DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of January 29 - February 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

In this issue I would like to inform everyone of the status of faculty hiring for the 2000-2001 year. While outstanding candidates in all areas of electrical and computer engineering will be considered, we have particular needs in the areas of nano-technology, networks and communications, signal and image processing, VLSI design and CAD, and computer architecture. A detailed advertisement of the openings in our department exists on our web site. Ads have been placed in various magazines such as IEEE Spectrum. Applications for these positions are due February 1. As of now, we have received more than 150 applications for these positions. We have requested letters of reference for about 50 candidates. During the next couple of weeks we will be identifying candidates for possible interviews. We plan to interview about 10-12 candidates for these positions during the months of February and March. We will announce the seminars of these faculty candidates in our newsletters.

Faculty and students are encouraged to attend the seminars and provide us with feedback on the quality of the candidates. Some of these candidates will become faculty in our department starting Fall 2001.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Seminar
DATE: Monday, January 29, 2001
TIME: 4:00 - 5:00 p.m.
PLACE: Technological Institute - Room L324
TITLE: Tools for Parallel Processing on Linux Clusters
SPEAKER: Bob Kuhn, Ph.D., KAI Software, An Intel Company

EXAMINATIONS

Tuesday, January 30, 2001: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination - 10:00 a.m.
Room M416
Demetrakis Demetrious
"Computational Electromagnetics Modeling of Man-Made 90 Degree Wedge Type of Structures using the FDTD Numerical Method"
Committee Members: A. Bayliss (chairman), A. Katsaggelos, and A. Sahakian

TRAVEL

Professor Jelen's participation at the SPIE International Symposium on Optoelectronics 2001, San Jose, CA, January 22-24, 2001:
Session Chair, "Novel Photodetectors," and
"Quantum Dot Infrared Photodetectors Compared with QWIPs," Photodetectors Materials and Devices VI Conference

Prem Kumar gave an invited Fireside Chat on "Quantum Communication, Teleportation, and Quantum Computing," to undergraduate students at the Lindgren Residential College, Northwestern University, January 18, 2001.

Prof. Kumar traveled to Madison, WI, January 26-27, to give a colloquium in the Physics department entitled, "Quantum Communication with Fiber-optic Devices."

Professor Razeghi's participation in SPIE International Symposium on Optoelectronics 2001, San Jose, CA, January 22-26, 2001:

Conference Chair, "Photodetectors Materials and Devices VI Conference".

Invited, "High Performance Quantum Cascade Lasers Grown by Gas-Source Molecular Beam Epitaxy," In-Plane Semiconductor Lasers V.

Valerie Taylor traveled to New Orleans, LA, January 8-10, and participated in the SC2000 Wrap-up meeting and the SCxy Steering Committee meeting.

Prof. Taylor traveled to Mississippi Valley State University in Oxford, MS, January 18-19, and gave a talk entitled "Prophesy: An Infrastructure for Modeling and Analyzing Parallel and Distributed Applications." She also participated on a CRA-W Panel about Graduate School.

CSRL NEWS

WILKINSON LAB

As was mentioned previously, the Wilkinson lab is now composed entirely of Sun Ultra 5 workstations. The HPs are gone. What I forgot to mention was that the new Suns have taken the old HP's names. So, now, for instance, moorea is one of the new 400MHz Suns.

This past week, all but fiji of the older Wilkinson Suns have been upgraded from Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 7. fiji will be upgraded once we've confirmed that the scanner software runs under Solaris 7.

PATCHES AND REBOOTS

As previously scheduled, the latest patch cluster will be applied to all non-Wilkinson Suns this week. The machines will then be automatically rebooted at 3am Wednesday morning, January 31st.

-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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