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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First, I wish to extend my sympathy to anyone in the Northwestern family who suffered due to the tragic events of September 11, 2001. I do realize the upheavals in the plans of many of our new and returning students. We hope that we can start the academic year in as normal a fashion as possible and will attempt to solve any problems resulting from the events of last week. As you may know, the event caused us to postpone the meeting of the ECE Advisory Board which was scheduled for September 13, 2001.
I want to welcome all our new and returning undergraduate and graduate students. I assume that the faculty have had a restful but very productive summer, and are ready to resume their academic year duties with enthusiasm. Special welcome is extended to our new faculty who joined us on September 1, 2001 (exact arrival date was of course strongly influenced by the events of last week):
Renato Figueiredo, Ph.D. from Purdue University, as an Assistant Professor in the computer architecture area;
Selim Shahriar, Ph.D. from MIT, as Associate Professor in the photonics area;
Ying Wu, Ph.D. from UIUC, as Assistant Professor in the image and signal processing area;
Hai Zhou, Ph.D. from University of Texas at Austin, in the VLSI/CAD area.
Please join me in welcoming them and making their experience at NU very pleasant.
One faculty member, Chris Jelen, resigned to join Northrup-Grumman. He shall be missed by all. Also, Carl Kannewurf retired after a very productive career in our department, but will continue to be around as an Emeritus Professor.
We extend our congratulations to Randy Freeman who was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure; he is also taking over the Directorship of the Dynamics Systems & Controls Council. Special congratulations to Professor Valerie Taylor for her selection to receive the Harriet B. Rigas Award of the IEEE Education Society.
I look forward to working with you during the 2001-02 academic year, which I hope to be productive and exciting, but peaceful.
-Abe Haddad
Interim Chairman
DATE: Thursday, September 27, 2001
TIME: 11:00 a.m.
PLACE: Room L324
TITLE: "Vision-Based Modeling and Interaction"
SPEAKER: Zhengyou Zhang, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
Monday, June 18, 2001: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination
Shih-Hui Chang
"The Simulation of Random Lasers"
Committee Members: S.-T. Ho (chairman), P. Kumar, H. Cao, and R. Chang
Monday, June 29, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination
Laura A. Drake
"Sound Source Separation via Computational Auditory Scene Analysis
(CASA) -- Enhanced Beamforming"
Committee Members: A. Katsaggelos (chairman), J. Rutledge,
M. Randolph, G. Kendall, L. Henschen
Friday, July 27, 2001: M.S. Final Examination
Michael Alan Walkden
"Signal Processing Libraries on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs)
for MATLAB Functions"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), A. Choudhary, and
L. Henschen
Friday, July 27, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination
Zhaoyang Fan
"Development of AlN and GaN for Practical Applications"
Committee Members: N. Newman (chairman), A. Freeman, and L. Henschen
Monday, July 30, 2001: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination
Alexander K. Jones
"PACT HDL: A C Compiler Targeting ASICs and FPGAs with Power and
Performance Optimizations"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), A. Choudhary, and Y. Ismael
Monday, July 30, 2001: M.S. Final Examination
Chandra Mulpuri
"Runtime and Quality Tradeoffs in FPGA Placement and Routing"
Committee Members: L. Henschen (chairman), P. Banerjee, and
A. Choudhary
Monday, July 30, 2001: M.S. Final Examination
Shawn Phillips
"Automatic Layout of Domain Specific Reconfigurable Subsystems for
System-on-a-Chip (SOC)"
Committee Members: L. Henschen (chairman), P. Banerjee, S. Hauck, and
A. Choudhary
Monday, July 30, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination
Milica Popovic
"Microwave Imaging of Breast Tissues"
Committee Members: A. Taflove (chairman), A. Sahakian, and M. Epstein
Tuesday, July 31, 2001: M.S. Final Examination
Elias Fradelos
"Option C"
Committee Members: A. Katsaggelos (chairman), P. Banerjee, and
L. Henschen
Thursday, August 2, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination
Melissa Lane
"Transport Properties of Thermoelectric and Transparent Conducting
Oxide Materials"
Committee Members: C. Kannewurf (chairman), T. Marks, and R. Chang
Thursday, August 2, 2001: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination
John R. Ireland
"Electrical and Thermal Transport Measurements of Novel Thermoelectric
Materials Based Upon Beta-K2Bi8Se13"
Committee Members: C. Kannewurf (chairman), A. Sahakian, and T. Marks
Monday, August 27, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination
Malay Haldar
"Optimized Hardware Synthesis for FPGAs"
