DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of October 15 - 19, 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.

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CHAIRMAN'S COLUMN

In this newsletter, I am delighted to announce the recipients of the 2001-2002 year Motorola Sponsored Undergraduate Research Program. The aim of this grant is to allow our undergraduates to do research with faculty and senior graduate students so that they get to know what research is all about.

In addition, we have three grants for the undergraduate research program funded by Microsoft last year which have not been used, and these are also being announced today.

List of the Microsoft funded undergraduate research projects for 2001-2002 

	
Gregory Lou		User Friendly Graphical Interface for
Advisor: Liao		Querying Scientific Metadata from Multiple
			Database Systems

Y. Vorobeychik		Data Reduction Techniques for the
Advisor: Scheuermann	Representation of 2-D Pictures

Carey Tischler		Towards Immersive PowerPoint Presentations
Advisor: Ying Wu
List of the Motorola funded undergraduate research projects for 2001-2002 
Vishnu Reddy		Web-Controlled Exploration and Surveillance
Advisor: Chi-haur Wu	Robot
	
David T. Nguyen		Managing Scientific Metadata Using XML and
Advisor: Choudhary	Databases

James Foster		Functional Timing Analysis in Presence of
Advisor: Hai Zhou	Crosstalk

Tulaya Limpiti		Signature Adaptation in Ad-hoc Networks
Advisor: Honig		

Justin Wong		Trading Speed for Power:  Reducing Power
Advisor: Ismail		Consumption by Using Newer VLSI Process
			Technologies
							
Vincent Hui		CMOS Circuit Design Factoring in Temperature
Advisor: Ismail		and Power Constraints
				
Matthew Hayden		Wave Generator and Amplifier Design for
Advisor: Kumar		Stable Optical Wave Generation

Allan Evans		Design of a Portable Type II Semiconductor
Advisor: Razeghi	Photodetector System
				
Lisa Doris		Estimating Time Domain Response from Swept-
Advisor: Sahakian	Frequency Microwave Network Analyzer
			Measurement

John Shen,		Design and Build an Updateable Message CD Player
Jed Brewer, 
Michael Englert, and
Prashant Velagaleti
Advisor: Taflove
I wish to congratulate all the undergraduate students for being chosen for these awards. I am looking forward to seeing the results of this research at the end of the academic year, when the results will be presented in a poster session in June 2002.

Two announcements:

  1. On Thursday, October 18, at noon we have our first ECE faculty meeting.
  2. The deadline for submitting resumes by seniors and graduate students for our resume book is October 19, 2001.

-Abe Haddad
Interim Chairman

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES/AWARDS/HONORS

Please follow the link below for a press release on the New Focus Student Award Ceremony. Jay Sharping, Ph.D. student of Prem Kumar, is one of the finalists in this high profile event sponsored by the Optical Society of America that is to be held next week in Long Beach, CA.

A HREF="http://lfw.pennnet.com/Articles/Article_Display.cfm?Section=OnlineA\ rticl es&SubSection=Display&PUBLICATION_ID=12&ARTICLE_ID=121935

TRAVEL

Professor Mary Phillips gave an invited talk titled, "Crosstalk in CATV WDM lightwave systems," at the OECC/IOOC 2001 Conference in Sydney, Australia, July 1-5, 2001.

CSRL NEWS

NEW STUDENT WELCOME

On behalf of the computing staff, I'd like to welcome our new students. Information on the department computing facilities can be found at

http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/CSEL/Computing-environment.\ html In particular, new students will be interested in

http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/CSEL/CSEL_FAQ.html

WILKINSON PCs INSTALLED

Sixteen Windows 2000 PCs donated by Microsoft have been installed in the Wilkinson lab and are ready for use by all ECE affiliates. They have an assortment of software installed, including

Visual Studio 6 Pro, Office 2000 Pro, Visio 2000 Technical,
Project 2000, Matlab 6.1, SSH Secure Shell, X-Win32, and the
NU Internet Applications.

 Login instructions can be found on the label affixed to each PC. Report problems and suggestions to <root@ece.northwestern.edu>.

MATLAB FOR UNIX UPGRADED

Matlab 6.1/Rel 12.1 for Unix has been installed for the Solaris SPARC platform. It can be accessed by issuing the "matlab" command from any Sun xterm. An extensive documentation set has also been installed in the /meas/matlab6/help directory. Here you will find help in various formats, including PDF and HTML. I recommend the following URL:

file:/meas/matlab6/help/begin_here.html

GIMP INSTALLED

GIMP, a free Adobe Photoshop-like image editing package, has been installed in /meas/beta/bin. Like everything else in /meas/beta, this software is not supported, so caveat utilitor. That said, we have tested this package (minimally) and it seems to be installed correctly. We would appreciate feedback from anyone that uses this package because of its potential usefulness. As usual, send that info to <root@ece.northwestern.edu >.

POSTFIX MTA REPLACES SENDMAIL IN WILKINSON LAB

After an extended testing period, postfix, an efficient, secure mail transfer agent has been installed on the Wilkinson Suns and delta, replacing sendmail. It will gradually supplant sendmail on all ECE hosts. Please report any mail-related anomalies as soon as you discover them.

NETSCAPE UPGRADED

Netscape on all Solaris Unix hosts has been upgraded from v4.76 to v4.78. This is now the officially-supported version.

-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.