DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of January 22 - 26, 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 ECE Department is preparing for a Program Review this year. This is a process that takes place once every seven years; every academic unit gets reviewed.

During Fall 2000, the department faculty prepared a document describing the current state of the faculty, students, research, undergraduate and graduate programs in the department, and what our goals for the next seven years should be. The document was sent to the university administration on January 10.

We will be reviewed by an internal committee consisting of professors from Northwestern, namely, Prof. Dudley Childress and Prof. Peter Dallos. In addition, we will be reviewed by an external committee consisting of Venky Narayanmurti, Dean of Engineering, Harvard (who will review the Electrical Engineering program), and Prof. Yale Patt, Chaired Professor, ECE, Univ. of Texas at Austin (who will review the Computer Engineering program). The review is scheduled for May 23-24. The reviewers will meet with each faculty member and a select number of undergraduate and graduate students.

We will keep everyone posted as the date nears.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

OTHER MEETINGS

Master of Information Technology Program (MITP) Open House

The first of three Open Houses for prospective students will be held on Monday, January 22, from 6:30-9:30 p.m., in Room L482 (Faculty Lounge) of the Technological Institute. Please see http://www.ece.nwu.edu/ITP/ for more information on the MITP program.

TRAVEL

Jorge Nocedal traveled to Merida, Mexico, January 8-12, to attend the 7th US-Mexico Workshop on Numerical Analysis, which he organized. He presented the paper, "Identification of Active sets in very large nonlinear programs."

Professor Manijeh Razeghi gave a Colloquium Seminar entitled, "Enabling Technology for the New Millenium: Toward Atomic Scale," in the Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Chicago, on January 17, 2001.

Professor Manijeh Razeghi is traveling to Arlington, VA, January 22-23, as an NSF Review Panel Member, Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Teams (NIRT) for Nanoscale Science Engineering (NSE) Initiative, National Science Foundation.

CSRL NEWS

WILKINSON LAB

Thanks to a generous discount of about $20,000 from Sun Microsystems, the old HP workstations with small, dim monitors were replaced last week with fourteen Sun Ultra 5s with 128MB of RAM, 9GB disks, 400MHz UltraSPARC IIi CPUs, and beautiful 21" flat-screen trinitron monitors. The department would like to thank Sun Microsystems and our former sales representative Dao Jensen for helping to make this happen.

The Wilkinson lab is now composed of 28 Sun Ultra 5 computers. Soon, it will also house 16 high-end PCs from the Microsoft donation headlined in previous newsletters.

SYSTEM PATCHES

All Solaris-based hosts (both SPARC and Intel) will be patched with the latest recommended and security patch clusters on Wednesday, January 31. The exact time will be specified in the next newsletter. This week, on Wednesday morning at 3am, the Wilkinson Suns will be patched. As usual, after the patches are applied, all patched hosts will be rebooted.

UNIX MATLAB LICENSE

As you may have noticed, our Unix Matlab license will expire at the end of the month. I have been in contact with NU IT regarding obtaining an extension license. I am told that MathWorks (the makers of Matlab) has forced NU to negotiate the new license with new terms, and at considerably increased expense. IT has sent a purchase order and is awaiting new, correct license codes from MathWorks, something I'm told was extremely difficult last year. We hope to have the new codes before the current licenses expire, but there is no guarantee that MathWorks will generate the right codes by then.

PC versions of Matlab do not use expiring license files, so are not affected by this problem.

-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.