DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of June 11 - 15, 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

This is the last newsletter of the academic year 2000-2001. I wish all the students who will be graduating on June 15-16 the best of luck wherever they may be headed (to other universities or companies).

In this newsletter, I would like to recognize the best students and faculty in the department for this academic year. The Teaching and Awards Committee consisting of Martin Plonus (chairman), Abe Haddad, Wei-Chung Lin, and Randy Freeman selected the following students and faculty for awards. They were recognized on June 5 during an ECE faculty meeting.

The Best Teacher for the ECE Department was Prof. Larry Henschen.

The Best Ph.D. Dissertation for the ECE Department was Hooman Mohseni.

The Best Teaching Assistant for the ECE Department was Jin Zhang.

The Best Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Student was Budyanto Himawan.

The Best Computer Engineering Undergraduate Student was Chirayu Amin.

I would also like to report on the Winter 2001 Quarter CTEC scores for all ECE faculty. As always, I have recognized all faculty members who have achieved an instruction score of 5.0 or higher, and in some lower division courses that are very hard to teach, a score close to 5.0. They are marked below with an asterisk.

   Course	Professor	Instruction Score
    202		Freeman			4.0
    203		Lin			3.78
    221		Kumar			4.60
    222		Katsaggelos		4.55
  * 225		Wu			4.86
  * 230		Victor Kim		5.36
    230		Scheuermann		3.16
  * 250		Phillips		5.29
    302		Haddad			4.53
    308		Yuen			3.53
    313		Rahimi			4.12
  * 362		Choudhary		5.0
  * 380		Honig			5.41
    382		Kumar			4.57
  * 386		Taflove			5.80
  * 388		Razeghi			5.18
  * 391		Ismail			5.35
  * 401		Jelen			5.60
    407		Yuen			4.00
    420		Pappas			4.75
  * 422		Haddad			5.27
    452		Choudhary		4.67
    454		Berry			4.77

Please join me in congratulating our best students and teachers in the department.

-Prith Banerjee
Chairman

TRAVEL

On Thursday, June 7, Professor Prith Banerjee and Professor Alok Choudhary traveled to DARPA in Arlington, VA for a review of the research project, PACT: Power-Aware Architectural and Compilation Techniques.

CSRL NEWS

SOFTWARE UPGRADES

This week we have upgraded some important software development and management programs to the latest available versions. These packages are now available on both (SPARC and Intel) Solaris platforms.

Package          Version         Location
-----------------------------------------
gcc              2.95.3          /meas/beta
GNU make         3.79.1          /meas/bin as gmake
GNU binutils     2.11            /meas/bin
GNU gzip         1.3             /meas/bin
GNU tar          1.13.19         /meas/bin

Note that gcc 2.8.1 is still our production version. 2.95.3 is installed in /meas/beta both so that those who need it can have it and also to serve as a testing location before being installed as the default. You'll need to put /meas/beta/bin in your path before /meas/bin to get the new version of gcc. Please send us feedback (email to <root@ece.northwestern.edu>) if you use this new version.

SERVER MAINTENANCE SHUTDOWN

The master NIS server will be shut down this week Tuesday at 5pm in order to perform critical "cold spares" backups of the system disk. The outage will last for about an hour. During that time, the web server will not be available and network connections may appear slow as the clients timeout talking to the main server and switch to secondaries.

WILKINSON UNIX UPGRADES

Now that finals are over and students are on summer break, we will be replacing the older, 270MHz, Ultra 5s in the lab with new Sun Blade 100s. These new machines feature a 500MHz UltraSPARC IIe processor, 128MB of memory, and the Solaris 8 operating environment.

-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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