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.
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I am pleased to inform you that one more faculty candidate has accepted our offer this week. Renato Figueiredo will receive his Ph.D. from Purdue University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Campinas, Brazil. His main research interests are in computer architecture and network computing, and he has published 10 papers in conferences and journals. With Renato we now have four faculty that will join our department in Fall 2001: Ying Wu in signal processing, Hai Zhou in VLSI, Renato Figueiredo in computer architecture, and Selim Shahriar in nano-technology. We are still waiting to hear about three more offers. This year we are doing very well with faculty hires.
This past week, the ECE department was busy preparing for the Program Review which happens once every seven years. We had two external visitors, Prof. Venky Narayanamurti from Harvard, and Prof. Yale Patt from University of Texas at Austin. They met with all the faculty and about a dozen undergraduate and graduate students in our department on May 23 and May 24. I wish to thank all the faculty and students for taking the time off their busy schedules to meet with the reviewers. We will get feedback from the internal and external review committees at the end of summer and use it to discuss strategies to improve the department in the next ten years.
On Wednesday, May 30, the department will host our third Motorola Distinguished Lecture by Dr. Margaret H. Wright of Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Dr. Wright is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Bell Labs Fellow. She currently chairs the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee for the Department of Energy. In 2000 she received the Special Award for Distinguished Service to the Profession from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Her seminar will be on "Direct Search Methods: Once Scorned, Now Respectable" at 4:00 p.m. in the ECE Conference Room. All faculty and students are encouraged to attend the seminar.
Finally, a poster session of the projects of the Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Scholars, the Motorola sponsored Design Competition, and the Graduate Motorola-Northwestern Center for Communications will be held on Friday, June 1, between 1:30-4:00 p.m. in the Mezzanine of the Motorola Museum in Schaumburg. These research projects (22 in all) are motivated by Motorola technology needs and were made possible by a Motorola foundation grant and by Motorola corporation funding.
-Prith Banerjee
Chairman
Wednesday, May 30, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination - 4:00 p.m.
Room M228
Yong Ma
"Development of Nanoscale Optical Devices Based on InGaAsP/InP
Material System for Fiber-Optic Communications"
Committee Members: S.-T. Ho (chairman), P. Kumar, A. Sahakian, and
H. Cao
-Pred Bundalo
Computing Facilities Manager
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .