DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of February 25 - March 1, 2002

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

Pinaki Mazumder will be visiting our department on Monday, February 25. Please plan to attend his seminar at 4:00.

We have our second ECE faculty meeting of the Winter Quarter on Thursday, February 28, at noon, with lunch to follow.

Congratulations to Professor Prem Kumar who was elected Fellow of The Institute of Physics.

Professor Valerie Taylor became a Senior Member of IEEE. Congratulations.

-Abe Haddad
Interim Chairman

SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENTS

Special Seminar
DATE: Monday, February 25, 2002
SPEAKER: Professor Pinaki Mazumder, University of Michigan
Title: "Design of Ultrafast VLSI Circuits Using Quantum MOS Technologies"
PLACE: Room L324
TIME: 4:00 p.m.

EXAMINATIONS

Wednesday, February 27, 2002: Ph.D. Qualifying Examination - 11:30 a.m.
Room E311
C. Andrew Segall
"Framework for the Post-Processing, Super-Resolution and Deblurring of Compressed Video"
Committee Members: A. Katsaggelos (chairman), T. Pappas, and A. Sahakian

Friday, March 1, 2002: M.S. Final Examination
Fei Wang
"Option C"
Committee Members: A. Katsaggelos (chairman), P. Scheuermann, and A. Haddad

TRAVEL

Professor Jorge Nocedal is traveling to Brussels, Belgium, Feb 19-24, to attend the 3rd FNRS cycle in mathematical programming and give an invited lecture entitled, "Optimization of Systems Described by Differential Equations."

Professor Manijeh Razeghi traveled to Austin, TX, February 17-20, to attend the Workshop on Compound Semiconductor Materials and Devices (WOCSEMMAD). She presented three invited talks: "Type II InAs/GaSb Superlattice Photovoltaic Detector with 50% Cutoff at 18.8 micron," "9 micron High Power, Low Threshold Quantum Cascade Lasers Grown by Gas-Source MBE," and "UV AlInGaN/AlInGaN LED Grown by LP-MOCVD."

CFS NEWS

NEW SUPPORT STAFF HIRED

Our top candidate, Pauline Wairimu, has accepted our offer to fill the Windows support position vacated by Jorge Lopez three months ago. Pauline was chosen because her experience in the last two years is a great fit for the department's Windows support needs. We look forward to her start date on March 13th.

We'd like to thank Rebecca Swierz of McCormick Computing Support for providing interim support. She's done a spectacular job and is very much appreciated. Rebecca will continue working with us until Pauline has come aboard.

MATLAB

As you may have already noticed, a new Matlab license file has been installed on the Unix hosts. The University has extended its Matlab license through September of this year. Because the Wilkinson PCs are part of an instructional lab, their Matlab licenses are controlled by a central server in the NU IT department. Faculty who need to have their *research* PC licenses upgraded should contact root ASAP. A good way to tell if you need this type of license is if Matlab posts a license expiration warning upon startup.

SOFTWARE UPGRADES

The Computing Facilities Staff (CFS) has upgraded the following GNU software to their latest released versions:

sed, find, xargs, patch

All of these are installed in /meas/bin. We will slowly work though the installation or upgrade of many of the GNU utility packages in the next couple of weeks.

We're in the process of upgrading perl and installing some useful modules for it, including a module to simplify creating plots and a perl interface to the Tk GUI-building library.

Shortly after that, we'll install the latest GCC in the /meas/beta tree for a three-month testing period before replacing our current production version (2.8.1).

Keep an eye on the CFS section of future newsletters for more information.

-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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