL

Thrasos Pappas traveled to San Jose, CA, January 22-26, to attend the IS&T/SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, where he was co-chair of the conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging. In the same conference, his student Junqing Chen presented their paper on "Perceptual coders and perceptual metrics." A paper by Jay Williams, Aggelos Katsaggelos, and Dean Garstecki was also presented at the conference.

CSRL NEWS

WILKINSON LAB

On several occasions we have noticed the lab in various states of disarray. Chairs moved away from workstations, paper trash left on tables, keyboards and monitors turned in unusual directions, and lots and lots of food wrappers and cups in the trash bin. Let us all work together to keep the Wilkinson lab looking clean and nice. If you move a chair from a workstation to collaborate with a friend, please be courteous enough to return the chair before leaving the lab.

Also, despite the signs on the walls, people continue to bring coffee, soda, and food into the lab. The reason food is banned in the lab is to prevent damage to the equipment. We work hard to keep the computers current and in great working order. Please obey this rule. The consequences of ignoring it are severe.

MATLAB LICENSES

As you may have noticed, we have gotten a temporary Unix license for matlab. It's good until April 1st. Hopefully we'll get a permanent 1-year license from Mathworks soon.

-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.