DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER
Week of January 21 - 25, 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

Please note that as part of Northwestern's observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, classes will not be held from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. on Monday, January 21.

Everyone is invited to attend the campus-wide observance at 3:00 in the Pick-Staiger Concert Hall with Rev. Samuel "Billy" Kyles and performances by the Northwestern Community Ensemble and bass Kevin Maynor. Additional events are held throughout the week.

John Spencer from Microsoft Research and other officials are visiting the campus and the ECE department on Monday and Tuesday this week.

Professor Taflove was informed by the Institute for Scientific Information that he is on the list of "most cited" people at Northwestern University. Congratulations, Allen.

You should have noticed the front-page article in the Daily Northwestern (Friday, January 18, 2002) featuring our own Prem Kumar highlighting his light-speed network computing research.

Congratulations to Prof. Razeghi's graduate students on the recently announced best student paper awards at the International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium (ISDRS) in Washington, DC, December 5-7, 2001:

1st place was awarded to Steven Slivken for "Development of Quantum Cascade Lasers for High Peak Output Power and Low Threshold Current Density," and 2nd place was awarded to Alireza Yasan for "Recent Advances and Future Trends of InAs/GaSb Superlattice for Very Long Wavelength Infrared Focal Plane Arrays (FPAs)."

-Abe Haddad
Interim Chairman

TRAVEL

Professor Jorge Nocedal is traveling to Guanajuato, Mexico, January 17-22, to attend the Second International Congress for Numerical Methods in Engineering and Applied Science and give a Plenary Lecture entitled, "Optimization of Systems Described by Differential Equations."

Professor Manijeh Razeghi participated in the following events during the Advanced Workshop on Frontiers in Electronics (WOFE-02), St. Croix, Virgin Islands, January 6-11, 2002: 1) Steering Committee Member, 2) Invited Talk, "Artificial Atoms and Molecules: Enabling Technology for the New Millennium"; and 3) Session Chair, "Emerging Technologies."

COMPUTING FACILITIES STAFF (CFS) NEWS

ANNOUNCING WIRELESS NETWORKING

I'm pleased to announce that the department has commissioned two 802.11b wireless installations. One installation is in the Wilkinson lab and the other is in the main ECE conference room (Room L324). Instructions for using your 802.11b NIC will soon be posted on our FAQs web page, listed below. Faculty members will be interested to know that the CFS will acquire a set of wireless NICs that may be loaned out to visitors for use at these two locations. Additionally, the CFS is working with IT/TSS to obtain a set of netids to be loaned to the department's visitors so that they may use our new wireless LAN.

ECE FAQs can be found at

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

SOLARIS REBOOTS

It has come time again to apply to all of the Solaris-based hosts the latest security and recommended (by Sun) patches. These will help keep our systems secure and running properly. While the patch process is transparent, a reboot of each host is required to apply them. So with that in mind, the CFS has scheduled a reboot of all Solaris-based hosts for 7:00 a.m., Wednesday, January 23rd. If there is an urgent reason to delay the reboot, please notify root immediately and we'll schedule an alternate reboot date.

HELP SAVE TREES

Last semester, the Computing Facilities Staff (CFS) created a document that offers tips for saving paper in the Wilkinson and other labs. This one-page sheet is taped next to laser1 and an expanded version is available on the web at

http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/CSEL/printing-tips.html

Please take a look! Help save some trees and some money for the department.

DOMAIN NAME TRANSITION

In the coming weeks, the CFS will be taking further steps towards NU's goal of transitioning from the nwu.edu domain to northwestern.edu. This next step involves making all ECE hosts on the internet resolve to their new names. While this sounds simple, it involves a lot of mini-steps and must be done with care. The change should be transparent to most users, but if you notice a problem, please do report it immediately. As usual, please use the <root@ece.northwestern.edu> alias.

-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.