Committee Members: A. Choudhary (chairman), P. Banerjee, L. Henschen,
and Y. Ismael
Monday, August 27, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination
Anshuman Nayak
"Automatic Parallelization and Optimization for Synthesis on
Multi-FPGA Systems"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), A. Choudhary, Y. Ismael,
and L. Henschen
Monday, August 27, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination
Brett A. Lane
"Low-Pressure Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition Growth of
InAsSbP based Materials for Infrared Laser Applications"
Committee Members: M. Razeghi (chairperson), A. Sahakian, and
C. Kannewurf
Tuesday, August 28, 2001: M.S. Final Examination
Satrajit Pal
"Architecture Independent Power-Aware Compiler for Hardware Synthesis"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), A. Choudhary, and
L. Henschen
Tuesday, August 28, 2001: M.S. Final Examination
Debabrata Bagchi
"Power and Performance Trade Offs in High level Synthesis"
Committee Members: P. Banerjee (chairman), A. Choudhary, and
L. Henschen
Wednesday, September 5, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination
Olga Shumsky Matlin
"A Framework for Verification of SDL Software Specifications"
Committee Members: L. Henschen (chairman), P. Scheuermann, C.-H. Wu,
and W. McCune
Thursday, September 6, 2001: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination
Geoff Waldschmidt
"Locally Conformal Three-Dimensional FDTD Method with Application to
Modeling Slow-Wave Linear Accelerators"
Committee Members: A. Taflove (chairman), A. Sahakian, and A. Bayliss
Friday, September 7, 2001: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination
Anna L. Chen
"A Dissipation Approach to Performance Analysis for Nonlinear System"
Committee Members: R. Freeman (chairman), A. Haddad, and
A. Katsaggelos
Thursday, September 13, 2001: Ph.D. Final Examination
Demetrakis Demetrious
"Computational Electromagnetics Modeling of Man-Made 90 Degree Wedge
Type of Structures using the FDTD Numerical Method"
Committee Members: A. Bayliss (chairman), W. Kath, A. Katsaggelos, and
A. Sahakian
Prith Banerjee:
Traveled to Las Vegas, NV, June 19-21, to attend the
ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference.
Traveled to Washington, DC, July 23, to attend NSF CISE
Meeting.
Visited Baltimore, MD, Aug 30, for the NASA Earth
Science Technology Meeting.
Abe Haddad traveled to Arlington, VA, June 23-July 1 to attend the 2001 American Control Conference. He participated in the Operating Committees of the ACC'01 and ACC'02 Board of Directors of the AACC as an officer of the AACC. He also partipated in the IFAC Executive Board and Policy Committee meetings as Chairman of the IFAC Policy Committee.
Aggelos Katsaggelos gave a plenary talk entitled "Trends in Information Technology" at the Conference on "New Developments in Research and Innovative Products in: Information Technologies, Environmental Technologies, Agrobiotechnologies, and Water Management Technologies," Thessaloniki, Greece, June 23, 2001.
Prem Kumar:
Traveled to Rochester, NY, June 12-14, to be an invited speaker at the
Eighth Rochester Conference on Coherence and Quantum Optics (CQ08).
His talk was entitled, "Fiber generated quantum correlations for
quantum-optical communications," sponsored by the Optical Society of
America.
Traveled to Santa Barbara, CA, June 26-27, and attended the
Final Review of the FY95 MURI Program on Advanced Optoelectronic
Components for Broadband Communications. He made a final presentation
on the 5-year MURI grant, "Integrated devices for terabit per second
1.3 and 1.5 micron WDM/TDM network applications."
Traveled to Redmond, WA, July 22-25, to attend the Microsoft
Faculty Summit 2001.
Jorge Nocedal:
Traveled to Maui, Hawaii, June 12-21, to present the
paper, "Active set identification for very large nonlinear programs,"
at INFORMS MEETING, 2001.
Visited Mexico City, Mexico, Aug 24-29, 2001, to continue research
collaboration with Prof. Jose Luis Morales, ITAM.
Alan V. Sahakian traveled to Albuquerque, NM, June 24-27, to attend the ASEE conference, attend ASEE Campus Representatives' meeting, and present paper: Introduction to Electrical Engineering: A Freshman/ Sophomore-Level Course Covering the Breadth of Electrical Engineering"
Valerie Taylor received the 2001 Harriett B. Rigas Award of the IEEE Education Society. This award, sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, was presented at an awards event during the Frontiers in Education Conference in Reno, Nevada. The Rigas Award consists of a $2000 honorarium, a gold-plated medal and a bronze replica, and a presentation scroll.
Jay Sharping, doctoral student of Prem Kumar, was selected as one of the eight finalists for the 2001 New Focus Student Award of the Optical Society of America. Each finalist received a cash prize of $2,500. Three of the finalists will be awarded a top prize of $10,000 after oral presentations at the OSA Annual Meeting.
You can look at news from previous weeks in Old News .