DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of January 14 - 18, 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

The first week of Winter Quarter went smoothly with no major problems. It helped that the weather was more spring-like.

Congratulations are in order to Aggelos Katsaggelos for three major awards from IEEE: 1. Meritorious Service Award from the Signal Processing Society; 2. Best paper award in the Image Processing Transactions; and 3. Appointment as Associate Editor of the IEEE Proceedings.

A reminder that the deadline for the Ford Fund for Capstone coursework proposals is January 18, 2002.

We look forward to a visit by John Spencer from Microsoft Research on January 21 and 22, 2002.

-Abe Haddad
Interim Chairman

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES/AWARDS/HONORS

Professor Aggelos Katsaggelos was selected to receive the IEEE Signal Processing Society 2001 Meritorious Service Award.

He received the IEEE Signal Processing Best Paper Award along with Dr. Guido Schuster for the paper they co-authored entitled, "An Optimal Polygonal Boundary Encoding Scheme in the Rate-Distortion Sense," IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, Jan. 1998.

Both awards will be presented during the awards ceremonies at ICASSP 2002, to be held in Orlando, Florida, May 13-17, 2002.

In addition, he became a member of the Editorial Board of the IEEE Proceedings for a three-year term, starting 1/1/2002.

TRAVEL

Professor Hai Zhou will be in the San Francisco Bay area from 1/17-1/20 to attend the technical program committee meeting of ISPD (International Symposium on Physical Design) '02. During that time, he will also give a talk on "Semantics of Circuits: Modeling Timing with Crosstalk" to Avant! Corporation, and visit Synopsys.

STAFFING NEWS

Jill Lavelle will become a part-time staff member starting next week. Jill will be fulfilling other opportunities outside of Northwestern. We wish her much success in everything she does and we would also like to thank her for all her hard work and dedication to the department. Jill has brought her many talents to the ECE department from web designing to being the department photographer. We are extremely happy that she will be continuing with us on a part time basis.

Good Luck, Jill!

Alice Wang will be joining the department on Tuesday, January 15th, filling the other half of the job with Jill Lavelle. Alice will be working closely with Jill her first week here in order to learn the ropes of the department and her area.

Welcome aboard, Alice! We look forward to working with you and wish you much success in your new role in ECE.

--Deneen Bryce, ECE Administrator

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.